effektd.net Roll the dice…

Recently went away on the weekend with my other half, probably the first time in a very long time I haven’t touched a computer for over 24hours.

Fortunately I couped well, and had some good company!

News news news…well I’ve gone console and hand held crazy! All this hype from E3 got me back to playing my DS. I’m really enjoying animal crossing, I unfortunately didn’t really give it a good enough crack when I first bought my DS, I’m really getting into it now.

In saying that I also went and purchased Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy (as per the request of my brother).

I’ve played SSB: Brawl for a good 2 hours and I must say, even though it’s button mashing, it’s bloody fun! Even the story mode puts a twist on things, and it’s great to see such a huge amount of characters avaliable!

Super Mario Galaxy unfortunately only got an hour of my love, I’m trying to concur a few other games first (including Zelda: Twighlight Princess - which I still haven’t completed to my dismay).

I’ve also gone on a spending spree on eBay and picked up New Super Mario Bros. and Zelda: The Phantom hour glass (I love my RPG’s) other than that I think it’s time to take a break from spending and actually finish the games I currently have!

Also yes JB (me if you still didn’t know) is no longer single! Miss Jo has managed to capture me after my last two years of being a single picky bastard bloke! Therefore smiles all round.

p.s. I bought a DS lite and I love it, it shits all over the original DS in so many ways.

Wow this years E3 Business Expo has been a big one.

I will update this post when I have time, but in brief.

Microsoft are following Nintendo, sorry I should say copying Nintendo.

Nintendo are doing what they do best, and bringing some further innovations to games, and two new periphals to further enchance the Wii expierence.

Sony, I haven’t heard too much to boast about, Home looked ok but micro-transactions arn’t my thing. Oh they also lost exclusivity to the Final Fantasy series after over a decade. Square Enix are making a version of FFXIII for the 360 as well as the PS3.

More to come! Stay Tuned.

It seems to becoming an increasingly hot topic recently with the dare I say it pioneers over at The Pirate Bay continuing to make waves in it’s defiance against the big anti-piracy agencies. I have to say I’m rather impressed with them, it’s about time the people stood up against this entire anti-piracy fiasco and tell the big companies they can’t do whatever they want, and they can’t shut everyone down.

I recall watching a documentary made about torrents, file sharing and everything P2P. Steal this film is what it was called. There were two parts. However I will admit this isn’t a documentary for the people who purely use sites such as the Pirate Bay for a quick download and leave it be this is more for the people who torrent a lot, and give a fuck about the community. You can watch this movie for free on google video, download it via The Pirate Bay, or watch it in parts on Youtube. I won’t go into detail about the documentary, however it’s worth the watch.

On to the title. In recent news, the Swedish government has passed a new law to allow tapping of internet traffic in the country, this applies to websites, personal internet use, business etc. Not only is this a massive invasion of privacy it’s ludicrous that a country has had to go this far, no doubt pressured by the U.S. to attempt to take down The Pirate Bay.

However in amidst of this, The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has recently informed everyone The Pirate Bay is going to go secure, and also has plans for the everywhere online to be encrypted, which in itself I doubt it’s going to be possible and/or feasible at this stage. It’s still a task for Microsoft trying to get un-secure boxes patched even with the automatic roll outs etc. I can’t imagine your average internet user really looking into securing their connection for the sake of torrents alone.

Even on an ISP level I doubt they would invest in such as practice to encrypt that, and even then they would have to have some form of decryption for the encryption for cases of pedophiles, criminal investigations etc.

I think at this stage it’s going to be purely user based encryption and some site specific, whether it makes a massive difference, is yet to be seen. Stick to the private trackers for now. I’ve also removed my seedbox as the company I was with nearly got caught on their old server, so I’m not planning on hanging around with a heap of movies stored under my name.

Also just quickly the legal case against The Pirate Bay still hasn’t gained any ground haha, it makes me laugh. The U.S. need to understand their laws only apply to people in their country, and the Movie and Music industry need to stop complaining about revenue, you’ve been milking the public for years, many people still buy a bands/groups/solo artists CD if they like what they hear from a download online, and/or a movie someone watches, same goes for games, if I like it, I will buy it!

So here is a tip for the anti-piracy driven people, find a method in which you can do content delivered media without restriction, DCMA and all the other “protection” crap just drives people more and more towards finding a pirated copy that entails no hassles.

For the last month and a bit all I have been reading about on the mid level techie news websites is the bloody iPhone coming to Australia

And websites such as news.com.au have a huge article on the “best deal” I haven’t seen this much reporting on any product bar home loans etc.

I’m reading an article comparing my phone (the N95 8Gb) to the iPhone, and to be honest the iPhone only really has the following over the current market;

• Safari Web Brower
• Multi-Touch Screen (Yeah that’ll be something to gloat about…until it breaks)
• 4Gb/8Gb Memory (My N95 has 8Gb)

It’s a bit cheaper than the N95 8Gb (which is retailing at around $800 to $900 still as far as I remember)

This phone isn’t even 3G, the camera is only 2Megapixels compared to the market leaders with a 5Megapixel camera. You can’t even install 3rd party applications on the thing, it needs to be approved by apple. Yes you can hack the iPhone to allow 3rd party applications to operate on it, but why would you buy a phone which you would have to void the warranty to get it to use something most of the other current market phones will do out of the box.

I don’t understand all this hype, at best it is a sub par mobile phone, which just doubles as a friggin iPod, you can play music on all the other phones out there in that category that are 3G!

Do yourself a favor Australia don’t waste your money on a fad.

Edit: Just removed the fact it wasn’t 3G, aparently the new one is, shows how much I’ve looked into the phone.

Also Telstra aparently sold out within 30minutes across the nation, are people fucking stupid or what?

NO MMS it also has NO MMS gg apple.

I can’t really conform to the post title…I’ve been embracing it for years.

I had been doing some thinking recently about blogging, my domain, the social websites, the explosion that is “Web 2.0″.

To quote the Wikipedia entry..

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004

Now most people who have been using the internet for say oh I don’t know the last 10 years or so will I think agree with me when I say, “Nothing has changed”.

However that statement is also wrong, and let me explain. I believe Web 2.0 to be the definition for the “new era” of the internet and/or if you like the “next phase”. I agree it’s already begining to sound like crackpot internet talk. Look at it from this point of view, the internet was a toy for the techies and the nerds many years ago, with let’s be frank a lower percentage using it for recreational purposes, those mainly being chat, mid-level gaming use and “homework”.

Today if you look around online, it’s all about communication on a grander scale, and with the increase in users has spawned a much wider variety of opinions, and users from when it (the internet) was still in it’s early stages never dabled in what they do today. Social Networking is on a massive scale with websites such as Facebook and MySpace with the latter losing ground recently. Needless to say it’s an interesting time online and I will be expressing my interests and grumblings on the blog in months to come.

I hope everyone enjoys the layout, and my posts!

Cheers,
jb