Meters
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Meters' OV-1-B Connect headphones have VU dials and a $349 price tag
The headphones offer quirky retro styling and working analog VU meters in the ear cups.
ParkMe updates Android app with real-time street parking info
Most of us know the stress that comes with parking your wheels pretty much anywhere in the city; if you're like us, you vow to hide out in the countryside and never return after each white-knuckled experience. But those are empty words more often than not, and we foolishly come back for more. ParkMe has been a lifesaver for these frustrating situations, but Android users have only been able to look for available parking garages -- until now. The company just rolled out an update that now offers motorists real-time street parking information, giving you the price and likely availability of metered locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and a few other cities. The feature has already been available for iOS, but this will serve as a handy tool for the millions bearing Google's mobile OS in-hand. Just remember to let your passengers do the navigating -- we won't encourage you to ParkMe and drive.
Officers' Quarters: Meter padding mayhem
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. Ah, meter padding. It's an age-old tradition dating back to Molten Core. Vanilla raiders will remember the Core Hound packs between Lucifron and Magmadar. You had to kill them all within a certain amount of time or they would begin to rez each other. That meant the hounds that were "dead" could still take damage. Rather than finishing off the last few, some DPSers would simply spam AoE on the pile of dead bodies -- meter padding at its finest! This week, a raid leader asks how he can get his DPSers to stop causing wipes by padding the meters in Dragon Soul. Hi Scott, I was recently promoted to raid leader in my guild and while I consider my guild to be fairly good, we do have one fairly serious problem. The good old meter padding. We initially managed to kill madness and spine at the 5% nerf, but since then blizzard has increased the nerf to 30% and when we have to ask our dps to simply stand around and not attack, they simply choose not to listen which sometimes leads to a wipe.
Engadget Primed: Camera metering explained
Primed goes in-depth on the technobabble you hear on Engadget every day -- we dig deep into each topic's history and how it benefits our lives. You can follow the series here. Looking to suggest a piece of technology for us to break down? Drop us a line at primed *at* engadget *dawt* com. Is learning how to meter with your camera really necessary? With all the intelligent models out today, who needs it, right? Well, you may, depending on the type of killer photography you hope to produce. When it comes to the person behind the camera, there are a few types of photographers. First, there's the photog who just wants to snap away, not terribly concerned about how their photos turn out -- or, at the very least, not interested in knowing how to alter the camera. If this describes you, that's fine -- the latest-and-greatest compact cameras may be your cup of tea. But then there's the amateur shooter who desires a better understanding of how their cameras determine exposure, and if you fit into this category, this piece should be right up your alley.Metering is not a subject you can easily master, let alone explain entirely in an article of this length, but we can give you an idea of how it all works. I consistently see the faces of my workshop students glaze over as I wax rhapsodic about the wonders of metering, but I also notice wry smiles from time to time, which shows me the wheels are turning -- they begin to realize all the things they can do if only they can conquer this aspect of photography. However, comprehension and applied mastery are two separate balls of wax. Putting what you learn to practice is the start, and you can improve over a number of months, but true metering control in any situation requires years of practice.So for our 2012 pre-apocalyptic installment of Primed, we'll break down the world of camera metering, giving you a bit of history, dissecting the main components, describing what your camera wants to do and telling you what the future may hold. By the end, you'll have a better understanding of this vital photographic topic... either that or you'll be in a nice deep sleep.Note: Check out our recent Primed articles on aperture and image sensors to add to your metering knowledge.
Breakfast Topic: What's your motivation to perform?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. The raid is falling apart. You're on a boss you've downed before, but now it seems impossible to make it out of phase 1 because people keep failing on mechanics they should already have mastered. Ranged DPSers are standing in fire. Healers aren't popping CDs when the boss smacks the tank with its hard-hitting ability. Melee DPSers aren't switching to the adds in time, so they wipe the raid. Tanks can't seem to position the boss correctly. The raid is falling apart. So what is it that will motivate your group to pick up the pieces, stop failing, and win? Some group or raid leaders seem to think anger is the best motivator. They get stern, raise their voices, and threaten to kick the next person who fails, hoping their severity will prod everyone to victory. Some take a sarcastic tone, mocking group members until they clean up their act. "Wow, what a pro-mage move -- you Blinked right into that explosion. You should really think about doing this for a living." Others seek to break the tension and frustration by giving everyone a short break. Perhaps a reminder of the rewards works best, since shiny new loot is a great incentive for most. Sometimes even humor does the trick; it's just a matter of getting people to LOL at how pathetic that last attempt was or how ridiculous their character looks while riding Magmaw. Since people are different, though. Sometimes one method of motivation doesn't work for everyone in the group. The angry lecture approach can backfire when group members get so worried about failing that they freeze up and stand still instead of doing their jobs. Taking a break or laughing for a few minutes can have the unintended result of breaking the raiders' concentration, at which point their loss of focus causes even more fail. So what is the best motivation for you to overcome obstacles, perform at the highest level, and succeed?
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing is a zero-sum game
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Have you ever cut a cake at a party? Dividing a cake into portions is an example of what economists call a zero-sum game. The total amount of cake is fixed, and you can slice it how you see fit. There's only so much cake to go around, so giving someone a bigger portion means that there's less for everyone else. You can't take half of the cake for yourself without reducing the size of the other pieces. In a zero-sum game, you're sharing a limited resource with your fellow players, and one person's gain is another's loss. Healing is a zero-sum game. Over the course of any given encounter, your raiders are only going to take so much damage. If one healer is handling 75% of the incoming damage, then there's only 25% of the incoming damage for the other healers to handle. The more HPS a healer does, the less their teammates are capable of. DPS classes work in the opposite way, where the more DPS one class does, the more DPS everyone does. Because of this unique zero-sum game that healers compete in, judging a healer's performance can be difficult.
Addon Spotlight: Helpers for priest healers
Addon Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, Addon Spotlight gives priest healers some suggestions for awesome healing helpers! Since there is still no beta addon news to cover and most of the user interface changes have been well documented, I continue to hang my head in shame, waiting feverishly for new word about addons in Cataclysm. Instead, I have taken to occasionally playing a human priest named Helicopter. Back in vanilla WoW, I was a raid-healing priest who basically played like the speeds of a tractor: a turtle for "slow" and a rabbit for "fast." The entirety of my existence consisted of picking one of two heals for the job, and that was that. When I popped into beta, rolled up a priest and set to work, I had no idea what I was doing. This week's Addon Spotlight is all about the things that I wish I had in beta -- an amalgamation of some awesome healing priest addons that can hopefully help out all you aspiring holy and discipline priests. Shadow, I don't hate, I promise. You'll have your day in the ... shade? You get enough tough love from your majordomo already, anyhow. Healer priests, this one's for you, with some vanilla priest stories thrown in for fun, of course.
WoW Rookie: Basic add-ons
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's. Last week, we talked about how add-ons add zing to your game, and we explained how to download and install them. We hope you spent time poking around some of the major mod sites and found some things that caught your eye -- but if not, we're back to fill you in on some of different types of mods along with some of the most popular add-ons that will streamline and enhance your game experience. What are the major kinds of add-ons? The bulk of what most players consider to be WoW's "must-have" add-ons falls into some half a dozen loose category types.
US government lays out cash for wall-based, in-home 'smart meters'
Google has its PowerMeter, Microsoft has its Hohm and Obama has his "smart meters." Got it? Good. Around two years after UK taxpayers began footing the bill for in-home energy monitors, it seems as if America's current administration is looking to follow suit. While visiting the now-open solar facility in Arcadia, Florida today, the Pres announced that $3.4 billion in cash that the US doesn't actually have has just been set aside for a number of things, namely an intelligent power grid and a whole bundle of smart power meters. Aside from boring apparatuses like new digital transformers and grid sensors (both of which are designed to modernize the nation's "dilapidated" electric network), 18 million smart meters and 1 million "other in-home devices" will be installed in select abodes. The idea here is to give individuals a better way to monitor their electricity usage, with the eventual goal set at 40 million installed meters over the next few years. Great idea, guys -- or you know, you could just advise people to turn stuff off when they aren't using it, or not use energy they can't afford. Just sayin'.
Spiritual Guidance: Tools to evaluate a Discipline Priest
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. After a minor hiatus, Matticus examines the pain that many Discipline Priests experience: That they're just not good enough and how to even the odds. Apologies for the lengthy delay. I needed to grab some field data which took way longer than it should have. Coincidentally enough, Amanda Dean wrote about this very same issue a few days ago concerning healing meters and Discipline Priests. It still makes me sad every time I read about this. A raid leader or heal leader asks a Discipline Priest to go back to Holy because they feel their performance isn't good enough. In most cases, I think it's just them not truly understanding how Discipline works. It has always been about prevention not healing.
Forum post of the day: Be disciplined about healing meters
Mellere of Wildhammer posted a brief lament about her guild leaders treatment of a Discipline Priest. The discipline priest was below a Retadin on HPS. Without understanding the role of mitigation as a healer, the Raid Leader told him to go holy to bring up his HPS. The OP expressed disappointment in the RL at this action.Several responders posted that this is partly the fault of Blizzard as they don't take into account shielding and mitigation to healing scores in the combat log. Daerilla of Spirestone intimated that she did not want to see mitigation included in healing figures, because then people would take notice of how overpowered Disc Priests are in raids. There were some less-than-kind comments about the Raid Leader's competence.
More cities using personal parking meters
Parking meters have made huge strides in recent years, with some of them -- such as pay-by-cell systems -- providing increased convenience to change-starved consumers, while others -- like auto-resetting meters -- have made it harder to get away with modest infractions like picking up a previous parker's minutes. Now, what may be the ultimate in parking convenience, the "personal meter" is starting to catch on in more major cities. The small card readers have been around for several years, but have recently become more popular; last month, Buffalo expanded its pilot system from a service for handicapped drivers to a citywide program. Buffalo's system, like many others, relies on the Smart Park reader, from Israel's Ganis Systems. The card reader can hang from a car's rearview mirror, and can be programmed with a city's parking rules. When a driver parks, he inserts the card into the meter, sets it for his location, and the meter starts ticking away. Enforcement officers with handheld receivers spot-check cars, and issue tickets based on data they download via an IR link. The system definitely sounds convenient, and could eliminate all of those tickets for underestimating how long you're going to be parked. However, we can't help but think it could be improved by adding wireless communication with servers that can automatically track violations and issue tickets. This could be more efficient than the spot-check system, even if it would put Lovely Rita out of a job.
