loonyblog.

All over Manhattan (they claim to have thousands), phone booth ads are popping
up that delightfully inform you that "you’re hot," meaning that you’re
standing within a Verizon WiFi Hotspot, which in theory offers free WiFi Internet
access
for one and all. Now ordinarily, I’d be the first to say this is great, and
a wonderful idea…except you have to wonder what the heck Verizon was thinking
when they placed some of these. While WiFi hotspots are wonderful, they’re
only useful if you’re someplace where you can actually pull out a laptop to
utilize
it. This is what makes those
T-Mobile hotspots at Starbucks so inviting. But
having them on random street corners is downright pointless.

I mean, what am
I going to do, stop in the middle of the street, plop down on the sidewalk
and check my e-mail? I’ve seen a handful of these things already, and not
one of them has been anywhere near a bench, table or chair of any kind. It
kind
of makes you wonder…what if these aren’t really hotspots at all,
but just ads that claim they are? After all, if you don’t pull out a laptop
or WiFi-enabled PDA to verify this, you’re just taking their word on it.

As an early birthday present, I was given the wonderful gift of an AirPort card for my iBook. I’ve had a wireless access point installed since I moved (I needed a hub, and a four-port hub with a WAP cost exactly as much as one without it), but this was the all-important item that would allow me to actually use the thing. Needless to say, I love it. My iBook gets absolutely insane reception no matter where I go in the apartment. I’ve primarily used it so I can check the comments on my evening posts at Shacknews without having to walk into my office, although I’m sure I’ll find more and more uses for it as I adapt to a wireless world.

What’s really quite funny, is that while my wireless network is locked down with wireless encryption, apparently the other two networks within my building (or the ones nearby) are not, as I’m able to connect to them at will and browse the web while leeching off their bandwidth. And as a testament to the awesome reception of my iBook, I’m able to get just as strong a signal to those networks as I am to my own. Yowza.

I’m amazed that people leave their networks so open, probably without realizing what they’re doing. I think it’s great when people intentionally set up WiFi hot spots, but most people just forget how far that signal can go. At E3 there were people browsing through some poor shlub’s vacation photos, because he forgot to turn off his WiFi sharing. Oops. At least there weren’t any particularly private photos there!

The AP reports on story in the journal Nature reports that people who play video games have higher visual skills than those who do not. What’s nice about this particular story isn’t necessarily that there are perception increases tied to interactive multimedia (that’s really not that new a concept) but more importantly that the piece specifically mentions games like Grand Theft Auto III, Medal of Honor and Counter-Strike as being anything other than ultra-violent gorefests.

The article goes on to say that in a study, people who played Medal of Honor for 10 days scored better on visual perception tests than those who played Tetris for 10 days. If you ask me, forcing someone to play Tetris for 10 days in a row is nothing short of insane. At least Medal of Honor offers huge amounts of variety. I mean, I love Tetris and all, but 10 days? Good lord, I’d go nuts.

Off the wire this morning:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Iraq ( news -web sites ) may have destroyed its purported chemical and biological weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday in an effort to explain why none had been found.

Well, of course, that’s why we didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction…Iraq destroyed them before the invasion!

But wait…isn’t that what we were accusing them of not doing? We were told that their WMDs presented such an imminent threat that we couldn’t wait mere weeks for the last round of inspections France and other U.N. members requested. Yeesh. I hope this blows up in their faces, but I have a sinking feeling it will just be swallowed by the majority of people in this country without a second thought.

But wait! We did find weapons of mass destruction! Unfortunately, they’re in Washington.

Get a load of this article in The Daily News (link care of Gothamist) about idiots who bought up lots of subway tokens at $1.50 figuring they could use them after the price went up to $2.00. Unfortunately for them, the MTA has discontinued tokens entirely. Oops. Guess they should have watched NY1 instead of sitting on their pile of tokens and feeling smug.

I’ve got yet another new addition to the sidebar on the right today…thanks to a very nifty Perl script by Richard Smith, you can now see the latest six shows currently on my TiVo. Since my TiVo’s not accessible to the outside world, it’s updated hourly by my server at home, which runs the Perl script and then uploads the results here. Neato.

Speaking of TiVo, they actually had some good financial news for a change. They’re still losing money, but they’re down to a mere $7.9 million loss for this past quarter, down from $35.2 from a year ago. With any luck they’ll get profitable in the near future, as life without my TiVo is a scary idea, and I’d rather not see them bought up by AOL Time Warner, Sony or some other company.

We had another internal milestone here at netomat, and so I figured it was time to post another interactive blog entry.

This third iteration is much, much better than the ones that came before it, as it has a much nicer toolbar, and even supports color and web links. As with before, feel free to go nuts here, and the more creative your entry the better (I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from linking to inappropriate places from within here…this is a family site).

As with the last iteration, you can move things around with the arrow, scroll back through previous entries using the pull-down menu (or the new arrows — very nice), and to clean the slate completely, simply go back to the first entry, which was blank.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I receive e-mail sent to news@shacknews, and my loonygames address has been freely available for years and years, I receive a whole lot of spam. Even more than most people, who already receive far too much spam. Unfortunately, legitimate mails sent to news@shacknews contain things that frequently set off most spam filtering systems, like having a different recipient listed in the to: header, large numbers of CC’d addresses, or no viewable recipient list of any kind. So for some time now I’ve had to suffer with a deluge of spam.

But all that is coming to an end, as I’ve finally found a mail filtering system that works: it’s called POPFile, and it’s a Perl-based system, that once trained, works like a charm. After just a day of training, I’ve already seen a huge drop off in spam, and that’s a good thing indeed. If you’re really hardcore, you can actually run this concurrently with Spam Assassin, although that’s really not necessary. Once trained, POPFile is all you need. And if you’re as sick of porno mails or HGH ads, or Nigerian confidence scams, I highly recommend checking it out.

MacSoft announced today that Unreal Tournament 2003 will ship on June 11th. God, being a Mac gamer is totally pathetic. This just proves the logic behind my decision to keep a separate XP box just for games. At this rate, we’ll get UT2k4 just in time for UT2k5.

For what it’s worth, Epic’s Cliff Bleszinksi told me at E3 that the real hurdle in getting UT2k3 ported to OS X was actually the OS itself, and that it should be much easier to get the next one out. We’ll see. In the mean time, Mac gamers can look forward to a few months before their shiny new game becomes obsolete.

Yep, I’m back from E3. It was a great show this year…there were a lot of solid games, and one really excellent one (Half-Life 2, of course). I saw some old friends and colleagues, and had a jolly old time. I absolutely live for E3, and it’s always sad when it’s passed behind me.

If you’d like to read my thoughts on the show, I’ve been posting my reports over at Shacknews. Here’s a link to part four, which has links at the bottom to the previous pieces.

It’s nice to be back, although I wish I had been able to take another day off from work. I got in ridiculously late on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and as a result I haven’t been able to recoup as much as I’d like to. Oh well.

I missed all kinds of stuff over the last week, including the sad passing of June Carter Cash (aww), and the renewal of Angel (yay!), but I’m getting caught back up on things today, and I’ll be posting lots more impressions from E3 over at Shacknews as I pour through my notes from the show.