Minecraft on the Vita, the best Minecraft experience On-the-Go.

If you want portable Minecraft On-the-Go, you've basically got 2 choices.  The Pocket edition for Android/iOS or the PS Vita edition.  Personally, I think the the Vita version is the better game.  Screenshots were taken directly on the Vita.  Yes, it can do that.  Press the Playstation button and Start at the same time.

That's my PS3 world, imported into the Vita.  they're Cross-save compatible.  Here's the Cubedon flag on my house.

While the Pocket edition does have infinite worlds, the Vita version has many features the Pocket edition doesn't.  The easiest to see right away is the Hunger and experience bars.

And you can see the netherwort.  Pocket edition doesn't have the nether, so no nethwort.

Here is my nether portal and redstone based cobblestone generator.  You can't build such a generator in the Pocket edition, no redstone functionality.  It doesn't even have buttons or pressure plates to open doors.

Neither can you brew potions or enchant items.

Also the Pocket Edition's UI and controls are not optimal, the Vita edition having the same control as the PS3/PS4 version.  And if you already have the PS3 version, the Vita version is cross-buy, meaning you don't have to pay for it.

I used qcma to transfer the photos.  You start it up, and then use Content Manager on the Vita to actually do the transfer.

Getting back in the swing of things.

As Kit Meredith says on her blog, it's hard to get back in the swing of things. There's never enough time to do what I want in SL and do other things in RL. I've also been trying to figure out a way to streamline photo stuff. On the new laptop SL pics are 11MB, which are teh devil if I want to send a bunch to anyone. Either I can compress them and lose quality or send em as is. Though one good thing is the new lappie must have the gods own integrated graphics. When I can go to a charity fashion show, have everything rez and take 600MB of pics, and only have SL crash after turning up the graphics after at least 6 hours of SL, that's something.

I swear, I should just set up a cron job to auto convert and scale pics I put in a specific directory.

Oh yeah I also have another new toy, that I've been wanting for over a year, a mighty Playstation 3. I needed one in addition to wanting one because Midgar (my Playstation 2 with Linux installed) was having hard drive issues. I knew it was going to fail soon, and it did. fscking superblock errors, it refuses to boot at all now, and I never did get all my files off of it. I installed Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3 late night the evening I got it. It runs soooo much better than on the PS2, the GIMP is actually speedy, though it's an older version than what I had on the PS2.

I've also discovered that the laptop's LCD screen is crap compared to the cheapo Wal-Mart LCD TV I have the PS3 hooked up to. It's contrast and color is not so good and it's even lower resolution. The TV is 1440x900 and the lappie is 1280x800. I'm using 1280x768 under Linux because going higher res causes the TV to try to scale things funny, the PS3's graphics chip is funny about output resolutions too, it only uses specific ones, so I can't force it to go 1440x900.

I've been playing Oblivion on the PS3 too, been collecting pretty dresses for my character, a female Imperial with reddish hair. :-) Oblivion's character graphics are "uncanny valley weird", even more so than SL. In some ways I think the game would have been better had the avatars been more "SL" in appearance, less realistic. They eyes on Oblivion characters are spooky.

I've been a member of Sony's Gamer Advisory Panel for over 5 years, so I'm hoping I'll get an invite to the "Home" beta. "Home" is sony's SL style virtual environment, that looks suspiciously a LOT like SL. I really want to compare the two. I'm also hoping they allow for user content so Elika can make hair and Roslin and CJ can make makeup for Home. Because I don't want to wander around Home without my ETD Hair in Mahogany or Fleur skin.