Another reason not to buy Sony Play Stations

"Sometime in 2000, Sony patented a process that would 'verify a disc as legitimate, register the disc to that particular game console, then wipe out verification data so the disc would be rendered unreadable in other PlayStations'."

So drop $50 on a game and be unable to take it to a party or friend's house without hauling your console? That sucks. Makes me glad that I can't play thumb-twitchers.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/12/193225

Heh. Just received a trojan "You have received a post card!" email

Yahoo's spam filter identified it as spam and put it in the spam folder. The bolded part of the message was a link that pointed to the following url:

http://82.205.192.28/~carla/postcard.gif.exe

I guess this n00b hasn't gotten the word that for the most part this type of executable doesn't get through anymore, it's SO 90's. I don't think I know anyone who spells quite that bad, so unlikely that I'd click on it. BTW, the IP address resolves to NEDA Telecommunications in Afghanistan. ;-)

Hello friend !
You have just received a postcard from someone who cares about you!

This is a part of the message:
"Hy there! It has been a long time since I haven't heared about you!
I've just found out about this service from Claire, a friend of mine who also told me that..."
If you'd like to see the rest of the message click here to receive your animated postcard!

===================
Thank you for using www.yourpostcard.com 's services !!!
Please take this opportunity to let your friends hear about us by sending them a postcard from our collection !

Spare Brains Games shirts

I wanted to get three t-shirts made for the convention in two weeks. Last night I stayed up late working on the designs because I knew I'd be near the shirt place today. So I stop at the shirt place. Turns out that to do three shirts, they'd have to do five screens at $20 a shot if I wanted multiple colors. If I didn't want multi-colors, they'd still have to do four. Add to this the cost of the shirts and the fact that the shirts will have stuff on both sides, and I'm looking at probably $150+.

Now, if I were setting these shirts up to be able to ultimately sell them, i.e. if I had a chance of recouping that set-up fee for the screens, that would be one thing. But I'm not. These are pretty much one-shot shirts.

So I stopped at Walmart and bought some Avery t-shirt transfer stuff and a bunch of t-shirts, I'll experiment over the weekend and see if I can do iron-on transfers that will be good enough.

*sigh*

Thinking about spam filters

It occurred to me that you could run emails through a spell check, and if more than, say, 20-40% of the words fail, flag it as spam. Or perhaps flag it as stupid, I dunno. :-)

ARGH! It looks like my laptop's hard drive is failing!

Locked up two or three times today, making noise, I think it's doomed. But I bought a service contract for it (one of the few things that I'll buy one on), so I should be able to get a new one installed. The question is, timing is getting kinda tight on me going to Phoenix for Con Games, can it be done before I go? I'm betting the answer is no.

Fortunately it's up right now, I'm burning a CD of my recently changed stuff.