Breach on Linux.com

The Linux Foundation has announced that Linux.com and LinuxFoundation.org accounts have been compromised. It believes the breach is connected to the kernel.org compromise. "As with any intrusion and as a matter of caution, you should consider the passwords and SSH keys that you have used on these sites compromised. If you have reused these passwords on other sites, please change them immediately. We are currently auditing all systems and will update public statements when we have more information. [...] We have taken all Linux Foundation servers offline to do complete re-installs. Linux Foundation services will be put back up as they become available. We are working around the clock to expedite this process and are working with authorities in the United States and in Europe to assist with the investigation."

DC universe online : F2P

DC Universe Online (Both PS3 & PC) Will be FREE to download and play starting in October

CounterStrike Go

For a CounterStrike Franchise fan , it doesn't get better than this : CounterStrike Go Trailer on Steam

BRINK : DLC : pre-order bonuses

Oh . My SD just didnt do that :( .

Thats greedy my beloved Game developers. The pre-order bonuses are supposed to be bonuses and not to be sold as DLCs later on unless they are map packs.

Brink DLC: Fallout®/SpecOps Combo Pack is available on steam for $1.99

pouce vers le bas Ubisoft

Ubisoft lied.

Google offers

Re-affirming the fact their three Generals are in for world domination , Google has added one more service to their arsenal : Google offers. I am not sure if this has been live for a while. But I saw this as an ad in gmail :

Currently the service is in beta and so there is nothing for Columbus,Ohio and so I am waiting for this to replace the Groupons.

Google-ing too much ?

From the office network , Google seems to think I am bot or some other crawler or something which is abusing Google.com. 


From the captcha page : 

About this page

Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this happen?

This page appears when Google automatically detects requests coming from your computer network which appear to be in violation of the Terms of Service. The block will expire shortly after those requests stop. In the meantime, solving the above CAPTCHA will let you continue to use our services.

This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests. If you share your network connection, ask your administrator for help — a different computer using the same IP address may be responsible. Learn more

Sometimes you may be asked to solve the CAPTCHA if you are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or sending requests very quickly.

IP address: 

Time:
URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=rss+feed+for+Quality+Center+updates&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=m-sD1&aql=&oq=

Dota2 Beta

Interested in Dota 2 beta ?


Try your luck with this link which will direct you to sign in via steam to get things started.

Firefox 6.0 out

Didn't Firefox just release FF5 ? Got the prompt that Firefox 6.0 is out and is available for download. Whats happening in the FF camp ?
 

Witcher : Director's cut : $3.99

Witcher , the director's cut is going for $3.99 @ gamersgate. Thats the CHEAPEST I have seen this game go for. The regular version was on for $4.99 for a month or so in gog.com.

Vader's song : Sword of the Witcher comes to mind as I write this.

to bite or not to bite

Having played all the Assassins Creed series , Brotherhood was an obvious buy @ $50 ( or so ) when they released it. With backlog of games from steams sales , I waited. And thank God I did :

Direct2Drive has the game for $15.95 :).

Arkham city : Aint no place for a hero

Hidden recovery partitions

The Dell laptops usually come with a recovery partition which in some machines are hidden by default.The laptop which I bought from India had the partition visible and I was surprised when i didn't find one in my fiance's laptop. In case you are wondering how to see if Dell has hidden the recovery partition in your machine :

• Click on Start -> Type in "cmd" without the quotes which should give you a command line exe in the search results. 
• Right click and Run as Administrator.
• Enter diskpart in the command line.
• DISKPART> Enter "list disk" without quotes.
• Select the disk number . I had only one connected and so "select disk 0"
• Type in "list partition" . This 
• Type in "select partition 2" ( 2 was the recovery partition in my case)
• Type in "assign" : this should assign a drive letter to the recovery partition.

You are all set. The recovery partition should be visible now.

Minecraft : BOGO

Well , the humble bundle ended and Minecraft is opening doors to a whole lot of folks with their latest sale :

• $21.95 for two copies( free gift code for someone you wub) 

From the official website :

When Minecraft is finished, it will sell for €20.00.
If you pre-purchase now during beta, you pay just €14.95!

Here's what you get:

• You get early access to the game to a discounted price!
• You help fund the development of Minecraft
• Custom skins in multiplayer
• Once you've bought the game, it's yours. No DRM.

EA insider deals

EA insider is throwing another one at the gamers with their 70% off deal on the games below. I am not sure on the details ( Facebook likes of 500 or so).If the expected prices are as below , there will be some happy faces seeing bulletstorm going for $9. Its an INSANE deal for the game though.

• Dead Space 2 [origin.com] (PC-DD) - Expected Price $9
• Crysis 2 [origin.com] (PC-DD) - Expected Price $18
• Bulletstorm [origin.com] (PC-DD) - Expected Price $9
• Battlefield Vietnam [origin.com] (PC-DD) - Expected Price $4.50

TRINE2 soundtracks preview

If you bought the Humble Frozen bundle , the TRINE 2 ( which is due for release this year) soundtracks preview is added as an extra. As always , the three songs which are available are just soothing.

• Trine2 main theme
• Thieves Guild
• Waltz of the temple forest elves

D2D : 60% off , Steam : Elder Scrolls pack

Direct2Drive has a decent set of games @ 60% off . The list includes :

• Crysis 2 $29.95
• Bulletstorm $11.95 ( the lowest I have ever seen this game for : Its a fun game but wasn't worth the intial price of $50)
• Section 8 - Prejudice $5.95
• FEAR 3 $29.95
• Borderlands GOTY $11.95

2nd day of Steam Quakecon sales has Elder scrolls GOTY bundles for 67% off :

• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition Deluxe
• Bundle price : $14.99

HB3 update : Atom Zombie Smasher

Humble Bundle is getting sweeter by day. The latest game to be added to the bundle is blendo games' Atom Zombie Smasher .

Bastion for PC : Aug 16th

Supergiantgames in their latest blog post & twitter updates revealed the PC release date for Bastion : Aug 16th .

The game has only had great reviews in Xbox and I wouldn't hope for any thing lesser for the PC version. The game has garnered a lot of appreciation for the hand painted environment, narration , gameplay & the soundtrack.


I was especially interested in this bit " .., remappable controls created for PC – plus gamepad support. " The recent purchase of Wired X360 controller has been rewarding. :) 

Available on steam for pre-orders  for 14.99
Official post here.

Gmail : Preview pane

Google blogs revealed the latest addition to Gmail's features : Preview pane , like you have in Outlook. The latest updates on tablets for Gmail had the three pane view and it was a no-brainer that we would see this very soon for desktop users.

Details here .

RAGE : Trailer

Oh , yes : I am still pissed off at Bethesda & SD with what they did with BRINK till now.But this trailer for RAGE which was shown today @ Quakecon is BADASS. And yes, as they : This is just the beginning .

Quakecon 2011 Steam Sale : Aug 4th

Steam is rolling out new set of sales from today till Quakecon ends (Sunday , 7th Aug)


Quake 4 is up for grabs @ $ 19.99 with steam slashing the prices of BRINK to $ 24.99. BRINK is free to play till Sunday 1PM PST with the DLC included. The 50% off with the recent patches , fixes and free DLC is the best you can get BRINK for ( at least for the moment). Splashdamage sites are abuzz with the fact that player numbers have gone as high as 3900 right after the F2P announcement. I still consider that it is a desperate attempt from SD to sustain the game and improve the playerbase. The fact that I got slammed for the above statement is an other thing.

Some of the deals below :

• Quakecon Pack 2011 $70
• DOOM 3 Pack $12.50
• QUAKE III: Team Arena $10
• Quake III Arena $10
• DOOM 3 $10
• Heretic + Hexen Collection [7.50
• The Ultimate Doom $5
• QUAKE II $5
• Final DOOM $5
• Master Levels for Doom II $5
• DOOM 3 Resurrection of Evil $5
• DOOM II $5
• QUAKE $5
• HeXen II $3.74
• HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel $3.74
• Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders $3.74
• HeXen: Beyond Heretic $3.74
• QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero $2.49
• QUAKE Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity [steampowered.com] $2.49
• Wolfenstein 3D $3.74
• QUAKE Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon $2.49

QuakeCon

Quakecon 2011 will commence in a few minutes.

QuakeTV/BRINK TV with GreasedScotsman & Mattcom will be shoutcasting the event live from Texas.

Official stream here.

Update:
From Mattcom :

Connect with QuakeCon

own3D.tv
Our exclusive page for the live stream. Tune in starting Thursday at 1pm CDT (19:00 GMT)
http://www.own3d.tv/quakecon

YouTube
View videos from around QuakeCon all in one official destination.
http://www.youtube.com/quakecon2011

Twitter
Get the latest updates from the coverage team.
http://twitter.com/quakeconcvg
Other official announcements will be available at http://twitter.com/quakecon

Machinarium

Machinarium is now on sale in Steam for $2.5.

Strangely humble bundle website announced the addition of HB2 games ( including Machinarium) to the list of games in the HB3 bundle. This makes me wonder how steam sales work ?

One thing to be noted here is that some of the folks who bought HB3 didn't realize that they already owned Machinarium as part of the bonus and went ahead and bought the game from steam as well.

Borderlands 2

 2K games in their latest blog entry announced Borderlands 2 for a April 2012 release.Amazon has the  pre-order going for $ 49.99 right after this announcement came in.

Release date as per Amazon :  December 31,2012 .
Promotion at this moment : Pre-order price guarantee

Image courtsey : gameinformer.com

Bundle in a Bundle

The Humble Indie Bundle 2 games: Braid, Osmos, Machinarium, Cortex Command and Revenge of the Titans have just been added to Humble Indie Bundle 3. Everyone who purchased Humble Indie Bundle 3 before 10:30am PST today will automatically see the extra games on their download page. New purchasers will have to beat the current average on the site to unlock the extra games.

This is a smart move considering the low average that was persisting across Windows compared to Mac & the generous Linux contributions.

Kindle with special offers

I have been using the Kindle for nearly 1.5 months and I have grown fond of it. I was a bit skeptical about this  since I always loved/liked the idea of  holding a book and reading it rather than some electronic gadget which stores all my books. I had to buy the Kindle at one point in time since it was clear that I wouldn't be able to carry them all back when I head back to India.

The part where it said "ads" in the initial launch made me wait for the reviews and judgements compared to the one without ads. Several YouTube videos reviews later , i opened my wallet to Amazon.

• The one interesting thing I started noticing about was that the offers which were displayed were not spam and were real deals in Amazon which has benefited me a lot.Yes , for the argumentative mind you are subduing yourself to buying more stuff from Amazon. Cycling through the ads for the day has become more of a habit these days with the good deals I saw in my Kindle.
• To name a few : $10 for $20 Gift Card in Amazon , $10 off on games in amazon (which worked on accessories as well) , buck a book ( though not the most impressive collection , you wouldn't go wrong with $1 : Water for elephants added :) ) , 25% on selected cameras ( bought a Nikon cool pix  for 62$ ) and so on. 

•  The ads doesn't show up when you read and it is only visible in the bottom most portion when you are in the home page or as a screensaver.

With the offers added , those $ 114 is worth the money spent.

Note : There is a whole thread in slickdeals forums on the offers from Kindle

Click

I rely heavily on the AUTO mode of the camera that I wield with some exceptions where i feel the manual focus and control adjustments would benefit. Lately I have been thinking about getting serious about using the camera the way I am supposed to. Oh , the manual options are a pain and my judgement of light ( almost , 95%) laughs back at me when I click a picture to see the point of my interest ruined by a shadow or the overwhelming darkness which i never can account for.

Countless are the times I have ogled at a picture that a friend took.Don't even think about the ones on the Flickr homepage.

Things to do :

• Start looking into the settings which I am comfortable in and learning to use it- oh , the curve already looks so steep.
• Buy a set of filters for the camera :
• Main intent is to protect the lens than looking for better shots. I am content with that for now.
• Buy a better lens : That is if I believe I can do anything better on this front.

BRINK DLC , Ohio State Fair

• The BRINK DLC is still not available in the US/UK for Xbox or PC . PS3 got some love yesterday when PSN users were reporting the DLC being available for download.Sony went ahead and made the content available yesterday , 2nd of Aug , which was consistent with the speculations which took roots considering Sony releases new contents on Tuesdays. I am not complaining. The DLC screenshots make for some good wallpapers. That is all what i have to say at this point :)
•  Ohio state fair opened up a week back and the concerts list looks awesome :
• Trace Adkins : Aug 3rd ( which is today)
•  Brad Paisley with Blake Shelton and Jerrod Niemann ( Aug 7) . Now I need to coax my friends to change the Saturday plans to one for Sunday :)
• Kingston & Sandisk 8GB flash Drives are going for around $8 in Amazon. The kingston one goes on and off with the free Super Saver shipping. 
• Update: They only have SS for the 11.99 Frustration free packaging one for the drive than then retail one.Funny how amazon is charging you $4 for changing the packaging.

LIMBO

Priced at 9.99 in steam from today , this monochromatic  indie puzzler has already captured the attention of gamers and critics for the mood & art style .Originally released as an XBLA exclusive, the game was re-released by the Danish developers playdead.

The trailer which i chanced upon months back when it was not even announced for PC gave me an eery feeling with the background score , continuous buzz of a bee and a  boy like figure running around in search of something in a dark world. The name somehow seems very apt.


From the steam page :

Winner of more than 90 awards, including GameInformer’s “Best Downloadable”, GameSpot’s “Best Puzzle Game”, Kotaku’s “The Best Indie Game”, GameReactor’s “Digital Game of the Year”, Spike TV’s “Best Independent Game”, X-Play's “Best Downloadable Game” and IGN’s “Best Horror Game”


One strange thing is that the official site for Limbo doesn't state that the game is available on PC till you get to the game store.

Diablo3

Gamespot in their recent interviews with the Jason Bender , one of the senior  game designers in Diablo 3, revealed couple of things :

• Diablo 3 would require a persistent internet connection. Why are all these games requiring an internet connection ? Gone are the days when you could buy a game , load it into the drive and just play. You get to hear the same story again and again: Its fun with your friends. Its so better in co-op mode. :( . I just need a standalone game which i can play without the internet connection.
• There will be a public beta. Glad they are doing this.Considering the fiasco with BRINK I had , I wouldnt dare to buy a game on the game day unless its TRINE's sequels. 
• Something which gives me the irks " We have learned a lot from the ..". Heard this bit of statement in BRINK from SD about ETQW and the game had none of the so called "learned" stuff when they laucnhed the game. Then again , its a relief that Blizzard are releasing a beta which should give you a good picture of whats in store.

C418 : 72 minutes of fame

Minecraft fame C418 :

Bezene & netbanking

Now I know what Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz felt when he zeroed in on the Benzene formula. Or sort of.

·         January 17^th 2011 :

o   log into Net banking

o   Access Denied, incorrect password.

o   2 attempts completed.

o   3^rd try failed and the account is locked out.

o   Wait for 24 hrs for the account to be active again.

·         Friday the 28^th of July ,2011

o   Log into Net banking

o   Password expired

o   Password modified

o   Logged in successfully.

All I needed was around 6 months of sleep

TRINE + Fedora + X360

The dmesg shows that Fedora recognized the X360 controller. Now if only I had a linux game which supported the controller.

After a quick check , I realized that TRINE had linux support and so I downloaded the 64 bit Linux version which was an .run file.

• 32 bit file has some issues which i am not sure of ( Not being able to install being one ).
• 64 bit TRINE setup installed fine , but the launcher doesn't work at all . I click the launcher , run the launcher from terminal. No response. 

Tonight will be a long one if i cannot find the issue with the launcher.

Wired Xbox controller

It has been a while since I thought I would get a wired Xbox 360 controller for some games which had support for the wired controller - TRINE , Batman ( the combat is just awesome with the controller than on the poor keyboard which at times fails to keep up with the button press - and when it's a laptop keyboard , need I say more ? ) , some support for BRINK with Smooth's config.

Store : Best buy , Polaris.

The expression on the guys face when I said I was looking for a wired X360 controller was noteworthy. People are going wireless and he is back to wired.A quick look and he claims that he cannot price match the 29.96 which amazon had and so I keep the controller back in its place and walk back. "oh , Sir - Extremely sorry for the mistake. I thought you wanted a wireless controller" . Sounded a bit hard to believe when I was stressing WIRED all along. Anyway , bestbuy matched the amazon price and I save $10.

The Greeter who saw me wielding a wired X360 controller asked me why I would buy a wired controller with wireless around. "To hook it up with a Laptop that I have to play some games" " Does it work that way ? . Thats nice then "

Back home and the OS & TRINE recognizes the controller without any issues and I play along. Oh , its fun :)

PS : forgot my windows live id password which I used for Batman : Arkham Asylum and now I have play the whole thing again . I am not complaining :)

Now , what will happen if I hook it up while in Fedora ? :D .

BRINK DLC - 3rd Aug

BRINK DLC is due by Aug 3rd on all the platforms - so says the latest blog update from Splashdamage.

As i mentioned in the edge gamers website for Quake Con, it will be fun to see the finals for BRINK being played on a map which they haven't played till 24 hrs ago. Good going SD considering they could have released it early for PC without wasting time on the consent from MS/Sony. I respect the commitment towards releasing the DLC on the same day for all platforms , but you could have spared the PC folks from the wait. Then again , that would have been a disaster with the FREE DLC for two weeks campaign.

I have lost hope in the game. Wish I could travel to QuakeCon though.

Indie Games

The humble bundle 3 is back and I haven't taken a bite till now. I liked COGS from the video reviews I have seen and it looks like your sliding block puzzler with some good thoughts added to make it feel less repetitive.

Well , while browsing the indiegame forums I chanced upon Bastion which looks awesome from the artwork. Pity its only on Xbox now. Hoping they would finish the PC port soon on it.



Browsing the sites linking the humble bundle 3 reviews , i saw a video review of COGS by a developer : Wolfire.The videos in his youtube seemed exciting mainly due to the way he focuses on explaining the research/ work behind it. Some of the videos didn't make any sense to me since I am a complete newb when it comes to game engines or lets say anything related to software development ( pity I am a software tester).


Indie games I have : TRINE , Jack Claw , Shadowgrounds ( All with the Humble Bundle 2) ,World of Goo

What have I been upto

I just hate to push myself to do anything. Even to get into a car and drive?- Yeah. It took me 9 months to drive a car after coming to US. Primary reason : Office is 10 minutes walk and I claim that as the 10 min morning exercise.

Weekend came and it was a small 5 min walk to Avis. It took me more time to get into a shoes than Patricia, the receptionist-cum-caretaker, to give me the keys. Thanks Avis.

Next came finding the car. I absolutely didn't hear a thing when she told me the make and model of the car. And what do I do - I press the red button on the car key which signalled the car ( a KIA Forte ) and in starts the alarm. Found the car , got into it , released the hand brake and then I drove. It felt like its been a while since I drove ( well , two months since I drove that sports edition Charger in Minneapolis ). But cruising along Polaris in that Forte felt good.

Weather in Columbus is horrible as ever - 93 F with the humidity kills you.

Captcha

Captcha or whatever that software is , hates me apparently.

or

I should start looking into prescription for glasses.

Unity interface

Hate it. < post ends here >

< or not so>

Swipes hdd of Ubuntu & installs Fedora.

Portal 2

The wait paid off ( Hope so) and Steam slashed prices on Portal 2 by 50% and I took the bite @ 24.99. Couldn't resist clicking on purchase when I saw it. I had missed it twice with the Amazon & Gamestop deals early June.

Steam servers are slammed and its evident from the 4 hr long download of 10Gb. :(




Listening to Munbe Vaa.

BRINK DLC

BRINK , the First person shooter from SD which has gone under the bus for many a reasons will be in discussion for the next couple of days as well ( though the community surrounding it is dwindling) .

The recent post from badman with the details of the DLC points out that the game is FREE , but for two weeks ; which doesn't sound like the way it was announced first time around.

Suggestion for SplashDamage : Get out of Bethesda's hands. They are ruining it for you .

Google guitar logo

The Google guitar logo doesn't which appeared on the home pages today doesn't really spell Google. The again , in honor of Les Paul : http://goo.gl/doodle/CxIO .

I was scouring Google to find someone making an effort to make some good strum with the cords in the logo. No luck till now.

Humble bundle

Humble bundle is back . Pay what you want for the 5 DRM free games and redeem it on Steam or download it directly.

Payment options : Amazon payments , Google checkouts , Paypal.

Games included : Trine ( OST also) ,Shadow Grounds , Shadow Grounds : Survivor , Jack Claw , Splot ( pre-order).

You can be an ass and pay them 1$ or pay what you feel. Trine is one beautiful game you would want to have in your pack.

Borderlands

2K games on 75% off on steam . Details in here .

4/12 - Mafia , Mafia 2 and the DLCs
4/13- Borderlands and three DLCs @ 12.48 $ or so. Bought it since I always wanted to try the game.

In the Air..

Love is in the air – The phrase always bewildered him as a child. Love in those times translated to only few things – love towards your mother (father never made the cut on paper ;-)), love for your favorite toy, and love for the favorite bakery snack which always left you drooling for more. Material stuff made up for most of the part in that “love” list.

5^th grade as he remembers had an English lecturer, a lady, talking about love from one of Shakespeare’s which puzzled him more. He learned that not only did love make it into the air, but sparks flew also. (Probably should have written a whitepaper on how the supposedly-in-the-sparks acts as accelerators for the chemistry between two mortals.) But he still had questions on it. Questions - some things which make a kid different from the adults we pose to be now. And they fire away these stupid queries of theirs towards the hapless- their parents, lecturers or their cousin brothers who claim to know it all.

10^th grade – Love for another mortal other than towards his family revolves around some one whom he constantly interacts with. Ask any guy ( who is not shy enough to admit ) and a teacher’s name would pop up. The sparks never flew even then.

12^th grade and so on – There is always the first love – the bitter one for most part. Blame the chamber called brain( not the mind or heart – heck the heart does all the pumping and gets all the blame for the stupid brain) which ousts all reasoning at that point and makes him believe that the sparks did fly. Except that he realized it quite late that everything else near it caught fire and the burns remain and he couldn’t bear it anymore.

The “so on “stage comes with a price. If life were a database, God plays the admin and a pretty good one at that. Making you capitulate when it stops responding to your queries.

Then all of a sudden, Violins blend in with that sound of a distant piano (which you never heard earlier), your knees weaken for no reason, your favorite musician returns from dead to sing “Here’s your love “. Sparks fly and you don’t care if you burnt down the whole planet. You are in love. The place doesn’t matter. The age doesn’t matter. The color of skin doesn’t matter. The lingo doesn’t matter. Love is certainly in the air. A definitely hot air indeed..

Sob..

Why does it have to be that the first game I watch of Chelsea's , after a while, have to be a defeat after being routed for a win from every nook and corner of football world ?