The important part is that today you have the chance to own one of the best role-playing experiences ever to come to the PC. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is the game that made me a fan of Star Wars even though I never enjoyed the movies (yes, even the classics). The story is rich, the characters are fun to interact with and gameplay actually works. Don’t miss out on your chance to own a classic for less than the cost of a starving african.

Update:
The sale is over. I hope everyone snagged a copy of this great game.

Magic: The Gathering Gatherer Autolinker is a WordPress plugin that takes special tags in your posts and converts them into links to the beta version of Gatherer, the official Magic: The Gathering online card database.

Installation

1. Download and unzip the plugin.
2. Upload mtgautolinker.php to wp-content/plugins.
3. Activate the plugin inside of WordPress.

Usage

Anywhere inside of your post you can put [mg]Card Name[/mg] tags and it will appear as Card Name on your blog. The card name you use does have to be exact and there isn’t a way to speicify custom link text, but anyone with even basic PHP knowledge could add one with little effort. If you’d like it to work in comments too just add add_filter('comment_text', 'mgreplacer'); under the addfilter line at the bottom of the file before ?>.

Source

This plugin really couldn’t be any simpler, you could have done it with minimal time and effort.
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: MTG Gatherer Autolinker
Plugin URI: http://tragicallynull.com/2009/02/14/magic-the-gathering-gatherer-autolinker-wordpress-plugin
Description: Autolinks Magic: The Gathering cards to the newly released version of the Gatherer (card database) using [mg]Card Name[/mg] tags.
Version: 0.3
Author: John Stone III
Author URI: http://tragicallynull.com
*/
function mgreplacer ($text){
$mgreplace = '/(\[mg\])(.+)(\[\/mg\])/';
$mgreplacement = '<a href="http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=+[&quot;\\2&quot;]">\\2</a>';
$text = preg_replace($mgreplace, $mgreplacement, $text);
return $text;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'mgreplacer');
?>

It’s really so simple just about anyone can edit it to make other custom “autolinkers” of their own.

Getting started should be easy…. should be

When you want to play Magic Online, you better have a credit card ready, because it costs $10 just to run the app. By that I mean accounts cost $10 just to create, but come with a $10 coupon for anything in their online store, neat eh? Well not if you wanted to pay with PayPal because you assumed the PayPal button on the account creation screen is anything but decoration. If you try to use PayPal you’re fucked, the account wont process no matter what you do, even if you switch back to credit card.

I call support and they guy makes the *click/sucking in air* noise when I tell him I tried to use PayPal, he informs me I can’t and the name I wanted was now “lost” and I would have to do everything again with a different name. Not only do they have a big “fuck you” button on there that’s a trap, they also say I’m SOL about getting my name back. Right foot, consider yourself started out on.

But at least the software is good, right?

Wrong. The software is clunky and resource intensive, which is surprising for a CARD GAME with no other effects than “shimmer” on foil cards. When you maximize the window you don’t get more real estate, no, all of the interface items just scale up. The way windows are managed inside of the app is acceptable at best, everything is done in “scenes” and in the sidebar, except the sidebar is too narrow because it’s just scaled and not expanded.

Maybe that’s a little strong, Magic Online has a tremendous burden placed on it, that burden being the rules. It has to keep track of every single possible card interaction, every single ruling and it has to add new sets every few months, and it does it pretty well. For that, things suffer. The way the cards zoom in on middle click is very awesome though.

An example of how they just get it wrong is when I first got my account to work the servers went down. All servers need downtime and maintenance, I know, that’s fine. But there is absolutely no indication on the app that the servers are down, instead I get a socket error. I’m a computer guy, so I know what a socket is, but the error is so obtuse that I end up uninstalling and redownloading the multi-GB app trying to get it to work. The solution to this would be to say in the error “Unable to connect to the Magic Online servers, please check your internet connection. If the problem persists, check the server status link below.” but no, socket error, fuck you fuck face.

What about the team behind it?

Incompetence is a harsh word, and I’m using it. The way everything is handled is abrupt, direct and unrefined. Even Dreamhost has better PR than the Wizards Magic 3.0 team. Everything gets labeled with “We’re on it, it gets done when it gets done.” including things like a new “Collections Server” that would resolve SHOW STOPPING issues like trades not working and 1 person losing “tickets” (de-facto in-game currency) and not gaining the cards the payed for. I briefly played in the beta for 3.0 and I got to see first hand how it feels more like 3 guys working in a basement and not a team that’s working under a division of Hasboro. But I’m sure they’re not to blame, I get the feeling that they’re understaffed and over worked with unreasonable deadlines. It just would have been nice for Wizards to splurge and actually have a real developer make their cash-cow of a game.

Cash-cow?

They print no cards, they ship nothing to nowhere, they use art of the paper cards. The online business is a nearly 100% profit venture for them, they pay for the software development and servers, that’s all. They sell boosters/tourny packs/theme decks all MSRP which is about a dollar higher than what they cost at a store and they keep all of the money. Don’t even get my started on the Theme Decks and what a disrespectful ripoff they are.

So why even bother?

At the end of the day it is the best way to play Magic. The rules engine works, so even noobs can pick it up without worrying about the “phases” or the stack, it prompts you and holds your hand along the way, automating every automatible process. You can play literally any time of the day and get in a game in < 2 minutes. That can't be beat and is a good experience... if you can afford it.

How much does it cost to play Magic Online?

$10, if you just want to sit there staring at the screen. $50 if you want to be competitive in casual constructed, >$100 if you want to be competitive in standard constructed tournaments. Most of this, of course, you have to rebuy every year or so when a block/core set rotates out. Drafts cost $15 (3 packs at $4 + 2 tickets at $1). People will try to tell you different, but your fun in this game does depend on how much you’re willing to spend, and that, for me, is Magic’s biggest downfall.

So what do you really think?

If you have the cash, Magic Online 3.0 is the best game in town. Everything works well enough to keep you sane and playing whenever you want is great.

I’ve been interested in Magic ever since I was about 8 or 9 when I saw a commercial for it on TV, it wasn’t gimmicky with overdone with shitty CG dragons flying everywhere, it just showed two people playing Magic with a really cool build up about how you can play anywhere at any time. It’d be awesome if it were as widespread as that shitty game in Final Fantasy 8 was, but alas it was not.

And So My Journey to Mt. Virgin Begins

I tried to buy cards, first Portal and then a 5th edition white theme deck (with Wrath of God!), finally being duped by the guys at the local hobby shop into the $10 100+ count boxes of old, shitty out of Standard cards that I couldn’t do anything with. I played in a draft or two but never did well because I was 12 and I was playing against adults. Later, much later I saw that there was an online version of the game, at the time version 2.5 and I could not have been happier…

How to be Successful in 7 Easy Credit Card Transactions

$120 later I probably could have been a lot happier. The bad thing about Magic Online (and maybe Magic: The Gathering in general) is that you can buy success and anything where money means you do well means fun and satisfaction decrease. Knowing that you lost a game because you didn’t buy 4X of the $12 rare isn’t a good feeling, especially if you can’t justify the $48 of invisible cards to your reptile brain. It’s not like Magic cards are subjective either, X card is good because of Y, therefore it costs more. Sure there’s a whole lobby for “casual” play but that just means you need the $6 rare set instead.

“Just when I thought I was out — they pulled me back in.”

After a few weeks winning because I spent the money and losing because I didn’t, I was done. I was pretty lucky and recouped about 90% of my investment by selling my collection, but I think I got lucky. But did I learn? Fuck no, fuck me. A friend mentioned that her boyfriend had gotten her to play Magic, so dopey-dumb me, forgetting all the bad and remembering nothing but the good decides to dive right in again, but this time it’s version 3.0! (3.0.5, to be exact)

How Quickly We Remember

Buy an account for $10, check. Buy 10 “tickets”, the de-facto in-game currency for MTGO, with the $10 coupon, check. Spend 3 days debating which cards to buy with the tickets and additional $60 investment, check. Realize you’re $90 away from being competitive in more than 1 color, check. Regret, check. Recoup initial investment, working on it. That sums up my entire experience with Magic Online 3.0 from a fun:financial standpoint. I’ll go more into detail about my feelings of the Magic Online 3.0 software and supporting cast of characters in my actual review.

A Challenger Appears

Apparently there’s an alternative to Magic Online that’s completely free but somewhat ugly. It’s called Magic Workstation and apparently you have to download a bunch of piece to get it to work, but get it to work I shall, and when I do, I’ll review it as well. Even if it doesn’t have the 500+ people playing at one time that Magic Online has, it’s still beats paying to win.

By that, I mean that the game doesn’t do anything particularly new or different aside from the AI director, which customizes the game each time you play, adding atmosphere, zombies, boss zombies and powerups along the way depending on how you’re playing the game. This is a straight shooter that gives you more things to shoot that pretty much any game before it, 50+ zombies at a time in some situations. It’s mindless, it’s simple to pick up and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

When I first heard about this game, I was excited. Fucking zombies, who doesn’t love fucking zombies, and more than that, who doesn’t love slaughtering fucking zombies? But when I started to see the promotional material for it, I got a little concerned. I’m a strong supporter of the slow, Romero style zombies, but this game opted for fast 28 Days Later style zombies. Disappointed as I was, I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity to massacre legions of undead.

As it turns out, my fears were completely put to rest as soon as I started playing. The zombie balance is perfect, they don’t feel overpowered in the slightest, in fact, their heads come off with a delightful ease. They do swarm with supernatural efficiency if you let them, but it’s quite possible to engage and neutralize an entire room of zombies without taking a single point of damage. Also, stopping a zombie mid-run and having it stumble over its own dismemberment is a joy everyone should experience just once.

Valve once again shows a deep understanding of what it’s players want from a game, they don’t resort to cutting the lights, leaving you to fire aimless into darkness for a cheap “scare”, they give you plenty of ammo (depending on difficulty), unlimited flashlight and competent co-op AI. They’ve made what many companies don’t seem to want to anymore, a fun game.

Preorder it now, you will not be disappointed.

It turns out that my VPS’s Debian install has been configured with exim4. I don’t know when I installed it, but it might have been included as a dependency somewhere down the line. For some reason PHP wasn’t feeling the love. So out with the exim4 and in the the postifx. I went in and used apt-get to install postfix. This automatically removed exim4, installed and configured postfix, allowing me to use PHP to send emails.

apt-get install postfix

Don’t do this if you’re actually using exim4 for your real email service, this is just a fix for people who need PHP to send email and use an external service like Gmail for their domain’s email.

To fix your problem all you need to do is right click on the Nod32 system try icon, then click “Advanced Setup…” navigate the tree to “Antivirus and antispyware > Web access protection > HTTP > Web Browsers” and make sure uTorrent and any other torrent programs are unticked (red X).

The problem is that Nod32 thinks uTorrent is a browser and then scrutinizes the traffic as such creating a very narrow bottleneck choking your normal internet traffic to a crawl. It doesn’t effect normal web browsers because of the low amount of throughput they have.

The solution? Run the following code in shell.
<code>sudo apt-get install ia32-libs</code>

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that an entirely instrumental album from NIN threw me off slightly at first, and having listened to all of the tracks, I find it to be an exceptional album, but it’s clearly not going to be for everyone, especially if you’re expecting some high energy rock to trash to. This album is more about the nuance of instrumental composition and clearly a pet project of Trent Reznor, and while still having some clear rock influences the tracks are high experimental and branch out into many different styles of music, but most if not all of the tracks feel very tight, well thought out and will be enjoyable to most people.

But don’t take my word for it. The first 9 tracks are free to everyone who wants them, then if you decide you like it, and I’m pretty sure you will, the entire album is only $5. And honestly, even if you don’t like it, support people when they take risks for positive change and actually trust the fans to support them. Thank’s for “getting it” Trent.

Buy it, enjoy it.

On the upside I do like Smart Bookmarks which allow you to view your most visited websites as well as your most recently bookmarked, the star, for it’s uglyness is a very nice way to quickly bookmark sites and the new notification system, while a little hard to get used to, is much more functional than the show stopping popup. There are also a mirriad of other features and behind the scenes stuff I’m sure, but that’s what has jumped out at me thus far.

All in all Firefox 3 is a needed and feature rich update that takes what works and does it’s best to make it better. It would be nice to see a little more polish before it ships but I’m not complaining, it’s the best browser available and it’s free.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 4

Rezen and the guys from #iTouch on osx86.hu have done it again, further simplifying the Jailbreak process to a single website visit, effectively obsoleting all other software Jailbreaks. No apps to download, no resets to do, this Jailbreak does it’s work in just the first step of most other software Jailbreaks. All you have to do is visit jailbreakme.com on your v1.1.1 iPhone or iPod touch and click confirm. That’s it. It will crash to the icons and reboot itself, leaving you with a fully Jailbroken device with Installer.app installed.

It’s important to note that this Jailbreak only leaves you with Installer.app installed, no default SSH client. If you need to SFTP or SSH into your device, you’ll need to install the BSD Subsystem, Community Sources and then OpenSSH using Installer.app. Super easy to do.

Truly Jailbreak your iPod touch or iPhone with one click

Step 1: Download patch-graphics from here. (Right-click, save as for best results. You might also have to remove the file extension .html depending on your web browser. You should be left with an extensionless file called patch-graphics)
Step 2: Using SFTP, upload the file to your iPod touch or iPhone to the /Applications/ directory.
Step 3: SSH into your iPod touch or iPhone and run /bin/chmod a+w /Applications/*
Step 4: Run the patch using the following command ./Applications/patch-graphics A bunch of text should fill the screen and you should be returned to the prompt.
Step 5: Success, you’re done. Visit the web with impunity.

Perhaps Apple really doesn’t get “stopping piracy” as much as MadDogg Steve Jobs’ open letter would suggest. Not accepting cash isn’t going to hurt the unlocked iPhone resellers, they’ll use disposable credit cards or Apple Store gift cards to purchase their iPhones, while people who legitamately just want to buy one with cash wont be able to. Anti-Piracy hurts your customers, always.

Step 1: [OPTIONAL] Follow my guide to replace Dropbear SSH with OpenSSH.
Step 2: Install Services.app though Installer.app. It will be in the Utilities section. If you can’t find it, make sure you have Community Sources installed.
Step 3: Run Services.app.
Step 4: You should see several switches, Edge and Bluetooth are superfluous on the iPod touch even though they may appear to be on. The switch you’re interested in is the one marked SSH, simply turn it off when you don’t need SFTP/Shell access to your device, which should be 90% of the time. If you see two SSH switches, please follow my guide to remove one of them.
Step 5: You’re done!

You should see a boost in your battery-life if you’ve been using your iPod touch/iPhone with SSH running.

An even easier to use GUI version of planetbeing’s 1-click iPod touch Jailbreak application has been released depreciating most of my previous guide. The new version requires fewer reboots and installs the alpha version of Summerboard but still installs an old version of Installer.app that you will need to upgrade. Portions of the guide that are still relevant can be found below.

You can download the new version and get instructions on how to use it here.

Previous iPod touch Articles

Replacing Dropbear with OpenSSH
Uprading to Installer.app version 3.0a
Original command line touchFree guide

Final Steps for Safety

Courtesy of the iTouch Dev Wiki

It is a very good idea to change the default password from “alpine” to something else. This prevents people who happen to see your iPod touch on a wireless network from logging into it and doing nasty things. To do this:

1. Install “Community Sources”, “BSD Subsystem” and “Term-vt100″ packages from Installer.app.
2. Launch Term-vt100.
3. At the # prompt, type “passwd” (without the quotes) and press return.
4. Enter your new password and confirm it.
5. DON’T LOSE YOUR NEW PASSWORD! :) If you do, in order to log into your touch from SSH or SFTP you will have to do a restore and start this process all over again.

How will they be different? Well they say their platform won’t be proprietary, that is “they aren’t trying to replace the web”. Prisim is based off of the virtually unknown Mozilla Labs Webrunner. Prisim will eventually be available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, but currently only a pre-alpha Windows build is available.

Unfortunately it’s not because they want to charge less. According to some, NBC wanted to charge as much as $4.99 per episode, up from the $1.99 and Steve Jobs wouldn’t bend on the $1.99 price-point so they pulled their content. And it’s not a secret that the major music labels would love to have tiered pricing.

This much needed update is especially good for iPhone/hacked iPod touch/mobile device users as now they can get and manage their Gmail from their device without having to delete email twice.

Amazon owns this now:
http://amazon.com/rampent-abuse-of-the-patent-system

Over-broad? Check. Obvious? Check. Disregard for prior art? Check.
Thanks USPTO.

Download the Revirginizer

There’s also the issue of IFPI using the stolen Oink.cd domain to spread propaganda, fear, uncertainty and doubt amongst the users of the site with messages such as “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users” when in actuality there was nothing criminally damning on the server in regards to the users. All of the data is generic, no transfer of copyright files EVER took place on the server, it couldn’t have by the virtue of being a torrent tracker, it just let people connect with each other.

They claim that there were over 180,000 users of OiNK, spread all throughout the world, a jurisdictional nightmare and simply cost prohibitive for anyone wanting to file suit against the users, especially given the completely spurious charges they would have to file. They have no proof that any file transfers took place and would therefore have to compel the users of the site to, in effect, point the finger at each other, impossible given that torrent clients don’t keep logs. Failing that, they would in some way prove that user x sent user y copyright files without any logs, something that would be near impossible.

Many large torrent sites have been taken down before, Lokitorrent for example, no users were ever tracked down and sued. It was much more fiscally sound for them to simply put the fear of god into pirates and try to scare them back into stores. Just more scare tactics from the people defending a dying industry on a gangrene business model, hoping that can win fans though lawsuits.

The consequences for the owner as well as the users still unknown. However, since no illegal material was ever hosted directly on Oink, only distributed between users via torrent, they may have a hard time proving that any copyright violation actually took place on Oink servers. Nor do they have logs of the connections and data transfer between users, virtually the only incriminating evidence to take place during torrent transfers.

Read more on TorrentFreak

The company claims one of the benefits of the idea is that people not familiar with ordering online will be familiar with the shelf setup, but perhaps in the real world teaching Grandma how to search with Amazon might be easier than teaching her to “walk” though a virtual store looking for what she wants, especially seeing as how there is only one Kinset and many stores like Amazon. Give a Grandma a fish and she shops for a day, teach a Grandma to use Amazon and she’ll shop until your inheritance is gone.

Texas residents can use the coupon code TAXSUCKS to receive free shipping.

Brown Microsoft Zune – $80
Black or White Microsoft Zune – $100
Please note these links will expire on October 23rd, 2007