Video Game Rant
Posted by Jeremy in Gaming, Rant, Technology on December 4th, 2008
If you’ve ever read the book Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card, then you know that it’s about the lives of a family of five supported by the income of the father, who is a video game programmer. If you haven’t read that book, go do so. No really…stop reading this and walk- no drive. Drive to the nearest book store and buy it.
Anyway, the father is a game programmer who once made a killing off of royalties for a game he made independently and had published via a company. If you’re thinking to yourself, “That doesn’t happen anymore…” it’s because it really doesn’t. The book takes place in the 80’s, when that sort of thing actually happened. To put it another way, making video games was like writing a book. You had an idea, you executed it, and then a publisher would pick you up and make your game happen.
But now it’s nothing but companies sitting there throwing together anything that’ll make money. Video games have lost their “for the people, by the people” feel. I really wish we could go back to that…
Between that point in video gaming and where we are now (huge companies mass-producing shit in disc format) we had a lot of little companies making really good games left and right. They all made some really good stuff. In fact one of my all-time favorite games, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, was made by such a company (Westwood). But once they started to make it in the gaming world they were snatched up by EA and the quality of their games went to crap.
So we’ve gone from individuals making games, to small companies making games, to big companies buying out the small companies and ruining them. And it pisses me off.
In Soviet Russia, Crisis Economics You!…Wait…What?!
As you should all know, we’re in the middle of this horrible economic crisis brought on by poor leadership, costly wars, wreckless mortgage companies (*cough cough fannie mae and freddie mac cough cough*), and the general stupidity of the average low-income American who thinks credit cards are the answer to life’s mysteries. It’s next to impossible to not know about this stuff. I mean it’s all over the news and the presidential candidate’s focus shifted over to economic issues instead of the war (which I find to be a suspicious coincidence, but that’s for another article). But maybe THAT’S the problem!
What if the media wasn’t broadcasting our impending doom brought on by this recession? Think about it- People hear our economy is tanking so what do they do? They cutback on spending their money. They keep it in the bank and don’t touch it unless they absolutely need to. What does this do? It further weakens the economy! We can’t strengthen it if everyone stops spending. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we’d be economically okay if everyone was spending as if nothing was going on. I just think that everyone freaking out and not spending money is doing more bad than good for the economy.
The Guild
Posted by Jeremy in Gaming, Humor, Internet, World of Warcraft on September 17th, 2008
I’ve recently become very addicted to Stumble Upon and I’ve got two or three friends on it that send me links like non-stop. Which is great, because I’m usually bored non-stop. By far the greatest of the stumbles I’ve received is The Guild. The Guild is a youtube-based show about a guild of MMO players in the same guild. The group decides to meet in real life to get away from the game, but they end up questing and doing boss battles in real life as much they did in-game.
WoW Tip: Easy Money
Posted by Jeremy in Gaming, How To, World of Warcraft on May 12th, 2008
I’m not a WoW pro by any means. My highest level character is a 43 Prot Pally and my alts are a 40 Fire Mage and 21 Holy Priest. So while I’m not a level 70 with a ton of gold to my name, I have played the game a bit.
The reason I’m writing this guide is that I just hit 40 with my Fire Mage. I was so excited to get my mount. I had saved up 9 gold (I spend as a get, so saving up that much is unheard of for me) and ran off to buy my mount. Then I was hit in the face with the realization that in addition to my 9g, I had to spend ten times that in order to USE the mount I was buying. That sucks!
Syncing Stuff
Posted by Jeremy in How To, Linux, Technology, Windows on April 27th, 2008
I recently got Ubuntu 8 to dual boot with Vista and soon realized it was a pain to have two places to store my music, documents, images, etc. I thought about using an extra harddrive as a shared harddrive where I could keep files for both. But I’m highly organized on the computer (which is funny, since I’m not all that organized off the computer) and didn’t want to deal with creating sixty billion folders and I also liked keeping files in Vista’s Documents, Music, etc. folders. In addition to that (yes, I’m trying to prove to you that I’m not just lazy), I didn’t want to fill up the harddrive with all my files. I’d rather keep them all spanned out across three or four harddrives. The only way to do that was with syncing software. So I tried Vista’s syncing software, but apparently that only works with media devices. You’ve failed me again Microsoft!
Five Websites You Should Check Out Everyday
Note: Updated June 22, 2008 to have 5 websites instead of 3.
Hello! My name is Jeremy Duenas and I live on the internet. My daily activities often include runs to the store (Newegg.com), getting an education (Wikipdeia.com), and of course the occasional run to the dump (myspace.com) to see everyone’s worthless crap. From sun up to sun down I bravely explore the internet. I’ve seen the worst it has to offer (2girls1cup) and the best (digg.com). It is during these explorations that I discover some amazing websites that are updated daily with original content. These are truly my favorite websites. It is for you, a fellow explorer of the web, that I compile this list of Five Websites You Should Check Out Everyday. Please note that this list isn’t in any specific order.
Windows Prank
Posted by Jeremy in How To, Humor, Technology, Windows on April 18th, 2008
Getting it to Work in Vista
Want to piss someone off? Next time you’re at their house, open up notepad on their computer and type the following:
text1=msgbox(”Click yes to undo”,52,”!”)
text1=msgbox(”Are you sure you don’t want to undo?”,52,”!”)
text1=msgbox(”Well whatever. It’s your computer.”,52,”!”)
Now hit Ctrl+S (save) and change the Save As Type from .txt to All Files. Now name the file popup.vbs and hit save. Feel free to open the file to test it out. All it does is pop up a warning box (to edit the text that displays, change the text in the code. The ‘!’ part is the title, not some weird bit of code).
Now click/drag or cut/past the vbs file into some directory your friend won’t stumble onto. Try the Program Files folder or something. Now right click on the icon and click Send to… -> Desktop (Create Shortcut).
Now click the start button and under All Programs should be a folder called startup. Open it up and put the shortcut to your vbs file into it. Whenever you friend turns on their computer, the warning box(es) will pop up.
Getting it to work in Vista
From the comments:
It works on vista…you just have to change the code to
x = Msgbox(”Hello”, ,”Critical Error”)
x = Msgbox(”Hello”, ,”Critical Error”)
x = Msgbox(”Hello”, ,”Critical Error”)
FTP via Windows Explorer
Posted by Jeremy in How To, Internet, Technology, Windows on April 16th, 2008
For the writing of this article I used Windows XP Professional SP2.
I recently got sick of using an FTP program every time I wanted to upload files to my site. So I searched around for solutions (thinking I could ftp via some hidden Windows program) until I found out that you can FTP via Windows Explorer. Not Internet Explorer, but Windows Explorer.
Connecting
To start your connection, open up My Documents (or any folder on Windows you want). In the address bar, type in the ftp address to your site (Example- ftp.sitename.net). After a few seconds, a box will pop up telling you that you cannot connect. Close the box and right click inside of the folder you were just trying to connect through. Select “Login As” and type in your log in information. Click connect and -poof- you’re connected to your site via ftp via windows explorer.
Make Future Connecting Easy
Close out that window (or keep it open if you’d like) and open up your start menu. On the right side of the menu, under My Computer should be My Network Places; click that. On the left, click “Add a Network Place” . Go through the wizard until you can choose between MSN Communities and Choose Another Network Connection. Select the latter and click next. Now type in your ftp address and hit next one more time (make sure to type ftp:// before your ftp address). Unclick Login Anonymously and type in your login name. Name the connection and hit finish. You will now be able to instantly connect to your site via My Network Places. For extra ease, place a shortcut to the connection on your desktop or quick launch bar.
Portable World of Warcraft
Posted by Jeremy in Apple, Gaming, How To, Technology, Windows, World of Warcraft on April 16th, 2008
Before you get too excited, I don’t mean portable like the portable versions of Firefox, Pidgin, etc. I mean for a portable harddrive (at least 7.5GB). Portable harddrives come in different sizes and types. I personally use an old laptop harddrive placed inside of an external drive enclosure and my iPod. You could also, if you’ve got one large enough, use a usb flash drive (thumb drive, pen drive, etc.). Obviously, in addition to a drive, you’ll need a copy of World of Warcraft and a subscription to it (so you can play it).
Use With Portable Harddrive
This is very simple. Either install directly onto the harddrive or go onto your C Drive and copy and paste your World of Warcraft folder onto the drive. It’s that simple. You can now use world of warcraft on any computer you want (assuming it has the required specs).
Use With an iPod
If you’ve already set up your iPod to be used a harddrive, go back to Use With Portable Harddrive and follow those instructions. If you haven’t, keep reading. Please note that this is done with iTunes 7 on Windows XP, so if you’re running OS X, it might be slightly different.
Plug your iPod into your computer and open up iTunes (if it doesn’t automatically open). iTunes should display information on your iPod. If it doesn’t, select your iPod under “Devices” on the left side of the program. Under Options, you should see a small list of options. Check Enable Disk Use. Now go back up to Use With Portable Harddrive and follow those instructions (or click here).
Playing the Game
To play the game, all you have to do is open up your harddrive and open up Wow.exe (or whatever the OS X or linux equivelant is). It’s that simple. For Linux, refer to playing WoW using Wine.
The Geek Survival Kit
When you’re a geek like me and you’re forced to survive in the wild (outside of your room), you might not know what to do. Conversations can be awkward, and often lead to you striking up conversations about that shock video you saw last week online. But I find when I’m at school, surviving in the wild is much easier, because I’m surrounded by computers. The only problem is that its not MY computer. With this article, I aim to help you make any computer YOUR computer.
All you need is a USB flashdrive. I use a 1gig LG flash drive, but something as small as 128mb will do. First of all, go to Portable Apps and download the Portable App installer. Install the program onto your flashdrive (it’ll take a while to do this, so go watch 2girls1cup or something :D). Once that’s done, you’ll want to start up the portable version of Firefox. This is where a majority of your survival kit will be going.
If you don’t already have one, head over to google and sign up for an account. With this account you’ll have access to Google mail (gmail), Calendar, docs, and many others. With this account, you get 6GB of online storage. And the best way to use that storage is a little Firefox plugin called GSpace. With GSpace, you can upload/download any file you want via Firefox. That means that if you’re finishing up a class and you’ve got some homework you need to finish up, you can upload the word doc, the images, the audio files, or whatever you need to Google and head home, download/complete the assignment and reupload for download at school. Now you might be saying that you can easily do this with a flash drive. This is true. But if you’re a graphic or web design major (I’m web major), you’ll have MASSIVE files that will very quickly fill up your flashdrive. But with Google + GSpace, you can fill up your 6GB with endless amounts of stuff.
This next one is setting your homepage to http://igoogle.com. Here you can find little widgets and dock them on the page. Personally, I’ve got Calendar, Gmail, and a few others docked so I can easily view my schedule, email, etc. Also remember to trick out your Firefox. Even though its portable, this version of Firefox can use plugins and themes just like the full version. The only difference is that Firefox auto-clears the browsing history when you remove the flashdrive (this reduces the amount of space needed to store Firefox).
Lastly, make use of the programs on Portable Apps. There are a ton of smaller versions of popular programs that you can use. There’s graphics editors, text editors, IM clients, and more. Also, you can easily add your own programs that will show up on the Portable Apps menu on the computer. I’ve got some GBA/SNES emulators on mine, alone with a few smaller games (Conquest, Crayon Physics, etc.).
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