How didn’t you know? Every mother and his dog is on the train to flogging gamers for all their worth, so why aren’t you? Soon you can be making the millions from this clearly untapped market!

Honestly, there’s been loads of attempts that clearly worked, just look at these websites for ideas on how to run your own games for cash website!

• BattleFrag
• Prizefight
• Gamelio
• GoBlam!
• Tournament.com
• Kwari

Now all these sites have one thing in common, and its not that they are all making lots of money, it’s that they’re all shutdown.

If you have been in the gaming scene in the past 5 years you should have heard of at least one of the above mentioned companies, and you know that they weren’t successful. Which is a shame, but that’s just the way it goes.

They all have fallen into this same trap…

Step 1
The top players make money from beating the less skilled players.

Step 2
The top players rake in the cash, while the low skill players leave and don’t come back and don’t recommend your site.

Step 3
You attempt to attract new players by giving them free money to play with since all but the top skilled players have left.

Step 4
See Step 1.

I do hope that one day, the new budding entrepreneurs out there will look at the past efforts of this and go…

“Oh, look, there’s been other people who tried this, and from the looks of their websites it didn’t work out too well for them as none succeeded, perhaps we should try another area in gaming instead”

…and then leave it at that and try something else. Instead it seems to go like this…

“These other people failed at this, so let’s copy them, put a different spin on it, and then get the gaming sites to post news for us about how this time, it’ll work”

So why this post? There’s a new bunch of people on the street who think that they have the answer on how to make money from cash gaming (needless to say; whatever it is, it won’t work). They are called PlayAll; bets anyone on how long they’ll last?

In patch 3.0.8 Steady Shot was nurfed by 10% damage, so I have re-written my mashable macro a little to weave in Arcane Shot to increase it’s damage.

#showtooltip Auto Shot
/cast Kill Shot
/castsequence reset=shift/target Hunter’s Mark, null
/castsequence reset=target/3/alt Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

Basically the same as the first version I made, which you can find here along with the explanation on what everything does.

Right, as we all know back in the days of old Napster ruled supreme. There was no contest about that and everyone I knew who was on-line was using it, however it obviously was highly illegal. Since then many companies have tried to ressurect Napster in many different forms from Kazaa to LimeWire. However they all still fall in the pitfall of being illegal. So what would happen if a legal alternative occured? Well, it’s no longer what would happen, as its now happening with Spotify.

So how does Spotify work?

Well, it’s simply a Windows/Mac on-demand streaming audio. There’s no waiting, and it’s so quick there’s no buffering either. You can scan through the tracks at will without having to wait for it to catch up with your track.

How do they make money?

Every 10 odd tracks you play you have to listen to an advert thats about 20seconds long. It then goes back to playing what it told you too.  If you don’t want to ever listen to the adverts you can get a subscription, one is just for a day, the other for a month and during that time you won’t hear any adverts at all. If you stick to free, it’s a bit like listening to a real radio station, just they always play good tracks

How good is it?

Well ive only been using it for about an hour, but from initial impressions, it looks and feels great. All the artists I searched for were available for play, along with massive back catalogues for all artists. You have the ability to queue up music to play, and you can also create playlists.

One thing that pleasantly surprized me about it was the fact it has last.fm scrobbling built in, just simply put in your username and password and off it goes…

Listening now using Spotify

You also have the option to listen to generic radio stations of which you can tell it what you like. So for example you can tell it you want to listen to music from the 90’s pop, or 80’s disco and pop.

How do I get it?

Ah the most important one of all. Currently Spotify is in an invite only stage, however it seems that if you visit this cunning link, you can by-pass all that! However no guarentees on this working for too long!

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/

- Ninja Edit -

Just found a rather useful Greasemonkey script that adds little notes next to artist names and track names on last.fm, and when you click them it will search in Spotify for playable tracks. More information over here.

WARNING – THIS MACRO HAS BEEN UPGRADED, THE NEW VERSION CAN BE FOUND HERE

After a very long stretch of not playing around with macro’s in WoW, I decided to see just how far the legal macro system could be pushed. After various browsing, testing and changing I’ve come up with a key mash macro…

#showtooltip Auto Shot
/cast Kill Shot
/castsequence reset=shift/target Hunter’s Mark, null
/castsequence reset=target/3/alt Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

Now what does it actually do?

Start auto-shooting, then if it can, cast Kill Shot, otherwise (if shift is pressed or target has changed) cast Hunter’s Mark, after that cast Serpent Sting, followed by 7 Steady Shots (will reset if target changes, alt is pressed, or if macro is’nt used for 3 seconds). It has not been designed to cope with the Glyph of Serpent Sting, but if you do have that glyph changing this macro is as easy as adding 2 or 3 more Steady Shots.

This is designed to keep Serpent Sting on your target at all times, so that the bonus 10% damage from Glyph of Steady Shot will be applied on all your Steady Shots. It’s debatable if kill shot should be after hunters mark, but I decided to put it at the start so that if you can kill shot you do it as soon as possible, rather than waiting for Hunters Mark + 1.5seconds GCD. It should also be noted that if hunters mark fades, it will not automatically re-cast it, you’ll need to hold shift to get it to re-cast.

Enjoy

WARNING – THIS MACRO HAS BEEN UPGRADED, THE NEW VERSION CAN BE FOUND HERE

Just a quick post to say that this is probably my track of the month. Originally found it through the film 21 and it also just got awarded “#3 Hottest New Music of 2008″ by Last.fm

If you had a previous installation of Aptana Studio in hardy and now that you’ve upgraded to ibex it no longer works then you aren’t alone. It no longer works since during the upgrade Firefox 2 was removed from your system, and there isn’t a way to put it back in as its been removed from the package manager.

Luckily the fix is easy…

sudo apt-get install xulrunner

Then you’ll need to either edit or create a startup script for Aptana to use. So make a file called “runAptana.sh” in /usr/local/aptana and inside that put…

#!/bin/bash
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner
/usr/local/aptana/AptanaStudio

Then, whenever you want to run Aptana use that script instead; otherwise you’ll get those nasty errors which hamper your daily work efforts!

It seems that forums cost money (duh) so MPUK have vomited all over their forums with adverts, so here’s the next greasemonkey script to hide them (as in, hide not remove, as in, you still get the impression).

MPUK Forum Adverts Hider v3.0a

As announced on the official Google Blog, tomorrow will see the initial release of Google Chrome. This is Google’s next step forward on the web. Instead of just creating what you interact with in their web applications, you will now end up using Google’s own web browser to access them instead.

But why would you switch to Chrome when we already have great browsers like Firefox and Safari? Here’s what Google have to say feature set wise, lets go through them shall we…

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features called “omnibox.”

Well, hopefully this will be much like Firefox’s 3 “awesome bar”, which provides users with a lot more interaction with their search history and their most used web-sites. Especially with the new bookmarking support.

The browser includes an open-source JavaScript Virtual Machine implementation called V8.

Ahh, a new JavaScript engine, hopefully this one has vast improvements in speed, as currently that seems to be the on-going problems with most browsers. We can only but hope!

Chrome has a privacy mode, disabling all logging for a certain window.

It seems everyone has finally reaslised that porn is a big deal on the internet, and that it’s big money, so why not help out the porn sites keep everyone viewing them without being caught? (You could of course use this mode for things like buying presents for people and you don’t want them finding out, but honestly, what do you think its going to get used for most?)

Web applications can be launched in their own browser window without an address bar and toolbar.

This is going to be used quite obviously for Google’s own applications like Google Mail, Documents, Calendar etc, and should be quite useful and be a space saver. Again, its a step from taking the web and putting it on your desktop, rather than it being within your browser.

Chrome includes an automatically updated blacklist for malicious sites.

Ahh the security, hopefully with an actively updated blacklist this could help improve browsers for the overall community, especially for those users without high technical know how. Although, if this isn’t by-passable, and false positives go through which has been seen in Google’s search results. It may annoy some people who class themselves as clever enough to know what they are doing, but does Google know better?

Supports third-party plug-ins.

I think if a new browser didn’t support these, it might as well just stop developement all together. Let’s hope that it’s as easy as Firefox for extension development and that its powerful enough to be useful. If we don’t get things like Firebug (not just the JS in-page version) then it might shoot itself in the foot. Let’s hope not!

Uses the WebKit Rendering Engine.

This is the same rendering engine that Safari uses, and its been proven over time that it’s very good and very compatiable across operating systems. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it too much. This also means that if your site already works in Safari, it’ll work in Google Chrome. Which is always a bonus when there’s already quite a few browsers out there right now.

As much as I love Firefox for development right now, im slowly beginning to shift over to Safari as I like the way it renders pages and makes them look more soft than usual. However, there are some things about both of these browsers which I don’t partiuclarly like, so here’s hoping that Google Chrome gets rid of those for me, and that Chrome can be my new browser for everything, rather than for one specific task.

I recently changed the background image for the Today screen on my XDA Orbit, however when you set an image to background it washes it out with a grey layer so that text is still readable. However, if you used a very light image to begin with, the standard white text of the Today screen becomes almost unreadable.

In true Microsoft style, there’s no way to change this easily through the Settings pane, or through the Theme settings pane either. So how do you do it?

1. Download Mobile Registry Editor
2. Make sure your phone is connected over ActiveSync
3. Load Mobile Registry Editor
4. Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Color\

If you see a binary key named 4 simply edit that and if you want the colour black, put in 00 00 00 00 then save it.

If you don’t see a binary key named 4 then you’ll need to create it. Do this by right clicking and going to New -> Binary Value…

Value Name: 4
Value Data: 00 00 00 00

If you had to create the key then the colour change should be immediate, if you were editing it you probably need to restart the phone.

After finally giving in I decided to work out how to get Firefox 2.0.0.11 and 3.0.1 running side by side. It turned out to be much easier than I thought, so I thought I’d share this with the world (although its probably posted on about 5million other blogs), either way…

• Download Firefox 2.0.0.11 from OldVersion
• Change the installation directory to something other than the default

That’s the easy part, now for the more complex bit…

• Make sure all your Firefox windows are closed (yes, this one too)
• Start -> Run -> “firefox -ProfileManager“
• Press “Create Profile” and call the new profile “ff2“
• Once it’s created the profile press “Exit”

Now navigate to the folder you just installed Firefox 2 into, and create a shortcut to the firefox.exe

firefox.exe -P ff2 -no-remote

Put that wherever you please and then you can load Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time!