Skip to content

Technology

Blizzard is spying on you

Donna Wentworth gives you an overview of how Blizzard is spying on you.

If this was the government, as the article points out, they’d have to get a warrant.

What’s even more distrurbing to me, is the blog comments on this article – the gamers just don’t care if it stops cheating. This is right up there with those who say “I have nothing to hide, let the government videotape/phonetap/etc”.

Where do personal rights start and end? Just because you click on a EULA, does it really give a software company the right to capture what programs you’re running, who and what you’re communicating over instant messenger, and what websites you’ve visited?

What's in a name?

I’ve received a number of questions over the years of where the name “Silwenae” came from. It was randomly generated in Everquest – the second name I chose within EQ. It was unique enough that I stuck with it, including registering 3 domains. (And for the record, it’s pronounced sill-win-ay).

CmdrTaco, co-founder of , has written an op-ed piece on Slashdot on how Blizzard made him change his name due to the use of “Cmdr”, a title, in his World of Warcraft name, and how it’s affected him.

Online persona’s are interesting – there is a lack of accountability in using a handle for your pixels. There’s safety in anonymity. It wasn’t until recently I even put my real name on my blog – not out of safety, but out of privacy. (Though smart interweb people just look at Internic to see who owns a domain, and I’ve never faked that). I grew up on BBS’s, and using popular characters from books I liked – and I see that trend every day online (how many Drizzt’s did you see back in the EQ days?)

What does an online handle mean to you?

Flickr launches Photo Printing

Flickr has finally begun to offer online printing of photo’s (if you’re in the U.S.). They have a FAQ up, and prices appear to start at $0.20 for 4×6 and go up from there, so it’s competitive. Looking at the Flickr Blog, I see they’re also available for in-store pickup at Target. Very smart.

What’s interesting, is you, as the photo owner, can limit who can order prints from your photo’s. I never thought of that – I would have assumed it was just for the user, but when combined with a copyleft model, that’s pretty darn cool.

More X-Box Fun

Playing around with the hacked X-Box, I figured out how to edit the XML configuration file to have My Music & My Movies on the XBMC point directly to my Buffalo Terrastation that houses all my movies and music – no more network browsing to get there, nice and easy.

Then I did something which I haven’t done in forever, which was hop on IRC. Got the link to download some emulators, and threw up MameOX and a Sega Genesis emulator. Threw some roms on the X-Box, and I was playing Elevator Action. I had upped Vanguard as well – I don’t think my wife is happy with me now as that was one of her favorite games growing up and she knows it’s there just to distract her. 🙂

Flock

I’ve downloaded Flock the new browser for Web 2.0 based on Firefox.

More to come – it’s very interesting but I don’t think I quite have the hang of it yet – though I am posting this blog post from Flock!

Modding my X-box

I soft-modded my X-Box tonight and am currently listening to an album in MP3 located on a network share on an external hard drive in my den from the comfort of my living room as I type this.

I used the Mech Assault hack to get the Evolution X dashboard installed, and then just FTP’d over the software for X-Box Media Center.

Reading the instructions X-Box Scene seemed daunting. 30 steps, downloading this file and that file, modifying files, etc. In reality, it was just a few steps:

  1. Plug in the memory card into a controller and turn the X-Box on
  2. Copy the MechAssault save file from the controller to the hard drive
  3. Reboot the X-Box with MechAssault and load the savegame which starts the softmod installer
  4. Follow the instructions, including backup your files, and Evolution X is installed
  5. Go to a PC and download the X-Box Media Center file and extract it
  6. Edit one file and follow the instructions in the notes of the file
  7. Look at your IP address on the X-Box dashboard and go to a PC. FTP in to your X-Box
  8. FTP all the XBMC files to your apps directory on your modded X-Box
  9. Reboot the X-Box. From the Evolution X dashboard, choose Applications and choose X-Box Media Center

Voila – you’re running XBMC. I went in to Music, chose look over the network, chose my Buffalo Terrastation’s workgroup, and 30 seconds later was listening to Liz Phair – and it automatically uploads the songs you’re listening to Last.fm, which I mentioned in the blog a week or two ago.

It’s pretty slick – the UI is fantastic, the applications and formats XBMC supports is impressive, and the performance is blowing away the experience I had using Microsoft’s Media Center Extender for X-Box.

I have some research to do to see if I can automount samba shares (which could be really slick when I have MythTV working later) but for now automounting music and photo’s would make me very happy.