Back to flock and playing gmod god

So today I was sitting at my computer thinking something along the lines of "hay opera [web browser] is really fast but not very compatible and Firefox with all the add ons I need is really slow, humm I wonder what happened with flock" so I proceeded to download a new version of flock, it has all the basics speed, looks, etc, anyway if you want to try it out there is a link it the blogs sidebar. But I have already written enough about flock so now on to gmod, gmod is short for garry's mod and it is a sandbox mod for half-life 2 or the source engine, now a while ago I bought it for $25 and it has since become my favorite game by far. as I do with every game I own I modded it but I downloaded so many mods that they broke the game twice and some of them don't even work with newer versions of the game, I decided to learn how to make my on mods and am on the track to get something really cool/useful out of it all. I will try to blog my progress but I will make no promises.

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Look at this atrosity

according to the EFF web page AT&T has been secretly assisting the NSA with its relentless wiretapping efforts but this time it is not wiretapping, spying on your phone lines but rather internet tapping, spying on your internet usage. Read the article here http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_08.php#005407 but for you lazy ones the entire blog entry follows

August 15, 2007

AT&T Must Face Justice for Illegal Spying

NSA Surveillance Comes Under Fire Today in Appeals Court Battle

San Francisco - In a packed San Francisco courtroom today, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals to allow AT&T customers to continue to fight against
illegal spying on their telephone and Internet communications.

EFF is representing the plaintiffs in Hepting v. AT&T, a
class-action lawsuit brought by AT&T customers accusing the giant
telco of violating their rights by illegally assisting the National
Security Agency in domestic surveillance. The U.S. government is
fighting to get the class-action lawsuit thrown out of court,
contending that the litigation jeopardizes state secrets.

"The courts cannot permit the government to evade responsibility for
unconstitutional activities with thin claims of 'state secrets.'
Without judicial review, there is no way to stop abuses of power," said
EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "The courts are well equipped to protect
state secrets while determining whether the spying is illegal and if
so, to put a stop to it."

"In trying to shut down this case, the government is hoping to avoid
accountability for spying on millions of AT&T customers," said EFF
Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Our system of checks and balances is
supposed to thwart abuses of power. The White House is trying to wiggle
out of those checks by taking the courts out of the picture."

Also Wednesday, the court heard arguments on the future of
Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush, a case alleging that the
federal agents illegally wiretapped calls between the charity and its
lawyers. The government also wants this case dismissed on state secrets
grounds.

"The President is trying to hide behind a veil of false secrecy to
evade a judicial determination that he broke the law. We're asking the
court to see through that ploy," said Jon B. Eisenberg of Eisenberg and
Hancock, LLP, attorney for the Al-Haramain plaintiffs.

C-SPAN television recorded today's hearing and said it would air later in the day.

The appeals court did not make a ruling Wednesday. The decision will be released at a later date.

Contacts:

Rebecca Jeschke

Media Coordinator

Electronic Frontier Foundation

press@eff.org

Jon B. Eisenberg

Attorney for the Al-Haramain plaintiffs

Eisenberg and Hancock, LLP

jon@eandhlaw.com

Ashlee Albies

Attorney for the Al-Haramain plaintiffs

ashlee@albieslaw.com

Posted at 04:49 PM

---

August 09, 2007

Appeals Court Battle Over NSA Surveillance on August 15

Government Aims to Block Accountability for Illegal Spying on Americans

San Francisco - In the wake of Congress approving a dramatic
expansion of U.S. warrantless wiretapping powers, the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals will hear arguments on the future of two critical
lawsuits over illegal surveillance of Americans. The hearing is set for
August 15, at 2 p.m. in San Francisco.

The government is fighting to get the cases thrown out of court,
contending that the litigation jeopardizes state secrets. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the plaintiffs in
Hepting v. AT&T, which accuses the telecom giant of collaborating
with the National Security Agency (NSA) in illegal electronic
surveillance of millions of AT&T's customers. The court will also
hear the arguments on the future of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v.
Bush, a case alleging that the government illegally wiretapped calls
between the charity and its lawyers.

"At issue here is whether the courts have any meaningful role to
play in protecting Americans' privacy from Executive branch abuses of
its surveillance powers," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "If the
claim of 'state secrets' is allowed to shut down litigation, then the
courts will never be able to exercise their Constitutional duty to hold
the White House accountable for illegal and even unconstitutional
abuses of power."

The court has scheduled one hour of arguments for Hepting v.
AT&T, and 40 minutes for Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush.
Because of the large number of attendees expected at Wednesday's
hearing, the court will provide an overflow room with audio and video
of the proceedings for spectators who cannot get a seat in the
courtroom itself.

For more information about attending the hearing, contact press@eff.org.

WHAT:

Hepting v. AT&T

Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush

WHEN:

2 p.m.

Wednesday, August 15

WHERE:

9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

Courtroom 1, 3rd Floor

95 Seventh Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

For more on EFF's case against AT&T:

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att

Contacts:

Rebecca Jeschke

Media Coordinator

Electronic Frontier Foundation

press@eff.org

Cindy Cohn

Legal Director

Electronic Frontier Foundation

cindy@eff.org

Lisa Jaskol

Attorney for the Al-Haramain plaintiffs

ljaskol@earthlink.net

Posted at 10:36 AM

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the muses of a tierd windoze user

Today windows barfed up the famous blue screed of death no less that 3 times and besides that there were at least 2 times ware it just skipped the blue screen and went right to rebooting. I have to say that all this is making me kind of reconsider my habbit to use my windoze computer so much more that my old power pc mac with a Nvidia go video card, maybe it is time to pull out the ol' power book and star life anew with a mac.

Halo 2 vista on XP

A company called falling leaf systems is working on an API that lets windows XP users run windows vista only games. This is a fact that I am very very excited about because it means I can play halo 2 on my xp maciene. I used to have vista but I uninstalled it because of the reasons listen in my "to hell with vista" post. When late july comes around I will be glad to fork whatever price they want for this software as long that price is less vista home premium.

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ClipMarks

So after I installed a new system I do what any other sane person would do and I install Firefox plugins like theres no tomorrow. One particular plugin that I game across in called clipmarks and its purpose is to let you create and share little scrap books of text movies and pictures that you find on the web. I think it is fun I I really recommend it.

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Stating the truth

This is so the truth happiness might just require ignotence

clipped from russellsteapot.com Russell's Teapot clipped from alanocu.backpackit.com

back to firefox

Today I think I may go back to Firefox and it might just stay that way for a while. I have said this before but now that I see that Scribe Fire is a good way to blog from my browser and that there are Firefox extensions out there that let me sink my bookmarks with delicious FF may be here to stay. Besides just being able to do everything that flock could do(that I cared about) FF can also support more extensions. Your befuddled blogger over and out.

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to hell with vista

Today I wiped my hard disk and replaced vista with XP. At first I thought that vista was great, ya know it auto installed my drivers and that sort of thing. Then I found that many of my programs would not work in vista and when I bought Halo 2 for vista and it did not work on vista, that was the straw that broke the mammal's back. I think that if M$ wants to make a successful OS they need to th make it backward compatible, at least for the most part. I might buy vista later but that will be only when it's really necessary. Now I am blogging from Linux and installing XP on the computer next to me. Your disappointed blogger over and out.



Technorati Tags: vista, windows, disappointed

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The coolest little desktop aps

labs :: wpf :: thirteen23

This seems to pride itself on good design and it is right to do so, their applications look beautiful and they are functional. The program nostalgia is the greatest for exploring flicker and Harmony is like walking in 3D through your music library.

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Nvidia loves hex

So I was playing command and conquer 3 with the latest Nvidia 7900 drivers and just after the EA logo the game quits to the desktop and gives me a error that is full of memory addresses and the like. Well I am grateful for the driver rollback feature and I know that on windows the sort of problem would have given me the BSOD but really Nvidia, step up the quality control. It is also worth men chining that I am not the only one.

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On Vista an back with flock

I got the trial of vista and I intend to buy it soon enough, You may have noticed that I have taken a break from blogging and it is because I was actually using Internet explorer of a time. Anyway now I have gone back to flock and I think that this may bring about a new spurt of posts.

technorati tags:Vista, Flock

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Finally, net TV

Joost™

Joost is a service founded by the creators of the world famous skype and it let you watch tv complete with ads over the Internet. Now you should know that I have been waiting and searching for this for as long as I can remember because I can not get cable and I think it will give broadcasters hundreds of possibilities for extra content like special features (which is built into the service) and letting the customer like you and me choose what show we want to watch. They already have a IRC (Internet relay chat) and time and a bunch of other things called widgets, one of my favorites is the news ticker. I think that joost may become the next Skype While joost is still in beta they have just opened up the beta program so that people can invite 999 people instead of 2. Although getting invited is the fastest way to get joost you can also apply for the beta from the joost website and a couple month later you may or may not get in (you probably will).

Now whenever I think of joost I somehow also think of zudio which is made by the people who make the azureus bit torrent client and is for downloading huge high definition video content. Zudio has much less actual content that you would actually want to watch but it does have a good bit of really good looking ads it could be said that it is just another approach to net TV. The thing that is really cool about zudio is that it is also a bit torrent client so you can use it to break the Internet (aka download stuff that requires bit torrent) and it is written in java which means it is cross platform.

I think I would use joost for watching net TV and zudio when I wanted to see really beautiful video.

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Untitled

EA Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars - Community

The command and conquer 3 world builder is finally out and this is the page where you can download it. It is still not the easiest program to master but it is better than the last one for generals which was build in debug mode. This release means that we may start to see some custom maps, now all we need is the mod SDK. Until the time the SDK comes out lets get to makin maps.

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A free phone

OpenMoko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This phone that looks much like Apples iPhone is open source and while the iPhone gets the award for the best looking of the bunch this phone called the Neo1973 get the award for the most promising phone among hackers at least. The neo runs Linux under the hood and uses the X.Org server Matchbox for its GUI. Personally I would but this phone before the iPhone but that does not mean that I do not want the iPhone and I still think that the iphone is really cool. That is all.

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aaaaaa it's the matrix

United States Patent: 7197459

Yes I did say the matrix. It appears that amazon has filed a patent for a hybrid machine/human computing arrangement, not in plain English this means a system of problem solving where humans and computers would work together to solve a problem the humans doing what they are good at and the computers doing what they are good at. I think that this is a great idea that has millions of amazing uses but that it also seems a little scary, after all how hard is it to relate this to movies like iRobot to the Matrix. Because of all the similarities to movies I think that the general public may have a hard time seeing how wonderful this technology is.

    Your next question may be, why do we need this hybrid stuff. My first answer is because the word hybrid sounds cool. My second, and more legitimate answer is because computers are really good at some things and humans are extremely good at others. For example when was the last time that you searched a list of trillions of things and came out with just the thing that you were looking for in less that 15 seconds, I will answer that for you, never. But then again when was the last time your computer wrote a 3 page paper for you again the answer is never.

    Now amazon has started a service called the mechanical turk that actually uses the ideas that they first patented, the site is here. What you do is you go onto the site and get a HIT which is something that is really hard for computers but really easy for us humans. When you have completed the task successfully you will that get paid a bit of money. So it seems that this could bring a new era of artificial artificial intelligence.

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A patch a day takes troubles away

At least that is the case with EA LA and command and conquer, according to my calculations it has been 4 days since the arrived in stores and guess what number patch we have, 1.04!! Now it for some reason my calculations are off that feel free to tell me that I can not count.

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Untitled

Songbirdnest.com | Songbird Media Player

I am blogging this for two reasons, first because the website has a great atmosphere and second because I like the program. Anyway by now you are probable wondering what the hell this program is, well it is a media player that lets you brows the web within it and if there is music on the page that you have up you can ether stream it or download it. Better yet the thing is based of the mozilla code base so the web browsing speeds are NOT reeelley slow. The thing is still in beta but then again when it gets out of beta it wont be cutting (or should I say bleeding(no just kidding  bleeding edge is enlightenment 2(it is to right?(OMG this is allot of parenthesis(maybe I should not be writing this late))))) edge anymore.

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FREE CAD

How to Use 'freeCAD'?

Yep it is free but I have no need for cad as welll as I prfer 3d modleing with blender for my desine needs. In any case if someone wants to do a review like thing for this that would be great comment and I can add links.

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aaaaaaaa yess the office 07 trial

The NEW 2007 Microsoft Office system is here. Get it now!

Now Because I am such a cheep (broke) student I never actually buy office I just live of the trials and when they are over I usually need to reinstall anyway. This is why I am so glad that the office 07 trial is out, let the painfully long downloads begin.

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someone wants to rebuild the net from scratch

Slashdot | Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch

according to this article Stanford University researchers are aiming to rebuild the Internet from scratch. I think that although this may benefit stuff like security their cause is hopeless because of the fact that new holes will arise and the switch from old to new could be and likely will be really cumbersome. This also seems like the kind of thing that will be tried and failed thousands of times before anyone realizes that they should be working on what we already have.

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I wonder

What cellphone did Steve Jobs use before he had an iPhone? - Engadget

We all want to know, by the way this is not a story but rather just a link

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finally real multipalyer on the wii

Engadget

The multi player console market has long been dominated by the Xbox lineup but the DS made an impressive jump into it with games like metroid hunters. The DS's multi player ability is what happened when Nintendo partnered with game spy, this partnership is making its way onto the wii, the first game to support this will be Pokémon Battle Revolution but we will probably see some real big name FPS games start supporting it soon. Now we wait for command and conquer on the wii.

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Zudeo

Zudio is what I view as a transition between you tube and hd you tube. It is a service that is provided by the same people that make the bit torrent torrent client Azureus and is included withe version 3.0 of that client. It uses bit torrent to get the movies to your computer which is blocked by some ISPs because that method of file sharing is commonly used to pirate stuff and is not the best choice if ya have a quota on your net usage. The quality of the vids is amazing just something that you have to experience yourself.

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windows had a fit

Around 5 days ago I got my mainboard back after sending it in for repairs, now when I really started to use my computer again I noticed that if I moved stuff to the desktop it would be locked, as in I could not move copy or open the thing(I do not remember the files being read only). the next day I found that the my documents folder was acting the same way and decided that maybe the other bits of my HD were fine but that my system needed a reinstall anyway.

So to start the reinstall i popped in a flash drive containing boot n nuke which consequently gave me an error 20% of the way through wiping(I think my SATA RAID was causing problems). after giving up wiping I popped in my windows automated installation DVD(love the auto install and if ya reinstall windows a lot I really recommend it) and waited. When I came back an hour later the system was ready to use. Now all I have to do is tweak the thing.

This is a story of windows bugging out and of the fast recovery that the auto install DVD gave me.

technorati tags:error, reinstall, windows, evil, annoing, auto

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Wii interface for your PC!!

WiiLi.org WiiFronted Beta - current version: 0.030b

While browsing for wii hacks (of which I found nothing worth the trouble of buying a mod chip) I found a little app for a windows PC that is a front end for the PC that looks like the wii's front end. After just looking at it I saw that it had lots of work still to be done. First it was low res and the icons looks bad. Second the little channel channel boxes are too skinny. And third it is really hard to actually use the computer. Although it is kinda pointless it is cool but I think that if someone did this with a program like desktop x it would come out much better and would probably be quicker and easer to make.

I say that if you really want the wii experience that get a wii but if you like a challenge that go and help with the coding.

I rate it

usefulness:0

Coolness:7

total:4

technorati tags:wii, fun, open

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MY mainbord just died

I have an asus a8n sli deluxe motherboard and a long time ago on of the pci x16 slots started to work erratically, then a week or so ago the whole thing died. The first thing that I did was look for a loose connection then I completely rebuilt the thing, it still did not work. My next step was to get the homebuilt looked at by a pro. That pro said that it was not the CPU as I had thought but that it was the mainbord (a much cheaper component the the CPU) and that it would have to be replaced. I did some research and found that the thing will be returnable for the next 2 years and I am now working to get the thing returned.

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The Not so Free Internet

Since the year 2000 the Internet has started to host some of the most successful multimedia companies in our time, an examples being iTunes. When you download a song from iTunes or any other site like this that content has something call DRM or digital rights management, for iTunes this means that you can't play it on more that 5 computers and you cant play it on anything but iTunes and iPod. Now you may be thinking that this is fine after all musicians should own their music, but this also means that if you suddenly buy say a 64bit computer where iTunes doesn't work you will not be able to play your music.
The Internet was made so that anybody could share content with the world, this is where DRM becomes a problem, it undermines the ability for people to share content like music. This may sound like sharing content is pirating but say one of your friends really loves a song and you want to listen to the whole song and see if you like it, then if you do you go and buy and album of that person.
My final opinion is that this issue is still evolving and with time we will see if the Internets content is owned by the people or by the business.

Cool flash web site

This is the site for a flash design company and as you can guess it has some nice flash. it really reminds me of a whole system.

The site is located here

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rrrrrr flock will not post on my mac and that is really what made me want to start blogging agan anyways. I do remember that it was hard to get the PC to work but I think that this is near impossible. O wait never mind I got it I had to enter my email for my kogin name.

Command and conquer

I have most probably already said that this is an cool game but now I own the command and conquer first decade. I mainly bought this for cnc tiberum sun and that is one of the best games in there, but I am reallying enjoying red alert too. The thing that really struck me about the older games is the full motion video and how well polished they all are. When I first set eyes upon the first GDI cut seen I was like, is this really a cut seen or is it a movie. The truth is that it is both, is turns out that Westwood (the game development company) hired actors for the cut scenes and in CnC 3 they have them again. As for how polished the game is they have really made the two sides have really different tactics and the game looks really goon (for the time).

    Now I do not want to make it sound like there are no bad parts to this game because there are some. The first is that the AI gets harder as you make the game speed faster, and the other one is that if your construction yard is destroyed you are dead. The game also has that annoying problem of ion storms but I think that adds more strategy for some advanced players.

    My rating out of 10 for this collection is

cost: 10

Fun: 9.8

graphics: 8

overall: 9.5

[any comments on spelling would be welcom]

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Orbiter

Orbiter - A free space flight simulator

as the link says this is a SPACE flight sim. I will warn you now that this is very hard and I can not get into orbit without autopilot. The thing that I find fun is downloading ad-ons, some of which make the game much easer to play. The best place to go for ad-ons is most definitely the orbit hanger, some mods that I recommend an the PEG autopilot to get ya in orbit, the firefly jumbo for the coolest ship in the verse, the delta glider the most advanced ship in the verse, and more to come in later posts.

Anyway here are some screens just for fun (if they are copy righted someone comment and they will be then down right away)

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line rider

InXile - The Official Home of Line Rider

mmmmmmk many of you probably already knew about this site but o well. This is a "toy" but many call it a game, the object is to have fun by drawing tracks for a stick figure to sled on. Although this may seem kinda dumb it is actually really fun. There are videos in the movie section that show really sweet tracks.

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CnC mod site

Command & Conquer Files - C&C Generals Index

I love CnC generals and have made CnC Den my main mod site. The thing that I have found is that this is better. The reason that I think this is that this site has different mods so a mod here would not be at the den and one at the den might not be here. If by any chance you do not have CnC generals I highly recommend it.

technorati tags:CnC, games, mods, modding

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Blender

Blender is a app that I have had on my system for years and have been trying to learn for just as long. I have found a good tut but I had just kept giveing up on it, I have not even gotten through the modeling part. This all changed a couple days ago (I hope) when I discovered a file called modeling.blend in the recent documents menu of blender. This file turned out to be the product of what I had done previously. I took that and found the place where I had stopped on the tut and began working from there. when I started I had a person with no feet and no hat now he has both. The URL is http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

technorati tags:moddling, 3D, Blender, Wiki, books, art, fun, computer, tech

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for the spiders

Technorati Profile

why the iPhone will sell

The iPhone released by apple on Tuesday the 9 fixes some of the major problems in not only smart phones but all phones. Until around a week before Christmas (when it got stolen) I had a RAZOR, this was a great phone but there was one problem, it was very complicated. For example contacts were hard to enter and it took me a read or two of the manual to figure out how to use the speaker phone. I also tried to use the hold function but I could not figure out how to switch between people. The RAZOR is also supposed to let you sink your contacts but I needed a mac (lucky for me I have one) and it had to use blue tooth and I had to re-pair the thing every time it got near another phone.

    Anyway you get the idea, the iPhone just looks so easy to use and there seems to be such good integration with the network which means things that the phones software should be able to do (like voice mail) are done by the phones software. And the thing can also switch to a wi-fi network for the Internet when available instead of using EDGE or EV-DO all the time. The one question I have is how much will using the mobile web cost.

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a new chat

HomePage in Peekko Chat

Have any of you herd of chatsum? It you are not familiar withe it it is a plugin for firefox (flock'd has it to for flock here) that lets you chat withe the people on the same page as you. I love this idea but when I bring up the sidebar it takes a really long time to load because the sidebar is a little web page. Now this is not a link to chatsum but rather one to Peekko which uses irc so you do not have to sign up and it is very fast. This sounds like a grate plugin but it never can connect for me. If any of you have or will try it tell me if it works. mmmkaaay

As for how I found this little tool it was from another blog and I thought that I may give that blog credit the blog is here http://killeroid.wordpress.com/

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the lil flick

Greased Lightbox » shifting pixel

this is light box, all it is a script for greese monkey that lets you do whats seen above for sights liker fliker. it is one of the more useful scripts and I highly recomend it.

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PLAY LOST NOW

lost is a game that shows how 7 mil people interact. the goal is to invite as many people as possible, there is a 500 euro prize but it is mostally just fun.

join now at www.lost.eu/14362

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How bout a mod?

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=73876&page=1&pp=15

This is a page I found of the relic forms, the point is to teach basic HW2 modding bu making the "Keepers" a playable race. Some of you that play HW2 may have the EX mod which does the same thing, this is better after all the mother ship for the keepers is this

instead of that carrier with worts in EX.

When I did this mod there were some problems with the spelling of stuff, the main thing is that you have to be careful with CAPS because some of the examples have them while the file or folder that those examples are referring to does not. The other problem was that HardED would keep crashing to solve this I looked on the rest of the thread and found a link to this which I haven't tried yet but it is worth a try.

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