Even though I don't use Internet Explorer, a lot of random applications use its zone model and api to access the internet. A while back, I enabled IE's Content Advisor.
Now, AVG's annoying "buy our shit" windows are blocked. Azureus' "we're extorting money from you" "donation" box is also blocked. Firefox, Iron, and even Opera all work unimpeded.
I fucking love this. Instead of seeing annoying windows asking me for money I see the content advisor, which is simple enough to hit Cancel on.
A giant middle finger to all who would force advertisements on me.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
fucking hell
So I went and got my car inspected. $16 for the state of Virginia. I went with $20.
Except they decided to call me on my headlights not being absolutely perfectly aligned, which I'd noticed for a while but has passed inspection several years prior.
The cost of aligning them? Another $20. Which meant that I had to use my check card. Which I didn't know the balance on. Which when I tried to call the credit union and use their automated teller bullshit to figure it out, hung up on me because I couldn't fucking remember the two sub-account digits for the account linked to the check card. Because they fucking change those digits too fucking often. So I paid with my check card anyway (no other option really).
Got home and discovered that the account had been $13 or so short. It pulled some from my other account to cover that difference automatically, but then charged me $5 for doing so.
So they charge me $5 for not having all my money in one place? Doesn't make a fuck of a lot of sense to me.
At least now I know that the charge on the Mio figure actually did go through. I saw the hold appear on my account almost immediately, but it went away and the charge didn't show up. I was worried that they had thought it was a fraudulent charge. Maybe something about making a purchase from a Japanese online store I'd never bought from before had triggered a red flag. Except they never even contacted me and I was just left in limbo until today when out of curiosity I looked back through the history and found that even though the charge was placed on the 29th of January, it didn't actually appear on my account until the 16th of February.
What the fucking shit. At least now I don't have to try and sleep during the day thinking that the good folks at Hobby Search didn't get the money they deserved after shipping me the product I'd ordered and had the money to pay for.
So my check card will have exactly $0 on it when this charge clears, and my other account that it drew from will have $40 or so.
inb4jobhunting
Except they decided to call me on my headlights not being absolutely perfectly aligned, which I'd noticed for a while but has passed inspection several years prior.
The cost of aligning them? Another $20. Which meant that I had to use my check card. Which I didn't know the balance on. Which when I tried to call the credit union and use their automated teller bullshit to figure it out, hung up on me because I couldn't fucking remember the two sub-account digits for the account linked to the check card. Because they fucking change those digits too fucking often. So I paid with my check card anyway (no other option really).
Got home and discovered that the account had been $13 or so short. It pulled some from my other account to cover that difference automatically, but then charged me $5 for doing so.
So they charge me $5 for not having all my money in one place? Doesn't make a fuck of a lot of sense to me.
At least now I know that the charge on the Mio figure actually did go through. I saw the hold appear on my account almost immediately, but it went away and the charge didn't show up. I was worried that they had thought it was a fraudulent charge. Maybe something about making a purchase from a Japanese online store I'd never bought from before had triggered a red flag. Except they never even contacted me and I was just left in limbo until today when out of curiosity I looked back through the history and found that even though the charge was placed on the 29th of January, it didn't actually appear on my account until the 16th of February.
What the fucking shit. At least now I don't have to try and sleep during the day thinking that the good folks at Hobby Search didn't get the money they deserved after shipping me the product I'd ordered and had the money to pay for.
So my check card will have exactly $0 on it when this charge clears, and my other account that it drew from will have $40 or so.
inb4jobhunting
Guild Wars April Fools' Day screenshots
Yeah, I took some shitty screenshots. And by "some" I mean "two".
Guess what? Jump break, motherfucker. Click that shit.
Guess what? Jump break, motherfucker. Click that shit.
april fools' day
So it's over. Here are some of the things I noticed.
- Google changed its name to Topeka... yawn.
- YouTube gave us TEXTp as a video quality option, bringing mplayer -vo aa to videos on YouTube.
- xkcd had a command line interface for browsing the site with all sorts of hidden commands and easter eggs. It's actually still up if you want to play around with it.
- 4chan had (working!) Facebook connect as an option for posting, which would post whatever you were posting to Facebook as well as wherever on 4chan you were posting it.
- ScoreHero announced score tracking for Final Fantasy 13 (and indeed, you could go enter scores for it)
- Guild Wars swapped the model size of players with that of minipets. Minipets were huge and players were tiny. The joke update notes contained some things from previous years, as well as some new things that were pretty funny.
- And on CAINE's forums I applied the Unicode right to left override character (U+202E) to the beginning of all posts, effectively reversing their content. Some people painstakingly reversed their posts so they'd show up correctly, which now means they're reversed for real since I've removed the filter.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
al-fucking-most...
Since I can't play Guitar Hero, I've been playing other games lately. Just yesterday (or was it this morning? I forget) I cleared the arcade game Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa with the game set to its hardest difficulty via the service mode, while only putting in five additional credits. The game isn't honestly all that hard, even on its hardest difficulty setting. Normally arcade games have completely unforgiving difficulty in order to make you dump more money into the machine, but this one's actually quite reasonable.
But that's not the reason I'm writing this post. I started up Melty Blood: Actress Again... again and tried once more to get Archetype Earth Arcueid unlocked. GameFAQs seems to have two differing opinions on how she's unlocked. The first involves beating arcade mode with everyone, and the second involves clearing Boss Rush mode without losing a single round.
With the difficulty set all the way down and the damage set all the way up, I went into Boss Rush, chose Neko-Arc, and set in for some beam spam (and aerial rocket spam against the giants). After a few attempts I made it all the way to G Akiha (the eighth match... ugh) without losing a round, but she raped me pretty quickly. She's so different from Re-Act Final Tuned. In Re-Act Final Tuned the only way I could beat her was to take Kohaku and drop molotovs on her, exploiting the gratuitous amount of invulnerability on the aerial molotov move. Well here I got her to about 1/4 health and then she killed me. Neko-Arc is easymodo (it was three or four uses of the aerial rocket, which hits multiple times), but still...
Going through arcade mode a whole shitton is looking more and more attractive right now.
But that's not the reason I'm writing this post. I started up Melty Blood: Actress Again... again and tried once more to get Archetype Earth Arcueid unlocked. GameFAQs seems to have two differing opinions on how she's unlocked. The first involves beating arcade mode with everyone, and the second involves clearing Boss Rush mode without losing a single round.
With the difficulty set all the way down and the damage set all the way up, I went into Boss Rush, chose Neko-Arc, and set in for some beam spam (and aerial rocket spam against the giants). After a few attempts I made it all the way to G Akiha (the eighth match... ugh) without losing a round, but she raped me pretty quickly. She's so different from Re-Act Final Tuned. In Re-Act Final Tuned the only way I could beat her was to take Kohaku and drop molotovs on her, exploiting the gratuitous amount of invulnerability on the aerial molotov move. Well here I got her to about 1/4 health and then she killed me. Neko-Arc is easymodo (it was three or four uses of the aerial rocket, which hits multiple times), but still...
Going through arcade mode a whole shitton is looking more and more attractive right now.
can't wait...
In lighter news, I can't wait for April Fools' Day (tomorrow). The only holiday universally celebrated by the internet always produces some lulz. Some sites do predictable things, others are random.
- Thinkgeek always has joke products.
- 4chan fucks with /b/.
- YouTube rickrolled everyone.
- Guild Wars usually swaps out your player model. One time it was a gender swap, one time it was stick figures, and last year everyone turned into ArenaNet's Japanese mascot, a moe-fied Gwen. They tend to also have fake update notes, though they're getting less and less imaginative with them.
- I can't think of any others at the moment, but there's sure to be some lulz out there.
youtube fucking fails
So youtube, continuing their history of soliciting feedback from their users about new layouts and then ignoring it when it isn't to their liking, unveiled their new video page.
Holy fuck what is this mess.
Whatever happened to sorting comments by timestamp? Instead they have to try and get all smart, grouping them by "highest rated" and whatnot. Not only that, where the shit is the timestamp? Where are the comment rating controls? Oh wait, you have to mouse over the specific comment first.
Navigation around the site and your account is even less obvious now. They hide everything you'd ever want to click in a menu, so that you have to click something else first.
The kicker: I was viewing a random video to see this shit, when I noticed it was playing back in their low quality format. For whatever reason, that setting never permanently sticks, so I found my account preferences and went to playback options to set it back to high quality.
Except the "prefer high quality" option is no longer there.
I only get a choice between "prefer ass quality" and "choose based on my connection" which is exactly the same as "prefer ass quality". I have a 7mbps cable connection, it can handle downloading their higher quality formats just fine when the server isn't loaded or acting up.
What the shit is this mess of fuck?
Seriously, go back to web design school and learn how to design an intuitive layout. Here's a hint: Often-used options such as the subscriptions panel, account settings, comment rating controls, etc. and useful information such as how long ago a comment or video was posted should be easily visible. Why hide everything until we mouse over or click on something?
I'm betting even fewer people will read video descriptions now, because it takes up so little room on the page by default and when expanded doesn't limit its vertical height and have a scroll bar. Giving any block-level element a scroll bar is an elementary task in CSS. In fact, I had a Stylish style that would do that for the older, better video pages. I've modified it to work with the new one, but I shouldn't have to fix your fucking site for you.
What the fuck, youtube. Why don't you fix your site's bugs instead of making new layouts that everyone hates. Fix the "video's loaded to 75% but stuck buffering at 25%" bug. Fix the bug where it suddenly just says "no, you aren't getting any more of this video". Fix annotations so that they consistently show up at the proper timing. Bring back the ability to add videos to the quicklist off of a user's channel. Give us a report comment link so reporting abusive commenters goes from having to navigate a neverending maze of help pages that don't go anywhere useful to "click and report".
Finally, grow a backbone and defend Fair Use. You've let WMG walk all over fair use. Make an effort to verify copyright claims before disabling or removing a video. Don't take action immediately upon accusation. This is America, not Nazi Germany. You're a video streaming site, not Big Brother.
Holy fuck what is this mess.
Whatever happened to sorting comments by timestamp? Instead they have to try and get all smart, grouping them by "highest rated" and whatnot. Not only that, where the shit is the timestamp? Where are the comment rating controls? Oh wait, you have to mouse over the specific comment first.
Navigation around the site and your account is even less obvious now. They hide everything you'd ever want to click in a menu, so that you have to click something else first.
The kicker: I was viewing a random video to see this shit, when I noticed it was playing back in their low quality format. For whatever reason, that setting never permanently sticks, so I found my account preferences and went to playback options to set it back to high quality.
Except the "prefer high quality" option is no longer there.
I only get a choice between "prefer ass quality" and "choose based on my connection" which is exactly the same as "prefer ass quality". I have a 7mbps cable connection, it can handle downloading their higher quality formats just fine when the server isn't loaded or acting up.
What the shit is this mess of fuck?
Seriously, go back to web design school and learn how to design an intuitive layout. Here's a hint: Often-used options such as the subscriptions panel, account settings, comment rating controls, etc. and useful information such as how long ago a comment or video was posted should be easily visible. Why hide everything until we mouse over or click on something?
I'm betting even fewer people will read video descriptions now, because it takes up so little room on the page by default and when expanded doesn't limit its vertical height and have a scroll bar. Giving any block-level element a scroll bar is an elementary task in CSS. In fact, I had a Stylish style that would do that for the older, better video pages. I've modified it to work with the new one, but I shouldn't have to fix your fucking site for you.
What the fuck, youtube. Why don't you fix your site's bugs instead of making new layouts that everyone hates. Fix the "video's loaded to 75% but stuck buffering at 25%" bug. Fix the bug where it suddenly just says "no, you aren't getting any more of this video". Fix annotations so that they consistently show up at the proper timing. Bring back the ability to add videos to the quicklist off of a user's channel. Give us a report comment link so reporting abusive commenters goes from having to navigate a neverending maze of help pages that don't go anywhere useful to "click and report".
Finally, grow a backbone and defend Fair Use. You've let WMG walk all over fair use. Make an effort to verify copyright claims before disabling or removing a video. Don't take action immediately upon accusation. This is America, not Nazi Germany. You're a video streaming site, not Big Brother.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
uva gamers spring festival
I didn't go for the entire thing, mainly because I don't have the money for the parking garage at Newcomb Hall or a parking permit for any of the parking lots near it, so I had to wait until after 5 PM when the permit lots become free.
When I got there I was pleased to see Rock Band 2 set up. Talked with friends a bit, played a song or two on bass (with a shitty RB strat... sigh) and then the drummer left. I would spend the next hour and a half to two hours on drums. When my right arm was about to fall off, I switched to guitar (using a GH3 Les Paul thankfully) and after I got accustomed to the atrocious lag on the HDTV we were playing on (for whatever reason it wasn't calibrated) I started doing well.
If it weren't for the fact that we had the unlock all songs cheat on since the save on that 360 didn't have everything unlocked, I could have gotten two achievements. I played the Beastie Boys' So What'cha Want on bass, which has the stupidest bass part ever. Even on Expert, it's all green. That's it. I could have gotten the achievement for gold-starring a song (if it wasn't already unlocked, didn't check) and since I upstrummed it and hit all the notes, the Flawless Groove achievement.
Oh well. I guess I'll care about that a little more when I actually have a 360 and my own profile to unlock achievements on.
The stupid part about it was that for whatever reason none of the DLC was working. Every time we chose a DLC song it booted us back out to the character select screen. We attributed it to the lack of an internet connection, but if that's really the case, that fucking sucks. It already sucks that some XBLA games like I Made A Game With Zombies In It! require you to be connected to the internet to play, but DLC? That completely ruins convention and festival use possibilities. Or fuck, if you're traveling with your 360 and want to play, you have to hope there's unsecured wireless nearby. That's completely retarded and while I hope the next generation of consoles fixes it, in my mind I know it'll actually be worse. For some fucktarded reason companies are getting really paranoid about how people use the stuff they've legally paid for, and it's getting to the point where Fair Use no longer exists. A generation or two from now, we'll only be able to play our games when they decide we should.
The sad thing is, nobody in a position of power seems to care about Fair Use. Anyone who complains about tightening copyright restrictions is immediately labelled a pirate. This shit is fucking ridiculous, and it's got to fucking stop. There are completely legitimate reasons for private citizens to use copyrighted material. If companies would just read Fair Use doctrine instead of pretending it doesn't exist, they'd realize that 90% of what they're clamping down on (WMG vs. GH/RB players on YouTube, for instance) is Fair Use.
When I got there I was pleased to see Rock Band 2 set up. Talked with friends a bit, played a song or two on bass (with a shitty RB strat... sigh) and then the drummer left. I would spend the next hour and a half to two hours on drums. When my right arm was about to fall off, I switched to guitar (using a GH3 Les Paul thankfully) and after I got accustomed to the atrocious lag on the HDTV we were playing on (for whatever reason it wasn't calibrated) I started doing well.
If it weren't for the fact that we had the unlock all songs cheat on since the save on that 360 didn't have everything unlocked, I could have gotten two achievements. I played the Beastie Boys' So What'cha Want on bass, which has the stupidest bass part ever. Even on Expert, it's all green. That's it. I could have gotten the achievement for gold-starring a song (if it wasn't already unlocked, didn't check) and since I upstrummed it and hit all the notes, the Flawless Groove achievement.
Oh well. I guess I'll care about that a little more when I actually have a 360 and my own profile to unlock achievements on.
The stupid part about it was that for whatever reason none of the DLC was working. Every time we chose a DLC song it booted us back out to the character select screen. We attributed it to the lack of an internet connection, but if that's really the case, that fucking sucks. It already sucks that some XBLA games like I Made A Game With Zombies In It! require you to be connected to the internet to play, but DLC? That completely ruins convention and festival use possibilities. Or fuck, if you're traveling with your 360 and want to play, you have to hope there's unsecured wireless nearby. That's completely retarded and while I hope the next generation of consoles fixes it, in my mind I know it'll actually be worse. For some fucktarded reason companies are getting really paranoid about how people use the stuff they've legally paid for, and it's getting to the point where Fair Use no longer exists. A generation or two from now, we'll only be able to play our games when they decide we should.
The sad thing is, nobody in a position of power seems to care about Fair Use. Anyone who complains about tightening copyright restrictions is immediately labelled a pirate. This shit is fucking ridiculous, and it's got to fucking stop. There are completely legitimate reasons for private citizens to use copyrighted material. If companies would just read Fair Use doctrine instead of pretending it doesn't exist, they'd realize that 90% of what they're clamping down on (WMG vs. GH/RB players on YouTube, for instance) is Fair Use.
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