Jan Leow's Blog Page

Quitting Pokemon Go

Having played Pokemon Go for the better part of 1 year and 2 months, I have decided to call it quits. It’s been quite an interesting game, but Niantic kept changing its game. The death knell came when one of the updates cause the power up to be less effective. Normally the power up increase the Pokemon CP by between 30 to 40. But the update cause the CP to increase only about 20. As you try to push the Pokemon strength and power to higher and higher CP, it takes more candies and stardust as well available powerup arc to do so.

Playing Pokemon for the Lone Casual Player

How time flies! I’ve been pokeying Pokemon for one year already! Though not so much a hardcore player like some, but I still considered myself as quite a frequent player. Ever since Niantic came up with daily first catch and first spin bonus, I made it a point to catch at least one Pokemon and spin a stop. Steadily building up my game character.

Pokemon Go new gyms strategy for the lone casual player

My earlier post about @PokemonGoApp was an adverse reaction to the new gyms. For a lone casual player, playing this Pokemon Go game can be frustrating. No doubt the idea from Niantic is to have players socializing more and team up to take down gyms on a cooperative effort; it is not always the case for everyone. I don’t have friends that have any interest in this game at all except one and if we get together it is not to play this game.

One of the core game play is of course battling out rival teams and holding a gym to collect your gold coins rewards. With the coins collected you could exchange it for upgrading your backpack storage, Pokedex storage as well as other goodies including having a change of wardrobe for your trainer!

Pokemon Go new gyms placement

Pokemon Go new gyms are awful, need new strategy for gym placement

I have been playing @PokemonGoApp since 8 August 2016. That’s about 11 months worth of time invested playing this augmented reality app! During this time there were many changes to make the game more interesting. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Niantic needed a way to keep the interest going for the off chance that people will invest real money to buy coins for upgrades.

Pokemon Go App new gym

Fixing Pokemon installation and Failed to Detect Location problems

So the Pokemon go crazed is sweeping over the world! And here is no different when the app was launched recently. However trying to get it to work was another matter. This new type of augmented reality games required quite an advance mobile phone in order to work. Although it the Pokemon website it said it need minimum Android version 4.4, the Google Play store didn't allowed me to install into my Samsung Note 2. I did finally found a way to overcome it.

Pokemon Go GPS is working!

Picasa Web Album ends by 15/March/2016

While reading some tech news, bump into this announcement that Google intends to close the Picasa Web Album. I normally wouldn't be bothered about as I have not been using that service. However ever since they shutdown Google+ Photos/Album and make users switch to Google Photos, I found that new service to be lacking with many features. I liked the fact of being able to store large amount of photos online as a kind of backup as well as for viewing and searching old photos for sentimentality and for references. The missing features makes Google Photos less useful than their predecessors.

Hiding Adobe Acrobat Reader DC Toolbar Pane

With the new Windows 10 roll out this year, I've also updated my PDF reader to Adobe Acrobat Reader DC version. With this update though the interface looked more up-to-date, but why, oh, why must they move those handy buttons about? Instead it was a step backwards on productivity. What use to be just a click away like the comment tools, now take several steps to achieve the same thing. In addition, the right side tool panel is always set to open by default and there was no settings to stop it from appearing!

Removing the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC right side tool pane