Justin Germino Ramblings

So I had switched most of my smaller blogs over to InMotion Web Hosting back in March 2015 and haven’t really looked back.  InMotion hosting provided me a seamless way to transition my sites over, and in fact I was so busy that I didn’t have time to migrate my sites away from my previous hosting provider so InMotion Hosting literally copied everything from my old host to my new InMotion hosting for me and when it was all done my site was up and running flawlessly on my new hosting provider.

Now, they copied not only the WordPress theme, database and plugins, but they also transported over years worth of upload files, the ones you add when uploading images and media to posts so I had media and image files between 2009 and 2015 that was all transported and uploaded too.  They do all of this for free for the 1st site you want transferred, and only charge a relatively reasonable cost for migrating additional sites.  I found it to be well worth the extra fee because if it saved you 4-5 hours of time yourself migrating your site, this to me was worth the cost, time was worth more to me.

You get CPanel which I always prefer to make things easier too, the Paper Lantern theme for me is preferable as it is always easier to search and find the function you are looking for in CPanel than the traditional X3 interface.

Of course you also get a couple of great advertising starter deals when you sign up and start hosting with InMotion as well. Not only do you get $100 in AdWords credit, but you also get Bing/Yahoo credit, Amazon Product ad credit and listing on YP.com.

You get access to all your normal reports and analytics from the web host dashboard as well.  But with Unlimited bandwidth and disk space you don’t have to worry about having to pay more just because you are storing more media files in your uploads folder, or have traffic spikes that use more bandwidth.

If you host video or audio files on your WordPress site itself and don’t use a cloud streaming service for your rich media, you will appreciate the unlimited disk and bandwidth space.  I have a much more expensive hosting provider for my main site due to needing more CPU/RAM needs than a shared hosting plan and I don’t get unlimited disk space and it gets costly.

InMotion hosting is also incredible stable and the uptime has been very good, better than my previous Bluehost or HostMonster plans in the past.  I also can tell you with all plans being hosted on SSD drives, you get better pageload and hosting speeds than you do and this is especially true if you leverage disk based caching like W3 Total Cache does when configured.

InMotion Hosting after 9 months of using it for 5 of my WordPress blogs gets my thumbs up, I have only had to open a single trouble ticket with the company in 9 months (since my original tickets to get my sites migrated). Opening a single trouble ticket in 9 months is actually a very long time, I had to open 2-3 on my main site in that length of time with a hosting provider that costs 4x as much per month.

For those who need more power than a shared plan, InMotion Hosting has pretty decent VPS hosting plans as well which give you more RAM for the price than most other hosting provider plans do.  Overall if you get less than 7k visits per day on your site, then you may be able to be supported just fine on shared hosting leveraging either Incapsula, Cloudflare and W3 Total Cache.

Fallout 4 is the Holiday game that both my kids and I wanted and will be consuming most of our free time over the next upcoming weeks.  I had been a Fallout fan since the original with the turn based strategy combat still being my preference.  This is why when I play Fallout 4 I still tend to use VATS and get near turn based strategy with targeting attacks, rather than playing it like an FPS completely.

Just can’t through frag grenades or do some other stuff with VATS.  I found some of the comical critical hits like when blowing someones head off and it becomes a severed head that floats off of the body rather than a head that explodes as seen in the video.

The game is fun, engaging and there is a ton of open world stuff to explore.  Perk up and play!

Man you would think the end of times was coming the way my kids were desperate about getting “Day 1” release games on the day they released. Waiting until Christmas was “too long” and the game would already age, with thousands of vids and walkthroughs online already.  This is what parents face now in this generation of social media and online video, where consumerism and all the marketing and sharing behind it make it that much harder for parents to try and teach their kids that “rewards” and “gifts” are not instant.  If it isn’t a Birthday or special occasion it is imperative that they learn luxuries and wants must be earned through hard work, reward system or sometimes simply saving and avoiding the urge to spend anything you do earn immediately.

As someone who telecommutes and gets gadgets sent to me all the time to review for Dragon Blogger, I can honestly tell you this is much harder in my house than in most perhaps.  The fact my kids see me get games, products and stuff all the time to do reviews makes it seem to them like I get all the cool and great stuff immediately without having to wait, delay or save up.  Realistically this is another part time job, reviewing products and it is something that I negotiate services for.  It gets explained but not always understood or accepted.

Also, not even I could negotiate a free copy of Fallout 4 to review, so I am having to wait until Christmas forcing myself to delay to set an example for my kids that we can’t always get what we want even on the day it releases.  Even though I could afford to buy it for myself, I decided to bite the bullet and set an example with this one.  It would be too much of a tease to play a game I wanted as much as them, and they would be forced to wait.  Sure I could put the “I work and earn money, and can afford to get it for myself” item but this would not be setting an ideal example, and I am willing to wait with them and show them that I can wait too just like they can.

Things are just so different from when I was a kid, there was so few new releases and toys compared to how much stuff gets constantly released now.  I used to spend allowance as soon as I got it just like they do, but I was more patient in waiting for occasions to get gifts.  Of course there was no YouTube, Twitch and other endless channels to cram what I wanted down my throat and “show me” how much I was missing out partaking in this awesome game or activity.  Instead you usually heard about the kid or two in school who got it already and asked how it was and listened in awe, or if they were particularly cruel used to tease and tell you how great it is and spoil it.

Of course, I still have the mindset that I don’t like to watch game play period, I like playing a game and experience it with no prior knowledge or video.  I read reviews only for issues or severe failures in a game like Aliens: Colonial Marines I may have wasted my money on if I didn’t do the research to see how bad the game actually ended up being.  But I particularly am not fond of Let’s Play or video game walk throughs as it ruins the story and immersion for me, my kids however are all about watching the gameplay and this makes them want the games more, and with sandbox games this lets them create their own stories and adventures.  But I don’t think this has the same benefit with campaigns and closed games, where the story is fixed and if you watched it before, it isn’t new and therefore you have no excitement value when you are seeing something already seen.

Either way, patience is something sorely needed in a generation wanting instant gratification and we fight the good fight, but always hope our kids can learn to tell the difference between needs and wants, and develop the hard working ethic to get rewarded only after doing the work and putting in the effort to provide the benefits.

Share with me your stories on how much you struggle teaching kids to wait and the difference between want and need!

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Man, nothing like doing a long recording and finding that there is a problem with the mic audio, I didn’t want to waste the video for this Mechanical Keyboard from Havit that I am reviewing for DragonBlogger.com so I just wound up using it as a blooper.  I will end up having to re-record the entire video anyway, but I do love this mechanical keyboard though my family complains how loud the keys are when I pound away on them at 95 Words Per Minute

In all seriousness, if you do any sort of video blogging (vlogging) or video it is a good idea to always take the time to do a quick 30 second check, stop (make sure your sound and levels are right) then proceed to start doing the official recording. A quick 30 second check could have spared me some time!

Silent Review of the HAVIT Mechanical Gaming Keyboard!

Had a bit of fun playing Lt. Morales with a skin pack last weekend!

Minecraft is an incredible game that brings out creativity, teamwork and simply exploration play that really engages kids in ways I haven’t seen with other online games.  One of the best things about this is that kids create their own world and literally can do whatever their imagination can come up with, this can be simply playing the game on Survival or Operators can do some amazingly complex rules and create Survivor Games or other type of PvP arenas.

However, I really need to find a more kid friendly server for my 8 year old Oliver to play and after playing on dozens of servers online the mix of bad language and older kids just didn’t bring him the experience playing with other kids around his age that we really wanted.  Hence I decided to purchase an official Minecraft Realms server and my son who is 8 is running it as OP.

This will be an application based Minecraft Realms server, that is only for kids between 6 and 12 who want to play, explore, create and not have to deal with older teenagers, trolls or harsh language.  Now, at 8 years old there still may be some PvP and battling as they tend to sometimes have competitions with friends, they have been friendly to younger players.   The other thing to help enforce only kids play is voice, my kids play via Skype so they can talk to each other while playing, this gives them real time communication and learning to talk and engage each other but also this helps ensure that they are actually all playing with kids instead of risking an adult impersonating a kid.

If you are looking for a Kid Friendly Minecraft Realms server and want your son or daughter to be invited to have some good times playing Minecraft in a friendly atmosphere with other kids who are between 7 and 12, then feel free to fill out an application.  If accepted you will receive an invite to the Minecraft Realms server, and be given the Skype username of Oliver who is the Moderator and Admin.

Apply for Access to Kid Friendly Minecraft Realms Server

I will personally overlook and audit all applications, this is a mission to keep things kid friendly and safe for the kids who just want to play and keep to a younger audience.

-Justin Germino

You probably have seen all the reports about the success of Windows 10 already having more installs than every other Linux distro just based on the free upgrades. With over 14 million installs and very few, though some problems report Microsoft is likely going to have an OS that will finally eat and expand upon a larger user base than Windows 7, Windows 8 and possibly even the former Windows XP.  There is however a caveat to everyone who gets their free upgrade and that is the fact that Microsoft isn’t making money by giving away free upgrades.  They are making money now on your data that is being shared as a result of the free upgrades.

Windows 10 more so than any previous OS and with Cortana ties into their Windows Online Services, to have the functions work fully you need to be connected to a Windows Live / Xbox Live account and this is where data gets stored, tracked, consumed and shared for the same purpose that one would see with any service including Google, Facebook or others and that is to serve you better and more targeted ads.  To build more information for the big data engines to make sure you are presented with the stuff more likely to get you to click and buy.

The privacy settings by default, Wi-Sense and more are simply ways to subsidize and offset the fact that they are giving away the OS.  Do I see at some point in the future targeted popups on your Windows 10 OS like the free editions of Office applications or a Ad supported Kindle Fire?  Maybe, Maybe not.

Of course it makes a lot of sense to have a single OS, Microsoft says Windows 10 will be the last Windows Upgrade and version, meaning all future updates will just continue to update the existing Windows 10 adding features, functions, bug fixes…etc.  Though you still can use an offline user account in Windows 10 you lose access to many of the features like Cortana that depend on the Windows Live account.

So far the biggest issue that I have with Windows 10 is the removal of Recent Places from the Save As menu, it makes it harder if you frequently like to put files in your recent folders to do this.  Frequent Folders isn’t the same and not as good, and I can’t find a permanent work around to this so is just something to get used to unless Microsoft fixes it.

Overall though I do like Windows 10, disabled a lot of security features, including the Wi-Sense which is where Windows would automatically connect to common public trusted networks (trusted) being the key word here as in it isn’t you trusting it, it was a partnership deal where Microsoft says it’s trusted.  So this is worth disabling and this video tutorial shows you how to do that.

Have you upgraded to Windows 10 yet?  What are your favorite things so far, or what do you hate about it? Share your story!

Had several issues on this site and most of my smaller sites that were traced back to a misconfiguration of my .htaccess file which most likely was caused by a WordPress plugin that updated it.

The error I saw in my errors file for Apache was Either all Options must start with + or -, or no Option may [closed]

In digging through my .htaccess file I found this line:

Options ExecCGI Includes IncludesNOEXEC SymLinksIfOwnerMatch -Indexes

And this was the line barfing, it said basically every OPTIONS has to have +, – in front or none of them can.

This must be something different with later Apache release or something as this file was untouched for months, but either way it was a simple fix.  Just moving Options -Indexes to a separate line without it being part of the same line resolved the problem and I was able to have the issue resolved.

Meanwhile, I had some issues with PHP and ION Cube Loader which is required for my Author hReview plugin so I had to have that setup which require a support ticket to InMotion hosting as they don’t allow you to check the module in PHP Configuration, but they were fairly quick to just load the Option and get this site back up and running again.

Overall I haven’t found the reason for the change, but suspect it may be related to Wordfence Security plugin which occasionally can update the .htaccess file I think, this seems like something the plugin would do and it was recently updated though I can’t prove it caused the issue.

Having lived in San Diego County now since January, my wife and I decided to take a short Anniversary vacation up to Temecula to celebrate the July 4th weekend.  We had such fond memories of our Napa trip a few years back and wanted to see how Temecula was which happens to only be about an hour and a half drive from our house compared to the 11 hour distance of Napa.

Looking forward to some relaxing days with just my wife and I exploring the Wine country and enjoying fine dining and alone time without the kids for a few days.  Meanwhile, I hope everyone who follows me has a Happy July 4th!

We are staying at South Coast Winery Resort & Spa and are enjoying a package deal.

So I run into a situation very similar to many parents out there of children who are even more consumed by gaming than when I was a kid, and trust me when I was a kid I had NES, Atari, Commodore 64 and gaming was very much a part of my everyday life but it pales to the access of amazing gaming opportunities that they have now.  My kids have taken gaming to the next level with wanting to broadcast, record and establish online personalities for their video game play which I encourage and will grow during summer vacations but there are some things I help them implement to lay down the foundation of getting some skills and knowledge that will help them other areas of professional life later on as well.

Leadership

All it takes to realize about a MOBA or MMO game where you run a guild or league is to realize that this requires coordination and teamwork.  You have your gamer be in charge of a group or lead and tell them that they set the strategy and issue commands, take advice and help run it and they are going to start establishing themselves as a leader able to give orders, re-assign team members to other responsibilities, call out mistakes and help showcase or assist where needed.  As long as done in a friendly and helpful fashion without raging or disrespect this can help deal with disappointment when a team fails, lack of coordination from lack of trust, and allows different personalities to help mesh or determine what works and what doesn’t.  Encourage your kids who are gamers to speak to their ‘group’ on teamspeak or another chat group so they can do more careful coordination of strategy and this works particularly well for League of Legends, Smite, DoTA2 or Heroes of the Storm for example.  The same thing was applied for WoW Guild Raids and GW2 Dungeon runs as well however.

Public Presentation

Here I admit is something that some people abuse and turn to disrespect or childish behavior on camera, but if you encourage and provide proper encouragement your child may use the webcam and live streaming to be comfortable talking to an audience they can’t see, being able to issue instruction, call out what you are doing as you are doing it, thinking ahead and getting into the mindset of explaining things can help them become better presenters, be better on conference calls and may assist with public speaking later on (though doesn’t address the in-person anxiety).  This also helps kids who don’t like their own voice, appearance, or are generally uncomfortable on camera get more comfortable with being on camera or having a presence but be cognizant of the risks and how they handle it.  My kids were so riddled with embarassement when making mistakes on camera video doing unboxings and used to have trouble talking when the camera record light was on, but they with practice became so much more comfortable on camera and relaxing.  I don’t encourage people to just become screamers, ragers or disrespectful swearing for the sake of attention grabbing.  It is important they find a personality or persona they like being or presenting while recording but try to encourage they keep it more PG rather than R rated, particularly if they are already under age and their target audience is under 18.

Think About Your Audience

Asking your gamers who want to record or showcase their triumphs and gamecast about who they want to watch and see, how they should react what reaction or response do they want from viewers gets them thinking about “customers” and the viewer is a consumer of their entertainment offering, put these ideas in their head to treat themselves as a source of entertainment or a service with consumers and these terminologies will help them later on as well.  They should also consider if they want to potentially find a way to monetize their service in the future, subscriptions like a TV show, do you want to try and sell the games you are showcasing, or merchandising like T-Shirt, branding…etc.  Or is it purely for fun and no intention on doing anything further.

Identity

Consider using a fake identity or a “Hollywood Name” for your gamecasting so that should you ever want to stop or even have someone else take over, you can offload that entertainment offering.  Tying it into your real name has permanency online long after you quit and want to stop people will find that you used to do this, so consider where you want this to be in your history.  Though if you use a webcam and not just a voice it is likely friends and people you know will find out so don’t ever assume you can do any casting or streaming anonymously forever if you are using a webcam, they need to know that exposing who you are is leaving yourself open to anything and this is where parents should take an active involvement too.  Encourage them to come to you if they get any comments, concerns or feedback that is trolling, flaming or may even fall under hate speech.  It is important you don’t flip out as parents and know some of the people who comment on YouTube and Twitch can say the most childish and hurtful things but you shouldn’t penalize the kid, use it as a learning experience to point out the lack of manners, etiquette and help teach them how to block and report offensive comments showing them how to handle these things and not dignify with a response, never get into a flame war with a commenter.  This will teach them patience as well as the ability on how to handle a difficult personality provided it isn’t physically hostile in person but something done via email or online later on too.
Software

Have your kid experiment with OBS (Open Broadcast Software) and they get familiar with creating inputs, channels, output, codecs, bitrate and other terminology to help learn how to take feeds from multiple sources and combine them into a broadcast whether it is to Twitch or to an output file they can upload to YouTube.  Encourage them with other video editing software to create titles, transitions, video intro/logo’s and teach them how to create YouTube thumbnails, do some editing and they can develop skills that delve into video authoring and editing later on.  There are a variety of free and paid tools that help and are worth learning here and it all leads to learning something new and software to help support the gaming as well.

In Summary

Done right and encouraged, your gamers can be developing skills that will help them outside of the field of gaming and this is even if they don’t end up being the next big YouTube Star!  One thing I like to do is help my kids use an Amazon affiliate tag on all their videos and donation buttons on their Twitch as just ways to encourage them to build a business model around their creation of media content as well.