Pirates of the Burning Sea is the pirate MMO we all wanted. Pirates, ships, things blowing up!

What isnt awesome about that? POTBS is what is considered the thinking man’s MMO with more strategy in between wood splintering and masts falling apart.

However the game has meet sub par success and Flying Lab Software has made the announcement that it will be reducing the number of servers from 11 to 4.

Higher player density is always a good thing but closing servers this early in its life cycle cant be good.

Check out the press release through the link.

POTBS Server Closure

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Yeah.. sounds like another MMO is about to walk the plank.

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Okay.

The Stage

Allow me to briefly expound on my network and devices. My Internet connection is from Comcast cable with advertised speeds of 5Mbps/1.5Mbps. Lately, I have seen much faster speeds at fairly regular intervals, something I am not complaining about. Perhaps one hidden feature of the Apple TV is a handshake with the ISP that gets a hot connection for all those savvy HD downloads. Or not.

From the cable modem, I run into a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. The firmware is stock Linksys, last updated sometime last year, so likely up-to-date (haven’t checked though.) I use DHCP to dynamically assign local IP addresses to all devices except my main PC which takes the static local IP address of 10.10.10.100. If you see instances of a local IP addresses in any of the tutorials or articles linked here, be aware that you will need to modify that to reflect your own local network setup. Using hostnames for devices on the network seems to work without any problem on the Apple TV, even when connecting to a Windows PC using the local hostname. At least, it has been no trouble for me.

My main machine on the network is fairly modern, home-built PC running Windows XP Professional SP2. We have another PC and an old iBook G3 on the network as well, but all the hacks and mods done to the Apple TV were successfully achieved with the main PC. There are a couple of hacks that require frameworks and plugins from a machine running OS X 10.4. For those, I consulted friends who delivered the necessary files. I also had an install disc for OS X 10.4 that came with my wife’s iBook. I used that disc on one occasion. The hacks that require files directly from an OS X install disc or machine have to do with installing Flash, Quicktime and other rich media plugins in CouchSurfer, a WebKit-based web browser for Apple TV. We’ll get into specifics on that in a moment, but if you are not really interested in having Flash in a browser (you can still have the browser!) then you really don’t have to worry about having access to OS X as mentioned above.

Source

None of the hacks or mods that I used on my Apple TV were discovered or created by me. There is a fantastic community of folks who work really hard to make this magic happen. Up front, I’d like to give full credit to the folks in the Apple TV community who have made these things possible. Hat tip.

The majority of my information came from ATV4Windows and the ATV4Windows wiki, a site based on hacking the Apple TV using a Windows machine as the main rig. Much of the information compiled there has come from other popular Apple TV resources, like iClarified, AwkwardTV and others. As of yesterday, ATV4Windows has moved to a subscriber model. I wish the developer there lots of luck making money off of Apple TV hacks, but I prefer free information so I’ll try to disclose as much as I possibly can right here. However, I do plan on linking you up with many of the same tutorials I followed. I won’t reinvent the wheel. Unless that wheel now costs $15. If you do have a Mac that you’ll be manipulating your Apple TV with, no worries. There is a ton of information and iClarified currently seems to be one of the better resources. AwkwardTV is similarly geared toward Mac enthusiasts.

Enough yammering. Let’s do this.

The “Patchstick”

The patchstick is simple really, it’s a disk image that fits on any 1-4GB USB flash drive. When connected to the USB port on the Apple TV, the patchstick will install a few basic applications to help get you rolling with hacks and mods. The main thing you’ll need is SSH support. That’s the primary goal you should have at the onset. Get SSH up and connect to your Apple TV from another machine on the network. If you get there, the sky is the limit.

I used the Patchstick that is freely available from ATV4Windows. Since the author has chosen to hold the new version ransom, the older version of the Patchstick will have to do. Honestly, you only need SSH anyway. As of a few weeks ago, the tutorial he gives on the Patchstick page was accurate. I followed his steps verbatim. The new Patchstick he has made does install a lot of nice software, but at this point, it seems to be stuff you can do on your own (and for free). More than anything, I like the idea of having a more controlled install. Get what you want and only that. For another option, you can use this tutorial.

So I hope you have been able to get SSH installed on your Apple TV. Once you have that, connect to it using PuTTY (Win) or Terminal (OSX). Use the IP address of the Apple TV or the hostname, AppleTV.local. The username and password are both frontrow. You’ll have that memorized in no time. Trust me.

Once you’ve connected, you are ready to start hacking it up. What I did is not necessarily what you might do. Please browse the documentation at AwkwardTV and the other fine resources for Apple TV hacks. It’s only by knowing what is available to you that you can really make a decision about what you would like to achieve with your Apple TV. My goals once seemed radical, but as I studied I realized they could be rather easily accomplished:

• Have root control over Apple TV.
• Copy files to the Apple TV outside of iTunes “syncing”.
• Play media files encoded with alternative codecs, like DivX and Xvid.
• Play media files that use different file formats, like Quicktime, MPEG-4, AVI and WMV.
• Stream files directly from my PC to the Apple TV.
• Browse the web with a Flash-enabled browser (on the “bonus” list).

SSH

With SSH access to Apple TV, you have all the the root you can handle. All your base are belong to us. Again, this is a rather fundamental step in the process. For me, I was really quite excited just to get here. It was even more fun to connect to the Apple TV using WinSCP and browse the root files and folders. The main access point for the Apple TV seems to be in the frontrow directory:

/mnt/Scratch/Users/frontrow

You’ll become comfortable with the structure of the files and folders in the Apple TV fairly quickly. You’ll find it is mostly simple, although there are a couple of tricky folders with the same names under different paths. Just check the paths carefully when performing any modifications. Don’t just haphazardly hunt for folders to dump stuff in. You might dump something in the wrong place, which could lead to some frustration and troubleshooting.

ATV Files

This application allows you to add folders and files to the /frontrow directory and have direct access to these files from the Apple TV main menu. ATV Files will also play media files using the native Apple TV player, provided the proper codecs are installed. For that, we look at Perian.

Perian

Perian is really quite wonderful. I’ve used it on OS X since day one. It really is a Swiss Army knife for playing media in Quicktime on OS X. It works just as well on Apple TV. With Perian installed on Apple TV, you can really open up the device to become a more true “media center”.

CouchSurfer

If it’s sounds like a web browser, it probably is. And that’s exactly what CouchSurfer sounds like. Formerly known as SafariHD, CouchSurfer is a WebKit-based browser that will allow you to load and view web pages right on your television through Apple TV. The experience is nifty, but not really amazing. You’ll find yourself wanting a keyboard and mouse. Interacting with websites with the Apple remote and scrolling around the silly alphanumeric table quickly becomes rather mundane. There is a workaround that will apparently bring support for simple peripherals to the Apple TV, but I’ve yet to give it a shot.

I did manage to get the Flash plugin working with CouchSurfer. It was a pain to get there, because of the need for some proprietary Apple frameworks from the very specific OS X version 10.4. But I did finally accomplish it. It’s not exactly the experience I expected. I loaded up the fun hulu.com to try it out. Two problems emerged: 10 frames-per-second (at my visual estimation) and no full screen. I’m not sure if either of those problems will be repaired in later releases of CouchSurfer, or if there is just some weird bug with Flash in this environment, but it seems hardly worth my time to try and enjoy the tiny frame that most streams appear in or the sluggish frame rate.

It’s still cool! It just might not be quite the experience you thought you’d have.

Shared Network Drives

This one is amazing. Using the tutorial at ATV4Windows, I managed to get some of of media in shared folders accessible by the Apple TV! This means I can stream files right across the network from the original folders in which they reside without having to copy them to the Apple TV! I bet you can sense my excitement over this, and truly it is a notable accomplishment for several reasons.

1. You do not have to worry about the remaining space on the Apple TV’s native hard drive. Let’s face it, even 160GB can be used fairly quickly when it comes to media. I probably have half of that in photographs alone! And my music database isn’t far behind that. That’s not even counting the heaviest of all files, video.
2. You can maintain your current file and folder organization structure without concern for re-adapting it the Apple TV or having iTunes import and “manage” it all. Essentially, it all works right where it already resides.

The one problem with streaming from shared files across a network, particularly mine, is the latency that can often occur with slower networks. I’m on wireless-G here which both the Apple TV and my main PC use (my PC being wireless is a long story for another day.) So without having a hard cable in the house, other than from the modem to router, my network speeds are fairly slow compared to a nice 10/100/1000 wired network.

Streaming media to the Apple TV doesn’t always deliver smooth playback. I will experiment with some options (including getting everything hardwired—which for me means a visit from a cable technician to fix a few coax outlets) but until then, I have opted to copy over media with higher total bitrates directly to the Apple TV. They stream from that disk flawlessly!

That said, the option of playing back media on the Apple TV directly from a shared file or folder over a network connection is absolutely terrific.

In Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning of this now-lengthy article, I chose the hacks and mods that would give me the most value and that achieved the goals I set out to accomplish with my Apple TV. I just wanted to get a “media center” experience out of the device and I believe I have. I realize there are quite a few details missing from this article. I do have step-by-step instructions on each hack. If you have the slightest difficulty in tracking down a solid tutorial on any of the hacks I’ve outlined, please let me know. I can publish details about each. Obviously, this article’s length is well beyond the typical blog entry here and so I wanted to abbreviate it somewhat. It’s most important that you realize how potent the Apple TV really is under the hood. Yes, it takes a little time and energy to pull the greatness out of it, but once you do you will really be amazed at what you can accomplish with this tiny box!

Good luck with yours.

• Awkward TV

Technorati Tags: apple, tv, hacks, mods, modifications, software, SSH, WinSCP, Windows, OS X, Mac, media, Perian, codecs, CouchSurfer, WebKit, ATV Files

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So I started researching a few of my options. I really like the idea of a Sony PlayStation 3 and started to just save up for one. Then I thought about Apple TV. It’s moderately priced, would likely handle the “iTunes” side of things in a cinch, would certainly have good hardware and likely good software. I’m no Apple fanboy. I like the diversity of operating systems and believe each serves well in unique ways. But I do love iTunes and the way it handles media (generally speaking). And once I looked at what the Take2 upgrade to Apple TV enabled the device to do, I was sold.

Using craigslist, I managed to locate a 160GB model at a decent price ($250, new-in-the-box condition). Once I arrived home, I noticed the factory restore the seller had initiated put the firmware back to the original version, Take 1 so to speak, so I started the upgrade option immediately. Once it was all patched up and rebooted, I toured the menu, set up access to my wireless network and shared iTunes resources from my main PC. Then I perused the features, watched a couple of YouTube videos and linked up my Flickr account.

Take 2: YouTube and Flickr

I am really impressed with both the YouTube and Flickr features. While it is not very efficient to have to “type” in searches using the tiny remote to scroll around a few rows of alphanumeric characters, once you are in, each experience is really great. For what they are, YouTube videos generally look great and even the sound seems improved. But the real winner here is Flickr. Wow! This experience is stunning. The speed at which they are able to grab really great looking images for viewing on the TV is impressive. Though it has a few imperfections, like a bad habit of cropping the top and bottom from photos, overall it really makes the Flickr experience even better. It’s so handy when family is over to start up a slideshow to view Andrew’s latest antics or talk about an event I shot. When Apple TV goes idle, it goes into a screen saver mode with a cascade of my photostream! So even when we aren’t using the Apple TV, it becomes a part of our lives just like the pictures in frames strewn around our rooms. That is such a nice touch and though seemingly insignificant, it really adds value to the experience for us.

iTunes Integration

Smooth as silk. Yes. It was just so easy. All my tunes, videos, and podcasts synced to the Apple TV in just a few minutes. The iTunes Store is there too, albeit in quite a unique form. The UI is really slick and geared toward simple manipulation with the remote. I can rent movies, even in HD, right from the store and begin watching within just a few moments. The picture quality of an HD movie is quite stunning on my Samsung 32″ 1080i HDTV. In fact, I’m probably more impressed by how Apple gets the image to look so good and still stream to me so quickly and with zero buffer! It’s hot. A couple of small gripes are the way movies are displayed in the store. Essentially they show the cover art as a thumbnail for each flick. It can be a little hard to read the titles of each movie. Once you hover the cursor over one, a plain text title appears as a caption, but you must hover over it. So I generally find myself hovering over each cover to see what the title is, as opposed to scanning the screen for what I want. Perhaps on a larger screen, this problem is less noticeable.

Podcasts are really well done on the Apple TV. I love browsing the store and grabbing at some of the top podcasts and just sitting back and seeing what happens or throwing on my personal favorites to listen or view. There really is some fantastic content in the podcast space. Apple TV makes accessing that content fairly simple.

Conclusion

Apple TV is okay. Apple TV Take 2 is quite good. I have extended my Apple TV to make it great and I’ll cover some of those modifications in another article. Stay tuned.

If you are in the market for a $300 media center, I’d definitely encourage trying out the Apple TV if you have a store nearby. You probably will not be disappointed. Are there better media players out there? Well, given the recent developments on the PS3 front and given some really interesting things I’ve seen done with a Mac Mini and given the impressive abilities of a Linux box running MythTV, I’d say there probably are better setups. But each has it’s own price, either in cold cash or in an investment of labor. I feel like the Apple TV is a shortcut on both fronts, time and money, but has a significant ROI. I’m happy. When I explain the mods, you’ll learn why I am ecstatic.

• Apple TV

Technorati Tags: Apple TV, Apple, take 2, media, itunes, PC, Mac, upgrade, center, TV, television, technology, podcast, movie

Breaking Update: Looks like Blockbuster might be trying to weave into the Apple TV space. (Article)

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Many web standards enthusiasts from across the globe will do the same thing over the next day. Don’t be surprised if some of the sites you know and love have a plain look about them. It’s all for the opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of the semantic web and the standards that provide a healthy set of best practices that make the web a better place for everyone.

CSS Naked Day

Technorati Tags: css, web standards, dustin diaz

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Enough ranting lets get into the good stuff. Pirates of the Burning Sea is one of the latest MMORPGs out there. If you can’t guess, your character is a Pirate, and well your goal is to explore and capture the Burning Sea. If you check out the website you don’t actually get much information that I could find on there. You can start out as a pirate or a member of one of the 3 major naval powers of the time, Britain, Spain, and France. From there you can be a Merchant, Naval Officer, or Mercenary. The class you pick determines your sword fighting style, or Swashbuckling, Fencing, and Dirty Fighting. These can be changed later on in the game.

Now lets start with the cool stuff: Character creation was indeed sweet. You have a wide range of stuff to truly create your own pirate or sailor. Your story starts off right as you are in a sea battle, and your captain has fallen, so whose to command the ship? You of course. After the first battle you head to port and welcome to your first town. The game is pretty cool in that its fighting is cool looking. Actual implementation of everything you wanna do is a little rough, but this is expected of any MMORPG. Sea battles were fun and exciting at first. Then when one drags on for a hour or so it gets a little repetitive, but it didn’t stop me from playing. I enjoyed most aspects of the Sea Battles. The intricacies like wind direction, boarding, broken masts, and you quickly get used to having to pull up side the other ship to fire all cannons.

The Bad Stuff: It just seemed like a Beta version or a Demo. The problem was it was the actual game. Now my roommate and I played the two week buddy version, but still, to both of us, the game simply felt unfinished. We asked our buddy who has the actual game and he said the main thing he has enjoyed is the huge PvP Naval battles, so that may be the game’s drawing point. The fighting was rough and the quests just didn’t seem very complete or in depth. It was usually just go out in the ocean and kill this guys ship. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Most of the moves you can learn lacked information and explanation. An Overall lack of information about the game, characters, quests, and moves + abilities annoyed me. Random glitches like when people attack your port you often see the ship going through the port.

The game idea was a really cool one and got my hopes up, but fell short of my expectations. There were a lot of small things thats added up that annoyed me, and although its hard to explain, the game simply felt unfinished to me. Hopefully the creators will be able to add much more depth to the game in patches and expansion packs. More involved quests, and much much more information about the game in general.

cout << “T Evans”

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So far, I have the first two days of the conference all planned out. I’ll play the other two by ear and schedule as I go. I want to leave a little flexibility. I already feel like I’m quite maxed out! It’s going to be a blast. I will likely need a day just to recover from the insanity of it all.

I’ll log updates here as much as possible. I’ll also post @Twitter, assuming they don’t have any downtime, on Pownce and possibly on Flickr.

A few events I’m looking forward to are:

• The Flickrite Meetup at the Cathedral of Junk
• Google Party
• The 2008 SXSW ABX
• The SXSW Godbit Dinner

Of course, those are all evening (non-official) SXSW events. I will be attending a plethora of sessions. One session I’m especially excited about is the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Preview. Hopefully, I’ll get a few free moments to meet up with the EllisLab folks and thank them personally for crafting such fine products, ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter.

If you are at SXSW and would like to meet up, send an email: sxsw@davidrussell.org

Technorati Tags: sxsw, flickr, google, godbit, events, schedule, expressionengine, codeigniter, ellislab, conference, austin, texas

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Originally we were due to get married last November. Gina spoke with her Dad and he offered to pay for nearly everything, but when it came down to it, he sort of flaked on us. So we had planned on doing it this March, since we would have our tax returns and that should have been enough money to take care of things ourselves. Well, our tax returns have come and gone, and we didn’t put anything towards getting married. I’ve already spoken of what we did spend it on, so I won’t go into that again. A few weeks ago I started thinking of just going to Las Vegas this week, and getting married there, but after finding out what it would cost we didn’t really have the money. Then we talked about just going to the courthouse and getting married there, and then we were going to have the reception at our house, a couple days later. We decided on just doing the ceremony and the reception all in the same day, at our house, on March 8th (next Saturday). So that’s the plan for now.

Gina has been planning everything out, and it sounds like it will be pretty cool. A whole bunch of people have told us they want to come, so we should have a pretty good turnout, along with the family of course. I’m starting to get excited about it. For the longest time I hadn’t wanted to get married. I never thought I would go through with it, because I was afraid that it would just end in divorce, no matter who I married. But Gina is the right one for me, we’ve been through more shit than I’d like to remember, and we’re still going strong. So a week from today, I will no longer be a single man.

Life threw us another curve ball a few days ago. Our landlord told us that the owner of the house we just moved into wants to sell. He said that he doesn’t think it will sell anytime soon, but that we may want to think about preparing to move again. I’m so sick of moving, I couldn’t believe this was happening again. I felt cursed. The good news is, there are a lot of houses in the area, all of which are the same size or larger, and the price tags aren’t bad. A couple years ago when we were living on New Chicago, the owner of that house was about to be foreclosed on, so we were forced to move. When we mentioned buying the house, the owner wanted over $300,000, which we thought was a bit high. Luckily, the market has been on a plunge for a while now, and rather large houses in this newer area are going for $220,000 or less. John and Gina went around looking at places the other day, and they found one they liked, and John is in a position to buy, so he’s putting in an offer on Monday. This does mean we have to move again, which sucks, but it will be to a house in which we won’t have to worry about moving again for a long time. John already said that if he wants to move at a later date he will just sell the house to us, so it’s pretty much somewhere we can live for years, and that will be pretty nice.

I was playing PotBS pretty regularly, but then came to a point where I was pretty bored with it. I was thinking that maybe I had MMO burnout in general, but then I got the urge to play some EQ2, and I had at that for a few days in a row. I’ve come to understand one thing about myself. I played the shit out of EQ2 for almost 2 years, but there were break periods here and there. Then I was playing single player games for a while, though none held my interest. After playing PotBS for a while, I was entertained, but then got bored, just like I had with all other games. Spending a couple months not really playing many games, and having more of a social life was fun, but then I got to the point where I wanted to play games again. Basically, when it comes down to it, I get bored easily. So I’ve decided that rather than just playing one MMO, or one single player game at a time, I’m going to play whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment. I’ve been enjoying EQ2 again, but I also enjoy PotBS. I also enjoy playing CoD4, and some of the other single player games I’ve purchased recently. So from this moment further, my loyalty lies at no particular point, I will be flying by the seat of my pants. That is, probably only until WAR is released, then I’m pretty sure I’ll be playing that as fervently as I once played EQ2.

I’m sick. I started feeling like shit at work yesterday, and it got progressively worse as the day went on. At this point, I feel ok, probably only because I took some meds. When I woke up this morning I had a fever, some head pain, and a slight cough. I’ve still been smoking, and I’m sure that doesn’t help, but I’m trying to not smoke as much until whatever this is clears up. I hate being sick, so I’m going to try and take it easy over the next couple days, hopefully I’ll be able to kick it by Monday, so that I can start preparing for the wedding. We have a lot of shit to do over the next week, so I don’t want to feel like shit while doing it.

 That’s about all for now.

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The Source of Information

I’m curious about how the source of information creates an amount of signal or noise. Since everything is either useful or useless to me, given that my experiences create such a filter, I should be able to find information sources that give me brilliantly useful information with little noise. And, in most cases, that’s where I aim.

But I have learned of other variables that play into the value of the information.

• Timeliness - If I receive the information in a timely manner, it is much more valuable than receiving the same information a day late. It might sound trivial to some, but poor information management could mean that you are simply not receiving good information when it is most valuable. Practically, we should learn to tap information resources diligently.
• Redundancy - Occasionally, we receive information from a wide variety of sources that are all saying the same thing. It might be a breaking news story, or a simple tidbit of water cooler talk surrounding the latest office memorandum. No matter the case, hearing information too often can be problematic. Practically, we need to pare our sources to prevent duplication.
• Volume - This is the toughest problem for information addicts. The tendency is to over-stimulate our minds with information in an attempt to feel complete. Yet, it is not humanly possible to gather and retain the level of information that most of us attempt to manage. Practically, we need to remove information sources, find the few quality sources that can make the difference and, most importantly, find contentment in retaining the top-level of information while disregarding the rest. Often, we gather for the sake of gathering and find ourselves rather inefficiently equipped with too much noise and not enough signal.

Certainly, the net can be cast much wider than that. Think about other ways that information sources bog us down.

The Use of Information

This is the benchmark for the value of information: how we use it. Good information is important. It can change a perspective, change a focus, or even change a life. Bad information is useless. It wastes time, resources and energy.

How we use information can determine its value to us and to others. Sometimes we mismanage good information and devalue it by irresponsibly passing it to people who are simply not relevant to the matter. We’ve all received that email CC from someone in the office. There are times when “out of the loop” is just fine! Other times we fail to pass on information that is pertinent to someone. We can so easily misuse information and cause conflict.

Managing information productively is an art form. It takes time to craft, but with experience you can manage wisely.

The Absence of Information

The final thought I’ve had is one that runs against the grain of the whole idea of information management: how can we remove information from our routines? And, if we do remove information, what happens?

This is more of an experiment than the other two thoughts. I’m intrigued by the thought that it might be very empowering to significantly reduce the weight of information that is passed to me each day. There is a delicate balance here. I don’t want to live under a rock and not take in information that has real importance in my life. But I do want to remove the sources of information that are reducing my margin for creativity and critical thinking. Much like a clogged artery that blocks the flow of resources to the heart, I believe our minds can be held captive by over-processing too much information. For many of us, turning off the television, putting down the book or logging off the computer would be a wonderful step toward improved information management. It’s a challenge that is hitting home with me lately and I’m constantly looking for ways to increase that margin. So far, I’m amazed by the little things that have returned on my investment. But I think there is a long-term reward as well.

You know, I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I’d like. I haven’t been playing guitar as much as I’d like. I haven’t relaxed as much as I’d like. Admittedly, it’s because I have not really taken control of information or explored ways to increase valuable information or reduce invaluable information in my life. Information management is a personal challenge and one that I’ve come to take quite seriously! If you are on a similar journey, or if you’ve been inspired to manage information more efficiently, let me know.

Technorati Tags: information, management, overload, productivity, life

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This past January, Chris cast vision for a new paradigm at Highlands—a focus on the inner-city of Birmingham. I believe God will continue to do wondrous things at Highlands and I am excited that more of my friends will hear first-hand the unique work that is happening there.

Chris is one of the finest church leaders in the world today! He takes no credit for the success of Highlands, but I believe the church wouldn’t be what it is today without a pastor who gets on his knees and humbly prays for Birmingham to come to Christ! May we all find inspiration in his words to help us reach people for Christ in our own cities. If you have a moment today, pray for Church of the Highlands, Chris Hodges, his team and the city of Birmingham.

Shift: Chris Hodges Blog
Church of the Highlands (Flash required, unfortunately.)

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