Chimo NgeBlog

Friday, July 8, 2011

This week’s best free PC games

As PC gaming’s apparent shift towards free-to-play continues, PC Gamer let me write about actually famous games like World of Warcraft. Of course, the indie studios still dominate the free games scene – and so they should, if they’re continuing to churn out material of this quality. In addition to Blizzard’s MMO masterpiece, this week we have a trio of splendid games from tiny studios. Read on for the best free PC games of the week…

World of Warcraft Starter Edition

Blizzard. Sign up on the official website.

Is the sun setting on subscription-based WoW?

Some unknown online game called World of Warcraft is now free-to-play. Well, sort of. What you get for your lack of money is time-unlimited game content up to level 20, although there are fairly tight restrictions set in place to limit the fun you can have.

What you don’t get are the auction house, voice chat, mailbox, player-to-player trading and, quite fundamentally, access to guilds. Gold is capped at 10, and trade skills stop at 100.

But what you do get are the first 20 levels of a truly majestic MMO. There’s a reason it’s so popular: it can be phenomenally deep and intricate, but it’s also accessible, friendly, and ultimately forgiving to new players, even those who’ve never picked up an MMO before. Its version of Azeroth is lighthearted, cartoon-like and welcoming, despite the dark things that go on within it. It’s constantly rewarding, too. If you’re not one of the hundreds of billions of people already playing, the Starter Edition is your chance to see why we think World of Warcraft is still the best MMO ever made.

Proun

Joost van Dongen. Grab it from the official website.

It's not like you really have much choice.

In Proun, named after a series of paintings by Russian artist El Lissitzky, you play as a ball travelling very quickly around the outside of a tubular circuit. But there are obstacles. Obstacles which smash your spherical little face in if you don’t have the reaction times of a star-nosed mole. (It’s the creature with the fastest known reaction times on Earth. I looked it up. Yeah, I’m cool.)

It’s a game in which the slowest speed setting is ‘Fast’. It is fast enough. To unlock the higher settings, you’ll have to win championships on the lower ones, which can be quite a challenge. As there are only three tracks (a fourth unlocked if you choose to pay for the game), it can also be a little tedious – but it’s worth pressing onwards just to experience the extraordinary speeds of the more advanced modes.

It looks great, it features some awesome music, and you can get it for absolutely nothing – although there’s a pay-what-you-like option, and the dev does, of course, encourage you to throw in a donation if find yourself having fun. You will.

Mosquito and Cow

Petum. Play it on Kongregate.

That is not what I thought a cow looked like.

This barmy puzzle game sees you taking on the role of a mosquito. Your mission is to suck the blood out of cows. And that’s it.

Of course, cows are smart. Smart enough not to let a pesky mosquito bother them, anyway. They’ll bat you away with their very strange tails if you get too close, ridding you of any opportunity for attack.

Sometimes it’s as easy as stumbling upon a cow who’s asleep. But most of the time you’ll have to hatch dastardly plans, rigging often quite complex traps for the cows to fall into. A pleasant little earthworm guides you through the game with pictorial hints, while the game’s entire aesthetic sits brilliantly between the twee and the obscure. It’s a surreal, silly game, but that’s why I like it.

Luftrauser

Not Vlambeer. Play it on the Vlambeer website.

Keeping the game this simple was a very smart idea.

Increasingly prolific Dutch indie developer Vlambeer and its side-projects are churning out some really top material at the moment. This time, it’s an air combat game that uses its extreme simplicity to its advantage.

You can fly around, and you can shoot. You’ll be attacked by other planes, which you’ve to destroy, but you can also destroy ships and the like. It’s all played on a screen with just a handful of colours on it, and the same tiny passage of music loops throughout.

It works, however, because every single element of the game is so precise. The controls are flawless, that little musical motif gets your head nodding, and the simplicity of its visual style affords clarity to every inch of the game. It’s small but perfectly formed, basically. I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

20110705 Detected Trojan, Worm and Virus Files

gun.exe; systemrs11.sm.sys;
b46683a6b3.sys; 67ce.sys; _006054_.tmp.dll; santa.exe; zmjhpzwe.exe;
xmlproviu.dll; winyyxjdc.exe; wdxdfc.exe; up_pack6i_231.exe; ss81a_323.exe; smart_vr_3.exe;
samjipse.dll; rsjntlnya.dll; sextape.exe; pue2yxyw.dll; prk-mcgvuxs.dll;
pbshell.dll; mrxpu.dll; kbdmacv.dll; junsei.exe; iweluracan.dll; hifefolouz.exe;
hex555.exe; gx00xg.exe; gtswolimw.dll; goo72df.tmpp.exe; gamebario_fmds3.exe;
exwows.exe; expclang.dll; eeqbciwn.exe; dat1a9.tmp.exe; d3dx11_4332.exe; codedoctor.dll;
casinolink.exe; b6232f3a956.exe; acsignext.exe; 39850896.exe; 1ea5.exe;
0.917256052876085.exe; 0.7879699047095916.exe; 0.1637252004117955.exe; _xyxrxg5.dll; psych02.exe; 06648365.exe;
wvnspool.exe; temp40228442.exe; tcpippatcherdll.dll;

Facebook blocks contact-exporting tool

has been blocking a tool intended to let people extract contact information their friends have shared with them, the tool's developer said today--but he's working on a way to evade Facebook's restrictions.

"Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove e-mails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people," warned Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter, a Chrome extension that automates the data extraction process.

The tool lets people save their contacts' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail. That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at Google+, Google's brand-new social network site.

The activity surrounding the export tool spotlights the value of the data contained in social networks. Google believes people should be able to extract information about their contacts and provides tools to let people do so. Facebook, the incumbent power in social networking, provides only a tool to let people extract what they themselves have put into the network. The friend list it provides is a series of names in plain text--no contact information, and not even a link to their Facebook pages to help distinguish John Smith No. 1 from John Smith No. 2.

• Facebook Friend Exporter tool reported that it didn't work, producing only names and the address of their Facebook pages, but not the e-mail address. In addition, Facebook earlier had begun showing addresses as graphics, not text that was easily detected, processed, and copied; Mansour got around this obstacle by extracting the information through the mobile version of Facebook's site.
In a comment on his Google+ page, Mansour had this to say:
This is what happens when your extension becomes famous :sigh: Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field.
No worries, a new version is on the making ... I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don't own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.
Seriously ... more motivation to figure out a different approach.
It's become a cat-and-mouse game. Mansour is working to sidestep Facebook's obstacles.
"New version with a different design is currently deploying," Mansour said. "You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me."
Mansour said that for now, he reverted his tool back to an earlier method involving iFrames.
Facebook didn't respond to request for comment yesterday and didn't immediately respond today.
The tool, though, doesn't look like a good fit with Section 3.2 of Facebook's terms of service, which state, "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."
End runs around Facebook
Mansour isn't the only one working on a way to let people extract this data.
Rafael Laguna, chief executive of e-mail and collaboration software maker Open-Xchange, said in a Google+ post today that his company is working on a similar tool.
"If it works we will release it on our test server immediately," Laguna said. The work is part of the company's SocialOX project that, among other things, is designed to give people centralized control over personal information stored at sites such as Facebook, Xing, and LinkedIn.
Laguna acknowledges that it might be difficult, but believes the fact that the software is installed in many places will hamper blocking efforts.
"Using the FB API's don't get you the email address of your Friends, just name and picture which doesn't really get you far. So we have to "scrape" the email address from the profile page of the mobile app, like Mohamed does. Facebook may block the server but everybody can download their own Open-Xchange server and install it someplace else, this will be hard to impossible to block.
In theory they can [block data availability by detecting behavior indicating an effort to copy it]. If you extend the cat-and-mouse hunt to hundreds of machines on hundreds of different lines it is very hard to track due to timing differences. Of course browsing through all friends is an unusual behavior, so you can block after a certain number of profile page views of one user. Or they can simply hide the email address behind a Captcha [the text-recognition tests used to screen out computers].
Facebook's stance has triggered something of a backlash among those who don't like to see data that's been shared to them be locked up.

Membuka Facebook dengan tampilan Excel

Anda sering menggunakan facebook di kantor tetapi kondisi tidak memungkinkan karena anda di awasi oleh atasan anda?? dalam postingan kali ini akan membahas trik atau Cara Aman facebook-an di kantor atau bagaimana merubah tampilan facebook menjadi excel , jadi anda dikira sedang mengerjakan sesuatu dengan microsoft excel oleh atasan anda, padahal anda sedang asik online.

Adalah situs hardlywork yang dapat diakses melalui www.hardlywork.in yang membuat Cara Aman facebook-an di kantor dengan Merubah Tampilan Facebook menjadi Excel. jadi kelihatan anda seperti sedang bekerja. di dalam website www.hardlywork.in ada nama akun, postingan paling baru yang sama seperti di dinding facebook anda, serta foto dan juga dapat melihat aktivitas orang yang me-like suatu posting

Jadi, semoga trik Cara Aman facebook-an di kantor yang dishare di media online yang Merubah Tampilan Facebook menjadi Excel dengan website www.hardlywork.in dapat membantu menyamarkan aktivitas anda yang sedang ber facebookan ria menjadi kelihatan seperti anda sedang bekerja. jadi lanjut deh maen facebookannya.

Tertarik ??? segera kunjungi websitenya DISINI

Climate Mission 3D app review on your N8

Climate Mission 3D is a free app from the Ovi Store for all Symbian^3 smartphones that allows you to do your bit for the planet while having a little gaming fun at the same time. We’ve been playing it on our Nokia N8, check out our Climate Mission 3D review.

The idea behind the game is that Nokia is giving away 50,000 Euros to good causes and you get to decide where that money goes. By completing missions you earn voting ballot to opt for your favourite charities. It’s an amazing idea and the fact it’s a fun game too only adds to the experience.

Check out the original Climate Mission

The idea is you look around the world for things you can help out with various projects. There are three different types of challenge: Iceberg, Ants and Trees. When you complete a mission you get a silver medal and this lowers the thermometer on the left-hand side of the screen, which tells you how well you’re doing and how close (or far) you are from helping with a sustainable planet.

The Iceberg challenge is the easiest, as you simply need to swipe the screen to get the large iceberg to crash into other ones to join the whole. You can also smash polluted black ice into small pieces for extra rewards.

The Ant game is a little trickier as you need to set a scent trail for the ants to follow, not only to the twigs and food but also back to the nest. You do this by swiping on the screen and while it’s easy, you will find that too many scent markers send the ants off in all sorts of directions, so less-is-more with this game.

The one we couldn’t really get to grips with was the Tree planting, which seems to be about spreading the seeds from trees in the most appropriate way but gathering points seems a little trickier than with the others.

All the games are in 3D, so you can swipe to move around and even pinch the screen with two fingers to zoom in or out. The graphics look pretty good and run smoothly on our test Nokia N8.

Once you’ve played through one of the games you’ll find that you’ve been awarded green ballots, these you can use to vote for which campaigns should get a slice of the money Nokia is putting up. There are six different campaigns running, two for Oxfam, two for WWF and two for IUCN.

Climate Mission 3D a great way to make a difference while sitting on the commute home, or when you have five minutes to spare. It’s free and you can download it from the Nokia Ovi Store right now.

DOWNLOAD: Climate Mission 3D
Size: 25.7MB
Price: Free

Check out our Climate Mission 3D review photo gallery:

Climate Mission 3D app review on your N8

WordPress 3.2 now available for download

Earlier in the day, the official release of WordPress 3.2, codenamed “Gershwin,” was announced via the WordPress.org blog. WordPress 3.2 is the fifteenth (15) major release of the WordPress platform and brings several improvements and enhancements, including: a slightly redesigned Dashboard, back-end improvements that involve dropping support for PHP 4 and IE 6, and the new default theme that is dubbed “Twenty Eleven.”

Also, WordPress 3.2 includes a brand-new full-screen editor when you're writing posts. Everything fades out except for the post content area on the new editor. In addition, WordPress 3.2 drops support for PHP 4, older versions of MySQL, and older web browsers like Internet Explorer 6. Finally, all updates after WordPress 3.2 will only replace files that were modified in the update, instead of completely re-downloading WordPress. This means much faster updates on “all hosting platforms.”

WordPress 3.2 is available for download via your Dashboard or from WordPress.org.

The Apps That Eat Your Wireless Data

If you have a cellphone with a monthly limit on how much data you can use, here are some tips on what types of phone use will gobble up your precious megabytes:

— Streaming video and videoconferencing. The biggest offender. One minute of YouTube-quality video eats up 2 megabytes. If you're on a plan that gives you 200 megabytes per month, you can't even watch Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video once per day. If you're on a 2 gigabyte plan you can, but don't make your iPhone a replacement for a TV. In either case, it's fine to indulge in YouTube and Netflix if you're on Wi-Fi.

— Streaming audio. The second biggest offender, and potentially more serious. While video is something we need to see to enjoy, Internet radio is more of an accompaniment to other activities, such as jogging or doing dishes. That means some people like to keep it on for hours. Audio consumes about a quarter of the data that video does, but 10 minutes a day will break the bank if you're on a 200 megabyte plan. One hour a day of Pandora consumes nearly a gigabyte, which you can afford if you're on a 2-gigabyte plan and don't use other data-hogging apps.

— Photos. If you're a real shutterbug, photos can consume significant amounts of data. Sending and viewing photos both count toward your monthly limit. Posting 10 photos per day eats up most of a 200 megabyte plan. If you're on a 2-gigabyte plan, you probably don't have to worry about photos.

— Maps. Navigation apps consume lots of data when they retrieve map images, up to a megabyte a minute. You're also likely to use them for long periods of time when you're away from Wi-Fi, such as when you're driving. Watch out for these.

— Web surfing. Web pages vary widely in size, so this will depend quite a bit on whether you like to visit graphically rich sites (lots of data) or spare, text-oriented ones (less data). But roughly speaking, ten pages a day will eat up about half of a 200 megabyte plan. Again, those on 2-gigabyte plans don't need to worry much about surfing.

— Facebook. Roughly equivalent to Web surfing. Status updates won't take much data, but sending photos and viewing friends' pictures will.

— Email. Most emails are tiny, in terms of data. Basically, you can send and receive email all you want, as long as they don't have attachments such as photos.

— Twitter. Like email, these short messages don't use much data, but if you follow a lot of people and click on links, usage adds up.

— Weather apps. Small, focused apps that report simple but useful things, such as the weather forecast, save data (and time) compared with looking up the same information on a Web page.

Google Maps 5.7 for Android brings Transit Navigation beta, updated access to directions

Good news, jetsetters -- those of you relying on Google Maps Navigation will now find it even harder to wean yourself off of it. Not like we'd ever recommend that, though. The navigators in Mountain View have just updated Google Maps for Android to v5.7, and while it's just a point update in terms of numbers, there's a healthy chunk of new material here. For starters, there's the addition of added Transit Navigation (Beta), which brings GPS turn-by-turn (or in this case, stop-by-stop) navigation to public transit systems in 400+ cities worldwide. It'll tap into your GPS module to determine your current location, and then alert you when it's time to get off or make a transfer -- downright invaluable in a place where you don't speak the language. After starting your trip with Transit Navigation, you can switch to another app or holster your mobile altogether, as an alert will still pop up in the notification bar (as well as a vibration) when the next stop is coming up. Google doesn't say specifically, but it sure sounds as if it caches things before you head into the tunnel, nixing that whole "underground service" problem.

Moving right along, users will also find improved directional services for driving / walking as well as a streamlined direction acquisition system within a Place page. There's also a couple of new improvements in search suggestions, with the addition of category icons and auto-insertion of places you got directions to into Places. Finally, the addition of the Photo viewer for Place pages should help you better visualize what you're about to walk (or drive, we guess) into. Head on down to the Market link below if you're down to try something fresh, but make sure you're rocking an Android 2.1+ device. Wouldn't want to crush your dreams, G1 owners.

Update: Android Central spotted a huge, huge inclusion to this build: the ability to download maps for offline usage. Check out a video just after the break.

Nokia E6: Symbian Anna Homescreens hands-on

The Nokia E6 has landed and brings with it the Symbian Anna update. One of the first things you notice on this QWERTY smartphone is the three new Homescreen layouts Join us as we check out the Nokia E6 Symbian Anna Homescreens hands-on.

The Nokia E6 differs from previous QWERTY business smartphones by virtue of having a touchscreen display, it also manages to pack in a Full VGA display into its 2.46-inch panel. Due to the compact nature of the display you'll find the Nokia E6 display isn't the same as on the likes of the Nokia N8 or Nokia E7.

Check out our Nokia E6 unboxing review

So much so, it follows the same laid down by the Nokia E71 and Nokia E72. To this end you'll find the clock and date pushed into the left-hand corner with your active profile details placed underneath – on the Nokia N8, for example, you'll find this to the right. Below active profiles is an empty box, which sadly can't presently be utilised for anything.

On the right-hand side of the screen you'll find a similar three banks, with enough space for four apps in each one. You'll find that Nokia defaults this to Messaging, Web, Store and Maps on the main screen, with email options in the bottom box. The middle one is left empty waiting for you to populate it with your own preferences.

Symbian Anna has a neat trick in that you can now preview the screen you're scrolling to, something that was lacking in the previous version. The second and third homescreens follow a similar pattern by offering up the clock and profiles on each page, something you don't have to have on the Nokia E7 or Nokia N8, for example.

The second homescreen is aimed at more personal apps, so you'll find Phone Setup, Photos, Camera and Search along the top, while the option to load your favourite social networking apps. The third screen simply has a music player, waiting for you to fill the rest of the page with your favourite multimedia apps.

The Nokia e6 homescreens make the most of the space available and while they hark back to the older Symbian S60 3rd Edition screen, the addition of touchscreen makes it so much easier to use.

CentOS 6 Now Supported By NetHosting Web Hosting

NetHosting web hosting company, a well known provider of cloud hosting, unmanaged and managed dedicated web servers, VPS server, and shared web hosting services since 1994 year, has recently announced that its lineup of premier hosting products will fully support the newest edition of the well known CentOS operating system, CentOS 6, which is scheduled to make its official launch on the 4 of July 2011.

CentOS is Fedora Linux based distribution that is very popular over different hosting companies as primary operation system. CentOS operationl system has a great community of developers, system and network administrators, and other Linux enthusiasts worldwide. And that’s one of the primary reason why CentOS is so reliable and advanced operation system today.

According to preliminary information from private sources, the new CentOS 6 operating system will have better performance with file system, better multi core cpu support and advanced support of different virtualization technologies. Also CentOS 6 will have improved kernel security protection.

CentOS has numerous advantages over similar projects including: an active and growing user community, quickly rebuilt, tested, and QA’ed errata packages, an extensive mirror network, developers who are contactable and very responsive, multiple free support avenues including IRC Chat, Mailing Lists, Community Forums, a dynamic FAQ. Commercial support is also available via a number of different vendors.

“Because CentOS Linux is an open source system, the 4-th of July, as a celebration of liberty, seems to be an appropriate release date for CentOS version 6,” joked Mr. Lane Livingston, NetHosting’s CEO ans President. “We are glad to provide an operating system that is made freely available to the public through a devoted network of knowledgeable professionals. We understand that kind of dedication here at NetHosting web hosting company.”

Other systems supported by NetHosting’s web hosting products include Fedora, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, DirectAdmin, cPanel, and Windows.

NetHosting web hosting company is the first provider that announced full support for CentOS 6 operational system.

Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 Apps Will Work On Rival Devices

Nokia’s very first Windows Phone Mango device leaked recently, dubbed the “Sea Ray.” The slick handset will be getting some custom apps developed by Nokia, but it’s been reported that those apps won’t be exclusive to the Finnish handset maker. Senior vice president of Developer and Marketplace at Nokia, Marco Argenti, revealed these plans during an interview in London.

Pocket-Lint met with Argenti, who discussed Nokia’s plans to develop several dedicated apps for Windows Phone 7 that will also be available to rival manufacturers, including HTC, Samsung, and LG. This is an interesting move because most handset makers try to create dedicated apps exclusive to their devices to differentiate their products from the competition.

“Every Nokia App will be available on every phone,” said Argenti, although he later acknowledged that some apps will be exclusive to Nokia users for a limited time.

However, the main area that Nokia will be exclusive on is in mapping. Argenti did not go into details, but it does appear that Nokia will be integrating many of the features that users are familiar with in its Ovi Map service. There will be an emphasis on discovery and 3D mapping, all tightly integrated into the OS and pushing Bing Maps down to a secondary option on Nokia phones.