The Best Pokemon Medallion Battle Tips and Tricks

The basics of Pokemon Medallion Battle are fun and easy. You choose six Pokemon to form your own team and fight live head-to-head battles against other trainers. 

But when it comes to mastering the game, there are a few things you have to consider. Here are some tips to become a Pokemon Medallion Battle Pro:

1. Pokedex is your friend

  
Use the Pokedex to check the stats, powers and evolution path of a particular pokemon. 

2. Gotta catch them all Pokemon Starters
 Based on raw stats, powers and evolution growth, the Pokemon Starters are considered the strongest pokemon in the game. At the start of the game, you are only able to choose one out of all 21 currently available Pokemon Starters. But you have another chance to get a new Pokemon Starter by opening the free Star Packs you get every 8 hours in the game.

3. Evolve ASAP
 Pokemon may be evolved by spending Candy in increasing amounts depending on their rarity and their resulting tier. 

Rarity	To Pokéball	To Great Ball	To Ultra Ball
★	50	100	200
★★	100	200	400
★★★	200	400	800

Save your hard earned Candies for Pokemon that have the best evolved forms - they have a higher CP and possibly higher tier as well.

4. With great power comes great responsibility
There are a variety of powers in Pokémon Medallion Battle, which activate before they fight. Learn how to use them to win your battles:

• Super Effective: If activated, multiplies the CP of a Pokémon by either 1.5x, 2x, or 2.5x
  • May be activated by your opponent's Pokémon's type or tier
• Priority: Allows the Pokémon to fight immediately if its CP is higher
  • Affected by Entry Hazards and Support, but not any other abilities
• Protect: Prevents a Pokémon from winning or losing
  • Using Protect will cause you to go first in the next turn
• Reveal: Reveals a random Pokémon on your opponent's Bench
• Arena: Increases the CP of Pokémon of a certain type
  • Unlike Entry Hazards and Support, Arena takes effect immediately
  • Affects both players' Pokémon
• Entry Hazards: Reduces the CP of the next Pokémon played by your opponent
• Support: Increases the CP of the next Pokémon you play

Once a power is activated, it cannot be used again for the remainder of a battle.{source: bulbapedia}
 

All 7 Generation Pokemon Starters in Pokemon Medallion Battle

The free Star Pack you get every 8 hours in the Pokemon Medallion Battle Shop may now contain the following Pokemon Starters:

GEN I: Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle

GEN II: Cyndaquil, Chikorita and Totodile

GEN III: Torchic, Treecko and Mudkip

GEN IV: Chimchar, Turtwig and Piplup

GEN V: Tepig, Snivy and Oshawott

GEN VII: Litten, Rowlet and Popplio

GEN VI: Fennekin, Chespin and Froakie

How to show your Twitter timeline in true chronological order

This ✨magical link✨ shows your Twitter timeline in true chronological order—without retweets, liked tweets, or any algorithm nonsense. (On mobile? Click “Latest.”) Enjoy! https://t.co/Q6h6pV20wV

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) August 17, 2018

My Bitcoin Experiment

I bought my very first bitcoin last August 27, 2017. To be more specific, I loaded 100 PHP to my coins.ph account and converted that same amount to 0.00044463 BTC.

Back then you can buy 1 whole bitcoin for a whopping 224, 907 pesos! I don't have that much disposable money lying around so I just settled with purchasing 100 pesos worth of bitcoin that day. And just like that I'm suddenly a proud owner of 0.00044463 bitcoin or 44,463 satoshis! Yey!



I further increased my bitcoin investment from 0.00044463 BTC to 0.00386646 BTC after two additional PHP to BTC conversions. I first converted my 10 pesos coins.ph bonus to BTC.  I then loaded 1000 pesos (with 20 PHP coins.ph transaction fee) and converted the entire 1000 pesos to BTC.

So back in Oct 13, 2017 my 0.00386646 BTC was worth 1,108.72 PHP.



You'll notice from the screenshot below that the BTC exchange rate has increased to 297,470 PHP from 224, 907 PHP for 1 bitcoin!

Fast forward to today, November 2, 2017...

... my 1,120 PHP investment is now 1,344.28 PHP all thanks to bitcoin and coins.ph!

As bitcoin continues to soar in value, I'm thinking of purchasing some more. But I know this bitcoin mania may turn out to be a bubble and all of it will come crashing down in the near future. If it ever comes crashing down, I'll be left with a loss of 1,120 PHP.  But if bitcoin goes to the moon, well...

Unofficial Hearthstone Magazine February 2017 Issue

My 1st attempt at making a Hearthstone magazine cover...

Here's version #2

Upgrading my MacBook (Aluminum, Late 2008) with a Samsung 850 Evo SSD (250GB)

Back in early 2014, I upgraded my then ancient MacBook (Aluminum, Late 2008) from a measly 2GB to a whopping 8GB of RAM. The speed improvement when booting up and opening apps was glorious indeed. I was planning back then to also replace the stock hard drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD) but I thought the 8GB RAM upgrade would do me just fine. And so I put off the SSD upgrade until the time that I could justify the need for one.

Fast forward to 2017 where my old reliable MacBook is evidently performing not so well anymore. 8 years of  continuous daily use had taken its toll and I'm left with no choice but to finally replace the stock HDD with an SSD in a last ditch attempt to improve its performance.

I thought it would be easy enough to do the SSD installation on my own. Just buy a Samsung 850 Evo 250GB SSD, clone the contents of the HDD to the SSD, remove the HDD from the MacBook, slap the SSD back in and presto! my MacBook will be running 10x faster in no time.

Easy peasy right? Oh boy was I ever wrong.

First off, I found out  that the SSD is not formatted out of the box so I had to do the formatting myself. To do that, I put the SSD in a USB/SATA drive enclosure and connected the SSD to my MacBook via the USB port. I tried to erase and format the SSD using Mac OSX's Disk Utility but the formatting process failed repeatedly. I Googled this particular issue and found out from the various forum threads that it could be due to a faulty or incompatible cable on my USB/SATA drive enclosure. One workaround suggested straight away replacing the HDD with the SSD and using a bootable El Capitan USB drive to format the SSD with the built-in Disk Utility. So I went that route and ended up with the SSD not being detected by the MacBook upon booting up.

Now what? What else am I left to do?

As a last resort, I removed the SSD from the MacBook and again put it back inside the USB/SATA drive enclosure and see if this time around my MacBook's Disk Utility can successfully format the SSD.

Lo and behold, it worked! I guess the cable inside the SATA drive enclosure was loosely connected or something hence the earlier formatting failure. I'm not entirely sure. Anyways, the SSD was formatted successfully and I was then able to clone the contents of the HDD using the Carbon Copy Cloner app.

Next step was to install the SSD on my MacBook. I used a Phillips #0 screwdriver to remove the single screw holding the HDD caddy bracket in place. After several attempts I ended up ruining the cross head.

Notice how you can barely recognize the cross head of the screw?  Yep, it became a round head screw courtesy of yours truly.

I tried using a rubber band, super glue and other tricks to remove a stripped screw but to no avail. To cut the long story short, I finally gave up trying, and just brought my MacBook to a laptop repair shop just to have that damn screw removed. And then the repair guy (Sir Tony) was able to remove the screw in just a couple of seconds! Trade secret, he replied when I inquired on how he was able to remove it so easily. (I was not around when he removed the screw).

(To be continued...)

How to prevent iCloud calendar spam

Here’s what you should do to prevent iCloud calendar spam.

Option #1: If you don’t use iCloud for your calendar, open the Settings app on your iPhone and System Preferences on your Mac. Head over to iCloud settings and disable calendars to stop iCloud syncing and event invitations.

Option #2: If you want to quickly get rid of the spam, just decline the calendar invite. The good thing is that the event will just disappear from your calendar. If it’s still there, make sure you disabled “Show Declined Events” in your calendar app settings. The bad thing is that the spammer will receive a notification, proving that you viewed the notification, you use your calendar and your iCloud email address is valid.

Option #3: Create a new iCloud calendar, move your spam events to this new calendar and delete the calendar. Make sure you press “Delete and Don’t Notify” when you get a prompt. This way, the spammer won’t know that you saw the notification and that this iCloud email address is valid.

Option #4: Go to iCloud.com on your laptop and open the Calendar web app. Click on the gear icon and open Preferences. In the Advanced tab, you can choose to receive calendar invites as emails. The good thing is that your email client could catch the spam before it shows up in your inbox. And emails are less intrusive than calendar alerts anyway. The bad thing is that you won’t receive any push notification for new calendar events, even genuine ones.

{source: techcrunch}