Just a quick news brief, to explain the beaver above....... Well.. Ummm. I was looking at the Canadian World Domination site, which is in my opinion one of the funniest sites on the Internet as mankind knows it... and I liked their beaver. He just looks so pissed off. So I shamelessly stole him. Yoink!! (That's also what I mean by the news headline, not what you were thinking, you sicko.)

While we're on the subject of World Domination (A topic btw which is near and dear to my own little heart!), let's talk about Ducks. Yeah, ducks. Sure they're cute, but just like a Lawyer in a clown suit, you've just got to wonder what they're up to. Ducktopia knows, and they've posted the plans for Duck World Domination!

Still playing Starship Troopers... Not a bad game at all.... So far. :) Some of the bugs (Like the bigass fire breathing tanker bugs) are very impressive little creatures. Regretably, screenshots don't seem to work in this game.. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

I didn't mention it in the news yet, and I'm not sure how many people have noticed it. Just to the right of the big FRAGtopia logo up top is a little picture. Click on it. Therein resides our new screenshots section. Check it out! :)

Looks like console owners in the UK are just as stupid as the ones here who lined up for 2 weeks in the snow to get a look at a Praystation 2. $2,500 CDN is what these fools are paying for the damned thigs. *sigh* Always knew there was something wrong with those European types. Now I know.

In other console news, Rune's buddies over at Sega have recieved a good kick in the groin from their yearly losses. Ouch. Poor, pathetic Dreamcast owners. :) Altho, from everything I've heard the PS2 isn't exactly as cool as the hype makes it out to be.... Ahh well. Gotta get a PC!

I generally think that PC Gamer=PC Lamer (Tho they are getting MUCH better now that they have a few staffers from the much lameted PCXL onboard) However, they do have some crappy looking game they're giving away.... If you're interested.... Which I'm not...... Hmmmmm... Uhhhhh........... Doo dee doo......

Oh yeah, almost forgot. HAH!

Was cruising around this morning, can't even remember what for.. (Probably something evil, you know me..) When I stumbled across this site.... Check out their Tshirts. Truly people after my vile, sarcastic little heart.

Last thing for this morning (It's 12:30, really too early or late to be posting news..) Have you ever wondered what a Redneck Haunting is like? Wonder no longer, just follow the yellow link road.

When it's this late at night, I start looking at things like this, and ROFLMAOing..... And the more I watch it, the funnier it gets. Frightening, and it's time for bed I think.

Got a copy of the Retail boxed Counter-Strike today. Looks sweet! Includes a pile of other mods, like Firearms & Revelations. Nice box, some sweet mods. Bascically it's all the really good user made Half Life stuff, for about $40-$50 Canadian. 6 games for the price of one. Very nice.

More later.

Marauder out.

Friday is good! In most cases it's the working people's last day of work, the schooling peoples last day of school and...it means only a few more days until I start my course for A+ certification training over at the learning enterprise in Orangeville. Just because you're not local it doesn't mean you can't take classes there either, they have a broad range of classes they teach online which I think is pretty sweet.

Got an e-mail yesterday with a pretty funny attachment I thought I would share.

For those of you who like to tweak and experiment you may want to check out some of these Shell Enhancements.

If you want to test your connection out give the bandwidth speed test page a try. Here's what my speed is.

Found some neat little utils on zdnet, one that lets you turn your PC into an answering machine, one that lets you use a PC as a complete phone system, one that lets you get CallerID info via email/pager and some other little neat things. I still haven't had a chance to test them but you may want to check it out!

Marauder sent me this link a while back of a cartoon strip that I liked.

Occassionally Marauder has been having problems getting online due to shaw@home's poor service. In times of desperate need you may want to consider one of these crappy "free" isp's that display their banner adds. Dispite the crappy speeds and poor performance on these free services this will at least allow you to get online to check your e-mail, communicate with the worth and do your daily business. (in most cases)

If you have some spare time on your hands and have a sick sense of humour you might find some of the stuff at http://www.newgrounds.com/ amusing. It's filled with flash cartoons and animations. The one I watched today was rather violent and wacky...it's all about pico and the uber kids.

Sorry for the lack of news from me over the last few days guys. Other than my damned cable being a trifle, as my good friend Nolman puts it "Dodgey", I've been working on my personal site almost non-stop in my spare time.

I unearthed some of my truly old artwork, from 1991->1995 and so have been filling the web server with fossilized pixels. Take a look and see what I was up to years ago. :) Hopefully my sense of color coordination has improved over the years. *Shudder* It's amazing how many pics I have sitting around from all those years ago. Totally misspent youth... Ahh well!

Liking Dop's idea of a tweak page. He comes up with more sweet, nifty little things than almost anyone else I know.

Just throwing Starship Troopers on my box to give it a shot. God it takes a VERY long time to install. Very disappointed it didn't turn into a shooter..... Looking forward to a good old fashioned bug hunt, complete with flying limbs and rending of exoskeleton..... From everything I had seen, that's the way it looked it was going. But noooooooo.. It's yet another RTS. Better be good, especially considering that it doesn't seem to have any multiplayer... And we all know how well RTS games without multiplayer do in the real world... Or don't do, rather. Anyhows, I'll have an opinion piece on it soon.

Reading up on the Chivalry mod from Sojourn Development for Tribes. Sweeeeet candy! Looks like a very, very buff mod. TKers get their own special, targetilicious skin....... and if you waste a TKer on your own team, you get double the points you do for eliminating an enemy. Sick of those jerks who CTRL-K just before you kill them? No problem. Kill yourself too many times, you become a "ghost", stuck in observer mode. Sounds like a blast!

Goshwin is apparently in love with this case. :) Nothing like a spoiler and pin striping to increase the framerates I always say!

From Iceman's newly built nVidia rehab center comes a smidge of info on the NV20, which is looking pretty sweet.

Machine, our oft mentioned little TC designing friend just sent me a screenshot of a project he's working on. A game using his own engine, from the ground up. I'd like to see it when it's nearing completion. This guy has a hellovalotta talent, and I honestly think that if he keeps it up he's going to make his mark on the gaming industry in a few years.

Gamespot has a great announcement! Diakatana is now available for sale on the N64! Considering the low expectations that most console gamers seem to have (I mean, hey...... How many times can you have the exact same game on the N64, just changing the characters around? I dunno, but they're still at it.. Hmmmmmmm... 3 years later?) it might actually sell. But then again, if one reads their previews, it might not. :) My faith in console owners is somewhat modified. They're only partial fools.

I was accused of being perpetually cranky the other day in an Email. Just for the record, I'm never cranky, and you can go to hell. :)

HEY! Speaking of console gaming, Retro Studios is looking for programmers to help out with the next Metroid game! Woot! :)

Still trying to find the time to finish up with Pacman....

Welp, I'm off to hack Microsoft and try out Starship Troopers.

Marauder out.

The same dutch hacker who hacked Microsoft before has done it again, even after they applied the patch to their webserver! Apparently he met with Microsoft and had a private tea party too discuss confidential information. Read more on it here.

Just got an e-mail from a chick named Cara who thinks I'm very talented. She likes my artwork and thinks I am "somewhat of a cutie". Just wanted to say thank-you...thank-you very much (Elvis Prestley impersonation voice).

Soon I plan on starting up a section for gaming and system tweaks. I recently posted in irc how I've been playing with the windows registry a lot lately and managed to setup my system so I can dual boot win9x & winNT with the same desktop, startmenu, favourites, e-mail listings, e-mail account settings and all that wonderful stuff. Since I've got so many requests to help people with it, I'll post a tutorial on how to do it soon.

For those of you who get bored with the windows shell (ie:explorer.exe) you may want to checkout litestep. It lets you use any shell and customize the shell however you want. On the other hand, you would probably be better off just switching to an open source OS such as linux.

Ever wondered what it's like to be a cop? Ever wanted one of those nifty police scanners so you can see what's happening in the law enforcement organization? Well...you can! Apbnews.com has live police scanners from many major cities in the US.

*crackle* that's a 10 - 4 Marauder
*crackle* Dopper over and out!

I just got an e-mail from an old buddy named TankAbbot who has been gone to boot camp and hasn't been able to do any online gaming in almost a year. Hopefully he'll be back online with highspeed and a fast comp for tribes2. Just wanted to give him a shout out and welcome him back. :)

As most people know Corel isn't doing too well. Ex-CEO Michael Cowpland, has been arguablly seen as the root of Corels financial problems. There has been many rumours floating around about thier Operating System, Corel Linux. Ironicly enough...with bankruptcy hanging over its head, Corel accepted a $135 million investment from thier OS competitors at Microsoft, which can now require Corel to port the .NET technology to Linux at no cost.

I've heard word many places that the Microsoft giants are aiming to invade Sun Microsystems turf with the release of thier new web strategy called .NET. Information on the .NET platform is limited, but a number of comparisons to the "industry standard, cross-platform, vendor neutral solution" which is Java have already surfaced. Here's a great thrashing of .NET that I found very very amusing. You may hear a lot of opinions on .NET similar to this, “Microsoft is spinning .NET as innovative but what they’re really doing is giving developers an updated set of handcuffs,”. You can read more on it here.

Just found out from Nvidia's website that they're now making a product called "GeForce2 Go", which is the industries first mobile GPU. These badboys will be packaged with toshiba laptops around spring '2001. Portable GEForce2 gooooooood......read up on it in nvidia's news.

Marauders Rune Review appeared on runegame.com recently.

Next FRAGtopia staffers meeting is tonight, 6pm @ VAM Computers. See you there.

I would post more news, but my cable is down again this morning. Note the "again" *sigh*

Hey bite me, monkey boy. :) You're not even using your little bullets I slaved over. (Ex. THIS: ) Hah.

Been doing a lot of work on the site fixing up little things that have been annoying me, trying to make things look a little more universal. I've also finally posted my little write up on the making of Zappy, my computer-in-a-box. (TM) Other new things include the screenshot of the day section, just to the right of the FRAGtopia logo above. Take a look...... Let me know what you think. Got any sweet screenies? Email 'em over to me.

If you are a reader of Penny Arcade (And if you are not, may your Grandmother be raped by Cossacks) then you already know that Tycho hates Folgers. Wow. I went a visited their site..... and now I know that Satan truly has a home on the web. From the pink background, and their slogan (Reach your peak at Folgers) I was initially very happy, suspecting I'd found a great new porn site... But it sadly was not to be.... Instead I found that:

A) Their site reads like Communist Party propaganda, and

B) Anyone who would subject another person to a dark pink background on any web site must be an agent of the Dark One. Argh. Surrender all hope, yea who enter here.

Rune mentioned the new Intel Pentium 4 processors. Hormone sent me this link to a review of the new Dell 1.5 ghz machines using said processor. Hmmmmmmm... Speed. Of course the damned thing is $3,300 USD! Ouchies. Expensive little toy. And it uses that frickin' RDRAM crap. Sigh. Does the evil that dwells at Intel know no rest?

Hehe. The Breast Cancer Society of Canada recently aired this ad to the dismay of hundreds of people with no bloody sense of humor. Frankly, I watched it and much hilarity ensued. Hah! Gotta love a guy with that 'ol entrepreneurial spirit!

Hmmmm. Checking out the Guy Code. Not a bad site, some really good write ups. And even a little section for the ladies. :)) Take a boo.

Messiah, one of the other Teamplay Tribes admins runs himself a little shoutcast server. Actually plays some good tunes from time to time as well. Check him out here.

I am again displeased with Shaw. I am getting constantly cut off from game servers this evening. Also having issues uploading my new, improved and hairier than ever before news post. Not a happy camper. (Oops. Said the "C" word. :) I will eventually have to crush them, as they stand in the way of my world domination tour. But I've changed my mind. This time their deaths will be SLOW and painful. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Anyhows, I can't take it anymore.

Marauder out.

It's just like Marauder to leave me to do the news while he stuffs his face... :-)

PC Shooter has an interview up with a few of the guys from Planet Moon Studios, the original MDK team who are working on Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Give it a read here. This game looks to be great as takes place in a very different environment than most other action games. Basically you have three races competing for domination of a large island along with a huge crazy giant named Kabuto. I've been following this game for a long time and it's made some really impressive leaps in it's development. It originally went from being one of the last glide/voodoo based games in development to having much more detailed textures and 32 bit colour. Take a look at what the game looks like now...the folks at Voodoo Extreme have slapped up a whole bunch of screenshots based upon the latest beta of the game. Check 'em out here and here.

Well it looks like it's Pentium 4 day as just about everybody and his dog is checking it out. Tom's Hardware Guide has a very in-depth writeup about it here. Honestly, I've heard various reports on the Pentium 4 performance which are basically along the lines of "It's not any faster than a Pentium 3" to "the Athlon beats it at lower clockspeeds". It doesn't look like the Pentium 4 provides much of a technological leap in terms of pure brute number-crunching horsepower but it does have other advantages like better compiler optimization, SSE 2 (double precision floating point SIMD), higher cache memory throughput and better scalability for future clockspeeds. All the same though, I think I'll wait on this one until Intel (or AMD) brings out their DDR SDram-based chipsets (or even better QDR!) and some of that 2 Ghz lovin'. Skip all that over-hyped, expensive Rambus memory crap! (hmm... uh oh... maybe I shouldn't have said that.... we don't wanna get sued!...)

Just got back from a road trip with Marauder from dropping off parts at the distributors. On the trip were were discussing many things, one included the new CS models. For you CS players who have been having trouble joining certain servers lately, I just found out why! Apparently the CS community has been split into two. One half playing version 1.0 and the other half playing a hacked version of 1.0 that uses the old 7.1 player models. You can read up on it here.

Apparently Q3 for Dreamcast will eventually allow PC players to face off against dreamcast players via the internet. However this wasn't supposed to be available until the maps are available and distributed to both pc and dc players. Apparently the maps that come shipped with dreamcast Q3 that were meant to be exclusive to DC players have already been been ripped and distributed to PC players illegally. More.

If you found Marauders post about VMWare pretty neat you may be interested in checking out this article about the free software Plex86 project that says it has successfully booted a copy Windows in the linux environment.

For tweakers like me who like a fast booting, clean windows install without extra files everywhere you probably already know about using the command line and creating batch files to automate cleaning up temp files, etc. I just discovered a new trick that lets you automate the tasks with shortcut icons in win2k and winME.

Suck it down dishonest ISP's!!! One of my favourite types of software are ones that monitor your ISP's performance so you have proof that your ISP isn't living up to their claims! I discovered a sweet little piece of software called iowatch that monitors the performance of ISPs' networks, giving companies the data they need to ensure thier suppliers are reaching service level agreements. If the ISP service isn't up to speed, you may be able to make them pay..literally. Unfortunately the cheaper home based services usually make you sign a waiver disclaiming them from the flaws, but hey you'll have proof that they're not living up to thier claims! Read up on it here and here. I still have yet to try it out but I'll let you know how it goes. I'll also be on the lookout for similar types of software.

For those of you who aren't familiar with emulation yet, there's a neat little emulator that's been around for a while that lets you play nintendo 64 games on your PC. Emulation is a really cool way to go back and play those classic games we all used to love that are collecting dust in the closet.

Remember the good old quake days when you're config files were to large in file size and you'd get those Z_Malloc Overflow errors and be dropped out to the console? Well I guess the same thing happens in half-life since it was based on the quake engine and now they've got a counter-strike scripting site entitled Z_Malloc Overflow. I still think that's one of the best website names I've ever come across :)

I've gotten a lot of my friends using MIRC as opposed to AOL's slow & bulky ICQ 2000 but they still don't know it's full potential and all the neat stuff it can do. A gentleman named "Steve Wray" explains some mirc features however you'll have to live with his poor site design with midi background music. If you really get into using mirc, you may be interested in the addon I use called IRCN. Here is a complete list of commands you can execute in mirc. If you still insist on using ICQ, you may be interested in using this original icq client from 1998. ICQ (I seek you) was the free instant messager utility created by mirabilis that is much faster than the newest ones released after AOL took over. If you wish to use the plugin features and url links then you'll need icq 99a. These older clients will allow you to keep icq running in the background without it wasting half your system resources. I have 512MB ram and I still hate how slow and memory intensive icq 2000 is.

Amazing how much it sucks when your cable modem's power supply decides it's time to blow up and piss Marauder off. Yes that's right. It's a global conspiracy, but I'm onto it. Every technological device I run into (And by "technological" I mean anything more complicated than a rock..... Make that a small rock....) is out to piss me off. And every stupid person in the world was placed there specifically by God to test my will. My will not to kill them... kill them all................

Anyhows, on to more pleasant subjects.

Wienerboy Dave sent me the link to VMware a few days ago, but being cablemodemless in the world, I was unable to post it. Check them out. They have a piece of software that allows you to run Linux under Windows (Hmmmm. Unstable Linux!) or Windows under Linux. Pretty damned sweet if you ask me! Can see some really good uses for such a program. Naturally, like all true believers I hope to eventually see Bill Gates and his minions banished from this plain of existance forever, and their followers forced to fight to the death in pits like animals, for our amusment. Regretably, such an outcome is likely not going to occur any century soon. So go get VMware. :)

Dopper and Rune are now updating the news. :) Woot! I'm not alone in this cold, cruel world anymore!

The PVK guys have agreed to an email interview, as I mentioned somewhere below.... If you have any questions for them, let me know.

Got to see Tribes 2 in action the other day, when I broke into an anonymous beta tester's house, and forced him to play it at gun point. Looking good. :) Still needs alot of work, but wow.

iLL Techneeqs has just sent it THIS from our friends at Something Awfull.... Ever wondered WHY you should install DirectX 8? JeffK explains.

Booyah! This is my first fragtopia.com news post...let me begin my opening post by saying that shaw and rogers cable suck ass and I hope they die a long and painfull death. I've decided to use my own quake bullets for news posts since I'm one of the few gamers who still is an avid quake1 fan and plays it often and the bullet is only 225 bytes.

Speaking of quake, I discovered a site called the GLQuake Update Project. It adds new effects to quake including fog and other stuff, just check out these screenshots!

For you counter-strike fans out there who like to lan and run your own servers you may want to check out zeroping.com's admin central! It goes into detail on how to setup a dedicated server, the config files, batch files, cmd line parameters, ports, etc. Also if you want to setup your CS server so people can vote to change the maps, just like in tribes as well as do other "extras" that make the server way cooler, checkout Admin Mod. Just for fun and giggles you may want to look at the kellhounds flash intro AGAIN! :)

There's been a big stir lately about the highly publicized Microsoft security breach reportedly related to hacking Microsoft's .Net strategy files and Windows source code. Even one of the worlds most well known hackers, Kevin Mitnick gave his opinion on the issue. In another unrelated incident one of Microsofts webservers was hacked and a message was left behind that said "hack the planet" which was taken from the movie "hackers". The dutch hacker dimitri claims to have had access to microsofts download site (which a microsoft spokeswoman denied) but it still leaves me with the fear of one day possibly downloading virii from windowsupdate. If all this talk about hackers and security makes you nervous a good place to start for security information is an article on pcworld.com on how to "Make Your PC Hacker-Proof". Internet security is important for everyone and I think everyone should be more aware of it. There are many security related websites out there, two that you should know about include grc.com and security focus.

I recently came across a site called bootdisk.com. It looks pretty sweet and has bootdisks for a lot of popular OS's as well as antivirus bootdisks and tweaks. However, for you newbies out there don't think that an antivirus bootdisk can replace a standard anti-virus software. If you get a nasty virus like the CIH (from someone like uh, Red Leader) it can corrupt every executable file you run by infecting it and after it gets cleaned it will leave some games/apps like half-life unusable until you reinstall them.

For anyone who's a command and conquer fan (I personally love the game) Here's why you were having problems playing online the other night, "Attention Westwood Studios Fans! Around 6PM (PST) on Tuesday, November 14th, a critical piece of Internet hardware failed which severed our users connections to the web, chat, and game servers. We are working nonstop to fix the problem and expect to have it resolved soon. We will update this page when when there is either more to report, or when the problem corrects itself. Please hang in there with us! Thank you for your understanding. -Virtual Ted!"

Memory....Good! Just upgraded to 512MB ram (yes half a gig baby) because ram prices went way down and it is dirt cheap again...woohoo! I noticed a huge performance increase once I put in 256MB (used to have 128MB) and it made my tribes1 playable again and got rid of the choppiness that made it unplayable for me.