Dota 2 gets Heropedia and new heroes: Wisp and Luna

Dota 2′s expansion gathers pace with the arrival of this week’s second update. This one introduces the heropedia, which presents a breakdown of every character’s stats, lore background and skills, with short videos of every ability. You can browse it now on the Dota 2 site, or access it via the “Learn” tab in the Dota 2 client.
The grand roster of heroes has also been expanded with two new characters, Luna the Moonrider, who’s much more dangerous than she sounds, and Wisp, a glowing ball of light with some unusual abilities. Find out more about them, and absorb the latest patch notes below.

Luna The Moonrider

– Moontastic Agility Carry
As titles go, “Luna the Moonrider” isn’t likely to instil much fear, until you actually see her and notice that she’s riding a giant panther. Then you’ll notice that the giant panther is wearing a hat, but while you’re busy noticing that, you’ll be taking a hit to the face from a rebounding magical chakram. Then as you’re trying to pull your senses together she’ll be activating her ultimate ability, which turns day to night and starts zapping you with bolts of searing moon energy. “What the hell, moon!?” you’ll probably cry.
The ability videos in the updated heropedia were done by Dota cinema, who have also done a couple of overview videos for the new heroes. Here’s one for Luna.

Wisp

– Utility Glowing Hero Ball Thing
No Warcraft 3 sprite was left unused in the formation of Defence of the Ancients. Even glowing balls of light can become characters, as Guardian Wisp demonstrates. According to his bio, “Wisp occupies all planes at once, the merest fraction of its being crossing into physical existence at any one moment,” which sounds grandiose, but it’s best thought of as a sentient glowing ball who just wants to help. It does this by tethering itself to heroes, increasing their movement speed and stunning anyone who touches the strand. For its ultimate trick, it can teleport to any point on the map for 12 seconds, taking any tethered hero along for the ride.
See these abilities in action in the Dota Cinema overview of Wisp.

And here are the latest patch notes:
HIGHLIGHTS:

• Added Luna
• Added Guardian Wisp
• Dota 2 now uses the CELT codec for increased voice communication quality.
• Added a testing tool to the Workshop tab that allows contributors to see their models on a hero before submitting.
• Added Heropedia to the Learn tab.

GAMEPLAY

• Bloodseeker: Fixed a bug where he could get healed by friendly heroes dying in the area around him that he didn’t deny.
• Pudge: Fixed a bug that was sometimes causing Pudge’s Dismember to do an extra tick of damage
• Pudge: Fixed a bug that allowed Pudge to deal damage without hurting himself by quickly toggling Rot.
• Rubick: Fixed a rare case where Rubick could get permanently stuck with Telekinesis Land.
• Rubick: Fixed a bug where Rubick would gain permanent Spectral Dagger buffs until he died.
• Rubick: Fixed a bug with Poison Release that would cause you to steal the wrong ability from Shadow Demon.
• Tiny: Fixed Aghanim’s Scepter siege damage vs backdoor armor
• Fixed being able to use a different player’s items in your combine, if that item was in your stash at the time

VISUALS

• More Rubick spell animations
• Various Rubick visual effect improvements and fixes
• Haste animation added for Bloodseeker
• Adjusted Ogre Magi’s sidearm attack animation
• Logos removed from waterfall and mid river areas to safeguard gameplay
• Tweaked dire banner position left of fountain shop
• Roshan timer appear only after 10 seconds have passed from death
• Reduced Gyro’s model scale a little
• Removed ambient effects on Razor and Morphling when hexed

UI

• Fixed some cases where icons could get stuck on the screen
• Fixed new heroes not showing up in the hero picker if you had custom view set (They’ll now appear in the top left of the grid view, for you to then place as you like)
• Tournament Panel: Fixed game list not refreshing unless you opened a different tournament and then back.
• Tournament Panel: Increased the size of the live games and recent games.
• Tournament Panel: Fixed details button not working properly for the last few games.
• Fixed Spectator label cutting off number of spectators.
• Fixed Live games not displaying correctly after opening a Tournament.
• Fixed a recent bug with the shop not closing when a unit is selected
• Fixed some bugs with losing commentator perspecting when pausing and unpausing
• Added backpack preview to couriers
• Back button in the loadout takes you back to the backpack if you arrived via a backpack right click
• Fixed some slots on the backpack not being right-clickable if they were not on page 1
• Fixed the first equip from the backpack sometimes not working properly
• Added inspect button near the hero panel for heroes that have custom items
• Updated the replay skill filter to have more usefull categories.
• Fixed dragging an item onto itself not turning its icon back on.
• Cheat commands are now echoed to chat
• Added a testing tool to the Workshop tab that allows contributors to see their models on a hero before submitting.
• Fixed Mute button on the scoreboard not working.

AUDIO:

• Dota 2 now uses the CELT codec for increased voice communication quality.

Diablo 3 digital edition restrictions relaxed

Opting for the digital edition of Diablo 3 will no longer place a temporary cap on your progress through the game, Blizzard has announced. Players buying the game on Battle.net post patch 1.0.3 were finding their characters locked at level 13 and limited to Act I until their credit cards were verified, a process taking up to 72 hours. With 1.0.3a, this has been fixed – but there are plenty of restrictions still in place for new buyers.
Unverified digital copies of Diablo 3 will still have restricted access to the auction house, trade, chat, public games, and they won’t be able to change their server region. As Blizzard explained last week, these measures are supposed to combat credit card fraud by making freshly-purchased accounts less useful as spambots, and therefore less attractive to unscrupulous types. The full explanation is available on the Battle.net forums, if you’re interested.
There’s no doubt, though, that it’s an inconvenience. On one hand, gold selling and associated underhandedness has to be combated somehow – but on the other hand, isn’t that exactly what the real money auction house was supposed to do?

Adobe is Nixing Flash Player Support for Android

As noted here yesterday, Google's new version 4.1 of Android, "Jelly Bean," is a substantial upgrade of the mobile OS. It's faster, has slick predictive features, and overhauled user interface components. However, it is worth noting that just as version 4.1 arrived, Adobe announced that there will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1.
"Beginning August 15^th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed" says a post from Adobe. "Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15^th."
Adobe's partners usually build Flash into their devices, but many users of Android devices have been accustomed to downloading Flash players for their devices. Beginning with Android 4.1, Adobe will absolutely limit access to Flash Player via Google Play to devices that already have the program installed.
This may annoy many Android users, but the news isn't a surprise. In November, Adobe said that it would abandon Flash development for mobile browsers.  Adobe has also drawn the ire of Linux users for standoffish policies toward the platform.
The underlying problem is that Flash is a form of Esperanto on the web. Numerous analyses have determined that approximately 80 percent of the video housed on the web is Flash-based. Flash is also a platform that new applications get built around, so limiting its flexibility on popular platforms ranging from Android to mobile browsers to Linux is very territorial behavior.
You can read more about Adobe's decision here. 

How To Change Notifications Position In Cinnamon

Cinnamon doesn't have an option to change the notification position on the screen yet, but you can do this by editing the theme CSS code (cinnamon.css theme file).

Let's change the notifications position. If you're using the default Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon edition theme (Nightlife Graphite), you have to edit the "/usr/share/themes/Nightlife - Graphite/cinnamon/cinnamon.css" file so open a terminal and run the following command:

gksu gedit "/usr/share/themes/Nightlife - Graphite/cinnamon/cinnamon.css"

If you're using the default Cinnamon theme (used by default in LMDE), use the following command instead:

gksu gedit /usr/share/cinnamon/theme/cinnamon.css

For other Cinnamon themes:  the cinnamon.css file path depends on the theme you're using (it's in the "cinnamon" folder inside the theme directory). To find out the cinnamon.css file path, open Nautilus and navigate to /usr/share/themes/ - here you'll find all the available themes -, double click the directory for the theme you're using you'll find a "cinnamon" folder where there's a "cinnamon.css" file which is the file you have to edit to change the notifications position.

Then search for the following code:

margin-from-top-edge-of-screen: 30px;

This is the margin from the top edge of the screen so this value changes the notifications position vertically - change its value to whatever you want. If, for instance, you want the notifications to be displayed at the bottom right, you can enter the value of your screen vertical width minus 100 pixels (example: if you have a 1920x1080 screen resolution, your screen width is 1080px, so you would use 980 (1080-100) as the value).

If you want to change the horizontal notifications position, search for:

margin-from-right-edge-of-screen: 20px;

Just like its name says, this is the margin from the right edge of the screen. Once again, depending on your screen resolution, change its value to whatever you like.

Once you change the values, save the file, then open Cinnamon Settings and under Themes, select a different theme, then switch back to the theme you were using. This basically applies the changes so you can see the tweaked notifications in action.

Now, to send a test notification, firstly install libnotify-bin:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

And send a test notification using the following command:

notify-send --icon=gtk-add "Test notification" "This is the message body"

AMD Catalyst 12.6 Has Support for Linux Kernel 3.4

AMD announced yesterday, June 28th, the immediate availability for download of the AMD Catalyst 12.6 video driver for Linux operating systems.

As usual, AMD didn't publish any release notes for the ATI Catalyst 12.6 (fglrx 8.98) video driver, but Michael Larabel from Phoronix states that it brings support for application profile, support for Linux kernel 3.4, and various other small bugfixes.

Moreover, AMD Catalyst 12.6 removes support for old graphics cards, such as the R600 and R700 GPUs ( Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000).

AMD Catalyst 12.6 video driver provides production support for the following Linux-based operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, openSUSE Linux and Ubuntu Linux. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Download the ATI/AMD Catalyst Linux Display Drivers 12.6

Rodent file manager is revolutionizing your ways!

Nautilus is a core application of the GNOME desktop environment, and is the one and only choice for many users that feel comfortable with it. I imagine that many people have never even tried to use another file manager, or don’t know about any worthy alternatives.
As expandable and configurable as Nautilus may be, it doesn’t meet the needs of power users or everyone’s preferences. If you are one of those, why don’t you try Rodent?

Why should(n’t) I use it?

Rodent is fast and fully featured. You will find that some things are done in a different way, but efficiency is not compromised in any case. All you need to do is give Rodent some time to get used to what is going on on this file manager, and Rodent will serve you back.
Rodent offers some unique features that everyone would find interesting and quite useful like the application launcher that you can access just by right clicking anywhere:

As you can see, right clicking in to empty space allows you to access everything you could possibly need in a fast, simple and efficient way. Useful things like “Open terminal here” that Nautilus needs an extension for, are offered by default in Rodent.

The first thing that might alienate you are the icons that Rodent uses, but you can easily make the file manager use the system selected icons (Faience in my case) through the “Personal Settings”.

Changing the icon set and size from the lower right bar made things quite more coherent with the rest of my system.

The powerful capabilities of Rodent show when you need to review, run, playback, or open a file. Rodent preview an image or a document when the cursor passes above it, allowing you to have a quick look of what that file contains. The same happens with folders and their content that are presented as a file list on a pop-up. (Click images for larger)

Rodent is not hiding its half-console nature. Almost everything you’ll do from copy-paste to renaming a file will make the bottom terminal of the file manager show up and allow you to write whatever command you need. Rodent is fully functional in both ways!

Rodent is not a suitable file manager for the Linux noobies, but it certainly worths the attention of every advanced user. It is built for those who know what they are doing, and want to have power on their hands easily available. It is a fast, modern file manager that will let you do what you want in the most efficient way.

I suggest everyone try Rodent for a week, and see how it goes (and come here and tell us about it). I will!