Flour Power

It was the happiest day of my Facebook-life when the possibility to hide applications from the news stream was added.

Since then I've been able to get rid of all the crap app/quiz/game that kept showing up on the screen. And a lot of it was from a single game - FarmVille. If only I had been shown this video, I might have been convinced to play it...

And while you're at it, check out the parody commercial for MafiaWars. This one I do play, but only due to my OCD ("obsessive completion disorder"), because I'm sick of the damn thing. The enjoyment is as big as the video shows...

The geek in me just gave a few good laughs at these screen shots of what Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Chewie, C-3PO and other Star Wars characters would write on their Facebook walls.

And if you haven't seen it before, here's another Facebook parody - The Facebook of Genesis.

I've been wanting to write about this tool, but for the sake of credibility, I didn't want to write a review before actually using it. And today I did.

Ninite calls itself an "easy PC setup and multiple app installer. And that's exactly what it is. It couldn't be any simpler, I guess. The website is just a list of the best Windows applications divided in several categories. You just select the ones you want, download a customized installer and run it. The selection is very good, and all the essentials are there, like Firefox and Chrome, uTorrent, VLC, ImgBurn, 7-Zip, Notepad++, etc.

The installer doesn't ask you any annoying installer questions. It just downloads the stuff you requested and installs it. Simple.

To make things even faster, it fires up several downloads at once, so that when when program finishes installing, it is very likely that the next one on the list has already been downloaded and ready to go.

But not everything is good. In my test the installer froze while installing Dropbox. I'm guessing that was because Dropbox requires, in the end of the install process, a login to the service, and the automated wizard couldn't deal with that. It would be nice to have a way to skip the current app and install the remaining ones (I had to cancel the whole thing and go to the site again for the ones that didn't install in the first run). Also, it's not possible to specify an installation folder other than the default (typically C:/Windows/Program Files), although this might be a necessary evil to make the whole thing as simple as possible.

In short, it's a great little tool that makes the task of setting up a new computer much, much easier.

Just like they did on Samuel Morse's birthday and Louis Braille's birthday, today, on the 57th birthday of the Barcode, Google presented its logo as vertical black bars on a white background.

Now if, for some bizarre reason, you want to generate a similar Barcode for your name, just head over to morovia.com, and select "Code 128" as the Barcode Format. This is how my name looks like:

And what good would an encoder be without a decoder? Use ZXing.org to uncover the hidden messages in barcodes.

I've always been a big fan of Monopoly. It was probably the board game I played the most as a kid, before the video games arrived in force. A couple of years ago I even tried a computer version of it, but it was just boring playing versus the computer (I don't think the multiplayer capabilities were very good). It was like the board version, minus the pleasure of holding all that fake money and laughing on my friends' face when I won.

So you can imagine my excitement when, earlier today, I found out that Hasbro would release a version of the game using Google Maps as the playing board and therefore create a worldwide Monopoly game - Monopoly City Streets. WOW!

The details were very sketchy, but Hasbro has since posted on the official blog some information on how the game was created, to answer some of the speculation around it:

So, did Google build it? From the reports you would think so but the application was built by Hasbro's UK digital agency Tribal DDB.

Have Google helped us? Of course, they've been great and have really gotten behind the project with all the support we needed.

Who else has helped us? The project was made possible by using the street data from OpenStreetMap, combined with Google Maps, API tastic!

They have also released a FAQ, to satisfy the more impatient while the game doesn't start.

Other sites report some more details:

Players start the free game with three million Monopoly dollars and can buy Downing Street for $231,000, while Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where the White House stands, costs $2 million.

Rent is paid automatically each day, from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

The game will start on the 9th of September 2009 and will go on until the 31st of January 2010.

This sounds like a brilliant idea, and I can't wait to rush in and buy the streets from the Portuguese boardgame version.

Not happy with implementing the "3 strikes" method of getting rid of customers alleged pirates announced earlier this year, Eircom has decided to bend over a bit more and go along with the music industry's demands to block access to The Pirate Bay.

Starting today, September 1st 2009, Eircom customers can no longer access The Pirate Bay and instead, are presented with this message (body in plain text for clarity):

On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website ThePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.

eircom recognises the legitimate rights of the owners of copyrighted material and believes that individuals who share or download copyrighted material without the authorisation or the permission of the copyright owner are acting illegally.

The Order further provides that should the PirateBay website content be legitimatised in the future then eircom has liberty to apply to the Court to have the Order vacated and access to the PirateBay website enabled.

eircom in compliance with the Order has agreed that access to the website the PirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs from the eircom network will be blocked indefinitely from the 1st September 2009.

eircom would like to reassure customers that:

* eircom will not monitor customer’s activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.
* eircom will not provide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies.

So if you're in Ireland and your ISP is Eircom, you won't be getting in The Pirate Bay easily (you can always use a proxy). And because I don't like to see people being denied their share of downloadable stuff, check out this nice post with 25 Great Pirate Bay Alternatives. Although I really doubt that anyone that is tech-savvy enough to know about and use The Pirate Bay will have a hard time finding alternatives...

The rest of you need not worry, at least for now, because the other Irish ISPs ignored the threats.

(via TorrentFreak)

Here's a warning to those who think that just because they have a Mac there's no way a virus will get into their operating system. One of the newest tricks that malware-distributing websites are using is to detect which operating system you are running and then serve you a version of the virus specific for that OS.

One such example was demonstrated by Symantec a few days ago, where blogs offering free streaming online copies of movies that were just released in the theaters try to lure users into installing a fake video plug-in, which is in fact a Trojan:

Interestingly enough, the malicious site to which users are being redirected is serving malware for Windows as well as for Mac OS. This is based on the user-agent string of the browser. For a Windows browser agent it delivers a Trojan intended for the Windows operating system, and for a Mac OS browser agent it delivers a Trojan for the Mac operating system. The following image shows the same URL delivering a Win32 Executable for IE8, as well as a .dmg file for Safari4 when the user agent for the Mac OS is used.

So watch out, Mac-heads! You might need to start learning on how to avoid these traps like us PC users have been doing for a while, because your godly operating systems might not be enough...

(via The Inquisitr)

The Google car is roaming around Portugal to add imagery to the Google Maps' Street View. Needless to say, some unusual situations have been captured, and some people with too much time on their hands found them. And I'm glad they did, otherwise we wouldn't have access to this:

And the best one so far features a monument by a famous Portuguese Sculptor - João Cutileiro - that makes the whole thing even funnier (it would be even better if the fountain was on...):

This last one was already removed from Google Maps...

Looking forward to getting some more of these

It's a bit of an oldie, but I just saw it now, and thought is was worth sharing. The Facebook of Genesis was created by the guys at College Humor and it's a very funny take at re-telling the story of creation:

This is just one of many (very funny) fake Facebook Pages. Others include Hitler's Facebook, Satan's Facebook and Jesus Facebook. Once again, I'm glad some people have too much free time to come up with these.

(via Mashable)

As if World of Warcraft wasn't enough, I got myself dragged into another game that has the potential to waste quite a bit of my very precious time - Fantasy Premier League.

The rules are quite simple. You are given a budget of €100 million to create a team of 15 players (11 + 4 substitutes) from the English Premier League. Every week, each player is awarded points depending on his performance that week. The "manager" with the most points in the end of gameweek 40 is the winner.

As simple as it this may seem, there are a lot of variables at work here, which turn it into quite a complex, and thus intriguing, game. For starters, €100 million may seem like a lot, but after Lampard, Gerrard (the obvious choices), a big gunner and a good defender, it's easy to realise that the remaining euros must be spent carefully. Then there's the matter of looking at the fixtures. Having the poor defender (the one chosen as filler, because the budget was already low) playing against one of the big four is not desirable, just like having the substitute forward/midfielder against a solid defense is not likely to bring any points from goals and assists. Add the injuries, transfers, the variations in players' value and, of course, the unpredictability of football (of the "soccer" kind, because I don't know a lot about the other one), and this Fantasy Premier League promises to be quite fun.

With the help I've been getting from people that know a lot more about this than myself at the FISO forum, here's the team I've built so far:

This will probably still suffer some changes before the season start on Sunday, so any suggestions are welcome.

I'm guessing there will be a lot of talk about this little game at work, and some of it might transpire here to the blog. I apologise in advance to the girls that read it (all 3 of them), as well as to those who happen to stumble upon this...

Apart from that, who wants to start a private league?