I had this Motherboard one day – and one day only. I never even got to use it, i opened the box and installed it. I was excited to use really use the power and features. I never got to use those features.

The board was faulty. Shame, look at the reviews on any site and you’ll see “Excellent, and great value!”. I never found a bad one so thats why i purchased it. I later found out to my mistake that it was a bad purchase. Seems like everyone that is purchasing it is having the same issue or at least a similar one. Its known as “CPU INIT” and all you need to do is a quick google to find hundreds of results leading to sites and forums all trying to work out a fix for it. It seems to me to be the ram, but its standard Corsair (2×2GB, 800MHz, 6400) RAM. But you can’t even attempt to get into the bios because it won’t boot and i haven’t got any other ram. For that reason alone i returned it – thanks eBuyer! – When i speaking to ebuyer on the phone, and the great chap on the phone told me that they have lots of problems with this board and if you get one that doesn’t do this, then you’ve got a good one.

I’ve now gone for Intel’s new X48 board, The Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6. I’ve been seeing some great reviews coming from sites and the X38 was very successful so I’m hoping its going to be a great experience.

Gameplay

When you first start the game, it has a great cut scene but it was confusing until i twigged what was going on. You are a russian bloke called Niko Bellic and you and your brother have moved here, leaving Mother behind. First you do a couple of missions for Roman (your brother) and get a cash flow on the move. You then work for different boss’s (i would call them) and do some other missions. Yes, these all include violence.

Graphics

I’m not the only one saying this, there a bit off to be honest. There really not what they say they are. And comparing them to the graphics on the advert – great false advertising from Rockstar there, thats all i can say. The graphics can be really stuttery at times apart from when your driving fast at the whole set starts to blur and seems realistic.

Online Gameplay

It really needs some going over to be honest. When you enter a “room” i would say, you select what game your playing before hand in single player mode and you wait….. and wait…. and wait….
Once your into a game room you stupidly have to get ever player to press ready. The single most annoying thing in the world. You’ll get people pressing it on and off to simply annoy you oh and the lag, i won’t go there.

Overall

Its a good game, with a good plot and story. But its really not what its cracked up to be. At the end of the day – I’m a first person shooter kinda man.

Writing a blog post and have post images? Trying to make those images interesting can be a though job, but not with Picturesque from Acqualia. It has recently updated and has improved features with version 2.0! Making your images look gorgeous and shown off with style.

User Interface

When you first open Picturesque you are presented with a clean and presentable UI, and it simply says “Drop your images here”. There is an option of using the apple media browser which contains your iPhoto & Aperture library and has the same drag and drop concept.

Once you have your image inside of the application, you have lots of choices and options that you can apply to your images.

Effects

Perspective – for angles. Reflections – for a mirror image underneath. Shadow – for a glowing effect. Curve – It removes standard corner, giving it a cool, curvey corner. Stroke – which allows you to simply add a border.

Picturesque has a preset button so you can easily apply the effects that you have used, the next time that you open Picturesque. It really does save me time allowing me to process a batch of images and apply the same effect. It also has compatibility with Applescript allowing you to run a workflow. This application was obviously thought up with bloggers in mind who need a quick and easy alternative to photoshop! Picturesque can be purchased directly from Acqualia software for $34.99

Thanks to Zac Cohan from Acqualia who kindly allowed me to review Picturesque.

UPDATE – I have posted a quick demo on YouTube.

When you first open Blogo, you are present with a nice presentable option screen asking you to enter your Blog URL or Twitter URL. (Yes! – its an awesome twitter client too). Once you’ve done this you need to enter your blog’s user name and password and once that’s been done, your in. Blogo overall is a little too buggy – it doesn’t do what you ask it do. The inbuilt twitter client is also really cool though. Its need a tidy, works and that’s all you can ask for! I’ll wait for a couple of updates until i really review it, as i feel that its too buggy for me to really get into it. But until then – its a good twitter and blog client

I’m not going to give anymore away – Go and see it!