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Digressions Geek

The Bike: Kespor GSX 2.0 (Shimano!)

Been on the bike a lot since the pandemic. Been taking this out almost daily for about 20-40km rides. Everything is stock except for the tires which I replaced with 2x Teravail Cannonballs converted to a tubeless set up.

This bike was an upgrade of the original GSX 2.0 that came with SRAM instead of Shimano groupsets. This particular one cost P55,000, which is a steal, compared to the P45,000 counterpart (SRAM Rival).

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Geek

Social media page blunders and how we can avoid it from happening again

Every so often, a Facebook page admin of a brand will make that mistake of accidentally commenting using the login credentials of their official account with the sentiments of a personal profile. As the former social media head of the Manila Bulletin many years ago, we took steps to ensure that things like this do not happen — but they do. In my time, I’ve had my fair share of blunders (luckily nothing controversial — like when someone posted about a waxing salon so readers actually thought it was a branded execution!). 

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Observations from my first NFT event organized by BitPinas

I remember my very first “Web 2.0” event back in, *checks notes*, the hazy days of 2006. I had just left my full time editorial job at Hinge-Inquirer publications (a proud genesis employee!) and was transitioning to full time work doing blog network management and writing for b5Media and Know More Media.

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Geek

BOOMER GEN – MANILA BULLETIN

I found an old piece my late father wrote for Art Samaniego of Manila Bulletin. Reposting it here for posterity’s sake

UTTERLY USELESS GADGETS II

BOOMER GEN – MANILA BULLETIN

By Jose Ma J Fernandez

Last week, we came up with a couple of seemingly useful but also useless – for most people – gadgets. Of course, we must credit our neighbors, the industrious Japanese, for always managing to come up with these crazy nice ideas and items that we await with bated breath each year. One blogsite I bumped into (Hubpages) has a list of some ten utterly useless travel gadgets. I had a big laugh as I went through the list of these items, and felt that I should at least share some of these with you. Especially since the others writing for this section are true techies who owe their allegiance to the Empire of the Geeks. Call me the non-geek, the absolute non-techie in this page. Which makes me wonder why the editors give me a rather long leash!

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The Ascent: Quick Beginner Tips

Here are some quick tips in bullet points. I’m playing on PC with GamePass.

  • For skills, I highly suggest investing most if not all in max VITAL SIGNS first (20 points). This is because you will die a lot once enemies start shooting back. If you love to use your augments, max your energy (BODY BATTERY) next.
  • Sell all your duplicate weapons and armor. Keep 1 of each only.
  • Weapon upgrades are permanent — if you upgrade your Dominator to Mk2, it stays that way for all Dominators dropped.
  • Biometric Timestamp is a great augment for healing over time. You basically use this to juggle heals using energy. If your energy is full, use it to heal up when there are no health packs dropping.
  • Try to pick up all the cyberdecks. Here is a guide. The caveat is that you can do COSMODROME before AG VAULT. Once you pick it up, it’s automatically equipped. No need to do anything.
  • The Dominator machine gun and the Dread Assault rufle are great all-around weapons in my opinion. The Dominator does good damage (with a huge clip) but slows you down when firing. You are more mobile with the Dread.
  • Elemental damage comes into play **maybe** after the Empowerment main mission. You can perform great with the Dominator / Riot Shotgun / Dread rifle in the first 10-12 character levels of the game.
  • I spent gun upgrade points on the Dominator (Mk 6) and Dread Rifle (Mk 5)) but now that I am a bit farther in, I would suggest saving more than upgrading once you get to ballistic, energy and heat weapons.
  • The Double Charge side mission requires that you buy a Stasis Drone from the vendor. That’s how you do stasis damage at the start.