Many of you know Ubisoft’s new draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme that ships with PC copies of Assassin’s Creed II and Settlers 7. If you don’t, check this link out. And this link.

The executive summary is this: if you play Assassin’s Creed II on a PC, you must be permanently connected to the internet or the game will stop working and you will lose your progress. For Settlers 7, you’ll “only” have to suffer the game stopping. Latest news indicates that this DRM will ship with the new Splinter Cell: Conviction, too.

Words cannot express how pigheaded this move is. It’s a giant fuck you to customers. It’s an expression of utter contempt for the people who line your pockets with their hard earned cash. It’s Ubisoft saying “Yeah, suck it, suck it and swallow because you have no other choice, bitch!”

The Problem is that DRM Does Not Work

My position on DRM is well documented, but indulge me in a rant.

(1) If your game is a single player game, it will not stop pirates. Company executives need to get their heads around this fact. Piracy involves two parties, and for lack of a better term I’ll call them a cracker and a downloader. Crackers will crack your game. They are smarter than your programmers, and there is nothing you can do about it. It’s an intellectual challenge to them, bragging rights to get the first cracked copy out onto the world wide web. They’ll get an advanced copy from a leak you never knew existed and BAM, days before your game is launched it will be available for download for free. Remember Spore?

As for downloaders, they will not stop downloading. If Joe has $70 and has a choice between videogames and food, guess what? He’ll buy the food and download the videogame. If the crack isn’t out yet, he’ll wait until the game makes its way to bargain bins or second hand stores or he’ll borrow a copy from a friend… but no way is he spending that precious $70 on a videogame that he can get for a whole lot cheaper.

Now, if you’re selling a multiplayer game and run the servers on which the game is played on, you can indeed dramatically cut down on piracy. That’s what Blizzard does with World of Warcraft, and that’s what Infinity Ward does with Modern Warfare 2. But for a single player game? Hah.

Ubisoft has done something interesting in that they’ve made the online component integral to the single player experience. We’ll talk about that in a moment – more after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

Behold!

This is one of only two Thermaltake Level 10 cases imported into Singapore through Corbell…

…and it’s mine, all mine!

The Thermaltake Level 10 is a premium computer case designed in collaboration between Thermaltake and BMW Group DesignworksUSA. Yes, BMW, as in the German car manufacturer.

Now, I’ve not seen many reviews of this case out there, but seeing as how you’d want to know everything you can about this case before you plonk down a whopping SGD$945/- for one (ordered direct through Corbell, you’ll have to go there in person), I figured I’d put up a few tips about buying and building a system around the Level 10.

1. This case is big

The Level 10 comes in a huge box that weighs 25kg. I first mistook it for an office fax/photocopying machine. A smart person will pay Corbell to deliver it to you. I, however, am not a very smart person, and so I struggled to get it in the cab. Take note that if you take a cab, it will not fit into the newer, smaller ones. Get an old-style Comfort cab (the boxy ones) and it’ll take up the entire back seat. Of course you’ll be fine in a Maxicab too.

The case itself weighs in at 21.5kg empty and is a bit bigger than some full tower solutions out there, at about 66cm tall, 60cm long and 32cm wide. Make sure you have space, not just to put the case, but to show it off too.

Weirdly enough, though…

2. Not everything can fit inside it

You have some hard limits to the sizes of your CPU cooler, video card, and power supply:

CPU Cooler: cannot exceed 150mm height. This will be a fatal flaw for some enthusiasts out there. Top tier CPU cooling solutions for the LGA1366 socket, including the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme, the Prolimatech Megahalems and Scythe Mugen2 will not fit in this case if we obey this limit. I’m not about to find out if you can force one of these babies in. The Scythe Zipang2 will fit, but you may want to consider getting an alternate cooling solution like the liquid cooled Corsair H50, which is what I will have running inside my Level 10.

Video card: cannot exceed 310mm length. This may be a fatal flaw if you absolutely must run the new ATI 5970 cards. I don’t know if its true for all of the cards out there, but the ASUS 5970 is 317mm long. You can get around this if you’re willing to substitute the intake fan (about 25mm thick) on the Level 10 with something thinner. Or you could wait for nVidia’s Fermi to come out.

Power supply: cannot exceed 210mm length. I didn’t know that power supplies got this big, but it wasn’t an issue for me.

The size of the case also leads me to my next tip, which is…

3. Buy extension wires

The Level 10 has a modular design; the motherboard, CPU, video cards and RAM sit in one big module, and the power supply, 5.25″ bays and 3.5″ bays are all in separate modules.

Any wiring has to “weave” through the main vertical stand to get from point A to point B. While this makes for a very neat wire management solution in the modules, it does mean your standard-issue cables are not likely to fit. Depending on your motherboard configuration, you may need extension wires for practically everything. I myself needed to get longer SATA cables to connect my BD-ROM drive to the motherboard, and my front panel audio connectors still can’t reach the proper pins on the motherboard. I can confirm, though, that the Seasonic MI2D does have power cables long enough for all your needs, including PCIe cables that can reach the 2nd ATI 5850 further from the power supply.

My advice is to buy the case and the components first, and set aside a nice afternoon to back-and-forth between your home and Sim Lim Square to get everything sorted out nicely.

4. This build is not a solo affair

You’re going to need someone’s help to build this PC. You need someone to help thread wires through the main vertical stand, carry the 21.5kg case around, hold the power supply cage up while you screw it back to the main vertical stand, and so on. It’s not a solo build.

…and that’s it for my tips! I’ll leave you with a shot of the innards while it runs:

First strip of the new year is up, and all of it is true. At least the person who spewed such hateful nonsense was a taxi driver, and not, say one of the leaders of a country or an ordained minister…

… actually, I’m not sure how that makes things any better. I’d call them bigots but for the irony.

Onwards 2010!

The Crunchpad, a touch screen tablet device developed jointly by Michael Arrington (at Techcrunch, a pretty well known tech blog) and Singapore start-up company Fusion Garage, is dead.

This is pretty bumming news, because the Crunchpad looked to be one sexy piece of computer hardware. I mean, look at it. It looks like something Apple would design, and a Mac tablet is something Mac fans have been having wet dreams about for forever:

A blog post on Techcrunch details Michael Arrington’s side of the story (I recommend reading it, if only for the drama-entertainment value). According to the post, the beginning of the end was when Fusion Garage’s founder, Chandraseka Rathakrishnan, sent Arrington an e-mail just 2 days before the product was supposed to launch. This e-mail apparently said that, upon pressure from its shareholders, Fusion Garage decided to move forward to produce the Crunchpad… without Techcrunch’s involvement.

I’ve always thought of the Crunchpad as a joint job from the start – the Straits Times even had a hands-on preview on it, saying that it was a result of a team-up between Fusion Garage and “famed American technology blog Techcrunch” – and Arrington is pissed. “We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark. So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement,” he writes.

Everything has now apparently gone straight to hell, with nobody answering Arrington’s phone calls and e-mails, and it looks like the Crunchpad is well and truly dead. Meanwhile, Arrington writes that he’s probably going to sue Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandraseka and his shareholders as individuals.

I’m kind of sad that a local start-up is getting such bad press, and I’d love to hear their side of the story (Fusion Garage’s website is currently down). Arrington is… well, not someone I’d usually agree and/or side with, but it does look like he and Techcrunch got shafted up the rear.

I guess I’ll have to keep on waiting for Apple to release that mythological tablet.

(designmartus, via BoingBoing)

(I’m aware that comments are totally wonky right now, looking into it!)

Tuberculosis strikes! We’ve been unable to update because the irritating disease hit me just as the new layout got done, and simultaneously, Zeng’s computer went kaput (but who cares about his crummy computer!).

The kind of TB I have is apparently not in my lungs, it’s in the lining between my lungs and my chest, or what is known as the pleural cavity. According to the doctor this means it’s not contagious. The TB had been sitting in my pleural cavity for a while, discharging fluid (or letting it build up, I’m not entirely clear about this point), and eventually enough formed in my pleural cavity that I got a stabbing pain whenever I did anything physical involving the chest (like, say, breathing). Yes, it was time to go see a doctor.

This may seem obvious, but it is crucial that you have a good, regular GP. The first GP I went to was a doddering fool who didn’t even bother to listen for diminished breathing sounds, forgot my answers to his questions and told me “Oh, sometimes when you cough you can pull a muscle in your chest”. The second GP bothered to listen, thought something was amiss and sent me up for a chest x-ray. The x-ray bugged the hell out of the radiologist:

And I was forced to go to A&E. So I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a good, decent, competent GP.

At this point nobody knew what was actually wrong. Worse, every test thrown at me by the hospital was negative. Blood test, blood cultures, all nothing. They poked into the fluid-filled area and drained some of the juice (it looked like thick urine, a very disturbing liquid to have drain out of your chest) and tried to grow the crap in it – nothing.

In the end, I had to go for surgery to do a biopsy of the infected tissue and clean and drain my right pleural cavity. Going under general anesthesia is an interesting experience – I fought it just long enough to inform the doctors how weird it felt (it most probably came out as an unintelligible mumble), and then my vision closed in on me and I knew no more. During the surgery they cut a bit of the infected tissue out, flash froze it, threw it under a microscope and peered at it, after which the pathologist declared it was most likely TB. Then they stuck a 20cm-long flexible tube inside my chest to make sure the area stayed drained for a bit, stitched me mostly back up and let me wake up.

That chest tube stayed connected to a gentle suction device for a couple days, and after I stopped leaking, all 20cm of that tube was pulled out of my chest. To help the doctor close the wound left behind the surgeon had left stitches ready to be tightened, drawstring-style, as soon as the tube was out. Both of these procedures were carried out while I looked on. It was not fun. To give you an idea how not fun it was, I asked the doctor if it would feel like when the nurse pulled the Foley catheter out of me (follow the link, don’t be lazy). His answer was a hesitant “Um, something like that”.

Yeah.

The TB diagnosis will not be confirmed for another 2 months – TB is a very slow growing bacteria. Meanwhile I am on TB medications, which currently consists of 8 pills and 2 capsules:

That’s one dose up there! Luckily it’s only once a day. Apparently the course lasts for 6 months, and gets reduced a bit of the way through – TB is a very hard to kill bacteria.

So hopefully crisis averted – Wikipedia says TB has a 2/3 mortality rate if untreated (I am really NEVER going to that useless GP again, ever). On the downside, I’m not allowed to have any alcohol for 6 months because the drugs are apparently so hard on the liver that straining it more might give me hepatitis.

Now I’m just recovering at home, and as soon as doing stuff doesn’t hurt anymore, we’ll try to get some content up.

Hi all, long time no see.

As you can see we’ve finally got around to updating the place. Things will be touch and go as we migrate everything over to WordPress proper (previously the comic strips were on their own database, now everything is integrated). We’ve got a bunch of new content ready to go up and everything, and as soon as the kinks get worked out we’ll get the comic updated!

If there is anything with the site that does not work properly, leave a comment here with a description of the problem.

Update @13/8 3.04AM: I’m knackered, work shall continue later today.

There are times when OMGWTFBBQ doesn’t even begin to describe the situation.

Check out the site: http://www.voteforthemilf.com/.

A simple redirect – an easy enough gag to set up – to www.johnmccain.com/palin.htm. And that’s what it would remain, except…

The first time you visit, it will redirect you to www.johnmccain.com and then to www.johnmccain.com/palin.htm. Subsequent visits redirect you to www.johnmccain.com. And therein lies the problem: either someone has hacked johnmccain.com, or the campaign has deliberately set up their site to link MILF to Palin. Apparently the McCain campaign actually owns the domain VoteForTheMILF.com. We’ll see how this one plays out, but for now, all I can say is:

FAIL.

Via.

My apologies, we almost lost our domain ‘cos (1) the credit card I use to update it was cancelled, and (2) the e-mail address registered with GoDaddy was made defunct.

I’ve paid the necessary fees and everything is fine again =).

Just a sketch of cloud strife , more towards advert children costume.

Happy holidays!

Yeap, haven’t touched it for a month now, and even though I’ve still got a month remaining on the subscription I doubt I’ll be going back to Azeroth until Wrath of the Lich King comes out, if ever.

I realized what an incredible grind it is to experience the end-game content. It’s mind-numbingly boring. It’s so boring, in fact, that while I am mining that next piece of ore (to get that next piece of gold to get the requisite 5 thousand pieces to get my epic flying mount to do the next repetitive netherwing quests…) I am (A) watching a show on my other monitor, (B) listening to a free university lecture in podcast form, or (C) sampling a new wine I bought.

Then as I marvelled at the irony of having to amuse myself while playing a game, I met someone, so seriously, fuck that WOW shit, I have better things to do.

(Besides, PORTAL is awesome. Muhahaha)

RESPECT.

It really looks like its going to happen.

The Writers Guild of America has been threatening to strike for a while now. The dispute is over online distribution of TV shows, amongst other things.

See, the current contract between writers and networks is that writers get a cut of DVD sales and TV ad revenue (amongst other things). But now some networks are pushing media to the web. Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost have webisodes, web-only episodes, exclusively available from the parent network’s websites. These networks derive ad revenue from these webisodes, and the WGA wants a cut. Since the current contract is up, the WGA wants to renegotiate… unfortunately, networks don’t want to pay them for online content.

It may not sound like much, but it is a big deal. WGA members write all your favourite TV shows: Heroes, Lost, House, etc. These shows are written through to the end of the year, but after that, no new episodes will be written. Heroes is even considering writing an alternate episode 11, finishing the current season early.

It’s an incredibly stupid move on the networks’ part, and I hope it gets sorted out soon. It isn’t enough that we get crappy shows on all the time, now they’re going to ruin the ones we do watch as well!

…And they wonder why we hate them.

Vincent stars in this student project from NUS. Can you guess who he plays?

Muhahahahah!