Family Sharing Announced on Steam's 10th Anniversary

The past week marked the 10th year of existence of Valve's Steam service. The past week also saw Valve announce a Family Sharing scheme for users to share their Steam game library with family and friends. A good move to commemorate Steam's 10th Anniversary.

Family Sharing is a boon for users who have family or friends who have hundreds of games in their Steam library and who can't seem to find the time to whittle down their game backlog. These hundred game backlogs are a sign of how far Steam has come from 10 years ago.

When Steam came out in 2003, like many people, I regarded Steam as just another form of oppressive DRM and I vowed I'd rather pirate their games than use Steam. Like many people, what changed my mind was the incredible sales Steam offered throughout the years.

I bought my first game on Steam, which was Half-Life, for only $0.98 in 2008. Since then I've bought all of my games on the various sales of different game shops. The low prices effectively ended the specter of piracy for me. Like many people, the sales built up my game collection to the point where I have a huge backlog.

Thank you Steam for helping to revive PC gaming and to reduce software piracy. Curse you for making me spend so much. Happy 10th Anniversary.

Oscar Schmidt Enters the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inducted new members this past week. Most of the attention is usually focused on well known recently retired NBA greats, which in this batch consisted primarily of Gary Payton followed by Bernard King.

I'm a huge admirer of Bernard King, one of the most unstoppable scorers of all time, but I was only interested in the event this year because of the induction of one of my basketball idols, one of the greatest shooters in the history of the game and a scorer on par with the scoring champions of the NBA, the Brazilian great, Oscar Schmidt.

After seeing him dismantle a Team USA led by David Robinson in the 1986 PanAm Games (now called FIBA Americas), leading Brazil to take the gold medal, I wanted to shoot and play like Oscar Schmidt. More than my other basketball shooter idols, more than Larry Bird, Andrew Toney, Pistol Pete Maravich, and Chris Mullin, I wanted to be like Oscar. I wanted to be like Mao Santa (Holy Hand).

He never played in the NBA because of his low draft position and his age. It also didn't help that he didn't play any defense and didn't rebound well for his height, but oh could he shoot and score. He looked so effortless and it was beautiful to watch him work. He didn't have the on-court arrogance of players like Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, or even Drazen Petrovich but he also had no conscience whatsoever in dominating the ball and putting up a shot. 

Oscar played similarly to Kiki Vandeweghe, the former All-Star NBA player who also played at small forward and was also a shooter with a beautiful effortless touch but who played no defense. Their difference was that Oscar had the confidence of a superstar who felt he could take every shot and make them. He was a player a team could build their whole offense around and this is what his teams did for his entire career.

He never made it to the NBA but he is the all-time leading scorer in the Olympics and he has scored more points than anyone in his entire career. For his accomplishments, for his love of the game, and for showing fans how beautifully the game could be played, my idol, the Holy Hand, Oscar Schmidt, deserves his rightful place in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

20 Thoughts After Resurrecting My Galaxy Tab

I got my Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 for free in December of 2010 through a promo of Smart.  The promo offered the free GT-P1000 if I subscribed to Smart's unlimited mobile Internet plan for around $45 monthly and a lock-in period of 24 months.

The warranty expired 12 months later and I cancelled my subscription in December 2012 after the lock-in period was over.  A few days into 2013, the internal storage of my Galaxy Tab failed, becoming read-only, reducing my Android tablet into a pricey media player.

6 months later, after a month of research and trial-and-error, I was finally able to revive my tablet. I'll be writing about how I fixed my Galaxy Tab in more technical detail at a later date, but for now, I'll just give a summary of the procedure of my solution:

1. Root the tablet
2. Enable boot or init.d scripts
3. Add a MicroSD Card
4. Create a loopback filesystem image on the MicroSD card
5. Mount the loopback filesystem image and copy /data to the loopback filesystem
6. Edit the boot scripts to unmount /data and mount the loopback filesystem as /data
7. Edit the boot scripts to mount the MicroSD card as /mnt/sdcard

Hot Summer of 2013 in Quezon City

The summer of 2013 is nearly over.  Unlike last year, I haven't really been productive this year.  Last year, I set goals for myself.  One of those goals was to spend as much time with my kids, and spend them without using gadgets or TV.

I wanted to be able to interact with my kids directly, without using electronic devices.  This was one of the reasons why I bought board and card games for Christmas 2011.  My goal was to interact more often, face to face, with my kids.

Last year, I realized that the best time to be able to spend time with the kids was during summer, since school was out and they could sleep late.  One of my goals last summer was to play board and card games with them as often as possible.  I was able to do that.  My other goals were hit and miss.  Some were partially successful while others were not.

This year, I haven't been as productive because of the heat.  I've spent almost all of my time during the summer in my airconditioned bedroom where the kids are camped out as well.  They sleep here also to share the airconditioning in order to cut down on our electric bill.  This is the coolest place in the house where my family can watch TV and the kids could read or play.

As the summer has gone along, I've spent less and less time in the 3rd floor of our house, which is the location of a lot of the pending work I'm supposed to do.  It's just so hot to stay up there for long periods of time.  Essentially, the summer heat has limited my family to just one room in the 2nd floor.

I'm looking forward to the start of the school year and the coming rainy season.  I'm expecting cooler temperatures that should allow me to work longer around the house.  Summer 2013 has been a wash.  I hope next summer will be better.
 

Planned and Unplanned Storage Upgrades and Replacements for 2013

We purchased a Compaq Presario B1200 series notebook (specific model was B1293TU) for my wife in the middle of 2008. We finally bought a replacement laptop in December of 2011 and gave this old one to our daughter. On New Year's Eve of 2012, after more than 4 years of heavy use, its hard drive finally failed.

We have a PC we use to store almost all our family's files, our main desktop PC which I simply named Storage. The last time this was in use was April 10, 2012. That was the day I came to the conclusion that the hard disk of our Storage PC was failing.