Sitemap
A manifest of every post and page on the site, organized by date.
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Build Photoblog, Build!
A lot of time has gone by since I first posted my plans to build a photoblogging them, but I finally found the time (and will power) to get building it these last few weeks.
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Kindle vs iPad? Not quite.
What we’re seeing here is a gold rush. Even if the iPad was a commercial failure (it won’t be), the hype surrounding it has force fed the reality of ebooks in the faces of the mass market for the first time.
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Bookmarklet: Share with Google Buzz
All my blogging juice has been sapped by Google Buzz this week. I’m having way too much fun with it. It mashes everything I like about Google Reader up with FriendFeed. I’m especially digging the real time updates on shares and comment threads.
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I’ve Gone and Made a Mess
My Warcraft guild finally brought down Deathbringer Saurfang. We’d been stuck on him for a few weeks now, unable to get our raid’s configuration just right to finish him off before the enrage timer wiped us. There was no magic bullet for it, really; it came down to a little luck and a lot of practice.
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Review: Razer Naga MMOG Mouse
The Razer Naga is a high performance 17 buttoned mouse geared specifically towards massively multiplayer gamers, works with any MMO, and supports PC and Mac.
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Review: The Book of Eli
I was psyched to see The Book of Eli. Who wouldn’t be? A Fallout 3-esk post apocalyptic world with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman fighting over a bible with machetes. That’s a rock solid premise right there.
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Security Tokens in MMOs
Security tokens are growingly popular method of securing MMO accounts. How could we improve these devices, and what other steps could developers take to secure player’s data?
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Building a Perfect Photoblog Theme
If I wanted to build a locally installed, Flickr-like photo gallery- what would I want out of it?
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Twenty Ten and Fifty Two
I’m notorious, as many are, with getting distracted and neglecting my blog for months at a time. This year I’m taking part in Project 52 to strive for more.
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A Better Instapaper Sync for Kindle/Mac
I’ve been using my Kindle with my Instapaper feed for a few months now. It works really well, but I wanted an easier way to sync the two. The Instapaper blog recently pointed to an Automator script that makes the process much easier, but I thought I’d take it a bit further. My variation of [...]
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Hack: Getting Lessn to Work on lighttpd
Over the weekend I decided to bite the bullet and move my domains from an Apache setup with Slicehost over to a peppier lighttpd server with Linode. All of my web apps transitioned to the new configuration easily (including WordPress) with a little lighttpd.conf magic, but I had a hard time getting Lessn to work nicely.
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This Warhorse, She Does Not Fly
I log back in and much to my horror I am no longer mounted on my Netherwing. Nay, I had magically been placed upon my Warhorse. I can only imagine she was as confused as I was as we plummeted thirty thousand feet to our death together.
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December 2009 Redesign
It’s been 10 months since my previous site redesign- practically a record, considering how often I usually change things around here- but I felt it was time for a fresh look for the ol’ blog. Abstract, as I’m calling it, is an original WordPress theme I built that’s super flexible and has a lot of neat features.
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Dragon Age: Origins (PC)
On the surface, Dragon Age’s theme feels fairly uninspired. An demonic force is trying to conqueror the land. The peoples (made up of humans, elves, dwarves, etc.) of the land are in turmoil and civil war, too distracted to prepare for the invading army. You are the unlikely hero who must bring these nations together and lead a campaign against the enemy. Nothing too shocking here if you have ever played an RPG before. What makes Dragon Age compelling, though, is the detail BioWare has put into the world and it’s inhabitants. From the moment you become a Grey Warden you are thrust into an ugly world of political espionage, slavery and religious zealotry that makes for some very enticing storytelling.
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Thoughts on Chrome OS
I’m a big fan of cloud computing. About 50% of the stuff I do these days is in the browser, and 100% of what I consider “mission critical” data is either directly (Google Docs/Gmail/S3/FTP) or indirectly (Dropbox/Mozy) stored in the cloud. That’s probably why I’m so enticed by projects like Chrome OS. I hate desktop operating systems. The malware, the hardware, the corrupted file systems and application errors. I want my computer to work. All of the time. No exceptions.
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Introducing Colugo, a self-hosted image service for Tweetie
Just a simple PHP script that interprets the POST call from Tweetie and stores the image data for you. I added a few nice little bonus features, like writing tweet data and copyright info onto the image, and integration with Lessn to auto-shorten the tweeted URLs for you.
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Getting the Dragon Age Toolset Running on Windows 7 x64
This took me the better part of the afternoon to figure out, so hopefully I can save someone else the time.
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Of Blizzards and Micropayments
So Blizzard introduced premium vanity pets for World of Warcraft yesterday; a miniature Kel’Thuzad and a Pandaren Monk. They do fun little things like freezing nearby critters and returning /bows from players. They cost $10 each, and in the case of the Panda, 50% of that goes to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. I’m cool with it, but it turns out a lot of people aren’t.
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Twitter Introduces Lists; I Introduce a "Game Industry" List
You’ve probably heard by now, Twitter is launching a Lists feature. The beta has been rolling out to users (randomly, it seems) for a few weeks now, but Twitter has finally gone ahead and made it accessible to just about everyone now. Basically, it lets users setup groups of users that they can share with friends, and those friends can follow all the users in that group with a single click. I think the Twitter team sees it as their first step towards the grouping mechanism users have been begging for these last few years, and it’s a solid first step at that.
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The Mac Tablet is (Relatively) Pointless
Who would really need a Mac tablet? Well, the same people who have already adopted those dreadful PC tablets Gates has been pushing for the last 5 years. We’re talking doctors, educators, engineers and I suppose a small audience of digital artists. Ironically, these are also the fields that seem to have a disproportionally higher number of Mac users. Why walk around with a bunch of patient history papers when you can carry one device with all that information, and everything else you could possibly want to know about them, their condition, etc. It only makes sense that these fields, and I suppose others, would want to move towards this. Of course, this leads the obvious question: is there any practical use for these things in my home?
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Looking Back at Warcraft: Eighty Levels Later
One of my long-standing gaming goals has always been to get a character in Warcraft to level 80. That probably sounds stupid to many of you that aren’t into MMORPGs, or games for that matter, and those of you that are probably look at that sentence and chuckle. “It only took you 5 years to get to end game? Impressive,” I hear you say. Fair enough, but back when WoW launched back in 2004, I didn’t have much interest in it. FFXI still had me wrapped strongly around it’s finger at this point, and wouldn’t be letting go for another year. Eventually I did pick up the game though, and rolled my first character: a troll priest. I found the game a welcome relief from the no-nonsense grind of FFXI, but something about it didn’t hold my attention.
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Postmortem: Aureus Knights
A few years back I founded the Aureus Knights with a handful of my friends, and I inherited the responsibility of maintaining our community’s site. We’re a guild centered around online gaming, and MMOs in particular. Maintaining an online community is always a rough thing; it requires patience with your users, an open ear to their wishes and criticism, and the willingness to adapt to their needs. For a community that centers around it’s web site as it’s leading form of organizing and communication, these qualities are essential in keeping the site fresh and exciting, and appealing to potential new users.
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Someone please just freeze me Cartman-style till 2010
God damn you, Blizzard. Here I am content with Wrath of the Lich King but eagerly anticipating Aion next month and Final Fantasy XIV on the horizon and you have to pull CATACLYSM out of your asses. You just ruined me for all other MMOs for the next year.
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Fever
I love Shaun Inman’s projects. I’ve been using his Mint package for years, and I’ve recently become a big fan of Lessn and Shortwave (here’s my waves file, for those curious on the types of things I use it for) so when I hear he had released an RSS aggregator my interest was immediately peaked. The man knows how to build sexy, lightweight, useful apps: the kinds of apps I eat up.
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Aardvark is Aawesome
Today I came across a web service called Aardvark, which one might define as a user-generated KGB; that is, it’s a community of users connected via web browsers, cell phones and instant messengers that define their own areas of expertise, and are automatically sent questions from other users that target those criteria.
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Opera 10: Why I've Switched
I’m what you might call a browser vagabond. I switch web browsers every few months, sampling the latest releases and trying to find that perfect fit for what I want and need out of the single most important piece of software on my desktop. I think I may have found the closest thing to perfect with Opera 10.
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Google announces Chrome OS
Chrome OS’s target audience will in all likelihood be less tech savvy individuals who use their browser for everything (my parents would be a perfect fit here; they do everything out of the browser these days), developing countries with old hardware (but Internet access, obviously) and schools. I could see Libraries seeing this as a nice fit too, assuming there are content control capabilities in there somewhere.
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MediaMall PlayOn
Decided to throw together a quick video review and demo of MediaMall PlayOn, a software packaging for media streaming to the PS3, Xbox and other products compatible with the protocol. It supports a wide variety of local file formats, and streams video from sites like Hulu, CNN, CBS, YouTube and more. The plugin architecture allows developers to add support for additional services, and there’s plenty available for sites like Adult Swim and Gametrailers.
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Mythic and BioWare restructure; Bethesda acquires id Software
EA announced that they would be restructuring Mythic and BioWare into a single RPG/MMO development power house. Likewise, Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media revealed that it has acquired legendary development studio id Software.
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Fix broken volume and media controls under Windows 7
I few days ago I noticed that my Logitech G15 suddenly stopped controlling the volume on my Windows 7 x64 installation on my desktop. After a little research, I realized that the service responsible for media control functionality on keyboards had magically set itself to “Manual” instead of “Automatic” startup. Here’s how to fix the issue if you encounter it…
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E3: Final Fantasy XIV Online Announced
I am so happy right now. My all time favorite MMO is getting a true sequel with a modern game engine. PS3 exclusive, target date of 2010. I… I… talk amongst yourselves, I gotta lay down for a bit. Oh God YES!
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E3: Telltale Breathes New Life Into Monkey Island
The most exciting news to come out of the E3 hype bubble so far? Telltale tweeted just minutes ago that they’ll be bringing the classic adventure game Monkey Island back in episodic format, much like they’ve done with Sam & MAX recently.
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Demigod
Demigod is a unique RPG and RTS hybrid that puts you in control of a powerful, God-like being bent on the destruction of the opposing Demigods. By capturing flag points which give buffs, portals that spawn automated minions and upgrading your base and Demigod, your goal is to work your way past the enemy force’s defenses and destroy their base.
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Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Let’s not spread this around too much, but I really enjoyed the original Night at the Museum. I thought it was a cute, family-friendly movie with a lot of laughs… and if you tell anyone else that, I’ll deny it up and down. So I was pleased when I heard they were doing a sequel. Ben Stiller is overdue for a decent flick, after all. Tropic Thunder was the only funny thing to come out of him in years, and frankly Robin Williams could probably use the cash.
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Terminator Salvation
McG’s stab at rebooting the aging Terminator franchise falls flat with it’s unimaginative story and disappointing finale. The talented cast of actors are the only endearing element to this otherwise bland film.
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Star Trek
J.J. Abram’s reboot of the Star Trek franchise has arrived, and all I can say is wow! The film far exceeded my expectations in many regards. This Star Trek film is unapologetically a prequel to the original television series, but they’ve managed to pull it off in a way that is both satisfying and fresh.
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This is one small step for man…
As a some of you may know, I graduated from UAT late last year and completed my internship just this last week. As such, it’s time for me to begin looking for a position with a studio and starting the career I’ve spent these last so many years working for.
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X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Wolverine’s origin story is one of the cornerstones of the Marvel universe, so far as comic book geeks are concerned. As such, it came as no surprise that Marvel would want to bring this story to the big screen, if only in a more palatable format for the movie going audiences to swallow.
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MMO Firsts (Meme)
Following my buddy Ryan’s example, I’m following suit and joining in on the MMO Firsts meme Syp of Bio Break started. I’d love to see more of these going around, cause you really don’t get an opportunity to learn about people’s MMO pasts all that frequently.
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Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion
My recent vacation gave me some time to catch up on movies and anime that I had in my queue for months. The first anime I completed was season one of Code Geass. The anime is 25 episodes long, was released between October 2006 and July 2007 and was produced by a studio named Sunrise [...]
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Leaving on a Jet Plane
Just a heads up, for those curious; I’ll be leaving for a family vacation to Ireland this Friday, and will be gone until May 14th. My Internet connectivity will be sparse, as we’ve rented a house a bit outside of town and wont have a constant connection there. I’ll try and update Twitter once and [...]
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Beyond the Sands
Day 3 of Beyond the Sands has arrived, and with it the final set of objectives necessary to complete the Warhammer Online live event. Given the unique, RVR-centered nature of the new Land of the Dead zones, Mythic decided to use this live event to drop players square in the middle of an intense conflict [...]
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1.2.1: A Major Game Changer for ORVR
When Warhammer Online first launched, Keeps were little more than just another objective on the battlefield. There was little incentive to holding onto them, as they were worth more renown to players to just abandon them, let them flip and then recapture them. As you may recall, it was this situation that caused me to [...]
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Switching to Slicehost
I did it. I flipped the switch. There’s no going back now. Well OK, technically there is, but I won’t. I spent much of yesterday getting my Slicehost slice setup, and today I went live with it. Slicehost isn’t your usual web host; they build you a custom, bare-bones server image that you can then [...]
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Adding a Bloom Effect to Warhammer
Fellow WCPI member Alufei of The Blue Scribes recently came across a trick on the Alliance forums for enabling a “bloom” effect to the game. Those of you who play Warcraft or EverQuest 2 (or the hordes of other games now supporting this technique) will know just how dramatic an effect this can have on [...]
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Mythic Closing 70% of it's WAR Servers
The blogosphere is buzzing today about Mythic’s decision to close down a major chunk of the Warhammer servers; merging the players into larger, more active servers. It’s interesting to see the varied ways people are spinning this. The anti-Warhammer and major MMO blogs (most of whom know little about the game, even as they form [...]
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MinChat 2.0 Released
I’ve updated my MinChat addon for Warhammer Online for improved performance, confirmed game update 1.2 support and a few new features. MinChat, as you may recall, is a chat interface mod that strips away all the annoying chrome and leaves only the things you care about: your chat log and tabs. Version 2.0 * Background [...]
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Skip Reentering Your Warhammer Password in the Patcher
Another tip for you folks of the WAAAGH persuasion: do you hate having to re-enter your account password into the patcher each time you start? There’s a simple XML hack to bypass that. Open up C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsWarhammer Online – Age of Reckoningpatch_user.xml in your favorite text editor. There’s only a couple lines of code. [...]
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Optimizing Warhammer Online's Game Performance
Warhammer Online is a beast of a game, and by far the biggest complaint I hear about it is how poorly it performs on players PCs. I can’t argue, Mythic still needs to do a lot of work on tuning things up. Patch 1.2 (which goes live tomorrow) improves performance a bit but there are [...]
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Returning to Warhammer Online
As some of you may recall, I called it quits on Warhammer Online back in November. I blogged about everything that was wrong with the game at the time, so I thought it only right to do so again after revisiting the game this last month. Surprisingly, many of the issues I wrote about in [...]
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Revisiting Final Fantasy XI: Finally Casual-Gamer Friendly?
Square Enix isn’t well known for producing newcomer-friendly games. Many of their titles bring a difficulty curve that can make things rough for players new to the genre to master. There’s nothing wrong with a challenging game, of course, but when it comes to one of those genres in particular— massively multiplayer games— it’s hard [...]
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Redesigned; v2009.1
As you might have noticed, the site went through a few changes today. I’d been playing with a handful of different designs for the last several months, and finally settled on this one just a week ago. A few nights of coding and here we are. It’s a pretty radical departure from my previous designs, [...]
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Mythic drops the axe; 60-130 laid off
Bad news for the good people in Fairfax, VA today; Mythic has decided to clean house, dropping anywhere from 60-130[1] folks from their payroll today. The tweets about it have been coming in all morning. Lots of recognizable faces, too. Angie and Justin Webb are gone, as is DJ Larkin. I’ve received unconfirmed reports that [...]
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</2008><2009>
Happy new year, everyone. This last year has completely flown by for me, and I expect this year will be no different in that regard. Having graduated now, I’m excited to see what the next 365 has in store for me. I hope you’re as excited for the year ahead as I am, and I [...]
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Viva le Outland
It’s been awhile since we last chatted, old chums. Thanksgiving and Christmas have come and gone, and the new year is just around the corner. I didn’t choke on a turkey leg or anything, I’ve honestly just been so engrossed with Warcraft that I haven’t had the urge to post. I figured I owed myself [...]
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Rocking Scarlet Monastery
My good buddy Chris ran me through the Scarlet Monastery couple days ago… OK, so maybe it wasn’t so much a run through as it was a complete obliteration. =) On the upside, I got myself an achievement and the better part of a level in a little over 30 minutes. Truth be told, SM [...]
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14 free or open source Windows applications I love
“What do you use to do this?” or “What application do you recommend for that?” I get asked these kinds of questions a lot, as do most folks in my line of work. What surprises a lot of people is that much of the time, I respond with a free or open source solution. I’m [...]
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Have Mount, Will Explore
Damn right I do! With a playtime of just over 2 days I’ve got myself from newb to slightly-less-newb-with-mount in record time (for me.) As sad as it is to put down on paper, I’m really proud of how quickly I’m progressing with my character. Considering the highest I’ve ever gotten in Warcraft was a [...]
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Revisiting the World… of Warcraft
It’s true. I caved in. Given the situation with Warhammer, I decided to restart my World of Warcraft account and revisit my favorite MMO class ever, the rogue. I hadn’t touched the game at all since May, and haven’t seriously played since early last year. I decided to start fresh this go around and rolled [...]
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Warhammer's Abrupt End Game
As I had expected, Warhammer has begun to get a bit tiresome in it’s post 40 end game. I’ve been trying to play… trying to push myself to grind renown so I can wear that great Conqueror set I’ve started collecting, but I’ve got to be honest: it’s getting boring. After you hit the final [...]
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Richard Garriot's Tabula Rasa ceasing service in February
The only shocker here is how long it took for them to say enough is enough. NCSoft today announced that the sci-fi MMORPG from legendary game designer Richard Garriot, Tabula Rasa, will be ending it’s services in February of next year. The game had long been plagued by development problems, and received poor reviews upon [...]
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Ding 40!
Finally reached my first big goal in Warhammer Online: reaching the (current) max adventurer level of 40. Coming next? Renown rank 46 (so I can begin wearing my first piece of ward gear), and then on through renown rank 80. Yeah, that one is going to awhile. =) For those more knowledgeable than I, how [...]
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Twitter a Hotbed for Hackers, Socialists and Atheists; Oh My!
Caught a tweet by Ethan Marcotte this afternoon pointing to a rather fascinating article over on Yahoo! News. Apparently the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion released a report on the evolution of web communities and social technology these last few years, and how terrorists might apply these advances to some nefarious means. The usual suspects are [...]
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One Month of Warhammer: The Good, the Bad and the Squishy
Last Saturday marked the one month anniversary of Warhammer Online’s retail launch on September 18th. Given how much my friends and I have been playing these last 30 days it certainly feels much longer than that to me. While I’d be lying if I said everything has gone perfectly, I think it’s important to give [...]
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Fifty People, One Question
A rather brilliant video I came across the other day. It’s the first in a series, so check out the rest of their site if it catches your fancy. The film maker, Benjamin Reece, also has a personal site chocked full of visual goodies worth exploring. Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece [...]
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Getting your extensions to work in the Firefox 3.1 Beta
If you’ve been running the Firefox 3.1 beta for the last few days like I have, you’re probably beginning to miss all those fun extensions you took for granted in 3.0. Sure, you could install nightly tool addons to disable version checking for you, but I feel dirty having a hack like that running all [...]
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MinChat: A Minimal Chat UI for Warhammer Online
A recent goal of mine has been to learn Lua, an increasingly popular scripting language that is used most commonly as the extension interface for games like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online. Having been quite the Warhammer addict myself these last few months, I decided now was the perfect time to put what I’d [...]
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When did we forget the fun of a challenge?
It never fails. Every passing week that goes by brings news of another MMO dumbing itself down to broaden its audience. To widen it’s market appeal. To try and survive against both the savior and the bane of the MMO industry, World of Warcraft. Today I saw word of EverQuest 2 following suit, and it [...]
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Blog Day 2008
As my buddy Brian pointed out to me, today is Blog Day — a once a year event where bloggers are encouraged to share their favorite finds from the blogosphere. First, I would feel neglectful if I didn’t reference my closest friend’s blogs. In no particular order we’ve got Ryan O’Sullivan’s personal site, Jim Weinhart’s [...]
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A Look at Warhammer's Preview Weekend
Last weekend Mythic Entertainment opened it’s doors to everyone who preordered the forthcoming Warhammer Online, an MMORPG based on — what else? — the long standing Warhammer franchise. I’d been playing WAR in closed beta for a few weeks prior to this, so I figured knew what to expect more or less. What I didn’t [...]
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NVIDIA releases PhysX-enabled graphics drivers
Having purchased physics processor manufacturer PhysX last February, graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA has been hard at work porting system to run natively on the GeForce GPU rather than the dedicated chipset PhysX had been selling. Today, NVIDIA’s labors came to fruition as they released ForceWare 177.83, the first WHQL certified driver package with PhysX support [...]
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PHP is dead, long live PHP! (Finally.)
8/8/08 marked the final day that PHP4 would receive support from it’s developers, and 4.4.9 marks the final update it will receive. It’s an end to an era, really; the first version of PHP4 was released in 2000. Even while PHP5 was released 4 years ago, and PHP6′s release is looming on the horizon, web [...]
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Pineapple Express
I’m a huge fan of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen’s films. Anchorman? Classic. Superbad? Awesome. Step Brothers? Pretty damn great. The duo have proven themselves to be true grandmasters in the mysterious and forbidden art of making me pee my pants. I get as giddy as a little school girl when a new film is [...]
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My Top 10 PC Games of All Time
I know, I know; I’ll well known for my hatred of top 10 lists on blogs, but I was personally asked to do this one so I couldn’t refuse. My pal Ryan recently his list in response to a PC Gamer special. I can’t miss a web meme, so here we go.
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Mozilla concept video a glimpse into the real Web 2.0?
“Aurora” is a concept piece by web think tank Adaptive Path for Mozilla, developers of the oh-so-famous Firefox web browser, and is intended to be a forward-thinking look into the future of how web browsers might function, render data and interact with users. The concept, at this stage in the game, is completely absurd of [...]
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Brightkite Location v1.0 Beta Released
Decided to release my Brightkite Location plugin for WordPress tonight in beta form. The plugin, which you may have noticed on my homepage, aggregates your Brightkite data, showing your location and your latest note or photo. It even builds a sexy little static Google Map for you, and will refresh your information every 10 minutes. [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Final Day
As my seventh and final day in my one-week experiment with MobileMe draws to a close, I find myself wondering why Apple would have set themselves up for failure like this. My week using the service has been anything but pleasant, and in fact I’ve found it to be a huge hindrance in my day [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Day Six
Another day with MobileMe passes. Lazy Sunday afternoon, with little traffic coming through the inbox. I played a little more with my Firefox mailto handler, trying what I could to make it work, but to no avail. I’ve given up on it. I can only hope Apple comes around and realizes how huge turn off [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Day Five
I was hoping the discovery I’d made yesterday (using the Bubbles SSB as a MobileMe Mail container) would make things easier for day-to-day use, but it really hasn’t. With Gmail, I never had a problem just keeping a tab open for email, and using GTalk for mail notifications. In fact, it worked splendidly! MobileMe continually [...]
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Step Brothers
My family and I went to see Step Brothers this afternoon. I knew it was going to probably be a bad idea to see an R-rated Farrell movie with my parents, but I threw caution to the wind and went anyway. Woo, not a good choice. Very raunchy, but also hilarious. I don’t think it [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Day Four
Once again much of my day was consumed with class. I’ve had a few emails trickle through that required attention, but most of the day I haven’t touched things. I discovered a site-specific browser (SSB) app for Windows today called Bubbles. Just as Fluid does for Mac users, Bubbles allows you to create instanced browsers [...]
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The X-Files: I Want to Believe
Stopped by the theater this afternoon and caught the second X-Files film, “I Want to Believe.” I was really excited for this one. I was a big X-Files fan back in the day, so the thought of a second stab at a big screen X-Files adaption was thrilling. The first movie, as you may remember, [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Day Three
Day three of using MobileMe was fairy unexciting, as much of my day revolved around Calculus homework and running out to do errands. I was hoping I might be able to use Mozilla Prism to place MobileMe Mail into a seperate Gecko instance, and thus have a workaround to the lockup issues I’m experiencing with [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Day Two
Day two of my week with mobileme challenge has begun… Morning — MobileMe and I were off to bad start yesterday, and I can’t say this morning as been much better. I woke up to find a MobileMe pop-up on each of my systems, informing me that my trial had expired. Clearly this wasn’t the [...]
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A Week with MobileMe: Day One
Thinking about switching over to MobileMe? I’ve been pondering the logistics of moving all my stuff over to MobileMe since they announced the service, and today I decided to give it a try. I’m committing myself to a one-week challenge with this, and I’ll chronicle my ups and downs on this blog as I use [...]
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Automattic releases WordPress for iPhone
Guess where I am right now? OK, nowhere exciting, really; but I could blogging from anywhere now, because tonight Automattic- the company responsible for the WordPress blogging platform myself and most of the blogging community uses- has released WordPress for iPhone. It’s free to download from the App Store right now. WordPress for iPhone isn’t [...]
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Gotham Knight
After catching The Dark Knight earlier today and loving it, I decided to pick up Gotham Knight and give it a try too. One can never get enough Batman, right? Gotham Knight is a direct-to-DVD anthology of six short, animated stories that take place in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, with each film [...]
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The Dark Knight
Finally had a chance to watch Dark Knight this evening after having to endure days of chatter on Twitter about it. “Oh man, it was so awesome!” I’d hear. “Best movie EVER!” one person declared. I died inside with each tweet, little by little. So today I decided to get my butt over to the [...]
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Watch Dr. Horrible. Immediately.
Joss Whedon, well known creator of popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, recently began sharing episodes of a new web series he created staring Neil Patrick Harris, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. Simply put, it chronicles mad scientist and wannabe super-villain Dr. Horrible, aka Billy, as he attempts to put a stop [...]
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Everything is so shiny and new
Friends and visitors to my site may have noticed a rather dramatic change this afternoon; I decided to bite the bullet and push my redesign, even though I still have a few things left to tweak and polish. Yeah, I’m really taking a note from MobileMe’s launch on this one. In any event, there’s nothing [...]
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FriendFeed "Neo" released
It should come as no surprise to any of you that I really, really like FriendFeed, given the things I’ve done with the API and the unholy amount of time I spend browsing, commenting and liking people’s stuff. However, I’ve had a hard time converting most of my friends into “true believers” and using the [...]
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Renovating Our New Place
My folks bought a new house in Arcola, IL, and they’re doing a whole-house remodel of it before we move in. Ironically, it’s located directly next door to a home we lived in 5 years ago, which they also remodeled.
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Encrypting Your Drive with TrueCrypt
In this screencast I take you through the process of securing your desktop or laptop hard drive using a freeware utility called TrueCrypt.
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Take advantage of Firefox 3's color profile support
One of the big complaints I’ve heard from the more photographically inclined about Firefox 2 was the lack of color profile support in the browser. The simplest way to explain color profiles (or embedded ICC) is to look at some examples of images rendered in browsers that don’t support color profiles (in the left frames) [...]
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TwitterBash launches
Today marks the launch of TwitterBash, a concept conceived and designed by my good friend Judson Collier. Judson hired me on to work on the project about a month and a half ago, and I think we’re both quite pleased with how it turned out. TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which [...]
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Blogger states obvious: Spore Creature Creator is fun, a productivity blackhole.
I love me some Spore Creature Creator. Acquired it through some more nefarious means earlier this week and have been having a blast. It’s a pity you can’t take your creature out and play a dummy level or something, just to see how it performs in the wild. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait [...]
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Firefox 3 lands; download it now!
Firefox 3 is arriving today, and brings with it a whole host of lovely new features that I’ve grown to love using the betas and release candidates these last few months. Some of the features I love in particular: The “awesome bar” (a new aspect of the address bar) gives me a central location to [...]
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Yesterday's Apple Keynote in 60 seconds
Awesome. I dig the iPhone 3G changes, and love the price tag for the Touch upgrade; MobileMe sounds really great, though it’s lack of support for non-Safari browsers in it’s bookmark sync makes it a no-go for me. I suppose you could couple it with other options, like Foxmarks, but I love an integrated option. [...]
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FriendFeed is not an alternative to Twitter. Get over it.
This week all I seem to be hearing is people wanting to describe FriendFeed as some sort of reasonable alternative to Twitter. It isn’t. I love FriendFeed to death, perhaps even moreso than I do Twitter these days, but it wasn’t designed to be a messaging system or to compete with Twitter; it was designed [...]
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Twitter: when all else fails, blame your users.
You’ve probably seen it all over your feed reader today; blogs screaming “Twitter just called Scoble out!”, or “Twitter is punishing their most popular users!”, and frankly they’re right. Alex probably thought he was doing the right thing and taking a proactive approach by explaining things in his blog post yesterday, but he made some [...]
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Major updates to SmugURL
Just a quick post to let folks know that I’ve pushed a major update to my SmugMug URL forwarding service SmugURL. It’s got a new web UI, a revised API and a lot of improvements behind the scenes. The rework I put into it allowed me to lay some framework for some future features I’ve [...]
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Getting FolderShare for Mac to Play Nice
I’ve been using Microsoft’s FolderShare (now Windows Live FolderShare blah blah blah) service for years now, and I’ve got to admit that as much as I hate most of Microsoft’s Live apps, FolderShare is one utility that I couldn’t live without. Well, OK- I could, but I wouldn’t want to. My recent addition of a [...]
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Resolving "Unsupported Operating System" Error in Windows Media Player 11
Fresh install of your slipstreamed Service Pack 3 media and missing Windows Media Player 11? Microsoft has yet to update the WMP11 download to support clean installs for Media Center with Service Pack 3, but here’s a fix that should work on any XP installation where you encounter the problem: Download Windows Media Player 11 [...]
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Jonathan Coulton and the Pirate Connection
As some of you may have heard from my Twitter stream last night, myself, Jim, Steph and Reid went to see Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm‘s concert in Chicago last night, and it was awesome. Coulton’s music was even more impressive in person, and Paul and Storm were quite hilarious. Here’s a video from [...]
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Viddler's Facebook app goes to Beta
Everyone’s favorite video sharing community Viddler unveiled it’s new Facebook app yesterday to a select number of beta testers. Colin made use of Twitter and Pownce to invite people to the test, and the demand has been quite impressive. The Viddler app is everything a Facebook app should be; it integrates seamlessly, is easy to [...]
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Enough Said?
No, it isn’t mine; it’s actually a Mother’s Day present from my Dad, Sister and I. Still, the thing is insanely sexy to use. I can feel it slowly breaking my will, especially with the local Best Buy carrying Macs now. >_
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Brightkite is Slick
Finally got an invite to Brightkite tonight (thanks Jeff!), and I’m pretty damn impressed to say the least. The best way to describe Brightkite is something like a mash-up of Plazes, Twitxr and to some degree Twitter itself, though it’s much more of a companion to the former than it is a competitor. Basically, you [...]
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Action… Jeans?
I got’s to get me a pair of those Chuck Norris ACTION JEANS. There’s nothing worse than getting your pants bunched up right when you need to perform a round house kick. I know from personal experience.
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SmugMug gets a Flash player- and it doesn't suck!
Earlier this evening Don MacAskill twittered that SmugMug released it’s new Flash-based video player and I must say, it’s very slick indeed. Not many folks realize that SmugMug supports video, but it does a real bang up job of it. If you’re a Power or Pro account holder, you can upload videos up to 2.5 [...]
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Introducing SmugURL
So, Jim convinced me to make the switch from Flickr to SmugMug last week; overall, I’ve been incredibly pleased with the service. I’ll go into the reasons I’m enjoying my time with SmugMug so much more than Flickr in a future post. That said, one aspect I didn’t like was their URL scheme. They have [...]
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"The Truth According To Wikipedia"
An incredibly thought provoking program on “Web 2.0″, and what it means to the world as well as ourselves as individuals. Fascinating stuff, even if it does feel somewhat biased in it’s representation.
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jQuery: Autoscale Element to Parent Width
Recently I’ve been working on a proposed redesign of my school’s online courseware interface; one of the requirements for my prototype was to create a fairly scalable, fluid interface that will work in any browser. This isn’t difficult in and of itself, but it made another goal of mine somewhat complicated: to make embedded video [...]
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FriendFeed Activity Widget Released
The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up. Give it a look.
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My Review of the LG VX 8800 "Venus"
Pros: * LG quality * Touchscreen * Nice, big slide-out keyboard * Brilliant display * Great camera Cons: * Laggy touchscreen response (probably an OS issue) * The unlock mechanism is too easy to accidentally activate in your pocket Rating:
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Take a number and wait with everyone else.
Dramatic Gopher REPRESENT!
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GPD08: Who Inspires You to "Do Good"?
So, Gary Vaynerchuk over at Wine Library TV posted a call for action yesterday: if we can create these huge viral memes on the web for stupid crap like what our favorite colors are or, god help us, figuring out innovative new ways to rickroll each other, why can’t we do it for something positive [...]
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Creepy People are Creepy
It’s been kind of a weird week. My family spent last weekend in Louisville, where I had a great time hanging out with Brian and finally visiting his new office at CNET. I always feel weird coming back from a visit there, because it still feels like home in a lot of ways. I lived [...]
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Digsby is Nifty
Jim alerted me to a new all-services-in-one IM client a couple weeks ago, but I only got around to trying it out last night. Digsby is a refreshing take on a heavily bloated, over saturated and more or less stagnant instant messenger scene, and reminds me a lot of the clients of olde, when chatting [...]
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Greatest. Rock. Video. Ever.
Robert Scoble rocking out in a feather boa? Pretty sure I had a dream about that awhile back… best not to ask.
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Animoto
Alright, so I came across this rather interesting new service called Animoto this evening. Playing with it just a bit, it seems pretty nifty; it’s a Flash-based music video (slide show) creator that lets you upload your own music, and either upload photos or import them from Flickr. There’s not that many customization options, which [...]
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iPhone SDK (finally) announced
And I’m shocked to say, it was totally worth the wait. This is exciting as hell— Apple really seems to have listed to the developers and gone all out on a professional, robust SDK and platform upgrade to really make it attractive to customers and developers alike. What I’m most pleased to hear is how [...]
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Ziff-Davis files for bankruptcy
Wow, this is pretty crazy. So apparently media power house Ziff-Davis is somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion dollars in debt, so they’ve decided to throw in the towel and file for bankruptcy. Ziff-Davis is the parent company to popular magazines and web portals like 1UP, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Games for Windows and PC [...]
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Fix Safari for Windows start up crashes
Happens a lot under Vista for me. Do what I did; grab the latest beta seed from Apple’s developer site. Works like a charm. Once you’ve signed in (or registered), head to the Downloads section. You should find a bunch of pre-release Apple software, including the latest version of Safari for Windows.
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Gary Gygax passes away
It’s a sad day for gaming; Gary Gygax, legendary designer of Dungeons & Dragons (among many others) passed away today at the ripe old age of 69. He did a lot for gaming, not just in designing classics that are still widely played and loved to this day, but also in getting those games out [...]
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Seeing Jonathan Coulton in May
I’m ppppsyched, going to be seeing a Jonathan Coulton concert up in Chicago in May with Jim, Steph and Reid. Just bought the tickets. VIP, baby. Oh yeah. Are you going?
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2008 Webware Awards are Up; Go Vote!
It’s that time again; the 2008 Webware 100 Awards ballot is up and ready for you to vote for your favorite Web 2.0 sites. It’s a nice way to show your love for those handful of sites and services that make your day just a little less of a pain in the ass. As always, [...]
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WP-Sightings Preview
So as you might have noticed, I have a little embedded lifestream on the left hand side of my blog here. It’s still just a mock up, sadly, and doesn’t pull live data. I’m working on changing that, though. Initially I was just going to slap some code together in my usual half assed fashion [...]
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Video Commenting
So thanks to the hard work of Colin Devroe and the rest of the Viddler gang, WordPress bloggers now have the insanely cool option of letting folks comment on their blogs using video. The plugin, which has been in beta for a few weeks now, is freely available on Viddler’s site, and requires just a [...]
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Back Online
Whoo, that took quite a bit of work. I established a dedicated server with my good buddy Ryan this last week, which entailed a large migration of wordpress data from across my various sites, among other stuff. A few days later, we’re back up and operational – and with a new design, no less. I’m [...]
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Announcing libGameFly
Tonight I’m releasing libGameFly, a PHP class for interacting with GameFly.com- the video game rental service. At the moment it’s very simple, just allowing you to expose your GameFly queue as a native PHP class and doing… well, whatever the hell you want with it. I imagine some pretty nifty WordPress widgets coming from this, [...]
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Happy Holidays
Howdy folks. Surprise; I’m not dead! No no, I’ve just been quite busy with work, projects, and the usual laundry list of life-related bits that lead to my vacationing from a blog every so many months. In any regard, I have a number of rather exciting things looming, the least of which is a live [...]
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Orange Box
Here’s a quick and dirty review of Valve’s “Orange Box”, containing Half Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal (along with the original Half Life 2 and Episode One, both of which I’ve already taken a look at in previous blog entries.) Half Life 2: Episode Two Short and sweet, would be my [...]
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ZOMG Hai!
Who missed me? *counts hands* Hm, well even so, I’m home and glad to be back. We had a fantastic time in Ireland, but decided to cut the trip a week short due to the looming possibility of a union strike for the Airline we were booked with and more importantly word of my grandfather [...]
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FYI: On Vacation
Just a heads up: I’ll be on vacation in Ireland until the 24th of October. I’ll have Internet, certainly, but it will be somewhat intermittent. If things go as they usually do during my visits, I’ll just be logging on at net cafes along the way to check my email, Skype voice mail, etc. If [...]
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Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG Disconnects on Apple Airport
I’ve had my laptop (a Dell XPS Inspiron Generation 2) for almost three years now. It’s still running strong, and overall I’ve been pretty happy with it. However, since day one I’ve had one majorly aggravating issue with it: the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG card disconnects. Like, a lot. Frequently. Several dozen times a day. I [...]
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Amazon launches DRM-free MP3 Store
Earlier today Amazon announced on their blog that they’re launching a brand spanking new online music store, simply called Amazon MP3 Downloads. Aside from the generic, easily forgotten name, I’m in love with what the site has to offer. DRM free, $0.89 (USD) a song, and a pretty hefty collection of very modern and popular [...]
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WordPress 2.3 Impressions
So as many of you are certainly well aware, the long awaited WordPress v2.3 was released today after a long series of betas and release candidates. 2.3 has had the blogging community foaming at the mouth for one reason: tags. You might ask yourself, if WordPress has had categories since day one, why do we [...]
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Final Fantasy XI Chat & Macro Commands
Decided to throw this together for my own quick reference. It’s based in part by a guide by Amanda Dean (Nalyr). These commands can be entered into the chat window (hitting space in the usual keyboard figuration on PC.) These commands can also be used to design macros for your convenience. Commands are broken into [...]
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Thoughts on Returning to Final Fantasy XI
So as many of you know, either because of my Twitter stream or because you know me personally, I’ve made a return to Final Fantasy XI along with my friends Ryan, Will and Jim. I began playing FFXI when early 2002, when I was accepted into the beta for the PlayStation 2. At the time [...]
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Bioshock: Greatest FPS Ever?
So, I just finished Bioshock this evening. What a crazy, brilliant game. The game mechanics and level design are top notch, there’s a very deep and involved storyline, and the gameplay doesn’t get stale after the first five levels. I have to hand it to them, I think they may have built the greatest first [...]
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Apple announces iPod Touch, iTunes Wifi, more.
Today at San Francisco’s Moscone West, Steve Jobs announced a several new iPods, a new iTunes Wifi Store and a new business partnership with Starbucks, among other bits. iPhone Price Drop Roughly $200 less. Overdue and very much welcome. iPod Touch Apple kind of gave AT&T a kick in the ol’ jewels today by announcing [...]
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Much Ado About Second Life
Those of you who knew me in-world as Vincent Shore may have noticed my absence from the metaverse as of late; and some of you who know me as the developer of Squawk, the social network integration tool for Second Life, may have questioned why I decided to sell my project. I thought now would [...]
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Mediacom Blows
Just an FYI: I may not be able to blog much this week, as my home Internet is completely useless. Mediacom was supposed to fix it today, but instead of sending out a maintenance guy to fix the signal – which I told them was the issue, and told them to send out – they [...]
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Web APIs by Example, Part II: del.icio.us
Today we’ll be looking at applying what we’ve already learned from working with the Twitter API to the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. As you might expect, the del.icio.us API offers a much broader set of functionality for interacting with it’s data. Besides being able to add bookmarks, you can delete existing ones and use a [...]
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Web APIs by Example, Part I: Twitter
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are essentially standardized methods for applications to talk to one another and share information. In desktop applications, the operating system provides a full range of APIs in order for your programs to run and interact with it (in Windows an app might register itself as an option for when you [...]
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iDrops actually work pretty well
So like I was saying, last week I ordered some iDrops from PodShop over on Amazon. I have an iPod nano that I got when I ordered my Mac Pro last year, and a year of use can leave some scars on a device so I thought I’d give it a try. What’s more, my [...]
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Running Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.
Here at home, I run a local apache install to make building and testing my web projects easier. Instead of having to constantly upload files to my web host, I can save them locally and refresh my browser to see the result. It’s easier, and because I run my local server off of my laptop, [...]
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The Simpsons Movie
Just got back from seeing The Simpsons Movie. I have to say, they did a great job on it. Plenty of laughs, a pretty decent story and, most shockingly, some original content. That can’t be easy for a show that’s been on the air two decades. 9/10. Definitely worth a watch. On a side note, [...]
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Squawk acquired by German social networking firm
I’m pleased to announce that Squawk (my Second Life tool for integrating Twitter, Jaiku, del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia) has been acquired by a social networking firm located in Germany. I’ll be working with the company over the next few days, helping them migrate all the assets over to their side of things.
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Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: I’m not a hardcore gamer. I may be looking at designing them for my career, but I don’t enjoy spending all day playing games- unless it’s a game that really pulls me in (which hasn’t happened since Final Fantasy X.)
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10 Years Later, and Linux Still Sucks
I’ve tried to like it, honest to God I have. Time and time again I’ve installed it over the years and tried to make “the switch”. But every time I fail.
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WordCamp 07: "The past, present, and future of Web publishing."
Video from Dave’s session on ‘The past, present and future of Web Publishing’ from WordCamp 2007. Colin also has a video up from Matthew Mullenweg’s session entitled ‘State of the Word’
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Howdy.
Decided to bite the bullet and get the ol’ blog up and running again. Bare with me over the next couple days while I get WordPress and a new site design up and running.