http://cago.ranter.net

Geeks ahoy.

The homemade system (out of free parts) finally blew its top, and I can’t say that I blame it.  Puny single core P4 proc is puny.  As cheap and poor as I am, even I have to throw in the towel when I can no longer get into the BIOS.  Determined to not repeat the mistake that I made in getting second-and-thirdhand parts into a 24/7 active server and hoping that it would not blow up, instead I made an even bigger mistake and bought an off the shelf system.

Even worse, it’s by Compaq.

Read the rest of this entry »

I really don’t want to post anythign else about Evony (nee Civony), but not only is it kind of like a train derailment, it’s a slow motion train derailment that goes on for weeks.  Aside from its gold farming roots, bizarrely overpriced revenue model, blatant click fraud, player contests that are just so sad that I really want to make a parody page but think it couldn’t be any funnier than what’s actually there, stolen everything, unbelievable amount of comment spam, AdSense filter bypassing, player-based promotion slash datamining, and just flat out boring gameplay, Evony has perhaps perfectly distilled web-based advertising down to its most perfect form.  Please read Coding Horror’s progression of Evony ads to see this amazing refinement over time.  For those of you who miss the point of its final form, I will attempt to point out its perfection below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally rebuilt my MythTV box last week, retiring the original proof-of-concept underpowered system that had been, uh, proof-of-concepting for about 1.5 years.  Not that this is interesting to anyone, but I figured I should write some of the details down so that I don’t have to relearn everything all over again when I rebuild again in 2 years.

Also, I’m writing this post while not actually at my MythTV box so these details may all be wrong anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’ve had about enough.  I’m killing off the ad block since:

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s in a name anyway?

Read the rest of this entry »

So I admit it, I’ve been playing Civony for, uh, about 3 weeks.  At the end of week 1 (when your newbler protection runs out) I had 52000-ish prestige.  At this point I’m hovering around 36-40th place on the overall server prestige list, with maybe 64000 players listed.  (Okay, a lot of those are inactives who made an account and found out there was no "qween.")  I didn’t try really hard either, and since I’m getting fairly bored with the game anyway, I figure there’s no reason to not tell people how to properly exploit the game’s substantially broken economic model to their own advantage.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://entertainment.upperdeck.com/wow/en/events/article.aspx?eid=46&aid=5809

aka Max Longstreet.

I wondered where Civony’s insane pricing for ingame currency came from, and apparently now I know.

Read the rest of this entry »

Free web-based version of a slow multiplayer version of Age of Kings that lures you in with cleavage and then sells you in-game items.  It’s in late beta so it’s about as completed as any other game on the market. Note:  This game was found via careful research and recommendation, i.e. I saw boobs on the ad banner.  This intro review was written after a vast amount of research, i.e. I started playing about half an hour ago and confirmed that there are in fact no boobs in sight.  Unless you count the chat client. This article will be updated as I play, possibly over days based on how long it’s taking to upgrade my town hall.

Read the rest of this entry »