“iPodLounge”:http://gallery.ipodlounge.com/ipod/displayimage.php?album=20&pos=15 has some pics of the iPod Shuffle in real life already, including pics of it compared to the original and Mini iPods. Needless to say, _holy crap_ that thing is small.

“GameShout”:http://www.gameshout.com/news/012005/article277.htm is reporting that Sony executive Howard Stringer has confirmed the price of the Sony PSP to be less than $200 at CES. He didn’t give an exact price, but that is close enough to the DS price to be some serious competition, especially because it can play movies and music as well.

Not that it matters. You’ll all just get free ones anyway from psp4free.com whenever it launches.

As many of you have probably gathered, World of Warcraft is simply one of the best games ever and most of the FG staff are totally absorbed by it at the moment.

If you play as well, check out these interface mods for the game. Thanks to some forward-thinking on Blizzard’s part, you can easily modify pretty much the entire “2D” interface of the game to your liking, whether you are using the PC or Mac version of the game.

Because of the immense amount of spells, abilities, and weapons available in World of Warcraft, it can be a challenge to manage them all and have them all accessible at any given time. This is where many of these interface mods come in handy, by letting you have 1 or more extra bars of shortcuts to your spells, items, and abilities. They have lots of other features as well, which I’ve outlined below. Just keep reading.
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After a few days of having a teaser on their site, Suprnova’s Sloncek did an interview with NovaStream.org about a new P2P app and network called eXeem that will be released for download in a couple of weeks. It’s being developed by a new, unnamed company, which asked Sloncek to be a representative for them.

It will be Windows only, with no Mac or Linux versions planned at this time. It will be ad supported, and not just banner ads either. It will be full of adware, most of which you can opt out of, according to Sloncek. Some of the less intrusive ones will be required for the application to function though.

Apparently eXeem is based off of BitTorrent, but is different enough that it can’t be called a BitTorrent client, and I assume it won’t be compatible with BitTorrents either.

The application will be downloadable from “eXeem.com”:http://www.exeem.com/ in a couple of weeks.

I’m a bit disappointed by this announcement myself… Mainly because of the lack of a Mac or Linux version and the ad-supported nature of it. That’s why I stopped using Kazaa years ago. And not with most of the Torrent sites apparently shutting down, it’s getting pretty hard to find a good torrent resource. I guess I’ll just have to start recording my favorite TV shows or something. How 1990’s.

After you get past the “beginner” stage with Firefox, try this “power-user” trick to make it download pages faster by allowing multiple connections so it can download more than one file at a time. It’s only useful for broadband users, so if you’re still on dial-up you can just skip this one for now.

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

More Firefox Tips

• Firefox Optimization Tips
• Fix Firefox Slowdowns
• A Beginner’s Guide to Firefox
• Duplicating your Firefox Profile
• Recently Closed Tabs Feature on Firefox 2
• When Downloads stop Working

The author of the “Whitehart”:https://addons.update.mozilla.org/themes/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows&id=364 Firefox theme has written a Beginner’s Guide to Firefox which covers everything from what exactly Firefox is, to what themes and extensions are and where to find help if you have questions. Send it around to your non-tech savvy friends after you convince them to switch, so they’ll have a point of reference for their questions.

Blizzard has posted a “coming soon” page on their community site to let players know what to expect in the coming months for the game. Mostly it’s more high-level quests and some class tweaks right now, but there are a few interesting things like “meeting stones” to help you find a party to take on a more difficult dungeon which should be pretty handy. There will also eventually be Player vs. Player battlegrounds, and Hero classes for characters that have reached the level 60 limit and would like the continue to improve their character.

But one tweak should make fellow FG editor JC happy, the druid class will receive a boost to their armor while in cat and bear form.

JC and I both play on the Eonar server, usually late at night. My character is Munix, and his is Lauran, if you want to say hello some time. So far we have been unsuccessful in convincing Scrivs to buy the game. He keeps saying something about “work” and “addictive” and “girls” and things like that.

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The largest and best BitTorrent site on the ‘net, “Suprnova.org”:http://www.suprnova.org/ has been shut down.

From the site:

As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up! But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it. We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links. We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.

This is a big loss for the Bittorrent community, but I expect they are shutting down the site to avoid being “raided”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/14/finnish_police_raid_bittorrent_site/print.html or have other legal action taken against them.

For a list of alternative sites, check out this “list”:http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=545. (At the time I wrote this, their server was down, hopefully it will be back up soon.)

*Edit:* “TorrentBits.com”:http://torrentbits.org/ has also been shut down without reason.

First the Nintendo DS was tunneled with XLink: Kai, and now the PSP is as well. The PSP is reportedly even easier to tunnel because it uses the recognized standards of wireless networking, rather than a closed, proprietary system like Nintendo’s. Great news for all you PSP fans out there… Now you just have to wait until you can actually buy one!

XLink Kai, the people that brought online play to the Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2, have already partially got internet tunneling working for the Nintendo DS. It’s in the very beginning stages at the moment so it’s not something that just anyone can do, but it looks like it will be possible, even if Nintendo never implements online play themselves.

After teasing players for a few days, Valve has “announced”:http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&id=364 the availability of a Deathmatch add-on for Half-Life 2. It is only available via Steam, so of course all of the servers are completely slammed at the moment. The download features 2 levels, and all players start with a gravity gun, pistol, SMG, and grenades, and you can pick up the rest of the weapons throughout the levels.

Valve also released the Half-Life 2 SDK, to help all of the inevitable mods get under way.

There is also a level design contest, where the winner will take home $5,000, along with 2 runner-up prizes of $3,000.

The reviews are finally starting to pour in for World of Warcraft. “Metacritic”:http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/worldofwarcraft/ is reporting an average of 94% so far. Most notably, “Gamespot”:http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/review.html?q=1&tag=gs_hp_flashtop_bg gave the game a 95%, with the following sentence to sum it up:

This is a stunning achievement that will make you feel privileged to be a game player.

The 95% rating is higher than Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Far Cry, GTA San Andreas and basically every other blockbuster game out this year. It’s the highest rating a PC game has received in the last 2 years at Gamespot, and the second highest rating ever given for a PC game at the site. Second only to Blizzard’s other game, Diablo.

If that isn’t enough to convince you that this game is not to be missed, then I don’t know what would. I was planning on skipping it myself because of a lack of time to devote to the game, but the Gamespot and other reviews mention over and over that the game is great, no matter how much time you can invest. There is even a system in place so that if you don’t play for a few days, you will receive a boost in your experience gains the next time you play. The longer you are “resting”, the longer your experience boost will last, which lets you catch up to the players that were playing during the time you were taking a break.

Plus the fact that it works on Macs or PCs out of the box, means you have no excuses for not playing this one.

“This”:http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&threadid=1445445&enterthread=y thread over at the Anandtech forums is cataloging all of the G-man sightings in Half Life 2. I only remember seeing him a few times as I played through… Perhaps I was distracted by all of the freakin’ bullets and rockets flying at my head.

Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol. Blog Torrent is easy to install on your website: we don’t use MySQL so installation is as easy as uploading a folder to your web host, and all administration happens in the web interface. Blog Torrent is easy for users: even if they don’t know what bittorrent is, they get an installer that downloads the file they want. But most of all, Blog Torrent makes publishing with bittorrent painless. Just click “upload”, pick a file, and you’re done. This is our preview release and it has a lot of bugs and rough edges… but we’re smoothing them out for the next version, so stay tuned.

That says it all pretty much… It’s a more simple way to download and upload torrents. I’ve never taken the time to figure out how to submit something to Suprnova or any other sites, because it just looks too complicated to be worth it. Looks like this will make it really easy to share files, even without knowing what a tracker is and torrent files, and all of that business. Plus it will allow for more specialized torrent sites to pop-up, and make it harder to shut down a few key-sites like Suprnova and immediately kill the majority of the system.

They are desperately in need of a Mac version of the desktop side of the system, so if you are a Mac developer with some free time, help them out.

Funniest site I’ve seen in a while… They continually point to “research” and “fact” that video games are a detriment to society, yet there isn’t a single link to any of this “research” or any of these “fact-proving studies”.

Fact: Hardcore gaming not only leads to video game addiction and abrupt lifestyle changes, but to crime and felony as well. Hardcore gamers never buy computer video games. Instead, downloading illegally copied video games or “warez” is the only method acceptable by the underground. Buying a legit copy is grounds for abandonment by community groups. You may not be buying your child videogames, but they can illegally obtain them off the internet.

(emphasis mine)

Hahahaha. They make it sound like video game “communities” are a cult that will brainwash your children and turn them into mindless felons!

These “mothers” may be taken a little more seriously if they backed up some of their “facts” with some sort of irrefutable evidence. And didn’t exaggerate and make blanket statements about the gaming “lifestyle”. Hey ladies, I’ve been playing video games since I was 5 years old, and have never committed a crime or killed anyone! I socialize perfectly well with others and actually work out in the public! Am I some sort of fluke, then? Since ALL gamers are criminals and social out-casts? Puh-leeze.

Someone needs to form S. P. A. M. W. T. M. T. O. T. H. “Sane People Against Mothers With Too Much Time On Their Hands”.

“via”:http://grumpygamer.com/

*edit*: Confirming suspicions… “hoax”:http://a.parsons.edu/~dyoo/2002-3/interactivity/mavav/. And a really old one at that… :)

Many people are probably sick of these free “something” deals, but people are only talking about them because they work! I’ve received a free 20gb iPod, as have 2 of the other FG authors. I just submitted my free photo iPod account for approval yesterday, so I should be receiving that soon as well.

And now, you can get a “free Nintendo DS”:http://www.ds4free.com/default.aspx?r=91871. You only have to sign up 4 people, or five if you want a free game with the system. And if you choose the game, you yourself also have to sign up for 2 offers, in addition to the 5 that you get from other people. Probably not worth it to try for the game, in my opinion, since they only cost $30 at the store.

The Nintendo DS just came out yesterday, and is already selling out at most stores. There were over 2 million pre-orders, and they can’t even make enough to keep up with demand. So not only will you get a DS with this offer, you’ll get it free!
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