Between the Spaces

This just Dugg:

“Apparently, a company in Sweden is offering file-sharing insurance - they’ll pay your fines if you’re sued by the RIAA. The /. submitter translates the link as follows: ‘For a mere 140 SEK ($19 USD) per year, they will pay all your fines and give you a t-shirt if you get convicted for file sharing.’”

Holy cow! RIAA Insurance. That’s just interesting/awesome/sad that anyone was able to think that up. That’s like jail bond insurance! Know you’re about to rob a bank? Just buy some bond insurance! That will guarentee that if anything goes wrong, you don’t have to suffer the consequences! What a world… when the law abiding corporations are the bad guys and the seemingly good guys are the ones doing something blantently wrong… again, it really comes down to what we law-abiding citizens have been pushed to. No excuses, just an explaination as to why this whole RIAA thing is so dumb.

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I’ve been interested in overly complex World of Warcraft macros for a while now, but have not really had the time to investigate what can be done. Yesterday, I came up with a pretty cool feature, so I thought, as have the few people with whom I’ve share it with so far.

Alright, alright, so what do you have?

Well, from time to time, most players with create a new character or two. I know I have and still do on occasion. The most frustrating part is having to manually re-enter all of your friends into your newly created character’s Friends List. So why not macro the task!

How to do this:

• Ensure that you are on the tab for universal macros (not specific to that character).
• Type ‘/macro’ to access the macro pane.
• Create a new macro, and select an icon for it.
• For each friend who you will want in all of your characters’ Friend Lists, enter a line containing the following: ‘/friend Name’ (where “Name” is your friend’s name.

When you are done, you will have a list that looks like the following:

/friend Bert
/friend Ernie
/friend Oscar

Once you’re satisfied with your new Friend List macro, just place the macro icon in one of your toolbars and activate it! If one of the listed friends already exists in that character’s Friend List, it will simply state that fact and try to add the next friend. I found that if I just add any new friends to this universal list as I meet them or as they join the game, all I have to do is click that button on my characters as I play them and their Friend Lists are always up to date!

The only thing I have run into that may need some attention is that each macro is only allowed 255 characters so if you have a lot of friends online, you may have to create multiple friend macros (i.e.: “Friends 1, Friends, 2, etc”).

SPOnG mentioned an announcement by Nintendo that Mario Galaxy will include a co-op play feature! This is very exciting news for those of us who play console games for the community of it instead of the concept of the game alone.

Nintendo Power announced that only six games will make it out of the gates on the day the Wii launches. Surprisingly, Mario was not one of them.

The games that will be launching are as follows:

• Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Wii Version
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
• Rayman Raving Rabbids
• Red Steel
• Super Monkey Ball
• Wii Dragon Quest

This does not necessarily exclude the possibility that more will be released on this wonderous day.  It simply means that Nintendo has confirmed these titles.  For those of you who are disappointed by this list, don’t worry! Nintendo seems to be doing things right this time around and to do things right includes releasing many many games just on or after launch. I’d expect at least double that amount within a month after launch.

Google recently introduced a page dedicated to bringing all of the works of Shakespeare together in one searchable place.  An excelent resource for any of us who have ever wanted to get into Shakespeare’s works but have not had the time.

Despite the debate raging over Google’s indexing of copyrighted material, I personally believe that it should be maintained!  It seems that, according to Techcrunch, Microsoft’s Live will be releasing a similar service.  The difference will be, instead of an opt-out service, allowing authors and publishers to remove their copyrighten books from the indexing service, Microsoft will be incorporating an opt-in service.

If you play Second Life, this should make you happy. Due to the results of a recent poll done by Second Life, development on a new feature is now underway that would allow scripters to embed web-browsing through Mozilla’s browser, Firefox in Second Life! This has an endless amount of possibilities including placing a specific web site’s current state on the face of an object in game, allowing users to browse the site without ever leaving the Second Life interface.

A friend of mine recently showed me some exciting things that already being done with Second life and it’s interface to the Web as it is now. I might just start following Second Life news… it seems as though it is starting to go into some places of great interest to me.

I love when awesome projects get some time in the spotlight or at least are recognized.

Today, I found a link on lifehacker.com referring to an article on extremetech.com addressing the problem of music becoming boring or stagnant. I’ve been a huge fan of Pandora.com and Digitally Imported.com (or di.fm) for years now. I had heard of last.fm but had not really done much looking into it until recently.

I highly recommend that you check these out, especially Pandora. It is by far my favorite source of new music. In the mean time, go read the article at extremetech.

Chatsum allowed a massive group of new testers into it’s ranks today stating that “if all goes well we’ll open Chatsum up to the public after
you’ve had it for a week.” This is fantastic news for those of us who enjoy seeing larger steps being taken toward building a community around the Interweb.

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At long last, Nintendo has finally done away with the cool code name “Revolution” and replaced it with the crappy actual product name, “Wii” (as in “we”). I’m not sure how much crack they had to get through in order to find this name to be adequate enough to represent their next-gen console, but they apparently do find it adequate.

Nintendo has replaced their standard product page for the Revolution with an announcement page with a fun little animation for introducing the chosen name. I’m truely wondering how many gamers will be turned off by this choice. I know that I will still buy one, but I might just keep calling it the Revolution.

This would be a great time for them to release some awe-inspiring stuff regarding the new console at E3 to make up for the bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

I have been using this wonderful service called Meebo for about 6 months or so now. It basically is a web version of Trillian with no IRC feature. Once can connect to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and now Google’s chat service - Google Talk.

Alike many other services on the web, Meebo’s front page have an enslaught of different languages to choose from in case the visitor does not speak English as their primary language. Awesome - catering to the world. Works for me.

A closer look (why I looked closer, I could not tell you - it’s actually a rather busy day today - maybe I’m just in analytical mode) proved to be well worth my time. One of the languages presented in the list was simply labled “l337“. Oh yes… it’s exactly what you think.

My interface now shows things such as “5CЯ33ll ll4[V]3” instead of “screen name” and “#31l*” instead of “help“. Props, kudos, whatever you want to call it, to Meebo for being so creative in their efforts to stay profession-looking but still have a personality which is completely essential in the business of web applications these days. I applaud you sirs.