Category: Interesting Reads

Indie games of the year.

According to GameTunnel, here are the independent developer games of the year.  Some of these I know, and love.  Some I haven’t ever seen, but plan on checking out.  The soccer game (#10 on the list) looks really cool.  Sorta Sim-Fifa.  And Darwinia made the list.  It’s a cool little game, too.  Check all of the listed games out.

A real geek test

If the regular geek test isn’t geeky enough for you, check out this geek test. Why is this one better? Well, check out some of the questions:

  • ROT13 this:trrxfnerterng
  • What does this do: echo $dorks==$geeks?”yes”:”no”;
  • Convert this from ASCII to English:49204561742046726F6773

Now, let me know how that worked out for you. Any one with a score they’d like to share? Let me know in the comments. Personally, I scored an 88:


My computer geek score is greater than 88% of all people in the world! How do you compare? Click here to find out!

Very clever virus?

Whoa!  Just read about the Feebs virus over at F-Secure.  In addition to normal distribution by web download, this virus stays in memory, watches for outgoing mail connections, and when it sees one with a large MIME attachment injects itself into the attachment.  This won’t make for a fast spreading virus, but it will make for smarter and more difficult to detect virus spread.

Sharing fat pipes with friends

How cool.  Looks like a couple of companies are working on technology to make it easier to connect multiple high-speed home connections to share big fat data pipes with multiple people.  If you hit that connection when none of your friends/neighbors are, you could get some absurdly high speeds through inexpensive home lines.  I’m very interested in this.

Apple fixes small privacy rights issue

I didn’t write about the original problem, but apparently Apple has fixed an issue in which personal information was sent to Apple when users shopped in the iTunes store (and since I don’t shop there, I’ll admit to not carefully reading up on the problem).  The fix is a simple and obvious one.  Now, when shopping, there is a note that your system can send some information to Apple about your browsing, and Apple can send back recommendations for similar songs and videos.  You have the option of turning this feature on or off.  Which, of course, is the right way to handle the situation.

Broadcasters want to take away your VCR

OK, that’s not quite true.  But there is an idea being pushed by broadcasters to close what is called the analog hole.  This speaks to the fact that anyone can copy regular TV and share/distribute/re-mix/mash-up what they have copied.  An example of this is the VCR, which happily records whatever analog signal comes through it if directed to.  Another example is video capture cards used in many PCs and video recorders like Tivo or ReplayTV.

Over at Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felton has written up a very good brief on the technology new bill the broadcasters are trying to get passed would use.My own sensationalist headline aside (it won’t take away your VCR, but would impact future sales of video recorders), this is another example of big business trying to restrict users’ rights because some users abuse those rights.  And to be honest, I’m not so sure why it is wrong for me to get a copy of a show from a friend when I missed the show and my friend recorded it.  But if this new bill becomes law, that could very well be impossible in the future.