I’m excited to try it out. I’m a big fan of just about anything Google. I’ve been using GMail quite heavily for the past two years. I’ve completely replaced every other mail system on my computer with GMail. I think I have about 8 different email addresses redirecting to my GMail. I’ve got things organized by priority, and labels. I keep all my contacts in there. It works seamlessly with GChat, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Voice, and Google Tasks, all which I also use on a regular basis.

Google is constantly improving, and adding features to their applications. I think they really understand their users and are constantly trying to show them that they care about each user, and they will always be there for us. At the current time there isn’t much indication that they will turn into big brother as the unofficial Google motto is “don’t be evil”, but one can never tell where things will turn in the future.

I really suggest that you give GMail a try if you haven’t already. Here is a video about the new Priority Inbox Beta feature.

This is my strategy for Poached Eggs level 1-6 for the iPhone game Angry Birds.

With this strategy you can get all three stars for the level.

1. With the first angry bird, you need to aim it so that it skims the top of the first structure, then smashes into the side of the taller structure killing the far right pig.
2. Use the second angry bird to kill the last pig.

The key to this level is to get enough damage to go over 35K points.

It just boggles the mind and has never ever been done before. To think that a player in EVE can contract a group of Dust 514 players to go and control resources on their planet is simply incredible. There is one question though. With now 55,000 planets that you can interact with in EVE, you’re going to need to narrow that down for the FPS game. I mean EVE only has about 40,000 players at a given time playing it. If you eventually get to that same number in Dust 514, you’re going to have a lot of planets with no activity. Maybe that’s the idea though.

Way to go CCP. Keep up the good work!

Reported first at DreadGaming

Now it was time to take a closer look into the game. It looks like it is a European game, maybe actually Russian to begin with. Ok, so now I have to look forward to bad English translations and weird gameplay that doesn’t make sense to us westerners. Whatever. I’ll try any game once.

I downloaded it, and was instantly impressed in character creation. It’s not just the same models with different skin colors (thanks SWTOR), but you actually have extreme differences in characters. One character type is three little characters. Some of them are soft and cuddly while others are giant and must smell terrible! I’m liking it so far.

Ok, now I’m into the game. It starts out with a good action sequence getting you into the game and teaching you about game mechanics. The graphics? Outstanding! And it’s running so smooth on my computer with full graphics (something even WoW struggled with). English translations are spot-on. Everything is making sense.

Now I’m past the introduction and into the real world. It’s pretty underpopulated with other human characters as expected for being primarily European based, and not very well known. However, the world is richly populated with tons of quests. The quests actually make sense and draw you into the game. They begin to teach you about the storyline, although that’s probably one of my main complaints at this point is I have no clue which side I’m on, or what that’s supposed to mean, how the sides interact. I’m kind of missing the big picture.

Anyway, here’s the site: Allods Online

Go and check it out and let me know what you think. I’m on server Tensess. My character is a sorcerer named TKFourTwoOne.

This is my strategy for the Poached Eggs level 1-5 for the iPhone game Angry Birds.

With this strategy you can get all three stars by only using 1 bird.

1. Aim the first angry bird right at the edge of the horizontal wooden plank. If you hit it just right, then it will shake the whole tower loose causing the boulder to fall down and crush all the pigs.

This is my strategy for level 1-4 for the iPhone game Angry Birds.

You can get all three stars on this level by only using two birds.

1. Aim the first angry bird right at the corner joint, You really want to try and clear out as much glass from the left side as possible with the first bird. You need to get rid of the vertical one, and as long as the piece that forms the roof is out of the way, then you should be fine.
2. Aim the second one for the diagonal piece of wood. This should cause the structure to collapse and get the little green pig.

The solution is to modify your WPTouch plugin to manually link to the images associated with your webcomics. Now, I ended up buying the WPTouch pro version, because it is more updated, and it gives you themes. I’m hoping that it will be worth it for me since 50% of my sites traffic is from iPhones.

Once you’ve installed WPTouch Pro, edit the file wp-content/plugins/wptouch-pro/themes/classic/iphone/single.php

Add the following code on line 45

<?php
$categories = get_the_category();
$category = $categories[0]->category_nicename;
$webcomic = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), ‘webcomic’);
if ($webcomic){
echo ‘<img src=”‘.get_bloginfo( ‘url’ ).’/wp-content/webcomic/’.$category.’/’.$webcomic[0]['files']['full'][0].’” alt=”" />’;
}
?>

Here’s what it does. First it grabs the category slug that the post is in. This is needed because that’s how Webcomic organizes your images. Second, it gets the webcomic metadata for the post. If the metadata exists, then we echo out the full sized image. That’s pretty much it!

If you have questions, I will try to help you out as best I can.

Facebook launched Facebook Places yesterday.
Anyone can find out where you are when you are logged in. It gives the
actual address & map location of where you are as you use Facebook.
Make sure your kids know too. TO UNDO: Go to “Account”, “Account
Settings”, ………”Notifications”, then scroll down to “Places” and
UNCHECK the 2 boxes. Make sure to SAVE changes and re-post this message

That advice is very misleading, and here’s why.

1. Places only works when you manually “check in” at a location. This advice assumes that Facebook is just grabbing your location every second you’re using it, and the broadcasts that information to the public. No, it only works when you voluntarily choose to share your location.
2. The term “undo” implies that there was something that was done in the first place. It’s like saying “to undo the status update feature” or “to undo the picture upload feature”
3. Going to the notification settings does absolutely nothing, but allow you to specify if you want an email or a text message when someone tags you at a location. So, basically… if you turn notifications off, you’re just telling Facebook that you don’t want to be notified when someone tags you at a location. I for one, want to know when someone tags me at a location, so I can then go ask them to remove my information if I don’t want other people to know when and where I’m at.

Now, if you really want to not share where you’re at, or be selective about who sees where you’re at, there are two things you can do.

1. Never use Facebook Places. Plain and simple. If you don’t use it, people won’t know where you’re at.
2. If you do want to use Places, but limit who sees where you’re at, change your privacy settings.
   1. Account > Privacy Settings > Customize Settings
   2. Change the settings for Places
   3. I set the permissions to my safe list (which you can read about setting up here)

What is your opinion on Facebook Places? I think it’s fine. There have been applications for over a year (four square, gowalla) that have used the same concept and it’s worked out well. When it’s a services based on users volunteering their information, then I don’t personally have any problem with it. What do you think?

I’ve been on Facebook for a long time. I have seen people do some pretty dumb things when it comes to protecting themselves, their identity, and the identities of their friends and loved ones. One of the biggest threats on Facebook is to give strangers access to your personal information. A lot of people I know play Facebook games which rely on you getting your friends to be neighbors. What typically happens though is that your personal friends don’t play those games, so you go out and find a bunch of random people to be friends with so that they can help you in the game.

This poses two problems. One, now strangers have access to very personal information about yourself which could easily be used to steal your identify. Two, the default privacy settings in Facebook are usually set to allow friends of friends to access your information. Not only are they harming themselves, but they are also opening all of their friends and families information to strangers. You can see the problem.

Default Settings Image

I propose a simple and effective solution. Facebook has finally put some decent forms of security and privacy in place, but it has to be used in the proper way for it to actually be effective. What I propose is that you create two lists of your friends. One of them is a ‘safe’ list that contains only the people you want to be able to access your personal information. Everyone else goes in your general friend list. Once you have those two lists you can change your privacy settings so that your personal information is only visible to your safe list.

Here are the step-by-step instructions to do this.

1. Go to your Facebook homepage and click the link on the left (right under your picture) for Friends
2. On the friends page, click on the button Create a List in the upper right
3. Type in the name Safe and select who you want to be in your safe list, then click on Create List
4. Click on the Account link in the top left of the page to get a drop down box and select Privacy Settings
5. Click on the link for Profile Information
6. Click on the button on the right side for each section and select Custom to get a popup window
7. In the popup window select Specific People and then start typing in the word Safe, so it will bring up your safe list to select
8. Repeat that for each section.
9. Now when you add a new random friend, you don’t need to do anything. If you add someone as a friend or family member that you want them to have access to your information, simply add them to your safe list.

And this is what your settings should look like afterward.

Secure Settings Image

Now you are protecting yourself and everyone else on your friend list. Thanks for helping protect me and my family! I wish you the best.

Check out the video

And read the full article here

I kept wishing during the video that she would step on her dress and trip over it. Which does present some interesting concepts on how you’re going to handle that sort of thing. What if another character steps on her dress? I was also impressed at the realistic body movements of the characters like the woman in high heels going up and down the steps. It actually looked like she was wearing high heels and that she could tip over if her heel slipped. I don’t know if that’s motion capture, but it’s better than anything I’ve seen on Madden games (some of the best motion capture modelling out there).

Can you imagine the hair styling that you can do now? No longer is your characters hair going to look like some weird plastic helmet that doesn’t move or change, but I image being able to choose straight hair, wavy hair, curly hair, and then choose the length. Then during the course of the game, you can actually choose your hair style and change it at any time. Is she going to wear her hair up today? Keep it down? Pull it back in a pony tail? Get it really fancy for some formal engagement? Have chunks of hair ripped of their scalp? You could go any number of directions.