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

    

Here’s how I did it:
(these are all apps/tweaks inside “Cydia”, apart from the wallpaper obviously)

1. FakeCarrier – lets you display text other than your cellular network provider
2. iSlideText – lets you display text other than “Slide to unlock” on the lock screen
3. No Icon Label for iOS5 – removes the lables of icons
4. No Icon Shadows – removes shadows from icons
5. SpotRemover – removes the “Spotlight” screen
6. the wallpaper

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, 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:

{c_magic}text{/c_magic}
{c_inferior}text{/c_inferior}
{c_rare}text{/c_rare}
{c_epic}text{/c_epic}
{c_legendary}text{/c_legendary}
{c_questlog}text{/c_questlog} (orange-ish)
{c_whisper}text{/c_whisper} (pink-ish)
{c_bonus}text{/c_bonus} (blue-ish)

Things get more interesting with the use of some icons:

{icon:lmb}
{icon:rmb}
{icon:bullet}
{icon:audio}
{icon:platinum}
{icon:gold}

For example:

These are simply typed in to the chat window – no hacks, 3rd party apps, or anything like that.

And yes, that is a “platinum” coin icon being used there… possibly a new, higher-value, currency coming in an expansion? We’ll have to wait and see!

(I discovered these through data mining, but I’m sure others either have – or will soon – find them too. Unfortunately that means we can expect highly colorful and creative, but annoying, chat spam)

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

Firstly, some l33t code they show us:

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

BaseClass *baseClassPointer;
delivered d;
baseClassPointer = &d;

baseClassPointer->setLimit(10);
cout << baseClassPointer;

Now I don’t code in C/C++/C# these days, but I’m pretty sure that code is damn near useless… and I’m certain neither Twitter nor your mobile phone use “cout”.

Next up is the ever important Mission Control interface, complete with audio analysis and a nuke icon (lower left) :

It’s a good thing they rely so heavily on GUIs as well, as this operator doesn’t even know where his ASDF/JKL; keys are… he just likes typing numbers:

Despite their nuke-tracking abilities, they have pretty poor stat reporting – sure the graph tells you what day it’s for (2/29/12), but I’d think something a little more specific would be more handy:

Luckily their state-of-the-art systems allow them to interact globally – it’s just unfortunate they’re looking at the wrong continent:

iPads seem to be one of the tools they use, but I can’t help thinking that they’d be able to type faster and get more done with a proper keyboard instead:

Maybe none of the above even matters, because after all:

Never mind solving your problems, and keeping your money safe… your bank has joined the “content creation” game, like every other blog and site in the world – which, you know, is what you pay them to do, right?

(PS so much for not being marketers)
You can watch the advert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxprXzf_zq8

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
2. Witch Doctor:
• not fond of the (male) voice – not sure what I’d expect/prefer instead
• I don’t like the look of the witch doctor… I know it’s part of his character , but his twitching makes me think of an old man, hit masks look silly and mojos look like rubber chickens
• felt quite strong all round, between the poison from the darts (doing damage over time) and Zombie Dogs, multiple mobs were getting damaged with minimal effort
• Summon Zombie Dogs was a real game changer – they obstruct mobs from getting to you, and mobs attack them… so you don’t have to keep running away as much (see Demon Hunter)
• Horrify was also quite handy at keeping mobs away – even worked on some rare mobs and mini-bosses
• ran low on mana fairly often, later in the game  – definitely think mana-regen gear is be needed (admittedly I kept using my Poison Dart spell, rather than a bow)
• Skeleton King battle was also relatively easy – the dogs occupied the mobs and got in his way, I kept back and kept shooting at him
3. Barbarian:
• looks like an oaf, sounds like an oaf, and reminds me of the ogres in Warcraft
• starts off strong – I was very excited when the first few mobs I attacked splatted and went flying, but not so good when surrounded by mobs, even with Cleave it just didn’t help, felt like I was taking damage way too easily (died on two occasions to two Unburieds) – found myself running away from mobs and trying to take them on one at a time
• it seemed like health globes weren’t dropping (maybe I just needed them more than with the other classes?) – taking damage (being melee) while not gaining life is a recipe for disaster… definitely think life gain, or more armor, would be needed
• Leap is a great ability for doing damage to a bunch of mobs, getting away from mobs, or for moving around the map a bit easier (don’t forget you can jump up and down levels)
• got frustrated several times with a mob that would set up out in front of me (especially in a doorway) while I was targeting another mob – my character would just stand there, unable to move toward and attack the targeted, while taking damage from the mob in front of you – something to keep an eye out for :/ (ranged classes would shoot toward the targeted mob, and hit the mob in front of you in the process)
• Skeleton King battle was not fun at all – having to be in melee range meant I was taking all of his attacks while only dishing out my own, plus had the extra skeletons to contend with (which also weren’t dropping health globes!)
4. Wizard:
• quite an annoying “better-than-you” voice – fits his character, just not sure I want to listen to it all game long
• seems to do quite a bit of damage high and low level
• the “Signature” abilities don’t cost mana (see Witch Doctor), which is great
• Shock Pulse (free to cast) and Arcane Orb are great for clearing out passages, or when swamped by mobs – especially when you spam them ;)
• Disintegrate does some serious damage, but is very mana hungry, so will probably need some mana regen for it
• felt much easier to take on multiple (even special) mobs and bosses than with the Barbarian – being ranged gives you a big advantage
• Skeleton King took a little longer than some of the classes, but was easy enough – kill the skeletons with Shock Pulse, and keep your distance from him
5. Monk:
• not as rewarding as the Barbarian when melee’ing mobs
• seems a bit strange to have two swords equipped (to increase your weapon damage), but then run around punching mobs
• Deadly Reach gives you some ranged attack, and generates Spirit
• Cyclone Strike is a nice way of dealing with a bunch of mobs, but costs a lot of Spirit
• Dashing Strike is handy for getting to, or away, from mobs (a bit like Barbarian’s Leap)
• would definitely benefit from passive Spirit gain
• took on groups of mobs (even three Unburieds at once – see Barbarian) quite fine
• Mantras might be useful, but I’m not sure they’re worth a skill slot and having to recast them every 3 mins (or every 7 mins if you spend a passive skill on them)
• Skeleton King wasn’t easy – being melee you still take lots of damage – but having a (mini)ranged attack sure helped!

I thought Monk was going to be my class of choice – being able to handle groups of mobs, attack ranged, have healing spells, and Seven-Sided Strike is awesome but just such a later game skill – but I think I’m most fond of the Demon Hunter or Witch Doctor (only really due to his Zombie Dogs which make things easier).

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2 – Diablo 1:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 3 – Diablo 2:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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

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!

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