I know it has been a while since my World of Warcraft hacking story but I wanted to give everyone an update.  After about a week I had everything restored to my account - the person in the department at Blizzard responsible for account restoration was actually quite friendly and helpful.  The whole experience made me inventory my alts and I decided to start leveling my first character in WoW - a level 35 Druid that has literally been chilling out in Ironforge for about 2 years.

Now that he is out of his cold chill I have been using travel form to its fullest and playing WoW entirely too much.  Since that story was posted I have reached level 65 with my Druid - if you play WoW at all you can figure out how much time that sucked out of my life.

In all serious though it really is a fun game - once you get to 70 the arena is great and I have been having a good time keeping up with various folks in Outland.

In any case - more WoW news as it comes in, but the crisis has been resolved.  I am now using some extreme measures to keep my password safe though - constantly cycling passwords and copying and pasting my password to protect against key-loggers (although I hear some Trojans steal passwords from local memory).  I also use my Macbook Pro for 90% of my WoW play - I know playing on a Mac does not make me totally safe, but I certainly feel a bit safer… if only they would release a key fob or something for ultimate security.  Oh well…

I thought Drew’s comment explaining his purchase and modification of the TiVo HD was thorough enough that I’m publishing it here on its own. My own TiVo HD is currently en route from wherever Amazon was holding it hostage over the weekend; I’ll post my impressions after I get it set up.

Drew says:

I can sing the praises of the very similar TivoHD. A little over a year ago, all Ginna and I had in terms of DVRs was two lifetime equipped ReplayTVs. We got them both for under $200, about a year apart, and at a time when there was no TivoHD or Series3, they were fantastic. Networking and program sharing, component output, hacked with larger hard drives, plus no fees ever was a fantastic feature set. When we got married and had an actual living room for a nice HDTV, I looked at what Charter was offering for HD DVRs and I found the Motorola MOXI box. This piece of hardware was leaps and bounds above the ReplayTV, not just for allowing HD content but also in that it was a cable company box that would allow you to plug in your own USB hard drive to up your show storage. I used a 750GB WD My Book and we were off to the races.

I know I said I would talk about the TivoHD but I had to set it up first. When we moved from Athens to an area where only Comcast offered service, I again evaluated their HD DVR offerings and was completely let down. They wanted to charge more for the HD tier of programming and about the same amount to rent an HD DVR that had no expandability and drastically less HD recording than we were used to. Enter the TivoHD. I began looking for a way to get my storage up to near 100 HD hrs for the least amount of money possible. I had an interesting time getting two working cablecards delivered but when they got here I was in business with dual tuners for recording two HD programs at once, and when they finally found an M card I wasn’t willing to undo what the perfect working setup I had. Luckily the My Book hard drive was a perfect addition to the TivoHD once I opened the cases of each. So now I only pay the Tivo monthly subscription fee which is close to the box rental price from either Comcast or Charter and $1.50 for the second cablecard. The beautiful part about using TivoHD at least with Comcast is that they send over most of the HD channels unencrypted for the cablecard to pluck out and deliver in Hi-Def glory—sayonara HD programming package fee.

Now in addition to the cost savings and the additional supported features that Tivo brings to the table, TivoToGo, Online program Scheduling, etc., we genuinely love the interface. Ginna had become accustomed to the ReplayTV and MOXI interfaces and could navigate them just fine, but the layout for Tivo is much more user friendly and she liked it best of all systems the first time she tried it.

I talked to Garrett about installing the larger hard drive and certainly if maintaining a fully intact warranty is what you’re after than the Series 3 might be the way to go for its external-non-warranty-busting expandability. I wasn’t interested in going that route for a few reasons. 1) I wanted to use my existing hardware and luckily enough the My Book Hard drive was a SATA drive inside a USB enclosure, take it out it fits the TivoHD, leave it in, and it still can’t plug into the Series3, 2) like the ReplayTV, the Xbox, a Mio GPS, my three Linksys WRTs running DD-WRT firmware, or any other piece of electronic technology I own, if it can be hacked to add more useful functionality, and I am capable of doing it, then I will in fact do it. 3) The Tivo Community forums mentioned that while Tivo will still know that you opened your box after the hack, that if you have problems and reinstall the original drive, you can still get access to technical support. While I hope I never have to do that, I was perfectly willing to take my chances to create the best DVR I’ve ever seen, packed with storage, features, and the most usable interface out there.

That said, I highly recommend the TivoHD to anyone out there currently running a cable provider’s stock box. You will lose nothing and have everything to gain, particularly if you can get out of paying the programming fee to you provider and make use of the free HD content they provide to cablecard users.

Thanks for the free content, Drew! Your check’s in the mail.

Other Tivo Tidbits:

• The best deal for any HD TiVo at the moment seems to be the Refurb TiVo HD from tivo.com for $199 shipped with 1-year contract. (via Gizmodo)
• If you’ve earned any TiVo Rewards points that you have yet to spend or need to claim points on any referrals you’ve made, make sure and do it soon! TiVo is killing the program as of next month. I just spent half of my remaining points on a Glo Remote so that I can pretend my new TiVo HD is a S3.
• Lifetime subscriptions are still available to any current TiVo subscriber who activates a new HD TiVo on their account. Though I would qualify for this, the $399 is far too steep to justify the benefits of not paying month-to-month. Is there anyone out there who thinks this is four hundred bucks well-spent? When you consider that I had my refurb Series 2 boxes for just over two years, the ~$500 I’ve spent on TiVo Service Fees for both of them still beats the $600 I would have spent on lifetime, even before you consider the complicated TVM implications. The only variable is whether or not I would have reaped additional benefits when selling the used S2 boxes on eBay. I currently don’t plan to sell them because they’re only worth about 60 bucks each and my last eBay TiVo sale went very poorly. Had they carried lifetime subscriptions, I suppose that would have pushed them up into eBay-worthy territory.

HD-DVD is dead. Yet again, my strategy of waiting it out seems to have been vindicated. I’m still not interested in a Blu-Ray player, but if a movie or a deal were compelling enough, I now feel that I could pull the trigger on HD movies without locking myself into a potential dud. I’ll admit that the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 was a compelling, almost tantalizing option, but I couldn’t escape the fear that when I finally bought it, I’d get burned a month later like this guy did.

This strategy has played out well in the past. For example, when everyone else was buying DVD burners for $300 that locked them in to DVD-R or DVD+R technology, I waited until a decent drive could be had for nearly nothing that would burn both formats.

In the case of LCD monitors, I felt like I waited forever to upgrade my 20″ CRT, and as a result, instead of the $600 I almost spent back in 2002, I upgraded to a nice 17″ Dell Ultrasharp in 2004 for $150. (Thanks, Drew!)

I even waited quite some time to get a decent digital camera because I just wasn’t happy with the offerings. I remember Scott mocking me relentlessly on vacation in 2005 because I still carried this clunker from 2001 after (seemingly) everyone else had upgraded to more pocketable, sexy cameras. Scott, I forgive you. That camera did seem pretty giant and ugly by that point.

Other items that proved to be smarter buys in their second or third generations (even though I lusted for them immediately upon release):

• My iPods (2G, 3G, 5G, and 2G Shuffle)
• 2004 Altima (had been redesigned in 2002)
• My upconverting DVD player

So is this hesitant attitude reflective of reasoned consumerism, or am I just a penny-pincher? Well, my brown-bag lunch might give you a hint, but I like to think that a good part of it is just being a wise consumer. I’ve saved quite a bit of money and enjoyed the fruits of the extensive R&D that comes with later models of gadgets, while only enduring mild bouts of envy over my friends’ latest and greatest purchases.

Counterexamples

In the interest of fairness, I’ll admit that I didn’t have the same level-headed patience regarding these products:

• iPhone - I told myself I was going to wait for the second-generation model so that they could work the kinks out of it, but after a month of loudly wondering to my wife whether it was worth it, she went ahead and surprised me with one. I would have probably caved anyway. I’ve been very happy with my iPhone, purchased after the price drop, and Apple hasn’t made me regret it with quality issues or tantalizing new models …yet.
• S1 Tivo - Yes, I got a nearly first-gen Series 1 Tivo in 2001, with 20GB of space instead of 12GB constituting the “nearly” part of the equation. But Tivo–really Philips and Sony at the time– were pretty slow to improve on the feature set of their devices. The biggest upgrades the Series 2 offered, more disk space and network connectivity, were both available to even casual hardware hackers like me from the moment I got my S1.
• Xbox 360 - Essentially got mine at launch (December 2005). Yes, a RROD sidelined me 11 months later for a few weeks, keeping me from beating Gears of War until after most of my friends had stopped playing it. Had I waited 18 months or so on the console, I would have gotten one that was far less likely to suffer from quality control issues. But I also wouldn’t have been able to play a whole mess of games, including Gears, CoD2, GRAW, and yes, even Dead Rising. When you’re limited to content that becomes less relevant by the month, there’s more of a downside to waiting patiently. But those HD-DVD movies I passed on will still be available in Blu-Ray when I eventually buy a player, and if I had wanted to own certain movies for $25 in 2007, I’m sure I’ll still want to own them in 2009.

I want to close this post with some words from a fantastic, roiling screed written a year ago by Joel Johnson, former writer for Consumerist and Gizmodo:

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. […]

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don’t need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn’t do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

• Wii Shows Up At Oscars
  While the A-list audience was laughing, do you think they were thinking about the fact that the video game industry makes nearly double what the movie industry does? (And growing!)
  (tags: oscars gaming wii)

So there’s this writer at The Times Online (British Times, not New York) who seems to be the latest graduate of The Kevin McCullough School of Irresponsible Pseudo-Journalism. The gist of her latest article is that many adult men are basically grown-up babies, unable to emerge from their youth because of their silly predilection for their most childish of habits: video games.

I know, it’s 2008 on the internet and I shouldn’t even deign to respond to attention whores like this writer. I understand that if we feed the troll, her goal is achieved. I just can’t let gems like these go unanswered…

At my college evening class last week, two intelligent, thirtysomething suited guys – solicitors or managers to judge from their e-mail addresses – were talking about their new Xbox 360s and what transcendent joy was to be had from them. I eavesdropped more attentively. Apparently, in Gears of War, the smallest details of the largest battles were crystal clear, in widescreen! Surely they were discussing their children’s computer games? Xboxes are toys, after all.

As are DVD players, computers, and board games, right? Surely, this woman has seen grown men playing chess in a park, and didn’t remark to herself that they were silly for playing with toys.

This reeks of the same naivete that puts the anachronistic notion in many people’s heads that fans of animated programming or comic books are stuck in their childhood because OhmyGodyoulikecartoonsandcartoonsareforkids! Um, no, there are whole realms of animation and comics that are specifically designed for adult consumption, not to mention graphic novels. Certainly, advertisers have been paying attention to this marketplace for quite some time, seeing as how they actually know how to do the research.

But wait–this writer did the research, too! She just ignored it.

Worried, I went unto Google and retrieved this trend for you: Nielsen Media Research surveyed American men aged 18 to 34 and found 48 per cent of them had used a games console recently, and on average, it was for 2 hours 43 minutes per day. Yes, half of not-so-young men spend nearly three hours a day gaming.

Kate, my dear, if that worries you, I beg you not to look up the statistics on hours spent watching TV.

Yes, there are plenty of adult gamers and no, we don’t appreciate being marginalized a la Fox News. Video games did $8 billion more in business than movies did in 2007 in the US. Note to journalists: If you don’t take gamers seriously, we’ll return the favor.

[The Dark Ages - Times Online]

(cross-posted to garrettvonk.com)

photo credit: GodsMoon

As a brief disclaimer this post was written about two months ago and I never had the time to finalize it - given the Series3 units are now on close out I figured I should post this in draft condition or it would be fairly useless by the time I posted it a few weeks from now…

After many issues with my Comcast Motorola DVR 3416 I decided to take the plunge and get a Tivo Series3 HD. The real clincher for me was the ability to purchase lifetime for $400 since I already have a DVR810H-S with lifetime.

Anyway, I ordered it a few weeks ago on Amazon for about $559 (unfortunately it costs more now and is seemingly unavailable). There is a $200 rebate as well so it works out to be about $110 more than the Tivo HDso at the end of the day it was a pretty good deal. The big differences is really a 250gb drive in the Series3 versus the 160gb in the HD, a nicer remote, THX certification, nice OLED screen, Crestron integration, TiVo Togo transfers are about twice as fast as the HD, and the lack of M-Cable Card support (the HD has this). The thing I really got me was the lack of M-card support, which may be available in a future software update. It didn’t matter much since Comcast didn’t have the M-Cards or know what they even were… If you are wondering the M-Cards let you view up to 6 HD streams with a single cable card - a regular cable card only views 1 stream so you need two of them for dual tuner support.

So, I got the Series3 from Amazon in a fairly mangled outer box, but the TiVo itself was ok. Then I ran out and got 2 cable cards - pretty easy at the local Comcast office. Supposedly they activated the cards while I was there but I had to call to activate them after I got them in the TiVo.

Setup took a while since I constantly connected to get the latest software updates, but once it was done everything worked great. The only problem I have had in about a month has been one of the cable cards being deactivated which was fixed by a quick call to Comcast.

In terms of the features I won’t get into too many specifics except that it works just like any other dual tuner TiVo but records in HD. Some of the menus are not fully HD, but still look great. The TiVo Togo works great as well - even for HD recordings. As far as Multi-room Viewing, you just cannot transfer HD shows to a non-HD TiVo. It would be great if it transcoded the HD shows to a Series2, but it would be a bit much to expect that. To be honest, the only stand-out difference (aside from HD) on the Series3 I noticed was the ability to change the aspect ratio on the TiVo rather than the TV itself - this way you get to see the fast-forward and guide overlays without a problem when zooming, etc.

To say the Series3 is just as good as a Series2 with HD is really a compliment though. When the Series3 first came out it was lacking quite a few features. It really makes me a little thankful I waited this long to take the Series3 plunge. Plus, I just heard that SDV is going to be supported via an upcoming USB dongle on the Series3 and HD so that is great news as well.

If you hate your cable company’s DVR and have some cash to burn, the Series3 (or HD) is really worth it. Having been a TiVo user for a while before using Comcast’s DVR I was really happy to have TiVo back on my main TV. Now, if Comcast can get its own DVR with TiVo out sometime in the next decade there will really be a tough choice to be made. I suspect that advanced features like MRV and TiVo Togo will be missing on the Comcast TiVo though so I will probably be happy with my Series3 choice for a while… until the Series4 comes out at least…

• GTA IV: Reinventing a World
  This teaser got me excited for GTA IV all over again. Can’t wait!
  (tags: gaming gta-iv games article)

• Progress: Intel Doubles Capacity of Phase-Change Memory, the Next Step After Flash
  This sounds pretty interesting - It would be great to have computers with combined memory for fast access and long term storage if they can make it affordable…
  (tags: Memory)

I experimented quite a bit in college. No, not like that. I’m talking about PC games. Even though I had an Xbox, a PSOne, a Gamecube, and a Dreamcast, and despite the fact that my PC could never be considered even a mediocre gaming rig, I was probably more of a PC gamer at that time than at any point before or after my four years at school. One of my favorites was Max Payne.  It was probably the still-relatively-novel bullet time gameplay mechanic, but I tore through this game like a basket of calamari.

And apparently they’re making a movie…

Today, the word on the street is that the film should start shooting March 2nd in Toronto, and is scheduled to wrap up on May 9th. John Moore is set to direct the story of a New York cop whose wife and baby are killed by thugs high on a designer drug called Valkyr. Devastated, the cop joins the Drug Enforcement Agency and goes undercover with the mob to find the source of the drug. Framed for the murder of his partner and hunted down by both the mob and the police, he is forced to wage a one-man war against crime.

Gaming Today: News for Gamers | ‘Max Payne’ to Begin Filming Soon

Mark Wahlberg?  This is going to be A) nothing like the game and B) terrible.  Oh wait, I guess that’s pretty much every video game movie.

Via Boing Boing