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My iOS 5.1 minimal iPhone theme

I’d been putting off upgrading my iPhone to iOS 5.1 because there isn’t an untethered jailbreak for it yet… but after watching out for how often I actually turn my phone off (hardly ever), I decided a “tethered” jailbreak would be good enough for me.

I wanted to give my phone a “minimalist”, “clean” feel, and I think I achieved that rather easily with only a few tweaks:

    

My Diablo 3 site :D

I’ve been wanting to for a while, and I’ve finally setup a Diablo 3 site :D

It doesn’t have a fancy name, or domain, but the content should be good – keep an eye on it if you’re interested.

Diablo 3 – Chatting in Color and Chat Icons

UPDATE: Since writing this blog post Blizzard have disabled the below functionality (icons+colours)

Diablo 3, like World of Warcraft, allows the use of colors in general chat. You can use some pre-defined color names, eg: {c_red}text{/c_red} (to type in red), but you can also enter aRGB values like so:

{c:FFFF00FF}PINK!!! PINK!!! PINK!!! {/c}
{c:FFFF8C00}DARK ORANGE!!! DARK ORANGE!!! DARK ORANGE!!!{/c}
{c:FFD2B48C}TAN!!! TAN!!! TAN!!!{/c}
{c:FF000000}BLACK!!! BLACK!!! BLACK!!! {/c}

Producing:

Hating on NedBank’s “Social Community Management Center Launch” ad

NedBank just released a new advert, showing off how they’re going to engage with their clients socially on the net. Not a bad idea, but the advert is such a load of far fetched crap I just have to wonder a few things (considering SOME of us that use the internet actually know a thing or two about it):

Firstly, some l33t code they show us:

Which, if I read it properly, is something like this:

Thoughts on Diablo 3 (beta) classes

These are some of my thoughts on the difference Diablo 3 classes. I’m not a serious gamer, and this isn’t an attempt at theory crafting or suggesting that any of the classes are imbalanced. Item drops are random, and can make a huge difference to the damage your character does as well as it’s survivability – in my playing I used what items dropped (that I could equip), so these comparisons aren’t entirely “fair” in that regard, but I still think my points are valid. It’s also worth mentioning that I didn’t try leveling up my characters as much as possible in each area, nor did I loot every chest I found etc, so my characters were (all) weaker and less equipped than I’d imagine most players to be… so do keep this in mind when reading my thoughts below, I just wanted to make sure my characters had to work for their kills, and see what the experience would be like.

1. Demon Hunter:
• best (least annoying) male voice so far, looks pretty cool, and who doesn’t like the idea of dual-wielding crossbows
• felt a bit weak at the start of the game, got a lot stronger/easier as the game progressed and I leveled up
• personally not fond of having to keep running away from enemies (so they can’t hit me) while shooting them
• Rapid Fire works best if you hold down the key/mouse-button to use it, rather than single casting it (silly me) – does a fairly good job of taking down big mobs or groups of them
• Skeleton King battle felt relatively easy – the Chakram took care of the skeletons he summoned, and being ranged kept me out of (most of) his attacks

Diablo Lore + Diablo 2 Postmortem

Diablo 3 is due out this year, possibly even next month, and I for one am looking forward to it! I play a lot of World of Warcraft, mainly working the Auction House and making gold, and Diablo 3 is going to have a “real money” Auction House. It probably wont make me rich, but it’s always nice if your hobby generates some income ;)

Back on topic, there’s a great Gamasutra article titled “Postmortem: Blizzard’s Diablo II” which gives you an inside look in to the development that went in to Diablo 2 and lessons learned from Diablo 1, etc – some interesting stuff.

Next up are three great YouTube videos by “Force Strategy Gaming“, covering the Diablo Lore leading up to Diablo 3, a great way to catchup before the releases:

Part 1 – Pre-Diablo:

Twitter Avatar Image Hackery

Twitter does something I consider to be poor security-wise… not renaming, or removing EXIF information from, uploaded avatar images. There are a few potential security issues around this, all of which I’ve personally come across:

1. The image might be named with the person’s first and last name – potentially disclosing more information than they intended to in their Twitter profile
2. Many people download their Facebook Profile picture to use on Twitter  – Facebook renames uploaded files to include the Facebook user ID, allowing you to easily find their Facebook profile (as opposed to trying to search on their first and last name)
3. If the original filename is unique enough you can often find other related pictures just by Goolging
4. You can use something like Jeffrey’s Exif viewer to extract EXIF information from the image – often telling you what type of camera/phone the user has

Sure, they’re small things, but for anyone wanting to Social Engineer the target it could certainly help. The frustrating part: it would take only few lines of code for Twitter to prevent this, and it really is (in my opinion) a “best practice” they’re simply not bothering to follow.

SQLite mischief (password stealing) via custom DLL

There’s a (Windows) program I use that stores it’s data in SQLite files… password protected SQLite files… and I’d really like to take a look inside of them. I’ve tried looking for the password as an embedded text string, I’ve tried decompiling the .Net code (with Reflector – but it’s obfuscated), and I’ve tried attaching a debugger and stepping through tons of ASM code, but still haven’t been able to find the password.

During a mild case of insomnia I had another thought on cracking/bypassing SQLite password protection: what if (in the case where the app uses a .dll file, rather than statically linking the library) I just downloaded the SQLite source code, added “logging” of sorts to each of the main functions (“login”, executing queries, etc), compiled it, and replaced the application’s version with mine – the DLL would basically just output the database’s password for me, in plain text, perfect for opening it with something like SQLiteSpy :D

SanDisk 2-in-1 memory card and USB

I might be a bit late to the party, but I’ve just found out about SanDisk’s “2-in1″ memory cards, which I think are awesome. They look and work just like a regular SD card (think digital cameras, etc) but fold half of it down and it reveals a USB adapter, ready to be plugged straight in to your computer:

What’s so great about this, you ask? Well, I’d imagine it’s far easier to keep one of these in your wallet than to carry a flash drive around with you everywhere (and I prefer to keep my keyring as small as possible so I’m not fond of attaching a flash drive to it). It also has a hardware “read only” lock (at least judging by the pictures), so no more “autorun” viruses when plugging in to infected machines, and you could boot an OS off of it and not worry about becoming infected or backdoor’ed (at least not past a reboot) when visting places like Defcon ;)

Selling for $13 from Amazon (for the 2GB), I definitely think I’m going to get myself one!

Scrooge McDuck Did Inception First

There’s an interesting article over at Cracked.com about “5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck“… like how they already did “Inception”, in a comic book.

Check it out: http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html#Title_box