Concerned-ish

Well then! The time to book flights is coming quickly, and I’m still a little short on cash. So, how to handle it? By parting with my trusty iPhone.

It’s an older iPhone 2G, with 8GB storage, but they still fetch a fair sum. The unit is unlocked and jailbroken. It is also used, but in extremely good condition so it shouldn’t be an issue. The winner will receive the phone with a clean slate, no apps or settings different from the original. Only difference is it’s unlocked, otherwise, factory settings. Pics will be up tomorrow, but for now, the rules!

RULES:

1) Tickets are $10 each. People who buy 5 tickets receive a 6th free.

2) The drawing will not take place if less than 20 tickets are sold. In the event the drawing is cancelled, contacting me with the PayPal transaction ID will get you your money back.

3) Drawing takes place on 1st February at 3pm GMT. A random number generator will be used to pick the winner from all entries.

4) Any donations NOT a multiple of $10 will be rounded down, and the rest considered a donation. For example, sending $19.99 will count as only one ticket. Seriously it’s 1 cent, don’t be a cheapskate.

5) PayPal fees are covered by me unless you feel generous.

6) The iPhone will include a GB plug adapter and 2 USB cables.

7) Proof of postage will be provided within the week. No extra costs for postage will be required.

Entries only count if sent using the donation link on the sidebar. A followup post detailing ticket numbers will be created shortly.

9) Rules may change at any time, but the 8 above are fixed.

And that’s it! I’ll update the post tomorrow with pics.

Did you know that EA inplememnts shitty DRM in their games? Of course you did. It’s EA. But did you also know that if you hit the limit, rather than having to contact EA support, you can justuse a cracked EXE and Steam will treat it like the original, overlay and all? Tested on Crysis Warhead.

Since I regularly decline to allow myself to get on with college work, here’s a bunch of stuff I’m working on right now, all in one place for convenience.Things that are online are linked.

Internets:

CISocial - My own version of Facebook. Fully functional but in beta. Oh, and we don’t sell your info to the highest bidder either. App support now enabled.

Godlike – My own image hosting service. Large limits, and no restrictions on what can and cant go on.

Godlike Files – My own file hosting service. Again, large uploads, but I’m not a dick about waiting times or slow speeds for non subscribers. Currently in beta for sorting out PHP issues.

Other Stuff:

ARG

That’s it for now. I think. I’ll update if I think of anything else.

I obtained the Windows 8 Developer Snapshot a few weeks ago, and got around to installing it today, expecting great things. Unfortunately my expectations overreached what Windows 8 can do and ended up somewhere in Australia on my special little metaphorical scale.

Allow me to explain. While Windows 8 is based on Windows 7, the kernel and User Interface have received major overhauls. It’s not that it’s slow or unresponsive, it’s just that, from a user standpoint, it’s a bit too different. While I knew from the get go that Windows 8 was a tablet / touch based OS (maybe skewing my opinion here since I don’t have a touchscreen), mouse and keyboard do work. So everything is fine there. However… it’s just simply not designed for it.

In fact, I don’t think it was designed for anything.

While it does look rather pretty, two major issues cropped up that stopped it from being useful at all. The first is that if you have more than one monitor, in the current dev snapshot, it just simply won’t play nice. Rather than using common sense and extending the screen over onto the other monitor, it stops it up short and makes you use a scrollbar. The second thing – where the fuck are all my programs?

Windows 8 does away with the start menu as we know it and instead fills your desktop with big shiny button things. The thing is, there is no longer an “All Programs” menu, so unless you know the exact file directory and .exe name, you’re buggered for the minute. But even then, it’s difficult to find how to get into Windows Explorer.  I’d be showing you screenshots in this article, but I couldn’t even find Paint, the UI is that different.

Under the shell, I’m sure it’s just good old Windows. But this needs polish. Lots and lots of polish if it’s going to become a good OS. At this point in it’s cycle, Windows 7 was already pretty far along. I’m sad to say it, because t really is such a good concept – an actual proper mainstream operating system for tablet PCs – but at the minute it just simply isn’t good enough. It looks as if the trend of “a good OS followed by a bad one” is, for the moment, continuing. Hopefully closer to release I’ll be proven wrong. But for now? Stick to Windows 7.

But hey.

It’s still better than a Mac.

cd root/Downloads

./wine %ProgramFiles\Winamp\winamp.exe -file “entertainer.mp3″

Step 1a: Disable your antivirus.

Step 1b: Open Notepad.

Step 2: Write the following string:

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$ [blah] EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Removing the [blah] and spaces.

Step 3: Save as.

Step 4: Filetype, set to “All Files”.

Step 5: Use the filename “TotallyInconspicuousFile.COM” make sure the .COM is capitalised.

Step 6: Save to a USB drive.

Steb 6b: Re-enable your antivirus.

Step 7: Giggle manically to yourself when whatever computer you plug it into flips it’s shit with the Antivirus going off.

I got up early today for the first time in… ages, to grumpily go somewhere I didn’t want to go. That mood quickly changed when I found out it was the National Memorial Arboretum (for those who don’t know, while I disagree with war, I have the utmost respect for those who give life and limb to fight for what they believe in), and I relented into going on the half hour journey to get there.

When I got there, I was bemused by the amount of people there – there were, easily, a couple thousand, which given the weather (foggy, damp, and generally miserable) surprised me. As we went around the site, I realised that this wasn’t just a war memorial, it was a site of remembrance. The first ‘exhibit’ we came across, for lack of a better word, wasn’t to do with fighting at all – it was a rock garden dedicated to stillborn and neonatal deaths. There were hundreds of rocks in the garden, and, for the first time in a long time, I paused to take it in. The number of babies that die before they leave the hospital is phenomenal, and I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like for the hundreds of mothers to lose their child. One thing I am confident of, however, is that if any of those mothers were asked, they would recall exactly where they placed their stone.

A little more wandering around took us past the Civil Defence and Bevin Boys monuments (for those who don’t know, Bevin Boys were volunteers and conscripts who worked in the pits to produce coal to power the war effort), on the way to the larger monument at the top of some stairs. On the way, we passed an RAF monument, where I had to pause for a moment and pay my respects – a single rose lay on the display, a final gift to one of the men who’d perished in the line of duty. The most recent plaque laid down is only a few months old.

Eventually we arrived at the largest monument – a list of every member of the Army, Air Force and Royal Navy to die since World War 2. The number of names staggered me – there was easily at least 30,000 names. In 1951 alone, 1,238 people gave their lives. Looking around, the most recently engraved names on the wall were labelled 2010, and were at the start of a new wall- and with that came the grim realisation that come the end of the year, far too many names will be added under “2011″. And there’s room for another 10,000 names – they clearly expect many, many more casualties in the future.

Along the side of one wall, as well as the wall towards the centre on that side, there’s a gap, leaving a large statue of a poppy wreathe visible from the outside. Some engraved writing was between the gap which read:

“On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a ray of sunlight falls through this gap” (I can’t remember word for word, but this is similar to what it says). At this point, I began to realise the sheer amount of effort that had gone into the memorial -the statues around were perfect and lifelike, and the work that must have gone into it is phenomenal. It’s free to enter, but people have the option of donating. I entered with a full wallet.

I left with an empty one.

Recently, during college hours after completing my work in around about five minutes (total brag) I took to browsing Reddit. Recently, I’ve been seeing stuff about the E-PARASITE Act. Now, being British I’m not entirely certain what this is, but my understanding is the design:

• Requires search engines and ISPs to blacklist certain websites
• Pisses people off

As an objective Brit who’s been dealing with the Digital Economy Act for a year and a half (and completely circumvented it using some of the most obvious things whilst doing exactly what it was designed to prevent), I see some simple solutions.

Darknets

The definition of a Darknet is one that is unreachable via normal methods. A so called “Dark Internet” consists of a network of sites that no search engine links to, and is in effect, completely isolated from the rest of the web while sharing space on it. Projects such as Freenet are attempts to create a miniature, fully anonymous Internet, complete with encryption – ergo, even if your connection was monitored by a third party, they wouldn’t recognize your porn episodes of Teletubbies being streamed. Additionally Freenet is decentralised – content is stored on multiple client PCs and accessed via P2P techniques. Nifty.

Otherwise, a darknet can simply be created with…

Custom DNS

When you type a URL, your browser requests information from a DNS server, usually your ISP’s own. This information is the IP address of the server to get info from, and the Act may force websites they don’t like to redirect to 0.0.0.0 – an invalid IP. Solution? Use a DNS that doesn’t. A simple router settings change is sufficient. Hell all I need is two servers and I could run my own DNS server – it’s that simple. If someone out there has two servers and 2 IP addresses, do everyone a favour and set one up if it passes. I’d do it myself if I had the cash.

Just some random crap that spews from my mind while having flu and tired.

Now, according to this article, last year the deficit was £927 billion:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7901306/UK-deficit-fears-reappear-as-debts-hits-927bn.html

Since I can’t seem to find a more recent figure (and it’s gone up anyway), we’ll stick with that. Now, thanks to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade

We see that the UN estimates US$321.6 billion on GLOBAL drug trade. I can’t find any figures on UK in my 30 seconds of googling, so I’ll divide by 10 and use that, for $32.16 billion.

So the first thing we need to do is convert to GBP, at the current rates. Google says 20447328000, so approx £2.04 billion a year.

Now, we divide this by 52 for one week – 2044732800/52 = £39321784.61538462, so rounded, £39,321,784.61.

Now, if we assume standard VAT of 17.5% on this, 17.5% of 39321784.61 is £6881312.30, so £6.88 million.

Now we know what the government would get each week, we can work it out by dividing the total deficit by the weekly tax.

£2044732800 / £6881312.30 = 297.1428574750197. So in actuality, it would take 297 weeks and a day-ish to pay it. 5 and 3.4 years.

Assuming 10% of the worlds drugs are in the UK (theyre not, it’s more like 1%), and the deficit has stayed the same (it hasnt, it’s now in the trillions if I remember correctly).

We’re looking at more like 50 years.

EDIT: This is in response to someone claiming if we legalised and taxed drugs in the UK the deficit would be over withing a week. YEP, I’M THAT GUY

If McDonald’s did deliveries. To my college. Yeah.

godimsohungrypleasefeedme.

OK so, it looks as if I’m gonna hit the £4185 tax threshhold and therefore need to reregiseter as self employed. Fun times!

Know what that means? VPSes will be official. So, I’m thinking, of offering 512MB, 40GB, 500GB packages (RAM, HDD, Bandwidth) for $20 a month – does this sound fair? Of course there’ll be more packages available too, but I wanna know if my prices sound fair for now on that so I can come up with higher tiers based on that.

Additionally, web hosting! $3 a month for 50GB space, Unlimited bandwidth… sound fair?

This wont eb ready until December-ish. So, if anyone is interested, leave me a comment? It’s gonna be important to get a few customers quick to help with operational costs, so anyone who’s even remotely interested, let me know.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, you can choose from a huge range of OSes for the VPSes.