Mark Dalton

So feeding my addiction to “We Rule” I have decided to carry out a little bit of analysis and thought I would share my findings with you, starting out with looking at the returns gained from the varying crops. Those already playing ”We Rule“ will know that in order to get started you really need to start planting, growing, and harvesting crops. This is how you start to establish a revenue stream and grow your Kingdom. As you progress through the levels more crops start to become available to you, offering varying levels of reward. Now on the face of it, it would appear that the more valuable crops will help you progress through the levels quicker, but is that the case? I decided to take a look.

As you can see all is not necessarily as it might first appear. Take for example the legendary “Magic Cauliflower”. It offers a whopping 2000 coins and 350 experience points, but it takes 12 hours for them to grow. Now if we were to grow the lowest level crop (“Corn”) over the same period, we would earn 3600 coins and 720 experience points!

Okay it’s not quite that simple as the “Corn” matures every 45 seconds and even I am not that addicted. So what is the best crop? Well, it depends on what you are going to be doing. If you are going to be sat glued to the game you might want to be growing Wheat, over a 24 hour period you can see this is the highest grossing “Crop” from the table above. However this does mean that you have to be harvesting and replanting every 5 minutes. If you are only checking your Kingdom once a day you might be better off picking a crop that takes a little longer to mature, but remember if crops aren’t harvested within a short period of time they will spoil and be worth nothing.

As and when time permits I will be looking into the other aspects of the game, and will update the spreadsheet accordingly. You can download the latest version of the SpreadSheet here (Numbers Format), (Excel Format).

So I am still working on my iPad blog post but due to a new found addiction it’s taking longer than planned. The problem is a game called “We Rule”; for those that don’t know this is a game for the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad that is a like FarmVille on FaceBook but without the noisy social stream. I am not sure what is so addictive about games like these, but I know I am not alone in my addiction. Leo Laporte of TWiT TV doesn’t seem to be able to get through a show without “harvesting his cauliflower”.

So I thought I would have a little show and tell and post a screen shot of my “Kingdom”. I am currently sitting at level 24, but I have gone more for aesthetics than monetary gain. Hey, we have all seen what happens when money takes over If you wish to join me I go by the original name of MarkDalton.

What does your kingdom look like? What is your strategy? Can you have a strategy with games like these? Have you actually spent any money with them? Let me know via the comments and upload a picture of your Kingdom at the same time.

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Back in October I wrote about a few issues I was having with my MacBook Air, well thankfully I managed to resolve them without spending any money! The main issue I was experiencing was a reduction in battery life, leaving work with a full charge I would use it on the train journey home and be left with a 20%-30% charge. Well, what I didn”t do was look at what I was doing during that journey.

The first thing I usually do, once comfortably seated, is plug in my 3G dongle and check my email, and try and catch up with the mess that is my inbox. Once we are moving however I would fire up the BBC iPlayer application and try to enter “unwind mode” by watching some of the programs the BBC shows that I actually like (few and far between these days).

Now it would seem that this combination is the perfect setup to drain the battery, at least on a MacBook Air. The BBC iPlayer content had been downloaded to the local drive, so I wasn”t streaming, but I still had the 3G Dongle plugged in and connected, and was checking my email while using iPlayer. So I tested the obvious combinations.

What I found wasn”t a real surprise, but both iPlayer and the 3G Dongle do make the machine work harder and therefore take their toll on the battery. I didn”t do any really scientific tests but simply using the 3G Dongle and working on email left me with 40%-50% battery life, and just watching iPlayer left me with 20%-30% charge. Now the MacBook Air hasn”t got the best battery but I have found I can get 2-2.5 hours out of it using it moderately, but if I am using BBC iPlayer or indeed watching any type of media, I can only expect 1-1.5 hours. This doesn”t really work for me!

My second issue was with the hard drive. Now this was initially triggered by an issue I was having with SuperDuper and errors during the backup routine, the support technician from ShirtPocket made it sound like the drive was going to fail at any minute, and he wasn”t to far out, as not long after I had a nasty “Will not boot” (I forget the exact error message) issue on the MacBook Air.

After doing some research I found a number of posts that all pointed to the same solution, format the hard disk drive and restore from backup. Now luckily I did have a SuperDuper backup that was 3-4 weeks old, and I don”t keep any data on the laptop (I use DropBox), so all I was missing was a few application updates. After doing this however the whole system picked up and was much more responsive, and I haven”t had any issues with the hard drive since.

So the question about what to do came up again. As I said back in October I love the MacBook Air in terms of its weight but after two years I am starting to find it somewhat limited. The more powerful, but slightly heavier, MacBook Pro is one option but we all knew there was a special event due and the much rumoured Apple Tablet device was what everyone was talking about. Every Mac fan know”s you don”t go and buy anything prior to a Steve Job”s Keynote!

When Steve stood up at the end of January and announced the iPad to the world, what I needed was clear. When I purchased the MacBook Air it was so I could browse the web, send the odd email, and look at my pictures while around the house or traveling. It however transpired that I did more on the move than I originally thought and the MacBook Air quickly became my main mobile computer. The iPad for me is what I really wanted when I brought the MacBook Air. What I then needed was a laptop that really is a laptop and capable of doing those more advanced and resource intensive tasks. This for me is the 13″ MacBook Pro. So decision made. I am going to replace the MacBook Air with a 13″ MacBook Pro, and when the iPad is available will be buying one of those.