Piracy!
Piracy in the digital age – An essay about piracy in the digital age. Is it really that bad?
The WWW is not the internet!
A real geek should know the difference, do you? Learn the difference and stop being a n00b.
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Vimeo Vs. youTube
Posted on January 30, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
I’d be annoyed that I missed the War on the Internet (an event that was recently put on by Electronic Frontiers Australia, in partnership with the Australian Greens) if it weren’t for the fact that the videos of the talks were posted online.
The videos were posted on Vimeo, a YouTube alternative, which I now like even more than YouTube for one big reason; Vimeo supplies excellent information about the videos. Most importantly Vimeo will tell you how large a video is. YouTube fails to offer this basic but important piece of information. In fact YouTube fails to offer any useful information about any videos it serves up. Even the information about the video, which is user generated, is useless a lot of the time and doesn’t provide much if any interesting or useful data.
The fact that YouTube fails to notify users about the size of a video they are watching wouldn’t be a problem if everyone had unlimited data allowances but they don’t. Most internet plans have a data limit and more people than not are on an internet plan with a data limit. [Read more...]
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THINK! Supaplex
Posted on January 26, 2012 by Jingles | 1 Comment
Supaplex is an old skool puzle game that was released in 1991, then in somewhere in the mid 90s (my closest estimate is somewhere between 1994 to 1997) Digital integration, the publishers of Supaplex, agreed to release it for free and thus Supaplex became freeware. It’s the first game that I know that went from commercial to free. Now it’s a lot more common for games to go from commercial to free or even to be completely open sourced, but that’s a story for another time.
I enjoy Supaplex so much that I wrote what turned out to be a long, and I think, pretty comprehensive history of Suaplex because there was a bit of misinformation about the history of Supaplex and how it came to be.
While I was researching for the article I came across a bunch of interesting Supaplex information scattered across the internet in it’s dark corners and an odd number of Supaplex websites. [Read more...]
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Supaplex: a history
Posted on January 24, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
The old adage that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” defiantly holds true in the gaming industry where clones are par for the course. Take a successful game, change the environment, enemies, weapons, story and maybe throw in a new game mechanic and bingo you have your own game.
A good clone can set the bar even higher and become more popular than the game it copied. Or it can be a complete failure that fades into obscurity.
Take ID’s Wolfenstine 3D for example, it never gained the critical acclaim it deserved. After Wolfenstine 3D ID released Doom which is commonly sighted as the game that put the FPS genre on the map. Doom was essentially an updated copy of Wolfenstine 3D. Since Doom there have been plenty of clones based it’s engine and the Doom engine that have reinvented the genre and taken it to new levels like Quake and Half-Life. Now the FPS genre is worth millions to the gaming industry.
If it wasn’t for clones games wouldn’t evolve, they wouldn’t get refined or polished, and the industry would be pretty stagnate and boring. You could also argue that the other side of the coin is that clones have the opposite effect, it’s clones that stagnate the gaming industry and make it dull and boring but I digress. That’s a whole other can of worms and an argument for another time because today I want to share the history of one particular game that proves clones can be successful. Released in 1991, it’s a clone of an equally legendary 8-bit game and a game that took puzzle games to the next level. It’s a game I still play to this day 21 years after it’s release; Supaplex. [Read more...]
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How to use QR codes to easily update passwords
Posted on January 20, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
I use KeePass password manager to generate strong passwords, by strong I mean gibberish passwords like this:
&ýJ8½u@è[ Aqîsñ«qÓÉ\8ÎzB
Good luck cracking a password like that, if it ever did get cracked it would probably be useless anyway because I would have changed it. Unfortuantly not every service lets me choose a real secure password, shame on you! I admit that I can be a bit of a security nut, just a little bit anal. But I digress.
I love the 'auto type' feature in KeePass so much that I decided I'll install it on my phone, so I did then I imported my passwords from KeePass. But when I tried to use a password I had imported it failed.
When I inspected the password it had been changed, there were a few characters missing or a few characters that had changed. So I tried a few different solutions but no matter what I tried tried it just wasn't going to work.
The only solution that I could come up with that worked was to use simpler passwords but this would mean making my passwords weaker i.e. less secure, not something that was an option for me, I wasn't about to go change 80+ passwords either just so that I could use KeePass on my phone.
I put the issue down to the fact that Windows and Android use different character encoding/character repertoire/coded character set, what ever. I gave up and forgot about it since it wasn't that much of a problem for me I was just bored and wanted something new to play with.
Just a few days ago I was looking through my spam folder to see if Gmail had misidentified any legitimate emails, something that it does every now and again, it's no major problem now I know about it. [Read more...]
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Stop SOPA & PIPA!
Posted on January 15, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
In America On January 24 Congress will pass two acts, SOPA & PIPA, despite the vast majority of Americans and people world wide being opposed to it. These two acts amount to internet censorship and these laws will be passed unless 41 senators block the vote.
These acts need to die. We need to protect our rights to free speech and privacy. If these acts are passed into law it sets a dangerous precedent and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world follows. Nobody wants the internet to be censored.
Even if you do not live in America SOPA & PIPA, if passed, will affect you. The laws will affect everyone around the world in ways that are apparent and not so apparent.
If you haven’t heard of SOPA or PIPA please read these articles about it:
Check out this info graphic, read what experts are saying about it, watch this short video:
Recently the Obama administration voiced it’s concerns about SOPA & PIPA and sided with the skeptics, while other members of Congress have back peddled hard on SOPA. These are only small victories in a larger war. Despite these wins we need to keep up the pressure.
Please do everything you can to raise awareness, to oppose and stop SOPA & PIPA. If you have a web site censor it, if you live in America email congress. Hit up americancensorship.org to find out what you can do to stop SOPA & PIPA. What ever you can do, do it! No matter how small your efforts will help to keep up the pressure.
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Midas
Posted on January 13, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Remember Midas? You may have herd of him, he’s the guy in ancient Greek mythology who had the golden touch, everything he touched turned to gold. After all was said and done it wasn’t such an awesome thing. It proves that you should be careful what you wish for.
This is why history is so cool, because it turns out the myth makes for a cool flash game. A 3 man Melbourne development team, wanderlands, turned the myth into a flash puzzle platformer for Ludum Dare 22.
The aim of the game is to touch the water (i.e. the river Pactolus) so that everything you touch stops turning to gold, then you have to touch your daughter/wife to pass the level.
It’s a brilliantly simple but challenging gmae. You can play Midas at Kongregate.
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Eye spy…
Posted on January 11, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Track pads on laptops are a pain to use, no? Ever wanted an easier way of pointing and clicking? Say hello to Tobii, tech that lets you look to point. You press and hold down a key, look where you want to point then release the key to click.
It works by shooting near-infrared lights at your eyes then uses two IR cameras to figure out where you are looking. It all sounds pretty cool, the only down side is that the tech requires extra hardware to work ergo you will have to pay a premium to get the tech when and if it becomes commercially available.
Checkout a demonstration of the tech:
The tech is still fairly new so it’s going to be exciting to see how it evolves. I think that Tobii’s biggest potential is not for lazy able bodied people but for disabled people. Specifically people who don’t have use of their hands or who lack the required limbs to use a mouse or track pad, although the tech would need to undergo some changes before Tobii would be really useful for a disabled person.
I can already think of a few ways Tobii could be improved. [Read more...]
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The first web page on the web
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Above: Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT at CERN was the first-ever web server, browser, and editor. The computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the World Wide Web.
There is no such thing as the last web page on the web, well not unless you count the newest page that was uploaded to the web but then there are likely hundreds and thousands if not millions of new web pages uploaded to the web each minute given that YouTube sees 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, but I digress. However there most certainly is a first. The first ever web page on the web, which still exists today albeit with a few updates from the original page, was an information page about Tim Berners-Lee’s new World Wide Web project.
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In memory of web sites lost in a HDD crash
Posted on January 8, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Yesterday I was bored so I decided to look through some of my old design work for some inspiration and came across some screenshots of websites I built back circa 2002-3 which prompted me to go digging deeper.
In a draw I have about 100 CDs mostly MP3 CDs (from back in the day when I had an iRiver IMP 250 MP3 CD player) and a bunch of backup CDs so I got them out and went poking about. [Read more...]
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OEM PCs – poor value for money
Posted on January 2, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
The new year is a shop-a-holics wet dream come true with all the sales on there are plenty of bargains to be had unless you’re shopping for a new desktop PC.
You would think that a major name brand OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) PC manufacturers, like Dell, HP, Lenovo etc… would be able to build and sell PCs cheaper than you could build one for given their purchasing power, economies of scale and all that. They either can’t or won’t.
For example Dell is having a “sale” so I hit up their web site to check out their “discounts”. Dells cheapest bottom of the line basic PC, the Insperon 620s desktop is normally $798.99 Dell have “discounted” the Insperon 620s by $200, making it $598.99 which is still poor value for money. The advertised price, $598.99, is for just the desktop itself i.e. without any additional “extras” sans a monitor. Throw in a monitor for a complete PC and you are looking at $700.19.
Even with the “discounts” Dell are offering on the Insperon 620s desktop PC it’s still more expensive than building your own PC with off the shelf parts from online vendors or retailers, and I’ll prove it. [Read more...]
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I'm Jingles, I'm like the Keith Miller of geeks, i.e. an all rounder, I'm a web scientist, an A+ certified (it means I'm not a “noob”) computer technician, and this is my blog. I'm your curator of all things awesome, cool and geeky on and off the net. More...
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