Battlefield 3 - Get more info from Battlelog

Ever wished there were more info in battlelog? - like more detailed description on each weapon including how much damage it could make or how accurate it is. Well now you can!

Battlelog by default does not provide you any of the above features. But there is a third party browser plug-in, which does gives you a myriad of info including the above. This plug-in is called (surprisingly) betterbattlelog. It adds more details and functionality to the original battlelog website. Inorder to unleash its full power, you must have an account in bf3stats. Read this post to know about it more. http://www.mindfane.com/2012/02/battlefield3-how-to-view-older-battle.html

Plugin website:
http://getbblog.com

Download page:
http://getbblog.com/en/download

Bf3 stats site:
www.bf3stats.com

This plug-in adds a lot of new functionality, but the key features that I found are:
1. Global ranking for weapons and vehicles. - This tool will let you know how proficient you are with a particular weapon or vehicle. But you should have at least 100 kills with it to be ranked.

Ranking for AEK-971

2. More stats on weapons - This is the most interesting feature to me. It will display additional info regarding each weapon. It also let you now how each weapon attachments affects its accuracy.

Advanced weapon stats for AEK-971

3. An intense performance tracking system with graph. This plugin uses your bf3stats account to present you a very detailed performance tracking graph. It lets you see how well you perform each day or week or month. You can track a number of parameters like SPM, Kills, Deaths, Wins, Loses, Score.....

Track your performance

Other features include the ability to flag cheaters. Once you do that, you will be warned when you try to join a server and the flagged player is playing in that server. You can also flag a particular server.

At the time of writing this, the plug-in supports only chrome 16+ and firefox. I hope they will add more browsers soon.

Share it with other players if you find this useful.

Battlefield 3 - How to get Combat Efficiency Ribbon

The 'Combat Efficiency Ribbon' is one of the confusing ribbons to achieve. The requirement says 'Get 3 Kill streaks'. In BF3 a kill steak starts when you kill 5 enemies without getting killed. After the streak has started, every further kills will grant you a 'Streak Bonus'

5 kills -> streak started
6 kills -> first streak bonus
7 kills - >second streak bonus
8 kills -> third streak bonus + RIBBON
9 kills -> fourth streak bonus
10 kills -> fifth streak bonus
11 kills - >sixth streak bonus + RIBBON

If you get killed, the streak is reset. ie for example lets say you got killed aftrer 7 kills. Then you have to start over again and get 8 more continuous kills to get it.

Remember - this is applicable to PC only. I do not know how this works in XBOX360 or PlayStation 3

PS: Some people claim that to get a streak you have to kill 8 people and to get the ribbon you have to do it thrice (8*3 kills). This is wrong. Look at the image below. I only have 14 kills in total and got the 'Combat Efficiency Ribbon' twice (at my 8th and 11th kills). My Bf3 skills are very poor. If it required 8X3 kills to get this ribbon, I would never get it in my life

Battlefield 3 - How to get Nemesis Ribbon

Some people find it is difficult to get the Nemesis ribbon in battlefield 3. The reason for this is many of them are not sure how to get this. In battlelog it says 'Get 2 Nemesis Kills'. What does that mean?

IN BF3, You become someone's nemesis, if you Kill that player 5 times, without him killing you in between. The other players can still kill you. Once you do that, you become that person's Nemesis.

I have searched the net to find out how to get the ribbon. There are two solutions.

1. Become a Nemesis twice.(Confirmed) ref: http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/battlereport/show/28140831/2/224752992/
   - Kill two players 5 times each without them killing you
   - Or Kill the same player 2*5 times. (you can get killed after the 5th kill and this will still get the ribbon)

2. Kill 2 of your Nemesis (Not confirmed)
  - Get killed by the same person 5 times. Then kill him - do this twice (your nemesis can be two different palyers or the same player).
 - TIP: try to get into matches with low player count to increase the odds. Try Squad Daethmatch

Battlefield3 - How to view older battle reports

In Battlefield 3, the profile page shows battle reports of only a few recent matches. One way to view older reports is to bookmark the report you are interested in. However, this is not going to help you a lot as Battlelog server purges reports that are more than 3 weeks old.

So how can you see the older reports?

Well at the time of writing, battlelog DOES NOT give you an option to do this. But there is a third party site called bf3stats.com, which can help you. Create an account in this site and they will keep your battle reports for  a long time. They also show more of your stats than battlelog does.

The site basically scrapes battlelog pages to get the data. So you have to update bf3stats reports after every 20 matches, otherwise you will miss the report.

You can get custom battlefield 3 stat banners from this site. They also provide an API, which you can use to fetch bf3 stats to your application or web page.

Here is a sample battlereport from bf3stats.com

Problems with Eclipse and Android SDK

A lot of people are having issues with the latest android sdk and eclipse IDE. Fortunately these can be fixed.
I will list the problems and solution in the order of their occurrence. Please keep in mind that this post only deals with Android SDK in Windows platform.

1. The Android SDK installer fails to detect Java SDK.
Problem: When you try to install the android sdk using the installer, you might have seen this weird error. Even though you have the latest Java SDK installed in your system, the installer will complain that it did not find any Java SDK in your system.
Solution: The solution is pretty simple. When you see this error message, click the 'Back' button and then press "next' button again. Bingo! problem solved. I have reported this issue to google, but they never fixed it. weird!

2. Eclipse does not display any android SDK platforms.
Problem: When you try to create a new android project in eclipse, you cannot select any target platform and the selection list is greyed out/frozen.
Solution: First make sure you have installed the required SDK packages using android SDK manager. Then goto eclipse. Choose Window-> Preferences. Select 'Android' from the left tree. You will see 'SDK Path/Location' field to the top of your screen. Click browse and select the path where you have installed the android SDK. Usually this will be <Windows Drive>/Program Files/Android/android-sdk. Click Apply. Now you will be able to select target platform.

3. Launching the emulator from eclipse always fails with an 'Invalid command-line parameter' error.
Problem: When you try to launch the emeulator from eclipse, a 'Invalid command-line parameter' error is reported and emulator never launches.
Solution: The problem is becuase the SDK path contains white space. You can fix it in two ways.
First, install the sdk to a apth where there is no spaces.eg: C:\android-sdk
Second, and the best solution is to edit your SDK path manually. See Problem #2 is see how to change SDK path. If you haven't already set your SDK path, do it first. Then edit the path manually. If you are using Windows 32 bit, Change 'Program Files' in the path string to 'PROGRA~1'. If you are using Windows 64 bit, change it to 'PROGRA~2'. Do not change the rest of the string. For eg:. If your original path was 'C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk', you change it to C:\PROGRA~1\Android\android-sdk.
Click Apply, and you are ready to go.

4. Emulator stuck at 'android' logo screen
Problem: When you try to launch the emulator, it gets stuck at android logo.
Solution: Try to reduce the SD card memory size. Also make sure your system has enough RAM. When you set  up a new emulator or make changes to its properties, it usually takes several minutes for the emulator to launch for the first time. So wait...


5. The Emulator has wrong orientation
Problem: Sometimes (especially when your target is 3.0), you emulator might show up in the wrong orientation.
Solution: Press Ctrl+F11 or Ctrl+F12 to change the orientation.

External USB Harddisk not detected by Windows 7

Ok I had a 1.5 TB external harddisk, which was working fine. However one day all of a sudden, Windows 7 stopped detecting it. I tried to connect it to another computer which had Windows XP and Windows 7. Both OSes detected it. I spent a week trying to figure out what happened. Here is how I fixed it
unplug the external HDD

At the command prompt, type the following lines, pressing ENTER after each line

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
cd %SystemRoot%\System32
start devmgmt.msc

device manager will open...

click 'show hidden devices' under View...

expand all the nods under device manager

there would be many greyed out  entries or entries with exclamation marks in device manager. Usually these nodes are displayed under this node 'Non-plug&play devices'. Uninstall all these  under all the nods and thn restart the computer and plug the HDD to the computer and check if it works.

Cleartype causes blur towards center of the screen in Samsung LCD - How to fix it

Windows cleartype has a lot of issues with several LCD mnitors. I have a Samsung B2030 22'' LCD monitor. I enabled cleartype and had trouble with it. No matter how I configured it, I always get the text towards the center of the screen (horizontally) blurrier than the left or right. This was very annoying.

The solution was simple and I found it acidently. When you are in cleartype dialog, press the 'auto' settings button on your monitor (yes the physical button on your screen). I did this and it fixed all the issues