Aussie Geek Podcast #005 :: Jedi Masters
Welcome to the show this week. We were a day late in recording this week. Sorry about that but the gremlins got into Keith’s Internets. He even checked next doors unsecured WiFi. No joy. But we eventually made it and here it is.
Make sure that you check out the new Aussie Geek Podcast Forum. Hosted by the great folk over at Lefora. Join up and be a part of this great community. Many thanks to The Herne and Knightwise who have agreed to become moderators.
Please send us your feedback either via email or by leaving your comment right here. You can send us an email or click the MyChingo link to leave us an audio comment that we can include in the show!
kissa.be shortened email link for feedback: http://kissa.be/vP as discussed in the show
Subscribe to this Podcast for Free via iTunes and RSS
Show Notes
Welcome
Tech News
- Mozilla’s plan for P0rN mode
- Google Docs get some new features
- Price cuts doubles XBox 360 sales
- Apple wrap up
- SPORE released with crippling DRM
- Next version of Ubuntu
- Learn Jedi Mind Tricks
- Life in Space
The Break
- Polar Bear Podcast All the best Andy!
Applications
- Update: Open Office 3.0 RC1 Available
- Softkey Revealer: Track down all those forgotten software keys
- Chrome Portable: As if you would install it
- Clipomatic: Extend the clipboard beyond one item
Firefox Extensions
- laterloop (Thanks Eric): Save websites to read later on your mobile device
- EverNote Web Clipper (Official Version): For those using EverNote, the latest release for the latest version of EverNote
A Word from the Wise
Sites and Services
- StopForwarding.Us: Send a polite message to your friends that insist on cramming your inbox with crapola
- Stormpulse: the best storm tracking website we have ever seen
- kissa.be: Shorten URL’s, text and email mailto addresses for webpages
- PleaseDressMe: Because geeks are lazy
Feedback
Farewell
- Join the forum
- Keep the comments rolling
- Follow us on twitter
- We would appreciate a review in iTunes
Featured Music
Marching Band
“Gorgeous Behavior” (mp3)
from “Spark Large”
(U & L Records, Inc.)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Napster
Buy at Puretracks
Buy at mTraks
More On This Album
Buy at 
WOW!!! Im realllllllllllllllllllllllllllly starting to miss Dave’s audio setup.
Me too don’t worry. Quite shit this week… see how much we look after you guys normally!
Just got to the end of the show listening to it that is. Whatever you do DO NOT MISS THE BLOOPERS at the end of the show!
Keith that was editing gold mate! Although it does give our listeners a lot of fodder…
Not first but before Knightwise!
I hear that EA has increased the number of computers that can be loaded with the game from three to five… They are only hurting the legal users which will be like 1/6 of whole user base. I wanted to buy it myself and there’s even a Mac version out there but ended up buying something else which is PC only. The sad fact is that I was following the development of that game and was really looking forward to it. A great concept managed by stupid people. It’s sort of like Dilbert in reality: “Even time they reach the limit, they will run to the shop to buy a new copy. hahahaha”. No, we won’t!
Some quick comments;
I do not watch prOn on the Internet! I prefer to watch the high quality DVDs that come free with adult magazines.
And as I mentioned before, when I surf using FF I dump my cache, history, private data every time I close the browser. And I never store passwords on my machine, they’re all in my head. So why do I need a “private” mode? As everyone mentioned, you can’t surf naughty stuff at work because your main server stores every site you’ve gone to anyway.
Re price cuts on XBox; I’m still not really interested because the PS3 is much more useful having a BluRay player in it. The only problem with PS3 right now is that they’ve put out an 80GB model at $400 and dumped the 40GB model. Actually BestBuy.ca is still selling the 40GB model at $400 alongside the 80GB model at $400 which is just stupid. But I’m not really interested in dropping $400 on a video game console, especially when they offer really stupid games like “Guitar Hero” in a bundle. What the hell kinda game is Guitar Hero anyway? It’s stupid as hell.
I still need to watch the Apple keynote although I’ve already heard about the new iPods. Ipod Touch, still too expensive. And nothing about a sub-$1000 Mac.
Re Spore; Meh. Doubt I’d buy it. Give me Half-Life 3.
Re Jedis; “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
Re Space; Dave seemed really excited about talking about bugs in space! Buuuuugs innnnn spaaaaaaaace!
Re StopForwarding.us; You’ve now given your friend’s email address to a company who will now sell it to a spammer. Nice goin’!
Re URL shorteners; I’ve been using is.gd a lot. Mostly because it makes the URLs so short in Twitter.
Re PleaseDressMe; “Sex. Do it for the kids.” (This is just wrong.)
And you forgot to mention (or rather you didn’t think you should mention) that I actually opened my blog! Ok, two posts don’t make a blog but I’m working on it, dammit! I’ve posted about 17 blogs on the Aussie Geek Forums already, so… If someone is actually interested, click my name for a link or see my profile on Twitter.
And you managed to get the podcast down to just over 90 minutes! Time for another 11-minute Herne comment, I think.
Nice job on the edits, KD! And Dave is a potty mouth, almost as bad as KW.
Lefora: Very simple. “Le” and “Fora.”
Le: French, loosely “the.”
Fora: Plural of forum.
Lefore = The Forums.
(It’s a good thing these were short comments, I’d hate to see long ones.)
Glad you like laterloop.
Perfect timing. I’ve been lusting for more tshirts. Still cant find a good Walking Dead shirt though.
btw - careful with that dust. The corp. boneheads at work brought in contractors with zero datacenter experience last year. Result was a Sun 6800 trashed. Four of the 8 CPUs failed which took down half the memory as well. BOM compliance is a major issue for the QA folks so I had to rut around in storage for parts for the beat. not fun. I hope you have multiple materials and layers to protect your electronics.
Ubuntu was one part of the Debian GNU/Linux but moved away. The distribution number is the year it was released and the month. E.g. 8.04 (Hardy Heron) 2008 04 .
A list of distributions:
4.10 Warty Warthog
5.04 Hoary Hedgehog
5.10 Breezy Badger
6.06 LTS Dapper Drake
6.10 Edgy Eft
7.04 Feisty Fawn
7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
The LTS is the stable distribution that you can directly upgrade from LTS to LTS.
Hope this is what you were looking for.
Frank
hmmmm i wanted to find a tshirt but found the snail instead lol
“Sorry that the tee you searched for is missing! Please realize that the Fail Snail is SLOOOOWWW. If you want him to go faster, give him a click! ”
maybe you brought down their site with legions of aussie geeks??Does this mean i will be forever badly dressed?Noooooo!!!
Good editing Keith! Now we know what you have to deal with in the bloopers no wonder it takes such a long time to edit!
Interesting discussion on Chrome. No mac option yet so I haven’t tried it. It would take a lot to get me to move off Safari though. I guess I’m a bit set in my ways like all those still on IE - unless there is a fantastically good reason (like a lot of websites I visit suddenly stopping working on Safari, or some fantastically useful whizz-bang feature on the new browser) then I’m not going to change. I use FF from time to time as there are some useful plugins but I prefer the look and feel of Safari.
Talking of text editors, I used to use emacs back in the day on UNIX machines when I was at uni - I used to know all those funny double key stroke short cuts, especially the mail ones as it was our main piece of mail software. How things have changed since 1994!
And following on from that, a good way of stopping those annoying forwarded emails is to send a friendly reply saying thanks, but you first saw that in 1998. It tends to be only those new to the internet who send them on anyway, so they soon get the message!
Good choice of final music again too.
PS: @Herne… following the french etymology it should be “Lesfora” as “les” is the plural article. But that sounds like a forum for girls.
And Dave… what does the A stand for again in EA? EA Arts? LOL.
Thank you guys for deconstructing my inability to pronounce anything the right way…
Hi guys,
I finally figured out how to get to the comments so I’ll leave one now.
I was interested on what you guys were saying about Spore. I have it and I’m working on finishing it when I feel like procrastinating, or in certain classes at uni. The DRM thing is a topic that I think gets blow out of the water and exaggerated a bit. iTunes only allows you to have music you purchased on a certain number of copies of iTunes. Complaints? I have Sibelius 5 at it only allows 2 simultaneous installs, but it does include an option to de-activate the installation. I still have no problems.
The number of allowed installs on Spore is still 3 but its on 3 different computers. I was shown this article on another website and I thought that it was very interesting.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080916-ars-puts-spore-drm-to-the-testwith-a-surprising-result.html
Yes you can just ring up and they will give you a new CD key. Even if you say that you are renting the game.
Crysis Warhead also uses this DRM technology but with a 5 install limit. There was a huge uproar in the Crysis modding community about this. However because there was no real info on it because of NDA’s the speculation spiralled. Once the game was realeased and the NDA’s finished the whole thing was sorted out. The following is a quote from EA passed on by Crytek.
“EA is expediting development of a system that will allow consumers to de-authorize machines and move authorizations to new machines. This system will effectively give you direct control to manage your authorizations between an unlimited number of different machines without having to contact EA customer service.”
Personally this should have been included from the start.
/End rant
Where you in the bathroom for this podcast dave?
I think that there is a margarine called leflora.
I also laughed at the EA arts.
Keith you did a great job. Editing audio is not the easiest thing to start with, but when you include a huge room sound it becomes even harder. Cross fades are your friend.
Looking forward to the next one.
@Frank Thanks for the list, and the explanation of how those version numbers actually work.
@David Hmmm…. maybe we did crash their site? Is this the AGP effect?
@Tom Thanks for the kudos… vi?! ick.
@Zygurt Thanks for the update on Spore DRM. If they do come up with the “de-authorize” model like iTunes, the only remaining question will be what happens several years from now once Spore is out of the release cycle. If you truly can re-install multiple times on the same system, and count that for one install, then that would eliminate most of the concern. Thanks for the kudos.
@Tom I did say “loosely” French…
Also, FireFox 3 for the Mac looks a helluva lot like Safari in the default skin.
@Dave It’s our job.
I know there are more listeners out there…
I have Spore and am playing it on my Mac (comes in same box as PC version, same install disc same as WOW) and really like someone said above the DRM is a little bit overblown. Apparently only 1% of people want to install it on 3 machines which I think they have raised to 5. the bigger issue for me was you could only have 1 account per install but I think they have changed that as well I read last week.
A lot of issues people have had with genius not being accurate comes down to metadata. if you have incomplete metadata in your files iTunes can’t make an exact match and makes it unreliable for some playlists. I added a lot of stuff from my external HD to iTunes last week and genius was recommending songs that I had highlighted to make the playlists and that’s cause of incomplete metadata, fix that up and Genius should work great.
Regarding the nano and shaking to shuffle. You really need to “shake” it rather hard for it to work. Unless your jogging like a 100m sprinter your not gonna be shuffling your music when jogging. Apple may be dumb in some areas but design isn’t one of them and that is a design feature, even if it is software.
Dave maybe you can make up your own book of pronunciations. I am sure it will be a best seller.
No I was not in the bathroom - very funny… I think I missed the EA thing… what did I say??
And KW has started my book I think, although I have not endorsed this as the official version:
http://aussiegeeks.lefora.com/2008/09/10/daves-famous-fuckups/page1/
I have finally had a chance to give SoftKey revealer a try as I’ve been trying to tell my dad to code up something similar and either I’m not using keys for much of the software I have or this program doesn’t support most of the software installed on my system. Granted, the softkeyrevealer says it supports 700 software programs but there is a lot more software in the wild than 700 programs. It only found 3 keys for me on my own system. When I learned about this on the show, I thought it would be able to compile a list of all software and associated registration keys that I could print from a text file. Alas, I’m off to look for something that can do that. If you come across any other ones, let us know on the show.