Pop-Tarts Oatmeal Delights

I always scan the Pop-Tarts section in the store for new flavors, and these popped up.  I've tried both available flavors, Strawberry and Mapley Brown Sugar.  So, how do they fare?

Well, first off, for something called "Oatmeal Delights", there certainly aren't a lot of oats in it.  Whole Grain Oat Flour is the last ingredient before the "Contains 2% or less of" section, and Whole Grain Oats follow shortly thereafter.  The first ingredient is Whole Wheat Flour.  So, it doesn't look like they really tried.

The oatmeal part isn't the pastry itself, but a rather crumbly coating on its surface, along with the frosting.

On the Strawberry ones, the frosting was always falling off.  It seems to be stuck on better on the Maple Brown Sugar ones.  That one Strawberry box may have been an anomaly, but since I haven't gotten more, it's hard to tell.

Both have fairly decent flavor, and it's nice to see them using some whole grains, but it's kind of pointless since they aren't 100% whole grain.

Overall: as far as the Strawberry flavor goes, I'd have to say stick to regular strawberry.  The Maple Brown Sugar flavor actually works well with what little oats are actually present.

BTTray.exe and Caps Lock/Num Lock/Scroll Lock Popups

So recently I installed the IOGEAR GBU521 USB bluetooth transceiver I got off of Newegg, which uses the Broadcom/WIDCOMM software.  Ever since, I've gotten a little popup whenever I press Caps Lock, Num Lock, or Scroll Lock, telling me whether it's now on or off.  It took me until a few minutes ago to investigate a fix for this, and being me, I'm here to post a howto with my results.

These are caused by the process that produces the bluetooth tray icon, BTTray.exe.  Killing the process in Task Manager makes the popups go away, and restarting it makes them come back.  You could disable it from the Startup folder of the Start Menu, but that gets rid of the tray icon.  "What if I want my tray icon and no popups?", you ask?

Be prepared for a little registry editing.  It's not too complex, but because we're editing the Windows Registry I'll put my standard warning here.

Warning: this process involves editing your Windows registry.  So long as you follow the instructions to the letter, there will not be any undesired changes to your system.  Don't just randomly change things without knowing what they do, and don't complain to me "your instructions don't work" if you didn't follow them to the letter, because I'll just laugh at you.  Also, don't follow these instructions if the above scenario isn't what's affecting you.

Now that that's out of the way...

1. Press Windows + R to bring up the run dialog.
2. Type regedit and press Enter.
3. Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then SOFTWARE, then Widcomm, then BTConfig, then select General.
4. Scroll down until you find the KeyIndication value.
5. Double click it, and change it from one to zero.
6. Now, open Windows Explorer and browse to C:\Program Files\WIDCOMM\Bluetooth Software.  On 64-bit systems, this might be C:\Program Files (x86)\WIDCOMM\Bluetooth Software instead.
7. Open Task Manager, click the 'Image Name' column header to sort by process name, select BTTray.exe, and hit End Process.  Answer Yes at the "are you sure?" prompt.
8. Now find BTTray.exe in the Windows Explorer window you opened and run it.

There.  You still get your tray icon, but no more popups.

Alternatively, instead of the first five steps, you can copy/paste this into Notepad and save as a .reg file (make sure you have that pesky "hide extensions for known file types" option turned off):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Widcomm\BTConfig\General] "KeyIndication"=dword:00000000

After saving, double click the file and tell it you want to merge it into the registry.

The last three steps basically prevent you from having to log out/log back in or reboot your computer to apply the change.  If you'd rather do that instead, be my guest.

For what it's worth, there look to be a few other settings in that registry key that are useful but have no GUI method to change them.  They're outside the scope of this post, though.

Done.

I won't bore anyone with specifics, but basically the idea I had in my non-ragequit-mode retrospect worked.  I had several attempts that failed for various reasons, and even after fixing what needed fixing I still had trouble.  Until I brought along experience scrolls.  The boosted experience gain helped my heroes work off their death penalty and it made all the difference.  I'd also brought a couple "reset buttons", or Powerstones of Courage, but I didn't need to use them.

There were two spots where I had trouble regardless of anything.  The wave with the Pefected Armor, and the wave with the Perfected Aegis.  The Perfected Armor, who is itself a Jade construct, brings along several Jade construct buddies as well as a group of White Mantle that includes a healer.  Perhaps the most annoying among them is the Jade Cloak, which is an elementalist that can really dish out a lot of damage if left unchecked.

The Perfected Aegis is a Jade Cloak boss.  Who brings five more Jade Cloaks with him.  In a wave that's entirely Jade constructs.  Yeah.  Overkill much, ArenaNet?

Once I made it to the last wave, I beat it no problem.  The hardest wave by far is most definitely the Perfected Aegis wave.

All Kryta zones reverted back to their original spawns, forfuckingfinally.

However, there's still a related quest line.  That also shows rather horrible design.  You're supposed to track down one of the Ebon Vanguard who went missing during the "omg everyone get to Lion's Arch NOW' quest, perhaps better known as the last part of Mustering A Response.  Except you're only given very vague hints on how or where to search for him.  Even once you manage to figure it out (I had to look it up...), the following mini-mission suffers from the same lack of direction.  Other than having an assassin NPC that you're assisting, you really don't know where you're headed.  You have an objective, but it's not marked on your map so you really have no clue where to go.

I want to complete this because you get a hero out of it and this would be the only hero my ranger doesn't have.  Even if I never use the hero I'd still like to have him available.

Re: previous post - Retrospect

First off, that post used a lot of terminology and didn't explain any of it.  I'd basically just ragequit the quest when I wrote it, and didn't feel like explaining anything.  The thing is, though, even though I could explain things here, it's really better to just look up all the terminology on any of the wikis related to GW1.  In order of my personal preference, they are guildwiki.org and wiki.guildwars.com.  You can also waste a lot of time browsing builds on gwpvx.com.

I'll try to explain stuff in this retrospect post a little better, since I'm not in ragequit mode currently.  I'm actually in "I only got 3 hours of sleep, why the fuck am I typing this instead of going to bed" mode currently.

The main subject of the previous post was my complete and utter failure at the final quest in the War In Kryta quest line, The Battle For Lion's Arch.  In this quest, you decide to open the gates of Lion's Arch and lure in the White Mantle (the bad guys!) so you can use the various chokepoints in the town to your advantage in completely erasing their existence.  To further this end, there are a metric fuckton of NPCs positioned in various useful places, and some barricades have been built specifically to funnel the enemies through the main chokepoint that you'll be fighting at.

My strategy was to take myself, as a ranger, with my usual Burning Poison build I'd used up until this point, alongside five heroes: a warrior, running a pure adrenaline build with the elite stance Battle Rage to fuel it, two fire elementalists loaded with area of effect spells, including Meteor and Meteor Shower, a necromancer minion master, to make use of the plethora of corpses this quest provides, and a lone healing monk.

That strategy failed in a number of ways.  First, my Burning Poison build, which revolves around the skills Apply Poison and Burning Arrow, to cause a lot of degen on enemies, only truly works well on fleshy enemies.  The enemy group composition gradually shifts to contain more and more of the Mursaat's Jade constructs, which, being constructs, are not fleshy, and therefore not subject to the Poison condition.  Also, for the high armor enemies where armor-ignoring sources of health reduction are more helpful, my only source of that was the Burning condition, which doesn't stack with itself.  So basically, I shot myself in the foot from the start.

Also, my minion master could be a lot better.  I had a traditional minion master, with Shambling Horrors (essentially have to be killed twice as the first time they're killed they turn into Jagged Horrors that inflict Bleeding on hit), and the Flesh Golem, of which you can only have one but it's super tanky and dishes out damage like crazy.  This build works, but relies on summoning minions one by one, which means if your minion master dies and loses all their minions they have to start over from scratch.  Game balance changes quite a long time ago changed the elite spell Aura of the Lich to basically summon an instant minion army given enough corpses, and this mission provides more than enough corpses for a single minion master.

So basically, I need more diversity in my damage.  Which has generally been my goal all along, after I realized that such team builds (generally referred to as "pressure" builds because they have more damage sources than an enemy healer can possibly be prepared to handle) completely wreck the AI.  In all honesty, I should get rid of the elementalists.  One should be replaced with a blood magic necromancer, using life stealing spells and health degeneration hexes.  The other should be replaced with an illusion mesmer, with various forms of direct damage, and an interrupt or two (most definitely Panic, which has been stapled to my mesmer hero's bar since I capped it).

In addition, I'll probably swap the adrenaline warrior for an energy warrior (utilizing the elite skill Warrior's Endurance to fuel the build, given the warrior's meager energy supply), so I can use the skill "I Will Avenge You!", which gives health regeneration and an attack speed boost for a duration that increases with each dead ally, of whom there will be a lot.  It only takes 5 dead allies to get 100% uptime with the skill, so basically I'll have an unstoppable powerhouse warrior once things really get started.

Then, there comes my build.  I want to stick with a bow build, so I can camp out on the hill with the ranger NPCs and plink away at things from a mile away with my flatbow, but all the builds I like depend on degen and conditions that only work on fleshy enemies.  The old "sniper" build I used to run would work, I guess, which basically just revolves around putting as many skills on my bar as possible that increase the nice juicy armor-ignoring bonus damage per shot.  Failing that, I can load up spirit spam (which, despite consisting solely of ritualist skills, I like more on a primary ranger) and have an instant decent support build.

I think my last "sniper" build I ran used the elite preparation Glass Arrows (which technically can deal a fleshy-only condition, but only against foes that are blocking), as well as Sloth Hunter's Shot (deals decent bonus damage, and deals even more bonus damage if you hit an enemy that's currently not using a skill) and a couple other high bonus damage skills, plus Favorable Winds to double my arrow speed (which also buffs the NPC rangers you get for the quest, and is a given because it's generally stapled to my skill bar).  I can afford to forgo my "fuck you, War In Kryta" button, aka the resurrection skill-preventing spirit Frozen Soil, because this seems to be the one part of War In Kryta that has a manageable amount of enemy resurrection capability.  I should probably also include Needling Shot, which deals a low amount of armor-ignoring damage, but recharges instantly if the target is under 50% health, just to help finish off high armor targets.  Using it with a Zealous bow to get energy back on every hit helps mitigate what little cost it has after my typical high amount of Expertise (which reduces the energy cost of ranger skills and a few other varieties of skills from other classes).

It would still really help to be able to have eight party members instead of just six (because despite necromancers and mesmers being more useful, elementalists are still useful, and an extra healer would help), but all these changes I'm conceptualizing here seem like they'll make the quest a bit more manageable.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get that sleep I mentioned way up there.

Yet Another War In Kryta Rant

Yeah, I've been playing GW1 lately.  GW2 just doesn't feel the way I wanted it to.  It should have been a Guild Wars MMO, but it ended up being an MMO in the Guild Wars universe.  Crafting professions were unnecessary, and the auto-debuff system basically means you'll never actually feel like your character has gained any strength at all.

Anyway.

So I finally decided to take another shot at doing the very last part of the second-to-last War in Kryta quest, Mustering A Response, where you escort Livia, Zinn, Blimm, and a bunch of Ascalonian settlers from the Ascalonian settlement to Lion's Arch.  Being a War in Kryta quest, it throws ridiculous numbers of overpowered enemies at you and calls it challenge.  All you can really do is run.  If you stop to fight, you're dead.  In fact, even the wiki article for the quest recommends flagging a sacrificial hero or two behind the party to divert the horde's attention ever so briefly.

After failing it because Blimm died when I was almost there, I got an idea.  All we're doing is running, right?  Let's go with that.  Warriors have an elite skill called "Charge!" that makes all allies within earshot move 33% faster for a while.  It lasts around half its recharge time, but I have a party of six available, all of whom could be configured to have "Charge!" on their skill bar with enough attribute points in Tactics to matter.

Entered the quest with a party of six, all with 12 Tactics and only "Charge!" on their bar.

Blimm died when I was almost there.  Ugh.

A second try would be much more successful, and I was finally, after all these years, able to move on to the final quest in the most horribly designed quest line ever: The Battle For Lion's Arch.

On the tin it looks like a standard "defend the area from waves of enemies" quest.  Which is exactly what it is.  Except for one thing: it's a War in Kryta quest.  Which means every wave is 20-30 enemies.  As it goes further, more and more of the Mursaat's Jade constructs get mixed in, with their frustratingly high armor levels.

I lost count of how many attempts I made.  The furthest I ever got was the wave just after the one with Oizys the Miserable.  When Zinn activates the Spectral Infusion buff way too fucking late to be of any use whatsoever because all the NPCs it's supposed to protect are dead by this point, and the enemies rushing the town are so far out of the remaining NPCs' league that they don't last very long anyway.

I've ranted about War in Kryta before, so I'll summarize what I've previously said:

Up until this point, two enemies with the same name had the same build, guaranteed.  Not so here.  The primary profession is usually the same, but the secondary can and will differ, and the skills they bring will of course vary.

Up until this point, if enemies carried resurrection skills at all, they were rarely used or semi-easy to deal with.  Sole exception going to post-skill-rework "We Shall Return!" in Nightfall.  They never did rebalance Awakened Cavaliers after making that change.  Even then, you can deal with their newfound spammable insta-res, because you're riding giant undead wurms that can siege the fuck out of them.  The War in Kryta pretty much requires your party to contain a Ranger with Frozen Soil to prevent the enemies from using their resurrect skills.

So, what have we learned from this?

1. First, whoever designed the difficulty brick wall for the War in Kryta content needs to be shot.  Repeatedly.  Until they die.  I would say this to that person's face.
2. Second, the Winds of Change content in Factions is probably much of the same.  Probably even the same person in charge.  I haven't yet started it because of the foul smell, taste, and experience of War in Kryta.  Plus I hate Factions PvE anyway.  It was thrown in as an afterthought.
3. Third, this whole quest line showcases horrible design decision after horrible design decision.  It's not just a little bit different, it's completely different from the entire rest of Guild Wars 1.
4. Fourth, I don't know if this is ArenaNet's definition of "fun and challenging", but I assure you it's neither.  It's tedious and frustrating.

Now, let's try to be constructive.  How would I take this War in Kryta mess and produce a balanced quest line out of it?

1. Make sure that entry into the content was willing on the part of the player, and provide a means to pause or disable it without having to complete it, while remembering where the player was if they decide to pick it back up.
2. Tone down the enemy group size.  It reeks of Factions PvE.
3. All enemies with the same name would have the same exact build.
4. No more than two enemies with a resurrect skill per group.
5. Tone down the armor on the Jade constructs.  It takes several minutes to kill one of them, and you get four or five thrown at you at once...
6. Longer pauses between waves.  Give the player a bit longer to recover, and maybe actually let them go pick up some of the items that dropped.
7. Allow the player to put together an 8-person party for the entire quest line, regardless of where they start from, since all War in Kryta content appears to be designed for parties of at least 8 players, which is a bit of a punch in the babymaker since the maximum party size for anywhere other than elite missions is 8.
8. When taking henchmen into War in Kryta, automatically buff them up to level 20 with appropriate armor and skills.
9. Have the auto-resurrection timer be shorter than 10 seconds on The Battle For Lion's Arch when the player has been pushed back to Lion's Arch Keep itself and is resurrecting while still under fire from the spells that killed them in the first place.
10. Make the NPCs who are defending Lion's Arch with you actually have decent armor and skill sets.
11. Do the auto-res thing for all the defending NPCs, not just only certain named ones.
12. A mission effect similar to the bounties received from people at res shrines in Eye of the North, so that death penalty can be gotten rid of without using consumables.  Basically, a bonus every 25 kills.

Azure Tusk

...or, you know, Bluetooth.

With my new phone's ability to use Bluetooth, I naturally wanted to be able to use that.  Especially considering how the network completely mangles the images and audio I send to it via MMS.  I began my quest by poking around various TracFone-related resources for the phone, since TracFone likes to be a little bitch and disable or overly restrict all the useful features on their phones.  There I found conflicting information, both suggesting that TracFone had disabled the ability to transfer files via Bluetooth, and that a good number of people had been using it on a regular basis.

I found way more of the "file transfer via Bluetooth works" sentiment than the "no, it doesn't work" sentiment.  So, I hopped over to Newegg and ordered myself a USB Bluetooth adapter.  Specifically, the IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter.  $8 shipped, with promo code that despite being openly advertised on their website I had to subscribe to and then later unsubscribe from their email newsletter to actually use it.  It arrived yesterday, and so my adventure in getting it installed and set up began.

The instructions that came with it gave conflicting directions for Windows XP.  First, they said "oh, the driver disc has a driver for Windows XP on it".  Next, they said "If you're using Windows XP, go to our website to get the latest driver".  Lastly, they said "or you can just plug it in if you're using Windows XP SP2 or later and use Microsoft's Bluetooth stack, limited though it may be".  Care to take a guess as to which one was the correct thing to do?

Well, I tried the driver they told me to download.  Even though it's for the GBU421 and their site makes no mention of the GBU521.  After installing that and plugging in the device, I got greeted with a Windows Found New Hardware wizard that never produced any results.  So, that wouldn't work.  I tried rebooting, just on the off-chance that it was actually required, and nope, still the same thing.  So, I popped in the disc and installed from that.  Wham, it worked.

So anyway.  Pairing my phone with my computer was rather simple, and I got the non-ass-quality PNG version of my wallpaper transferred.  I then tried to transfer the text message noise I'd made in FamiTracker, basically recreating my old text message noise (the Power Rangers communicator beep) in NES.  It transferred, but didn't go into the ringtones folder because the phone doesn't recognize WAV files for some stupid reason.  So I encoded it to MP3 and it took that.

Then it started acting up and not letting me transfer anything from the phone at all, saying I'd need to reboot, so I did.  Then it worked properly.

Anyway.  The things you should get from this are:

• Install the IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth adapter's driver from the disc on Windows XP, not from the internet, and don't just plug it in and try to use it with Microsoft's shit, because it's, well, shit.
• TracFone-branded  LG 420G phones can indeed transfer files via Bluetooth, and therefore not have to suffer through faggoty automatic-by-cell-network transcoding/lossy compression, and for free.  If any later software version happens to change this, my phone's software version is LG420GHL_V10f.
• People always think that the Power Rangers communicator beep is something from Kim Possible.

Main Screen Turn Off, The Sequel

So, over two years ago, I bought a Tracfone.  I didn't really expect much from a prepaid carrier, but I never anticipated it being as shitty as it was.  Still, the phone worked, so I stuck with it and kept buying airtime to extend my service date.

After a while I realized "hey, Twitter has the ability to post and get tweets via text message" and set my shit up for that.  This would become the primary use of the phone, to check and update Twitter while I was out of the house.  Occasionally I would make calls, but it was mostly text messaging.

At some point during MAGFest, the phone's plastic became cracked.  It had been starting to crack for a while, but it was relatively minor, so I didn't really care.  This crack, though, was a lot bigger and I could see the circuit board inside the phone if I looked at the right angle.  The phone was aging anyway, and I'd seen a newer one at Giant with a $30 price tag and a camera for a while.

I got that phone last Thursday.  Despite not being labelled as such, it was actually $15 with the bonuscard.  For anyone who cares, it's an LG420G.  Took it home and went through Tracfone's process to transfer the number and service from my old phone to the new one, which was actually really easy.  Just fill out a form with some uber-secret values from the old phone and the one identifying value from the new phone, and shit happens.

Things I've noticed:

• It has an external screen for Caller ID and displaying the time/date/signal/battery life.  I still set it to only answer a call if I open it and press Send, though.
• It will actually charge off of a USB connection from my computer, unlike my previous phone.
• Getting used to a slightly different button layout will be annoying.  Both for general use, and text messaging.
• It has bluetooth.
• It has a "web browser".  Tracfone charges 0.5 for each minute of using this, rounded up to the next whole minute.
• It can do wallpapers and MP3 ringtones.
• It can also apparently send email.  Regular emails cost the same as a text message, but I sent a picture via email and it deducted a whole minute and then half a minute.  I assume that the extra half minute was for the time it took to upload the photo.
• The camera maxes out at 640x480, and won't let me zoom it in despite having the option to do so.
• It also came with a TF64SIMC4 SIM card, meaning still on AT&T, meaning still shitty signal in my house.
• It came with double minutes for life, so I don't need to buy that card again.
• Being a new phone, the spring in the hinge isn't broken, so I can't just flip it open with the flick of a wrist like with my old phone.

Regardless, it's a much better phone that isn't falling apart, so I'll take it.  I'm going to save up my money and get the 1 year/400 minute card so I won't have to buy minute cards as often.  Those 400 minutes will double to 800, which should theoretically be more than I need in a year.