Category: Random stuff

Bruce Schneier on Cyber War and Cyber Crime

A nice, short talk by Bruce Schneier, giving a little insight on the hype surrounding cyberwar and cyberterrorism and explaining in laymens terms, why most of what people are currently hearing is nothing but fearmongering and a grasp for power by the military, police forces and security services. Well worth watching.

Getting Fallout New Vegas to work with Wine

If you can’t wait to play the newest iteration of Fallout, yet don’t want to boot Windows to do it – with a little effort you can get it running under Wine as well.

It doesn’t seem to work out of the box, even with a very recent release (Failed to initialize renderer. Unknown error creating the GamebryoRenderer.)

But if you don’t mind adding a little patch and compiling Wine yourself, you should be able to get Fallout New Vegas up and running in no time.

WineHQ Bug 24831 describes the problem and someone else came up with a fix just a few hours later. But if you’re running Ubuntu 10.10, sadly the patch doesn’t apply right away. To manually fix it, just get the Wine source package and edit the file ‘dlls/d3d9/directx.c’, go to line 477, remove or comment out this part

*device = NULL;

return D3DERR_DRIVERINTERNALERROR;

and substitute it with this:

return IDirect3D9Ex_CreateDevice(iface, adapter, device_type, focus_window, flags, parameters, (void *)device);

Save the file and run ‘dpkg-buildpackage’ and when finished, install the resulting .deb.

(Or just download my modified directx,c and save it to wine1.2-1.2.1/dlls/d3d9/directx.c before compiling)

That’s it. Enjoy your stay in New Vegas. :)

Cheap Domains registration

Namecheap just announced that they’ll offer new .com/.net/.org domains for $5.99 and transfers for $4.99 during the rest of September 2010. Just use the coupon code ‘SAVEBIG’ and save a few extra bucks.

Personally, I can only recommend them – I’ve been a satisfied customer of Namecheap for years, never having any problems (though I’m only using their registrar services and can’t speak for their hosting products)

Drugging and electroshocking little kids… for science?

A story, so unbelievable, you’d expect hearing it from conspiracy theorists and random crackpots was just published at truthout: The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA’s Experiments on Children.

It’s quite long, but if you have an hour or so to spare, it’s sure worth reading. Involving clinical child abuse on a massive scale, using drugs like LSD and electroshock “therapy” on at least hundred children as young as three, interrogation and torture of POWs and collaboration with Nazi doctors, big pharma sponsoring drugs to be tested on unsuspecting patients, CIA financing and cover-ups as well as physicians and psychotherapists, who’ve kept practicing and teaching in the US for decades, after committing all those crimes against humanity during fifties and sixties.

Due to a complete lack of citing sources, it’s quite hard to check for accuracy of said article – but sadly, it appears quite plausible, considering it all happened during the time of MK-Ultra, a large scale, illegal CIA human research program, which to this day remains highly classified by the US government. While you’re at it, you can spend some time reading up on that too, starting with the Wikipedia article.

WordPress 3 All in One SEO Pack breakage

If you recently upgraded to WordPress 3 and you’re using their new default Theme together with the famous All in One SEO Pack Plugin, you probably already noticed an annoying little bug: Your blog title is now appearing twice. Kinda defeats the whole SEO thing…

While the bug itself hasn’t been fixed yet, there’s a simple workaround.

Open up functions.php of your TwentyTen theme and go to line 262.
You’ll see a line that looks like

add_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentyten_filter_wp_title', 10, 2 );

Just add two forward slashes in front of it so that it looks like

//add_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentyten_filter_wp_title', 10, 2 );

Everything looks like it’s supposed to and AIOSEOP is back to doing its magic.

Get Portal for free! And OS X as well…

As most of you die-hard Mac users already know, hardly any major game worth playing is available for OS X (except EVE Online maybe). For some odd reason, some at Valve decided to port Steam to OS X and make it available to the “huge” Apple gaming community… Well, whatever…

So why even mention it? Because at the same time, they decided to give Portal away for free! Most likely to get some media attention and give Apple fanboys at least one excuse to install their app. Guess it worked, but who cares – you can get one of the most innovative games of recent years entirely for free. Yeah, even if you’re on Windows.

Portal used to cost money. Until May 24th, it’s free. End of story.

Well, technically speaking, there are some strings attached. Fortunately, they’re entirely decorative. We just like the way they look, swaying in the gentle breeze created by a million people simultanously fainting from shock at the news that Portal is free. Now you have no reason not to try Portal.

“I have a reason,” some of you are probably typing into an angry email. “You see, sir, I own a Mac.”

Well guess what: For the first time ever, Portal is also available for the Mac.

“Capital news! But the excellent puzzle adventure Portal won over 40 Game of the Year awards; Surely it must cost at least five or six hundred dollars.”

You’d think that, especially since it actually won over 70 Game of the Year Awards. But, like we keep saying, Portal is free. Free on the Mac. Free on the PC. But only until May 24th. So you only have a few days to decide if your free copy of Portal is worth the price we’re currently charging – which is you ever-so-slightly moving your index finger just barely enough to click the big red “download” button right there to the left.

Ok, so there’s no big red button here… But it’s right here on their site. And from “inside” their steam client you just have to click on play now and wait till it’s downloaded. Have fun!