Accumulation of Win

First off: I love Battlefield since the first release and I have been playing all of them since Battlefield 2 weekly for hours. I love DICE for making awesome games with such attention to details and with the guts to put something new into each and every one of them. I also loved Mirror’s Edge and Pinball Dreams/Pinball Fantasies – both DICE products (those where the days guys!). What I hate is when some producer (read: EA) takes over and drives a perfectly good franchise and an awesome games studio against the wall by doing things like manipulating game review scores or not releasing it on steam. But the latest is really the kicker… they want you to install a spyware, they call ‘Origin’ if you want to play Battlefield 3 on PC.

I am really happy to see the reaction of the German gamers population, that led to EA’s latest scandal now even making it into the mainstream media.

In case you missed out on the details: The reason is that in the EULA (you know, the colossal text that you scroll down and accept when installing something) they get the agreement from you that, if you want to play Battlefield 3, you allow them to scan your entire harddisk and send everything they find to undisclosed third parties, which technically even includes private documents, photos, videos and the like. Not enough that you actually paid for the game (as far as i read the rumors, EA wants to increase their prices from now on from average 50 to 60 euro per game), you also have to install a trojan/spying virus with it to be able to play.

It took quite a while since the first complaints started to emerge online in August, but now that Battlefield 3 has been released, it is finally all over the german speaking media: Die Zeit, SpiegelOnline, NZZ, n-tv. Only Bild is missing out on that one so far. However, I am wondering why the Media outside of Germany does not seem to report on any complaints at all. Are you people satisfied with what EA is doing? Are you not informed? Or is the mainstream media just not covering what’s going on?!

What can we do about it? I for one will not even install the game until EA has modified their EULA dramatically (unfortunately I pre-ordered in April without knowing at that point, that it will run with Origin only). I will give Amazon a bad review on Battlefield 3. I will write a complaint email to EA’s Privacy Department and if nothing has changed until 11.11.11 I will send back my copy for a refund and start playing Skyrim as planned and only Skyrim instead. *drool*

Workaround: If you want to play Battlefield 3 anyway but of course would like to prevent Origin from scanning your system, there is supposed to be a solution called sandboxing. I haven’t tried it myself, but go ahead and report back if it worked… I would still suggest you to at least write a complaint to EA about it though, otherwise there will not be anything happening ever and you would at some point sandbox each and every game you buy.

Yay! I just accidently found a game called ‘Sequence’ on Steam! Wait. Steam has what now?! Ok, from the start: I love the indie game releases this year, so i regularly check what’s on Steam. And there it was featured today: Sequence is one of those rhythm games that are flooding the market lately (most prominent example would probably be Guitar Hero). I am actually not so very impressed by this gameplay idea in general and the fact that it combines RPG elements with the timing of direction punching on the keyboard or gamepad is not the reason why i mention it here. No, the real reason is that it is featuring music by Ronald Jenkees and this guy is just genius! I have been watching his performances with the synthesizers quite some time ago on youtube and was always thinking about ordering one of his CDs. You can see that he just loves what he is doing when improvising along his sequencers. And now that I just found out that he obviously contributed some tracks to this game, i have basically no choice but to support him finally – with the tiny price of 3.59EUR (its 10% off right now) there is absolutely no reason to hesitate! If you would like to know who Ronald is and what’s his music like, here is my favorite track:

Suck at this, Kinect – I am off to the holodeck now… kthxbai!

I do not own a Time Capsule, I do not plan to get one, nor do i want to connect a usb disk every time i feel like making a backup of my stuff. What i do have however is a wireless network and a Windows 7 PC. Why not use the available disk space in my PC for the backups of my Macbook Pro? I found out how to Time Machine Backup to a Network Drive…

In Snow Leopard it was still possible with a few tweaks and manual image file creation to get the OS to actually backup over the Network onto a Windows NTFS disk. Hoozah! In Lion (MacOSX 10.7.2) there is even another step required to get the backup process running. Using just step 1 it will fail with the message ‘The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features’.

1. So besides the same steps as in Snow Leopard to prepare the Backup Image File (my previous post) you will also need to…

2. Download and run the script from this file to modify backupd in such a way that it accepts remote disk on the network share: backupd_anyafp_r2 – just unpack and run ./install.sh from the terminal.

Thanks to msft.guy for the script!

PS: I still get the feeling that the backup of a FileVault encrypted home directory even on Lion still doesn’t work while being logged in. Meh.

Correction: I had to switch to FileVault2. Now the whole disk is encrypted and my guess is Time Machine can handle that…

What if I still can’t find my share in TimeMachine?
(added 24. Jan. 2013)

Here is a checklist what I would try then:

1. close the preferences or even reboot after running the script above.
2. Find out your Computer Name:
   1. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences and click Sharing.
   2. Note the computer name appearing at the top of the window.
      – For example “ZergasMacbook”.
3. Find your MAC address:
   1. In Apple menu, select System Preferences...
   2. From the View menu in System Preferences, select Network.
   3. In the left column of the Network preference window that opens, click the name of your connection ( Ethernet or Built-in Ethernet).
   4. Click the Advanced... button, and in the dropdown, click the Hardware or Ethernet tab.
   5. The address is the string of letters and numbers next to “MAC Address:” or “Ethernet ID:”.
      – For example “00:15:20:aa:fe:a1”.
4. Create your sparsebundle:
   1. Follow the steps described in my guide: Create a sparsebundle on your Mac manually with the name “ComputerName_MACaddressWithoutColons.sparsebundle” and move it into the shared folder on the windows machine.
      – In the case of the examples above it would be “ZergasMacbook_001520aafea1.sparsebundle”.
5. Connect to the share:
   1. On your Mac, in Finder go to the menu Go -> Connect to Server…
   2. Choose the share with the sparsebundle in it on your Windows computer. The share will now be mounted under Volumes with the name of the share folder you gave in windows.
      – For example let’s call the directory “MacBackup” on the computer “WindowsPC” then you a folder on your Mac called “/Volumes/MacBackup”.
6. Mount the sparsebundle:
   1. Open a terminal and mount the sparsebundle as a drive under /Volumes on your mac by typing: hdiutil attach -verbose /Volumes/MacBackup/ZergasMacbook_001520aafea1.sparsebundle
      You can also just double-click on it to mount (thanks, mike!).
7. Connect the sparsebundle:
   1. Now add the sparsebundle as the Time Machine destination with the terminal by typing: sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/mounted_sparse_bundle
8. Then try starting the preferences and go to TimeMachine looking for the sparsebundle again.

BTW: In the terminal you can hit TAB and OSX will complete the name of a file or folder you were about to write. Like this you dont have to type all the sparsebundle file name.

Good luck!

Fall is coming and even though there were quite a few very cool indie games this year (see my review of Limbo for example), the big blockbusters are still to come! Sure there has been Blink and Homefront out already, but although being hyped a lot, i somehow never got myself to show any interest in them. Instead, here is a short introduction into my most anticipated ones:

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They are everywhere! Even the new business cards of my company has a QR-Code on the back now. The most prominent application for them must be in advertisement, where the little block of visual bits forms the connection between print media and online content. The idea is simple: For example, on some poster that already got your attention they put this square of black and white spots. With a camera and an app on your mobile (for example Barcode Scanner on Android) you take a picture and *bam* your phone has just decrypted the URL within the code, which you can then visit without typing a single letter. Basically it works like a Barcode but with two dimensions. The one on my business card contains all my contact information, so you don’t have to scan it or even type it into your phone.

Now this dude, Brian Benchoff, found out that according to the specification, a lot of the code (up to 30%) can be “unreadable” by the phone and still be decoded. So he did the obvious, he put some stuff inside the code like so:

You should try it yourself, it actually still works and in this example gives you the URL of Mozilla Firefox if you scan it. This is actually a pretty sweet idea and if I would make my own business cards with a QR-Code on them, i would definitely integrate a logo like this as well.

Read the full Article with all the explanation why and how it works on Hackaday.com.

Check out The Top 10 QR-Code Generators in case you would like to try creating your own Codes. In addition, here is a small clip of another interesting application of QR-Codes in Korea where you can go shopping in a virtual store.

Maybe you have played the 1991 platformer ‘Another World‘ back in the Amiga or in my case Atari times. I remember the very smooth animations which in those days were just awesome compared to the frame-by-frame pixel animation most of the games had. Without any textures however the game got a certain minimalistic feel. This is what Limbo (Latin limbus, edge or boundary, referring to the “edge” of Hell) reminds me of. But I am not comparing. It is fresh. It is more creepy. And this is due to two simple design decisions: first of all it is all black and white, with an old flickering camera effect and all shapes are drawn as silhouettes only. Second, there is no music whatsoever. Just sounds and some ambient noise. And those are just awesome! Footsteps, flies and… what is that noise coming from the bushes over there?

Creepy visual art, perfect atmosphere. My new favorite parallax-scrolling puzzle platformer is called... Limbo! (sorry, Braid)

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You probably know the tune ‘Like a G6’ by Far East Movement, which by the way isn’t half bad. What I found here now is a nerdy version of that song about some heavy role playing. The title? Roll a D6.

http://vimeo.com/23248158

You might like to compare it to the original.

I already posted this clip on my facebook application page yesterday just when it was released by DICE/EA, but I know a lot of people who are not on facebook anymore. So here you have it too: The latest Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Teaser, recorded on the Multiplayer Map ‘Operation Metro’, which is going to be played like a Rush Map (as known from Bad Company 2). Enjoy the destructible environment and – what amazes me in every single trailer I have seen so far – the fantastic ambient sound effects. Pure awesomeness!

The Rush Layout of Operation Metro, with its different zones: outside and inside. Also pictured are the mcom stations to be destroyed.

picture via http://a.beining.com

I only work on a MacBook Pro once in a while, and every time i do i am wondering why it feels so edgy and not-smooth-at-all… I always thought it was the extremely low resolution those things offer, but now i know what makes a huge difference: its the ridiculous exponential mouse acceleration! Luckily i found a System Pane that you can install to set it to a ‘right’ feel:

http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-download