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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Beware the Antec Fusion Black

    I built a nice, powerful multimedia PC a few weeks ago, but once I got past the initial installation stages it’s been giving me some trouble. Most annoying among the ongoing problems is something of a showstopper: Every time someone touches the front of the computer, it resets.

    A problem, yes?

    On a whim I went a-Googlin’. It turns out that I’m not the only one with this problem. There’s also a relatively simple solution, though it involves hauling the machine off of the shelf yet again so I can monkey around with its innards. As a test I may just tape a piece of conductive material to the side of the chassis, bridging the front panel and the rest of the chassis, to see if this is indeed the final fix.

    Add this to the fact that the VFD (supposedly a multi-function display built into the chassis) has never worked as advertised and actually causes more problems than it’s worth (which is why I just unplugged all power to that useless piece of junk).

    In short: If you’re looking for a multimedia PC chassis, you might want to steer clear of the Antec Fusion Black… unless you feel like getting your hands dirty doing some internal rewiring.

  • Blogroll Updated

    It shows how often I really look at my journal, the fact that my so-called “blogroll” sported several defunct links and lacked a few sites I read almost daily.

    I’ve remedied that problem, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I still have managed to miss one or two important sites. Hmm.

  • City of Designers

    My plan, such as it was, involved coming home and stuffing my face and hopping into City of Villains (sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t) to run some missions with my new Corruptor, Ragnaroq. I did, indeed, run enough ‘paper missions to open up the Steel Canyon mayhem mission (hello, “summon teammates” temporary power) and somewhere along the way I received a costume piece recipe.

    For the uninitiated, let me explain. (I’m resisting the urge to go all Inigo Montoya on y’all right now. Who loves ya?)

    City of Heroes and City of Villains could be thought of as “World of Warcraft but with superheroes.” It’s true after a fashion, but fashion is exactly what the City Of franchise has going for it over almost all other competing online worlds. One of its biggest draws is the ability to customize the look of your hero or villain. You can spend an hour just puttering around in the costume shop, and that’s before you start getting any of the “bonus” items!

    Earlier this year, the game’s creators introduced the “invention” system, a sort of crude and silly economy designed to give those with too much money something to spend it on. The idea is that as you go around performing your acts of derring-do (or dastardliness) you’re picking up bits of “salvage” and, occasionally, a “recipe” which allows you to combine specific bits of salvage into new power enhancements, new temporary powers and… new costume pieces. You use the salvage and recipes that you want, and sell the ones you don’t at whatever rate the market will bear.

    So. To make a long story somewhat shorter, my icy and dark little villain has dark and icy little wings on her back But that’s not where I wasted most of my in-game time tonight. Oh, no. Adding a single costume piece to an existing look doesn’t take very much time at all. No, my big mistake was in deciding to tidy up the base. (more…)

  • The King Of Perfect Timing

    I’ve always had a few knacks, among them a knack for being proven wrong almost immediately after making a definitive statement. This time the knack which has bitten me in the backside is that which gives me the utmost in perfectly ironic timing. If I do something, there’s a good chance that if I’d simply waited a day or two I’d have known not to do that something.

    On Sunday I purchased the license code for the City of Heroes/City of Villains “Good Versus Evil” edition for the kids’ account so they could get some extra character slots per server and go into supergroup bases and such like that. So, guess what yesterday’s press release from NCSoft had to say?

    Today we announced the acquisition of City of Heroes from Cryptic Studiosâ„¢ and the formation of our new Northern California studio which we are informally calling NCsoft® NorCal […]. Nearly the entire City of Heroes team from Cryptic Studios has joined the NCsoft team and together we have formed the core of our new studio.

    Okay, so far so good. What’s the catch?

    All players with City of Heroes retail accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn’t previously have access to “the other side” will find that they do now.

    Oh. Well… I suppose that’s a good thing… for people who didn’t plunk $30 down for said “access to City of Villains” a mere 48 hours beforehand! Dagnabbit.

    (It bears mentioning, footnote-style, that the “GvE” edition provides a few in-game perks that probably won’t be given away with this “access to” bonus from NCSoft. Still, I could’ve bought the code for said perks alone and spent twenty dollars less. Such is my life, eh? And the kids get the benefit now instead of having to wait ’til NCSoft blesses everyone. So. There’s that, at least.)

  • Gravatar Support Added

    For what it’s worth, the comments portion of this journal now supports Gravatar images. Now that they’re owned by the WordPress folks, I figure performance shouldn’t be too much of an issue going forward.

    What can I say? It’s an excuse to use “buddy icons” in my journal. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

  • Annoying New Comment Spam Trick

    Well, this is amusing. And by “amusing” I mean “annoying and frustrating,” of course.

    A while back I posted an entry containing a music selection. Several comments were made at the time, and then life moved on. This is all normal so far. This morning, however, I saw two new comment notifications in my mailbox for that entry… and one of them looked really familiar.

    It should have, since it was Kyla’s comment exactly, repeated by someone claiming to be “GoDaddy” using GoDaddy’s support email address. The next comment from them was a few characters of gibberish… which got approved because the previous comment was approved, probably because it looked identical (from the spam filter’s perspective) to an existing comment.

    So, yes, I deleted them both and marked the gibberish comment as spam. I just hope this isn’t the new trend. I have enjoyed a couple years’ worth of peace and quiet on the spam-fighting front and don’t want to go back to the bad old days of playing whack-a-mole.

    Hell of a way to start my Friday, let me tell ya.

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