MacHeist Nano Bundle

This week, or at least for the next 4 days, MacHeist, (that site that gives you cheap software bundles) are actually giving away 6 Titles for free. Yes, free, you even get the serial numbers. I grabbed my copy on friday, I was alerted to it via Twitter (I know, there's a use for it sometimes?!).

Here are the titles, and yes, they are Full Versions.

• ShoveBox
• WriteRoom
• Twitterific
• Tiny Grab
• Hordes of Orcs
• Mariner Write

The one and only drawback at the moment is that MarinerWrites Serial will not be released until there have been 500,000 participants. So really, if you own a Mac you should be over there downloading and doing your bit so the rest of us can get Mariner Write.

iPhone Troubles! Apple is not friendly to victims of Thievery

I have yet to load these titles on to my computer, I have been battling with my iPhone this weekend. Apple, do not make it easy for you to resync your iPhone to a new computer. I'm sure, thankfully, that only a small percentage of users with iPhones ever have their computers stolen, so they dont have the option to "Deauthorize Computer" before Re-syncing their phone to a new computer. Personally, to get my iPhone to work (so I could load new applications on) I ended up having to 

1. Download Senuti to get all my purchased music off
2. Backup my iPhone
3. Restore it to its original factory settings
4. Resync
5. Restore from backup
6. Re-download all the applications (including bought ones, and I dont know if I've been charged twice or not)
7. I'm not up to here yet.

Really, they should just lighten up about the whole only syncing to one computer thing. Its just annoying.

No Friday Funny....

Friday Funny is a Day Late

I dont even know if this is funny. I just looked at it and thought. WTF....Crazy Japanese. :)

Thief! What to do if your computer is Stolen

Number 1. Call the Police! Obviously!

Number 2. Give them your Serial Number for your computer.

Number 3. Sit down and have a good cry.

Actually, I wouldn't know what the right thing to do is, but I can certainly tell you what I did.

Monday afternoon my fiance came home from work to find a brick sitting outside our front door, the window smashed and the back door wide open and our flat trashed. Wonderful, Burglars, and us with no Insurance. M&^%$r F*&^&r !

Without going into the specifics, and putting aside the feelings of our personal space being heinously violated by a pair of opportunistic tip rat thieving C*&#s, we have learned a few lessons about security this week. 

While Apple apparently used to maintain a database of stolen Mac's I've learned they no longer do. While there isn't a hell of a lot you can do to protect your laptop after it is stolen, there are things you can do before hand. Windows systems apparently have a number of programs, but for Macs the best thing I have read in numerous forums in the last 4 days is Undercover.

Because laptops are increasingly popular, and desktops are becoming smaller and more portable, computer theft has reached huge proportions worldwide. According to a recent FBI report, 97% of all stolen computers are never recovered. Many people we know have had their Macs stolen, often in 'safe' situations. That's why we developed Undercover: a unique theft-recovery application designed from the ground up for Mac OS X. 

What it does? A number of things, including tracking it, taking photos of whose using it, making it behave erratically and enabling you to remotely kill it in a matter of speaking.

I wish I had have known about this program before, however, I also wish my laptop wasnt stolen either, and before it was stolen, it never actually entered my head that it might one day be stolen. So, that ends that sentence. My next laptop will definitely have a copy of this software on it.

What else can you do to protect your computer from thieves?

Disable Automatic Login. 

Secure it with a Lock.

Secure your home.

Take out personal contents insurance.

or the obvious. Take your laptop with you everywhere you go. But even thats not fool proof.

eGames 2009 expo Review

This weekend in Melbourne (Friday thru Sunday) is the eGames 2009 expo at the Royal Carlton Exhibition Hall. Last time I went to the eGames expo was in 2007 when it was at the Exhibition Centre in Southbank (Geoffs Shed), we went on the Sunday, which is when a lot of the finals were being held for Counter Strike, Dead or Alive 4 and Guitar Hero. It was quite good that year, we managed to pick up a nice amount of freebies and there were a lot of up and coming games being showcased.... Assassins Creed, Tabula Rasa, Fury, Mario Galaxy, Naruto to name a few. True it was quite crowded and there was a bit of a line up to play games, but it took us an afternoon to work through the exhibition and we were still not through everything but were so tired we couldn't walk further.

This year we went along, bought tickets beforehand for the Saturday, and planned to get there at 10am so we could get the maximum amount of play time. I was a little concerned that the Royal Exhibition hall in Carlton next to the Melbourne Museum woud be a bit small compared to the massive expanse that is Geoffs Shed. We were all thoroughly excited to go though so it was really disappointing to rock up and find that not only was there no Nintendo Stage show or big Nintendo presence, there was no Sony and other notable names like EA, Konami, Activision were missing also. The biggest presence was Ubisoft, an their both which contained Red Space, Assassins Creed 2, Avatar 3D and the Popstar dancefloor for the Wii game. All quite impressive, but after previous years you couldnt help but feel overly let down, all in all it took about 20 minutes to walk around the whole exhibition and take it in. Intel had a stand for the Masters Games events and Australian Gamer were there too albeit with a small booth and minus Matt and Yug, who apparently provided a lot of the floor show in previous years as well. The biggest disappointment was Microsoft. Their Display was a truck, with 4 screens of the same game playing... not good! Considering Microsoft are trying to launch so many new features, one would have thought their contribution would have been of the bigger stands there.

Of Course there were the usual Anime Booths and Madman Booths and Education Booths (Cheers to the Monash University booth for giving me a Frisbee and the info on doing a PostGrad degree on the cheap), the consumer electronics show was also kind of ho hum, containing everything from Jim's Antennas to Speaker Systems, Home Automation and Plasma TV's.

The Cosplay Action was also very limited. I got some good pictures and spoke to a few people (The Halo guy spent 8 months putting together his costume and it looked amazing) but was hoping for more. Thankyou to all the Cosplayer's who let me take their photos and obligingly posed.

I've looked and there arent too many reviews around of the event yesterday or today, there didn't seem to be much in the way of twitter streams either. Vooks have a review of Friday and PC World have an interview with the organisers, Peter Barlow. Maybe he can explain why the event was so small this year... my friends and I had lunch in the elephant and wheelbarrow after and discussed at length possible reasons why we might be so disappointed "Where we being overly harsh?" "Did they have a reason?" "Could the same amount of gameplay been had with 30 dollars of rentals from the local video store in an afternoon?" and we couldnt come to any real answers, other than, no, we're not going back next year. Shame. :(

31/10/2009

 Here's a Link to my Photos from the Day and Below is a YouTube compilation of the the Photos I took.

Please dont take my photos without linking back to this site or at least acknowledging that I took them,  they mightn't be much but they're my "not much."

The Great Good Game Scrapfight

This almost qualifies for the the Friday Funny.

If you've ever watch ABC 2 on Monday Nights at 8:30 (the timeslot for those who are sick of Southpark on SBS, because Matt Stone and Trey Parker have just gone _too_ far lately) then you'll be familiar with Good Game "the show by Gamers for Gamers". Recently they just celebrated their 100th Episode and even more recently...as in this Monday just passed, saw a changing of the guard of sorts with a new presenter (A Girl!) Hex taking over the original Junglist, who had been presenting the show from the very first episode (If I'm right).

The whole cross-over was handled kind of badly, I wish I had a You-Tube video of it, there was a particularly funny part where Margaret Pomeranz ended up in the chair where Jung normally sits and laughs and says "You N00b Bajo". That made me laugh, however the rest of the show was fairly cringe worthy.

So anyway, it appears the Junglist's Axing has caused a bit of Angst around the Australian Internet's sites for Gamers, So far its had a mention on Kotaku, OzSource and ZGeek. Yesterday, Good Game released a statement via their forums about the reason behind Junglist's sudden axing, which was hastily retorted by Junglist himself, then it was responded to by Bajo and the production team and then it was on for young and old... apparently (I'm reading al this today). It was all getting pretty nasty when suddenly Rupert Murdoch's flying monkey's picked up the story and ran with it at News Limiteds news.com.au site.... where the comments are just going nuts, much like the forums at good game and the comments at Kotaku. It would also appear, that a rival reviewer from another network has weighed into the Good Game Forums and posted the following under Anon (My guess is its Yahtzee from the Escapist Zero Punctuation reviews and the Game Review show on PayTV).

"Hi GG crew, guess who. Better yet dont, I'm writing as anon for good cause, one should never be fratenising with the competition ;)

I was actually turning in for the night when I got a call about this situation, now 2 hours later my morbid curiousity is sated. I've got to admit I've saved this thread for prosperity, something tells me its going to be the thing of legend and a textbook case for future generations.

Let me be blunt. This is a death spiral, 'syd' (Janet I'm assuming, I'm afraid I'm not to l33t) I've no doubt this has been thrust upon you, but you need to get spin on this and for the love of god get some control over your hosts. Honestly it's going to take a miracle to pull the show out of this, I'd instead be worrying about careers, this one's going to follow people around.

Every change in a series has led to angering the hardcore base and the forums flaring up, its inevitable... what makes this spectacularly gruesome is someone seems to have forgotten the nature of your demographic. You might as well have run a series of promo's with the hosts tearing strips out of each other... forums are how your demographic communicate, and you can be guaranteed this has already spread further than these boards. I've even noticed a few posts comparing it to a family breakdown... sobering stuff with this demographic, and you were planning on trying to crack into the tween market?

I wish the very best for all of the team. It's a young group and despite being on the other side of the fence, I'm gutted something like this has happened to them. Best of luck to all."

Zgeek also have put in their two cents (Again, I'm guessing this is Pirate)

This is so lame. I just wanted to add my voice to the many who say this is a rotten idea. There was no need to get rid of Junglist. They could have added Stephanie Bendixsen without getting rid of him and achieved the same effect.

Junglist's reviews where the reason I watched the show. The other guy annoys me.

Epic fail by ABC management. You guys need to fire your marketing people because they obviously know nothing about their audience.

Just to prove that we are still living in the digital age, there's now a Save Junglist website, where you can sign petitions, fax the ABC and pick up a complaint letter to email to them.

The whole thing is probably an excersise in HR "How to not fire Gamers" as they will take their greivances to the entire internet, and any message board or forum they post on with degrade into nothing but a Flamewar.

Of course, I liked Junglist, and I am fairly sceptical about Hex's reviewing ability (the Forza review was bit childish) but I'm no hardcore gamer (in fact, rather than Casual Gamer mines more of a passing interest).

So Good Game may be shooting themselves in the foot. Then again, they might not be! But you cant deny, watching a scrap fight from the safe distance of the sidelines is always entertaining! As are some of the videos made from the fallout (below Hitler getting mad at Junglist's axing, from the Savejunglist Website)

Friday Funny

I found this site on Monday for the first time and thought it was hilarious and when I say hilarious, I mean I was laughing so hard I thought my ribs might crack more. However I looked at it at work (not a good idea because there seems to be an obsession with menstruation and vagina's) no its not porn, it Regretsy!

If you havent come across Etsy yet, you must be living under a binary rock, Etsy is an online handmade marketplace for all things crafty. Its most notably known for being stupidly over priced and some of the things people post on this site, like the Gem to my left is complete crap. I know there's a saying "One mans trash is another mans treasure" but this is taking it too far. Some other pearlers include the "Embellished tights" (Ripped to shreds) and the "Party Sweater" (Maybe if you were going to an acid party and needed something to trip off).

The funniest thing about Regretsy are the little comments on each post... they're truly what had me laughing the most as I perused it.




Just remember, this site is NSFW (Not  Safe For Work).

Thanks Regretsy for bringing the Friday funny.

Which is better, Degrees or IT Certifications ?

I just got an email offer, from a users group, to sit for a particular Certification for a software for free.

I've asked my Boss, as its work related software, and he's for it, I think (he's being incredibly supportive).

 

Never having sat a certification exam before, I dont know what I'm in for, or whether its worth it.

 

I have a degree, I remember what getting one of those was like... (and I'll remember every year when that HECS letter comes to tell me how much I still owe).

...just wondering, what can anyone tell me about certifications (I dont care about MCSE's either, those are a dime a dozen as the saying goes).

 

Generally speaking I'm for continuing education, lifelong learning as the ILO (International Labour Organisation) terms it. So in that respect, I'm up for it... and the studying etc involved, and career-wise it certainly wont look bad on my CV (As my boss pointed out).

 

What do you think? Got a Certification? Was it easy to get? Is it relevant or just a shiny bit of paper in a frame (like my degree) ?

Friday Funny

From Tokyo Mango

Funny People in Japan dancing in Slow Motion to Nujabes track.



Sure it's not funny in the way other friday posts have been, but you're laughing with them...except at the Sumo at the end... I laughed at him.

(If you want to learn more about  Nujabes head to my music blog Adventures in Sound)

Have a good Friday!