Category Archives: Technology

Play like a TWIT

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Playing as a clan makes FPS games so much more enjoyable. If you play CoD and you like Team Tactical then the chances are that at some point the TWIT clan has kicked your ass. ;)

As the name suggests, Team Tactical is all about playing tactically as a team, if you’re all running around like headless chickens, kill streaking, camping, playing split screen even though you’re just one person or doing jumpy spinny shit with a sniper rifle – just don’t be surprised when we chalk up a win. But hey, if you play us and win because your straight up better, we’ll gladly congratulate you… and then proceed to kick your ass in the next round. ;)

Things you need to know about us:

  • We practice quite a lot, by which I mean we play all the time.
  • We know each other really well – we have skill sets and load outs that complement each other.
  • We all have good quality headsets, Turtle Beaches – if you’re stomping around like an elephant then we will hear you.
  • We communicate constantly whilst we are playing, calling out tactics and enemy locations on the fly – we respond to situations super quick.
  • We don’t play cheap.

That last point is very important to us and really the motivation for this post. We don’t use n00btubes or heartbeat sensors unless we pick them up from fallen enemies, we don’t spawn trap, we don’t corner trap, we don’t glitch, we don’t boost and we don’t camp.

Guarding the flag, bombsite or bomb (think S&D) is not camping, that’s called Protecting The Fucking Objective. Ignoring the objective entirely and sitting in a corner racking up kills whilst the rest of your team valiantly tries to PTFO, that’s camping.

Killstreaking is for people who would camp, but have ADHD, running around the map racking up kills and ignoring the objectives. This is particularly evident in game modes like Kill Confirmed, seriously, the number of times I’ve died and seen people just walk away from a whole mess of tags is staggering.

Boosting and glitching are self explanatory. I was genuinely amazed this weekend that despite how easy if is to watch a game back and to report people and have them banned for 5000 days, we still managed to find ourselves in a game where two idiots boosted to an MOAB. Really guys, you didn’t think that having one of you at 25-0 and the other at 0-25 was going to give the game away!

So come on people, put down your RPGs and come play like men, you’ll probably still lose, but at least we’ll respect you. Unless you’re 12 and whine like a little bitch and threaten to “merk us”, in which case we’ll probably just laugh at you.

Don’t hate the iPlayer…

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At some point iPlayer disappeared from the XMB on my PS3, I think it happened during the firmware update that made the iPlayer a dedicated app, but I cannot be sure. Since then I have intermittently seen the TV/Video option in the XMB and assumed that the problem had rectified itself, but then the next time I started up it was gone again. Having scoured the internet, it seems lots of people are reporting the same problem. I have seen lots of suggested fixes, mainly based on signing in and out of PSN/Home/Qriocity, but none of these worked for me (I don’t even have Qriocity or Home installed!). I stumbled across a solution completely by accident when trying to do something else, I created an extra user on my PS3, completely stock settings, signed in as the new user, deleted the new user, switched back to my regular user and suddenly the TV/Video option was back. All of this was done on firmware version 3.73.

Dear Tim…

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I like the way Apple work. I like their vertically integrated approach and dedication to pushing the boundaries of technology. Life inside Steve’s walled garden is pretty epic, but that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t things I would change. After the release of Lion, the standing down of Uncle Steve and with iOS 5 imminent, now seems like a good time to list my annoyances and suggestions.

First off, let me say that customised notification sounds for texts/emails/etc on iOS is a super massive win, the same for unified notifications. If these weren’t features in iOS 5 then they would be near the very top of my list.

1. When you are sending a text message, right after you have hit send, the name of the recipient is replaced with “Sending…”. This lasts for all of two seconds, but feels like an eternity when you think you may have sent that text to the wrong person. The level of terror is heightened by the fact that there is no option to cancel the text.

2. Sure, I now have the option to merge folders, but Finder still feels awkward to use as none of the views feel quite right. I don’t like the way that files moves around the mouse pointer when you are dragging them either.

3. When I connect my iPhone to my MBP, it irks me that I have to launch iTunes in order to sync my contacts, calendar, photos, etc. Bring back iSync!

4. I would like to be able to combine my FaceTime account on my phone with the one on my Mac, so that both “ring” and I can answer either.

5. I know that you can get other browsers for iOS, but what’s the point if the first time I click on a link it immediately opens Safari? Allow me to choose the default browser the same way I would on my Mac.

6. An air like MBP. Lose the optical drive, add support for the external SuperDrive (maybe a new ThunderBolt version?). Replace the HDD with a phat SSD.

7. A pony. I’d quite like a pony.

TWIT for life

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I feel like I owe Jason Bradbury a massive thank you. I have just had the most amazing weekend and it really is all thanks to him.

I joined twitter in September 2008. I knew some other people who had joined and thought I should grab myself a decent username in case I decided to start using the service, but I really didn’t take it any further than that. Around this same time I started reading Jase’s blog on his newly relaunched website (coinciding with the release of his first novel) and at some point after that he started tweeting and added a link to his twitter feed from his website. I discovered the link to Jase’s twitter feed one Friday lunch time and remembering the account I had created for myself decided to log in and take a closer look. I was amazed to see that Jason was exchanging messages with normal people and confused by the strange #ff that accompanied so many of the messages that were flying back and forth. I quickly discovered that #ff was short for follow friday and that this meant that people were recommending other people to follow. I was quite taken a back by this, after all, my previous experiences with social media were fairly limited and the tools I had used had a nasty habit of sustaining relationships that I would happily have left behind, but here was a tool with the power to connect me to new and exciting people. I followed three people on that day, Jason Bradbury, Becky Kingston and Wayne Thompson, at the time the thing that stuck in my mind was that Jase followed me back, if I had only known what was to come!

Over the next few weeks I began to check twitter more and more regularly, following more and more people, although tending to read far more than I posted, I couldn’t believe that anybody who didn’t know me would be interested in reading my thoughts. I began to follow one of my favourite wrestlers, Chris Jericho, and was enjoying reading the tweets that Chris was retweeting, they were like Chuckisms, but Jericho themed. I tried to think of something funny to tweet in the hope that Chris might retweet it and then I nailed it “@IAmJericho Chris Jericho future endeavoured Vince McMahon”. If you don’t know much about wrestling then you will just have to trust me that I nailed it. Chris did retweet my message and I was ecstatic… and then a strange thing happened, other people started retweeting it… and following me. For several days after my original tweet I received RTs and new followers. This gave me a new confidence to start conversing with people rather than just consuming the tweets of others. One of the people that I began talking to was Wayne, he seemed to be kind of like me, we talked about PlayStation games and the Gadget Show (some things never change bro ;) and Wayne added me on PSN.

Tweeting along to the Gadget Show has become something of a ritual for me and I thoroughly recommend it, I’ve met so many cool people in this way including a badger from outer space!

 

 

One day I was playing MW2 when Wayne invited me to join his party. I did and we had a few good games, I wasn’t as good as he was (some things never change bro ;), but I had fun. A few weeks later I was online again and Wayne invited me to join his party again, I did and was slightly surprised by the two other people also in the party, veedubhev and supermarioex. Wayne introduced us and explained to the others that I didn’t have a mic. We had some great games and exchanged some banter (I tended to be on the receiving end due to the lack of a mic) and this became such a regular occurrence that they invited me to join their TWIT clan and pushed me both to get a mic and to follow the rest of the clan. The rest is history, if it wasn’t for the fact that we all live so far apart, we would be inseparable, but modern technology means that we are all only a tweet/text/email away and can normally be found shoulder to shoulder, slaughtering the competition on CoD Black Ops.

This weekend was the first weekend that we were all in the same place at the same time. It was awesome. I spent the weekend with SMX, Wayne and his lovely fiance, we went to Gadget Show Live 2011 at the NEC on Friday (where we met up with a bunch of our other twitter friends) and traveled down to meet up with Hev and her beautiful daughter on the Saturday. So you see, it is all thanks to Jason and The Gadget Show that I met my three best friends and that is why I owe him a massive thank you. Thank you Jase, see you at the NEC in 2012!

Shameless plug: Jason Bradbury’s third novel is available now from all good book retailers. ;)

Browse like a ninja

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If the only metric you use to make your choice of internet browser is performance then you are a fool. The security of your personal data must surely be at least as important as how quickly you can render a page? I should explain that this post has been coming for a while, articles about Evercookies and Firesheep were worrying, but it was a piece on internet security on The Gadget Show [that completely failed to mention browser choice] that was the ultimate catalyst.

Firefox is my browser of choice because it is the safest, thanks largely to the security and privacy on offer from some of the myriad of awesome third party add ons. I have previously explained why NoScript and AdBlock Plus are must haves for me, but I have recently come across two more add ons that have quickly found a place in my personal hall of fame.

BetterPrivacy provides an easy way to manage super cookies (LSO Flash Objects, DOM Storage Objects – cookies that never expire). You set it up, in my case this meant telling it to delete everything when Firefox is closed, and then you forget about it.

Ghostery allows you to see exactly who is tracking you using web bugs, beacons, hidden pixels etc and then control which ones you allow. In fact, it offers you a profile on the source of each tracker to help you make your decision.

Go on, check them out and start browsing like a ninja!

If you are interested in browser security then you may be interested in this article about changes in Firefox 4.0 to prevent abuse of the CSS :visited selector.

Thanks to James Hugman for pointing out Ghostery to me!

With great power there must also come great responsibility

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In the same week that the story of Jessi Slaughter came to light, this post appeared on Engadget.

Free speech is a right that everyone should be entitled to, but when you say something, it’s all on you if it offends/upsets people. If you say something that a lot of people find offensive/upsetting then you can expect a lot of people to tell you about it and you have to except that they might do that in a way that you find offensive and upsetting.

So you are responsible for what you say, but what if someone provides you with a stage? With maybe the exception of reporting on something upsetting/offensive as a news item, the stage provider is effectively endorsing the content of your message. It is a reflection on them. Websites such as YouTube have a right to uphold their standards by refusing to post, or by removing videos containing content that they find objectionable. This is not censorship. You have the right to free speech, not to have people agree with you. The important point here is that the judgment call on what is acceptable lies with the stage provider, even if they use popular opinion to make their decision on where the threshold of acceptability lies.

In the case of Jessi Slaughter who is a minor (yes, I know that’s not her real name), her parents take on the responsibility for not protecting her from the full horror of the internet and the responsibility for not policing what she was saying*, she did instigate the entire episode after all.

In exactly the same way, Apple and Google have the right to refuse to allow apps containing content that they find objectionable in their respective app stores (the rejection of apps for the purpose of gaining/maintaining market control is an issue for another post). You want Nazi wallpaper on your smart phone, go do it, but don’t expect Apple/Google to help you.

I wrote this post because freedom of the internet is one of those subjects that people like to convince themselves is full of grey areas, when really it isn’t. The internet is as self policing as the spoken word, it’s just that people don’t like having to make the decision on what is black and what is white because they are making clear where their own threshold of acceptability is and other people might disagree.

*Despite what one of the talking heads on GMA said, rap music is not responsible for Jessi Slaughter’s actions.

Twitter I love you

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There aren’t many downsides to using Twitter, but one of the more obvious ones is the number of bots spewing out spam. Thankfully, no machine is able to pass the Turing test, which means that whether the spam takes the form of @replies or DMs, it is easy to spot that the account is not genuine and notify Twitter of this. Once a few people have flagged an account as posting spam, or if a large number of people suddenly block an account, or even if an account suddenly follows and then unfollows a large number of people, Twitter will suspend/delete the account. If only there were a similar system for emails.

Dot Robot: Literary awesomeness

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I have just finished reading Dot Robot, the first book in the techno thriller trilogy by Jason Bradbury*. I rarely read fiction, I’m more of a biography or software textbook kind of guy. The last piece of fiction I consumed was a few years ago, it was the first novel penned by Mick Foley, wrestling superstar and New York Times best-selling autobiographer, so the bar was set quite high for the man from The Gadget Show. Have no fear though because Dot Robot is the very definition of a page turner, it’s awesome. I’m a self confessed geek, so the premise of the story of Dot Robot was like every dream I’ve ever had (except for the ones with Megan Fox in them ;-), a tale of good vs evil, played out in a world of gadgets, computers and the internet. I think Dot Robot is supposed to be for kids, but so is The Simpsons and for me, like The Simpsons, Dot Robot manages to pull off the difficult task of simultaneously appealing to young and er… not so young (hey – I’m far from old).

The experience of reading this book really was like riding a roller coaster, a gripping, multi-emotional, twisting and turning journey, that at one point actually had me so mad that I was completely unable to put the book down. The bottom line is that if you are a geek, of any age and/or sex, you need to read this book, but just be sure that you have the next in the series available for when you finish it, I didn’t and the suspense of the cliff hanger finish of book one is killing me!

* Jase is such a top bloke that he actually sent me a signed copy of his book!

Surfs up

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firefoxRecently a lot colleagues and friends have been telling me about how awesome browser x is or why I should use browser y and at the back end of last month Windows users booted their machines to be greeted by an update informing them that there were other browsers besides IE and were prompted to decide which one they wanted to use. I wonder if any of them realised just how big of a decision they were faced with? I took the time to investigate all of the browsers that people recommended, but found myself going back to the browser that I had been using all along, Firefox.

Right off the bat I’m going to say that I think IE sucks; nobody should brag about scoring 55% on the Acid 3 test. For sure 55% is an improvement on 20%, but it’s a long way behind the competition, most of whom are chalking up 100%. I want to use a browser that is standards compliant and I want you to use one even more; as a web developer I don’t appreciate having to blight my HTML with hacks just to get my pages to render/function correctly in IE. Acid test scores were not what drove me back to Firefox though, after all, the current version of Firefox scores only 94% in comparison to Opera, Safari and Chrome, all of which are in the top marks club I mentioned earlier.

Firefox isn’t the fastest browser either, it is fast, but Safari is no slouch and Chrome is Usain Bolt fast. Where Firefox wins is in the content blocking department and it’s all thanks to the open source community and the add ons that they produce and maintain. Content blocking seems to be a rather controversial subject and mainly because by content blocking people generally mean ad blocking. This slashdot article discusses an experiment performed by Ars Technia where content was hidden from users of popular ad blocking tools. I understand why people like Ken Fisher, the founder of Ars Technia, object to ad blocking, I just think they are missing the point entirely: I value my browsing experience more highly that I value your business model. I actively block certain content in webpages using NoScript and AdBlockPlus, adverts are included in this. With NoScript and AdBlock Plus I can decide what I want to see and what I want to allow, Opera, Safari and Chrome all provide an ‘all or nothing’ option, but none of them offer the granularity of control that I want need. I do not want random code from random 3rd party sites being executed on my machine, I do not wish to be tracked across the web, I do not want hideous [Flash based] adverts hoovering up all of the resources on my laptop and I certainly don’t want, and this is a particular bug bear of mine, stupid ad word type adverts which pop up an annoying box whenever the mouse happens to move across particular words on the page.  If you decide that your site cannot exist without these things and place your content behind a paywall then I accept that, but don’t expect to me sign up.

If Apple ever decide to implement proper support for add ons in Safari then I’m there, but all the time things have been hacked together as Input Managers that require me to run Safari in 32 bit mode I’m not. Likewise, if Google ever decide to allow proper content blocking then I might consider switching to Chrome, but I think this is unlikely as they have failed to add the necessary hooks even with direct coaching from Giorgio Maone. All of the currently available Chrome content blockers use an easily circumventable CSS hiding approach that can be coded around in about 3 minutes which isn’t that surprising when you consider that Google make a sizeable amount from adverts themselves! So like I said, around the world in a multitude of browsers only to discover that the grass was greener on my side.

It’s an iMac. The End.

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Sometimes I marvel at how the Universe works. Today I was discussing with two friends, one a colleague, the other my boss (virtual fist bumps to El Holandés and El Jefe) the naming convention that Apple uses for it’s products. The example we were discussing was the iMac and the focus of the discussion was why all iMacs are identified as just being an iMac and not an iMac Inspiron 550GTi. This evening an article appeared on TUAW.

“Apple’s official names for its products are generally simple. Although the current iMac bears very little resemblance to its 1998 ancestor, both products have the exact same name. In the hands of Sony or Dell the current iMac might be called the “iMac 12390 XMT” or something similar to differentiate it from the slightly slower and less capacious “iMac 10460 TMI” that they sold last year, but Apple keeps it simple: if it’s an all-in-one desktop computer, it’s an iMac. The End.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!