Tomorrow is Free RPG Day once again, a day to let your nerd flag fly by paying your friendly local gaming store a visit to see what they have in stock. If they're worth the Cheetos and Mountain Dew on their gaming tables they'll have some nifty new games for you to take home for the asking (it is Free RPG Day, after all). If you're lucky you'll be able to try them in the store with your closest friends (or people you don't even know, which can be just as fun). Or maybe you heard about tomorrow well in …
One of the cornerstones of the Internet is making information available to whomever wants it for low or no cost. Case in point, the TCP/IP stack within the operating system you're now running to read this post was probably originally posted to the Internet better than twenty years ago under the BSD license. In fact, if you dig around inside the "About.." panes of Windows chances are you'll find that little block of text (at least, everything up to Windows 2000 had it, it's been a couple of years). The fan cultures that many of us partake of grew …
Yesterday afternoon while backstroking around in the Olympic-sized swimming pool of RSS feeds that is my Google Reader account I stumbled across a link in the blog Cyberpunk Review to an album recorded and released by Colin Timothy Gagnon called Cyberpunk. Feeling curious because their recommendations are more hit than miss, I downloaded the album from Colin's website (it's free, though if you enjoy it there is a Paypal donation link to show Colin some love), decompressed it into my .mp3 collection, and gave it a listen this afternoon. If you're expecting industrial music or something along the lines of …
It could be said that DNS is one of the services which underpins the Internet by translating hostnames (like drwho.virtadpt.net) into the IP addresses which are actually used under the hood (such as 66.93.100.253). Unless you remember the IP addresses of the sites you usually visit or you have them hardcoded on your system, if your local DNS isn't available there isn't a whole lot that you can do online. Scattered around the Net are publically available DNSes that you can configure your machine to use in the event that something goes wrong with your …
Every morning I pop open Google News in one of my browser tabs and mainline the top 100 stories to get a sense for what’s happening in the world and what general sort of day I’m in for. Last week the Associated Press announced that it would be modifying the content it makes available on the Net in such a way that they can (hypothetically) control how it can be read, where it can be read, and who can read it. They say they want to be able to monitor how the content they make available to everyone …
Wireless net.access is not yet ubiquitous, but it's pretty common and becoming moreso every day for a variety of reasons. Net.access is definitely in enough demand that a lot of places sell wireless access to whomever is willing to pay for it. If you're lucky, you'll get a good price on an hourly rate or a daypass, but if you're not you'll get reamed on the price of daily access (I remember one hotel I stayed at in Florida that demanded $30us per day for 802.11b access). This has angered some people to the point at which …
It's just about the middle of January, and just now has winter come to DC. I don't want to say that it's cold or anything but we've gone from wearing t-shirts and shorts outside to frost on the windows and multiple layers of clothing because the temperature has been below freezing for much of the day. As if that weren't enough, the wind's been cold enough to feel like it's cutting right through you, and the pressure waves of cold air coming off of the Metro trains when they arrive at the station are enough to deaden one's sense of …
