a hshieh blog.

A weblog named “AntiSpore” was recently created to take offense to the game Spore, by EA, in which the player gets to create animals and watch them run around in their environments. If you don’t give them mouths, they will die of hunger. If you don’t give them meat, then they will become vegetarians.

It all seems to make sense.

AntiSpore doesn’t think so. Rather AntiSpore has decided that EA’s game is a direct attack on Christian views, based on the fact that the animals will change to their environments. Now, I am a devout Christian myself, but I don’t see how Spore, a game about creating, is an affont on Christian values.

AntiSpore

Free huggers: Remember to put on your deodorant!

The GI Avatar demo webpage is up! Generated by yours truly.

visit

One day, Best Buy and Gamestop will take over the world with their tweaked, high prices. Best Buy workers will allow incompetence to proliferate in the community, and Gamestop will allow trade-ins of small children for 10% of their original worth. Gamestop will then sell the children to families in exchange for badly refurbished ones.

It took a while, but it finally works. Time to expand that word list.

Gizmodo recently published an entry on the US finally overtaking 3G usage in Europe. But what’s the big deal. Why doesn’t the US jump on the 4G boat already? Yeeesh.

I am constantly asked, “How quickly can you take down someone’s computer?” and am constantly told, “No one’s dumb enough these days to open a virus.” Well virus or not, contrary to standard belief, the public really doesn’t check any more in regards to security before opening a file.

In a recent talk I was asked to demonstrate how hard it would be to shutdown someone’s computer through overload. I opened a text editor, created a looping batch file, packaged it in an executable, and plugged a phony icon into it. The whole process took less than a minute, since it consisted of typing “start start start start start …” and then having the same process launch: painfully “Hello World.” level programming anyone can do.

I threw the file online as a torrent, said it was the crack to the upcoming Red Alert 3, and watched hundreds of computers freeze and crash despite putting “will cause computer to crash” and “fake” in the file name and description.

Wow.

Download a similar looping batch file here

Many people ask me, “Alan, how are you always mobile blogging from airports. Doesn’t that cost a lot of money?”

Well yes. It does. But there are three ways to get past the “airport required redirect”:

1. Most airports don’t block image extensions. Hence, add ?.gif, ?.jpg , etc., to the end of each URL you want to access.
2. This ones simple. Try out generic user names and passwords. Most of the time you’ll end up with a password being “default”.
3. Boingo, which seems to be everywhere offers free internet for mobile users. Just set your browser up to appear to be coming from an iPhone.

If you’re still stuck after this, benefit the economy and pay for the wi-fi. Otherwise simple packet decryption should let you easily bypass wep/wpa protection.

Grant Imahara is my hero because he:

-is the ultimate engineer
-is an alpha Asian, yet fourth generation
-won BattleBots
-can design robots in his head
-is scared of fish
-worked at ILM where he helped with Star Wars, Jurrasic Park, and the Matrix
-designed the arms of the Energizer bunny
-is fun size
-enjoys Legos
-refused to change his hairstyle for his spot on television
–

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m on an epic search to find the Mythbusters, since all 5 of them are my heroes. Accordingly, I shall begin this leg of my epic journey by featuring each of the Mythbusters, and provide 10 reasons why that Mythbuster is my hero.

I initiate with everyone’s favourite, Kari Byron.