Of all the random dates already in my calender, I have just added another! The so called Pi approximation day, which I missed this year, is on the 22nd of July and is so ‘celebrated’ because it mathematically gives a close approximation (divide 22 by 7) to the true value of Pi. Oh well, this time next year (sans one day) I will make a Pi pastry and who knows what else…
Randomly came across this great map for Quake 3. Its an excellent remake of the Simpson home for all your fragging needs. The level of detail is astonishing, from the excellent textural work to the scale that says 230 pounds when stepped on. Genius
Yes, granted the title to this post makes no sense and basically relates to nothing, but I thought it set up this post rather well. You see, this is just a brief post to apologise for the less than usual frequency of my updates in the last couple of weeks. Its been a bit of a busy time so I have slightly taken my finger off of the pulse of the various industries I follow. Since the majority of my posts are reactionary commentaries or rants or how-tos it follows I have not been writing much.
Also, the much vaunted laptop (dv2799) I bought a couple of weeks ago has now had to be swapped a third time!! The first time it had a strange RAM corruption problem in the GFX RAM and the second laptop I received had a poorly constructed USB header which shorted the whole thing out. *sigh*. Still third time lucky I hope, its a lovely laptop, its just a shame it is let down by dubious quality control at Hewlett Packard’s end.
So, stay tuned, I have by no means lost interest in my blog! For now, I leave you with the comedy genius of Simon Amstell.
I want to briefly share an interesting story about a fake iPod I came across earlier in the week. At work, it turns out someone had tried to return a Apple iPod Nano 8Gb they had bought, substituting the Apple iPod for a cheap fake. The circumstances surrounding this are a bit sketchy as I was not there at the time, the first time I came across it was when the fake iPod nano was returned by Apple with a polite and bemused letter to the effect that Apple only services original hardware. Intregued, I took another look at the iPod nano.
As you can see, from the outside it is a very good quality fake - the screen looks a little strange but there are no marks or variations which would immediately suggest this product is a fake. The back plate is engraved correctly with the appropraite logos and serial numbers, although there is a small circular hole on the back plate which should not be there.
On switching on the iPod however, it becomes immediately apparent it is not a geniune article, the unit took a few seconds to boot during which it displayed a strange egg time icon immediately followed by an odd screen with an Apple logo and an animated message saying ‘Loading…”.
The low resolution screen looks awful and the user interface, although trying to copy the iPod interface, clearly fails to impress.
The scroll wheel doesn’t work, nor does the middle button. To move from entry to entry, you have to press the left and right buttons (for up and down respectfully) along with ‘Menu’ to enter into an option.
Entering any of the menu options results in this bland and annoying message for a few seconds.
The Music section looks as though the skin has been copied from WinAMP. Apart from the initial menu, no effort has been made to recreate or emulate the Apple iPod interface in any of the ‘functions’ of this device. Song and albumn navigation is rudimentary and feels more reminiscant of a portable CD player than a modern MP3 player.
The photo / picture option takes you to a very unfriendly file browser with no previews.
I never did get far into the movies function given that the machine appartently was devoid of movie content. Next up is the radio function. I didnt test if this would tune into anything but at least it is a feature not found in original Apple iPods.
Voice recording, another first for the clone! Unfortunately it didn’t seem to want to record anything and I quickly moved on.
The eBook feature simply took me to a screen saying Empty Disk and promptly switched off the machine.
And of course the essential “Good Bye” screen, you will be seeing a lot of it as the battery is terrible, the clone performs poorly and frequently switches off at random. I have no idea what a fake iPod like this would cost, but the only value I can see it having would be in situations like these where people try to con refunds on their original Apple products (or as a film prop), I pity anyone who would consider using this as a functional MP3 player.
Randomly came across it today on youtube, brings back memories from my childhood! The episode where the Coyote finally catches the road runner - classic
I have been a huge Rammstein fan for a while now, not hearing anything new regarding them of late, I decided to check out their website. There I found a rather amusing parody made by creative editing of Völkerball footage. If anyone can point me in the direction of a translation, I would appreciate it
EDIT: I found a translation in one of the youtube comments
Bayern des samma mia. = Bavaria, yes that’s what we are.
Bayern und des bayrische Bier. = Bavaria and the bavarian beer.
Bayern und des Reinheitsgebot. = Bavaria and the ‘German purity law’.
Des is unser flüssiges Brot. = That is our liquid bread.
I don’t normally post viral youtube videos, but today I found a clip purporting to be the ‘best 5 second clip on the internet.’ I may be a bit late to the party with this one (I only found out what the whole Leeroy Jenkins thing was about last year) but take a look and tell me what you think…
I went for a long walk in the wilderness today and imagine my surprise when I saw this object moving at great speed above me. Please note, when I refer to UFO I don’t mean “I saw aliens”, I mean that I saw something that I could not identify
Anyone seen anything similar in the Kent area today?
(Higher quality pictures available on request, I also have two more pictures with the ‘object’ getting smaller / further away.)
Let me set the scene, I was randomly on MSN when a friend of mine sent me a message saying “http://www.almanbirasi.info/list :)” On inspection, the site appears to offer a service to tell users who has blocked them on their contact list, a function not available in regular MSN.
I would highly advise anyone looking at any such ‘third party’ service to do a bit of background digging before giving ANY of their details over to a dubious third party. I was immediately suspicious and I will detail for you why.
1) The page looks well designed, but has no google page rank. This can mean one of many things, but usually it means a site or page is new. A service such as a MSN block checker is likely to spread virally (if it worked and was genuine) and this would likely lead to it being assigned a google page rank. An example where this SEO based tool can be very handy.
2) Whenever you are prompted for personal or account details, you should immediately stop for a sanity check - look to see who owns the site (can be done by a whois) and if your data will be secure. This takes on two forms, one - is the site reputable (can be checked a number of ways) and two - will your data be secure ? For the latter, considerations of encryption (is the page SSL secured) and data storage (does the site have a privacy policy etc)
3) The link ‘http://www.almanbirasi.info/list’ infact takes you to a page ‘http://www.msnliststatus.com/’ which is a bit odd.
4) The .info TLD - call me a domain-ist if you will, but I don’t trust this TLD.
5) The terms of service explicitly state that by using their service you are opting in to (a doubtlessly un-opt-out-able) advertising service.
As it turns out I was right, I sent a message back expressing my concerns to this person, assuming he had stumbled across it and sent me the link. Here is the conversation we had, edited to remove the name of the person.
Person A says:
http://www.almanbirasi.info/list Konrad says:
what is this? Konrad says:
haha no way! Konrad says:
it has no page rank, i.e. its a great way to loose your login details to do something you can do within gaim / pidgin Person A says:
huh? Konrad says:
I would not use it Person A says:
huh? Konrad says:
looks like a big security hole Person A says:
what? Konrad says:
lol you tried it didnt you? Person A says:
what? Person A says:
did it just send a message for me? Person A says:
fucking thing Konrad says:
hahahaha! Person A says:
sorry, just changing my password Konrad says:
lol Konrad says:
thats funny Person A says:
did it send a message to you Konrad says:
yes
So, as you can see, he used this utility and it logged into his account, sent me (and presumably others) a link back to its page without him either knowing or expressing his permission for this. It appears this has been going on for a few months with users also reporting having their accounts hijacked. Luckily there is a very simple way to determine whether you are on a person’s contact list or whether he/she has blocked you on a variety of accounts not just MSN like Googletalk, ICQ, AIM etc. It involves using a free open source program called Pidgin.
Install it, setup the account you want to use and login. Right click on the contact and select ‘Get Info’ this window should tell you everything you want to know about a certain contact as illustrated below.
My friend is very clued up about systems, IT and security but he fell for it, just be careful on the web.
On my old blog I did a fairly in-dept look at the legendary Goldeneye for the n64 and a newly released tool for editing levels and items (even allowing for construction of ‘new’ levels.) I came across two new levels that have recently been released. The first is by Dragonsbrethren who has used the tool to completely remake the Silo level into an interesting mix between Caverns style exploration to Frigate style hostage situations.
The second level will be familiar to anyone who played Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to Goldeneye. It is a port of the Chicago multiplayer level into Goldeneye. Not had a moment to test it out (its been a busy few days recently) but it looks fun. Not sure what this will bring to Goldeneye that Perfect Dark multiplayer didn’t already, but its a great effort none the less.
This comes as details of a possible Official Remake of Rare’s Goldeneye have begun to surface. There are a lot of legal obstacles undoubtedly still present, not least of all is Nintendo’s declaration that they are actively pursuing bringing Goldeneye to their Virtual Console platform. Microsoft refused to comment on development of the ‘Reimaged’ Goldeneye for their Xbox Live Platform further adding to the speculation.
