CAT | Technicity
I was introduced to this fine flash game by Jon at work. If you play it, submit your score to the SockTown group. I’m holding strong at spots 1-5 in the Medium difficulty and the top spot in the Hard difficulty. I welcome any and all challengers. Except if you’re good. Stay away.
When did Tiger Direct start making these YouTube videos?? The cheesiness rivals some of best bits I’ve seen on Shop at Home.
His enthusiasm for the ten… eighty… pee is impressive. Actually seems like a pretty decent TV. Maybe one day, Chris. Maybe one day.
Have you read about this yet?
SCO chairman wants Congress to make port 80 porn-free
I paste excerpts:
The governor of Utah signed a nonbinding resolution on Tuesday that calls on the US Congress to do something about the rising tide of Internet pornography, preferably using technology to stick it in a ghetto where those who don’t want to see it don’t have to do so. The resolution, which passed both houses of the Utah legislature, was backed by CP80 (”Clean port 80″), a group founded and headed by Ralph Yarro. CP80’s plan to cleanse the Internet isn’t the only controversy that Yarro’s involved in, though; he also happens to chair the board of directors for SCO.
Yarro now spends time trying to get “graphic” art pushed into its own corner of the Internet through his work with CP80, which wants Congress to legislate that all porn must use a series of alternate ports. Port 80, the main HTTP port, would be reserved as a “community channel.”
Their draft bill would use the “Miller test” for obscenity, and anything deemed obscene that appeared on the “community channel” would open the web site operator to a prosecution or fine.
CP80’s solution would apply to the US only, of course, and their plan for dealing with international pornographers (who are unlikely to move to another port dictated by the US) is a simple but draconian one: consumers would ask ISPs to “simply block all IP addresses originating from a non-compliant country.”
This is THE most ridiculous proposal I have read in a long time. Trying to purify HTTP traffic running on specific ports?? Wow. What’s next? If you send me dirty pictures via e-mail and I access them using POP3 on port 110, big trouble! But, if I’ve changed my port to something else, that’s fine?
The strange thing is, the way that TCP works is that while the client makes a request using port 80 or 443 to the web server, the client itself opens its own random port to accept the incoming data. So, any ‘graphic images’ are delivered on this random port anyways! If I were running a fancy, upper-class pornography supersite and were somehow charged with violating this legislation, I would take it to court for sure, with my wireshark captures in hand. So stupid.
What else will fall under ‘community ports’ in the future? Ports used to stream media? Ports used to connect to Second Life servers, or World of Warcraft? Will they need to be sanitized as well? How about XBox Live? BLEH!!
I never expect this ‘proposal’ to be made into a law, but I am amazed that certain groups are SO TERRIFIED of their children stumbling onto some hot naked action that they’ll try to manipulate basic TCP delivery mechanisms to further their puritan agendas.
Oh, this graphic from their site is funny. Space man with stacks upon stacks of dirty hot space lady porn.
Nintendo Hand-Held Child Molester Target
I don’t know about you, but I’ve Pictochatted my way into so many pants, I’ve lost count. The ladies can’t resist my urban-styled street scrawls and aggressive stylus strokes.
Performed my first XBox 360 mod this evening. I had to buy a specific SATA controller card in order to flash the XBox 360’s DVD drive, but other then that it’s pretty easy. So, if you plan on getting an XBox 360 at some point, pick one up now before they start blocking DVD firmware writes! 
Update:
Xince some people have asked me why I would do such a crazy thing before my warranty expired, it wasn’t my own XBox 360. It was Mandie’s brother’s (Brandon). And you talk about crazy, he bought the extended warranty for the thing when he bought it 3 months ago. Lucky for him, the little warranty sticker proved faulty and didn’t tear or leave some sort of ‘void’ message when it came off.
Ever try to watch online video only to be told that the content isn’t available in your area? I can think of two right off the bat: ABC.com’s online television offerings and Yahoo’s online hockey broadcasts. I’ve tried a couple of ways to get around the IP detection, including using public proxies in US to route my traffic through. The problem with this approach is that the speed is usually horrible, plus you need to configure your browser + media player to use the proxy, and then change the configuration back when you’re done. Garbage, it is.
Garbage!
I’ve been reading about how Rogers is starting to throttle BitTorrent traffic (again), and a number of users suggested taking advantage of SecureIX.com’s personal VPN solution. You visit their site, sign up for a free account, set up a new PPTP connection in Windows and voila: Rogers can’t detect the traffic because it’s all taking place in an encrypted tunnel. I don’t want to even imagine the bandwidth costs these SecureIX fellows are incurring since all of this traffic is routing through their VPN servers, but oh well.
As an added benefit, their VPN servers are located in the US, so when you visit a web site, it detects your IP as being located in the US, allowing you access to their forbidden goods. I have tested this with ABC.com’s online video, and it worked perfectly. I will have to wait to test it on Yahoo’s hockey feeds until a game is showing, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
yoink!
I like surprises. Especially ones that I’m not expecting. Case in point: Vista Media Center. When I turned it on today, there was a new item in the main menu:
This ‘Sports’ menu item just showed up today out of nowhere. And it is all sorts of fantastic. Now, there’s some parts that I can’t take screenshots of due to the limitations of my super-shitty Media Center PC locking up when I try to view live video directly on it (but mysteriously works fine through the XBox 360 Extender…). I will do my best to explain what each sub-item does.
First of all, the ‘On Now’ will show a little bar at the top of the screen with the games that I can watch right now, with their current score. I scroll to the game I want to watch, click it and it shows up underneath the bar. Works great! ‘On later’ just shows me the games that are coming up. Pretty straight-forward. Now, on to more screenshots.
The Scores section, at first glance, looks pretty bare bones:
Highlighting an upcoming game will show you the team’s current record. Clicking on the item brings up some interesting stats about the two teams, like current goals/assists/points leaders, pretty standard stuff.
Clicking on that little Fox Sports item on the side, however, brings up a whole world of fun:
It starts off with a little pre-game synopsis. Very nice!
You can compare a LOT of stats between the two teams. Scoring (even divided up by period) powerplay / penalty kill stats, OT info, shots info… it’s crazy in depth.
Injury info…
You can even compare depth charts, with handy little player graphics. Reminds me of NHL 96. Or something like that. Anyways, all of this is available BEFORE the game starts. What happens if the game is actually in progress? Well, you get some different information. 
You can see the current score, and a shot-tally at the bottom of the screen. Handy for quickly checking how your goalie is doing in the game. Now, no one has scored in this game yet, so I move on…
There is also a ‘Players’ menu option which is HUGE for anyone participating in a fantasy sports league. As GM of the Poop Faces in LBFF, this is exactly what I need to get us over the hump and into 6th place.
There’s support for the NFL, NBA, MLB and the NHL. I’m actually pretty surprised by the level of support for NHL stats in this app. I thought it would be treated like a second-class sporting citizen, but everything works great.
Anyways, I went ahead and added my favourite Poop Faces to my roster:
It’s pretty easy to find all your players here, just type in the first few letters.
And then you’ve got your roster all set up. You can see their current season’s stats in several important categories.
I thought this was pretty cool. Now, none of the Poop Faces are playing tonight since there’s only the one game between LA and Edmonton on right now. I wondered what would happen if one of my players WERE playing right now. So, I added an ex-Poop Face, Petr Sykora. Check this out:
Yeah, live fucking stats. For my whole team. In one spot. StatTracker can eat it. This is heaven.
No one has scored yet in the Edmonton / LA game, so I’ll post an update when there’s some actual stats to view. Until then, maybe go set up Windows Vista and bask in the glory of this wonderful piece of technology.
Also, while this surprise was pleasant, there was an even better surprise over the weekend. I want to scan a couple things before I post about it, but it’s coming.
UPDATE:
Stoll managed to score a goal, so here are some screens when there are some stats to look at:
Google Reader, you know I love you. That is why I am willing to forgive your silly error messages, such as this one you just threw at me:
So informative. Good work.
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom (and believe me, it truly is infinite), decided that any movies you would like to play over on your home network via the XBox 360 would need to be encoded WMV-style. Your mountains of Xvid, Divx, Quicktime, etc. movies are like a pair of cymbals to a man with no arms: they can’t be played. You would have to transcode your movies to an XBox 360-compatible format before trying to watch them. A hassle, indeed.
Do not bother yourself with such hassles. Take the easy road and install TVersity, a uPnP-compatible media server which will re-encode your existing movies on the fly! Similar in function to Transcode360 which would allow you to accomplish the same feat using a PC running Windows Media Center, TVersity will run on your plain-jane copy of Windows XP, 2000, etc.
I ran into some issues getting it to work when I first installed it. Luckily, their support forum is filled with people who like to help poor strangers like myself. Unluckily, I am too impatient to wait for their silly replies. TVersity requires that ffdshow be installed to handle the decoding of the video/audio streams, and I had it installed. Unfortunately, it still didn’t work. I tried a bunch of different things, but it ended up that installing the latest alpha version of ffdshow instead of the ’stable’ release solved my problems. I watched an episode of the Brak Show I had lying around as well as Who Killed the Electric Car (SPOILER ALERT: It was JR!). They both played like they were champions of their respective genres.
Anyways, if you find yourself owning an XBox 360, and start missing the capabilities that your 5-year old original XBox offered, check it out. It still isn’t XBox Media Center, but the pain will dull as the pleasant memories fade…
Christmas this year was pretty great. I finally was able to open the Wii that’s been laughing at me from within the closet since launch. Many hours of Wii Tennis and Bowling were played with family and friends, I started getting into Twilight Princess, and all was right in the world.
Now, as a small disclaimer, you have to realize that my birthday is a mere 10 days after Christmas. And this was my 25th. It’s significant. I am now an old man. Old men need to be pacified at every available opportunity, or else they will snap and smack you with their cane.
On Boxing Day, we headed to the local Futureshop and Best Buy to check out the deals. Best Buy had a sale on a few XBox 360 games, including NHL 2K7 for a mere 29 dollars! I have written about the 360 version of NHL2K7 before and how my lowly XBox version pales in comparison. I thought this deal was great, so I picked it up.
“But Chris, you fool!” I hear you say. “You don’t have an XBox 360!” …
And this is why I’m not proud of myself.
The premium XBox 360 bundle was on sale for $399 on Boxing Day, a full $100 off the normal price. Adding up my gift cards / Christmas money / Birthday money, it ended up only costing me about 50 bucks. I was hesitant at first, knowing that when the Wii saw me lugging that guy downstairs a mere 4 days after I opened him, tears would be shed, insults hurled, etc. But, I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. I am a sucker, you see. And the Media Center Extender built into the XBox 360 solves my tv-out / de-interlacing issues I was running in with my Media Center PC.
Some of you already know this dirty secret, but I felt that I should come clean. Don’t beat me up when you see me next.
