Note: August 6, 2012, this has become the third most popular article on Zylblog.
EA is testing out a new technology developed by Gaikai with the Sims 3, allowing you to play The Sims 3 online, over the Internet, very similar to the way the regular installed version of the game works. You can check it out at www.thesims3.com/trial. Bear in mind, it is a trial, and it is in beta. You can not save your game. It does not have any expansion packs and is base-game only at this time, though I would expect this to change in the future.The trial is only for one hour.
Gaikai has very smooth remote processing. The game runs on their servers, not on your computer. I kind of expected it to be glitchy and choppy, however, it was quite smooth. I would not have guessed, had I not known what it was, that it was running on a computer elsewhere. The game starts fairly quickly, with very little time at the loading screen. This is my favorite part, since loading is mind-numbing and alone prevents me from playing many games. The graphics quality was good, and the sound quality was good as well. The screen resolution was slightly off, but this was only noticeable on the game interface (where there are circles and squares which make good flaw reference points). Full-screen mode did not fill my wide-screen display, and left black bars on the sides. I am guessing that this is simply a limitation of this technology at this time. The interface on my computer that the game ran in used Java
Create a Sim:
Being as there was a time restriction, I decided to go with an already created Sim. I went through some of the clothing options, accessories, etc and it all seemed to work. You can not, at this time at least, individually customize the personality traits. Upon creation of a Sim, you select a personality type, so to speak, that already contains your traits. Continue reading →
Stop all spam to your website, blog, or forum
The Internet is a great way to share your information with others, whether it be useful information related to computers or health, or the less-useful specialized information like training poodles (of which, I have no fear in offending anyone who does so..) Unfortunately, there are aspects of the Internet that can make it less pleasant and very difficult to share information. Spam, which seems to almost get into your websites from the inside. In this article, I will talk tools that assist with stopping spam of content management systems: Spambots, email harvesters, and other wrongdoers.
Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, SMF Forums, YaBB, and Joomla (amongst many) are prone to spam more than hand-coded websites because they are universally the same across the Internet. Most spam on a blogging system occurs in comments, and most spam on a forum occurs either through i. guest posting or ii. registration and then posting.
There are a few tools available to prevent spam which I personally use on this website.
At the time of posting, I am and have been using Akismet, NoSpamNX, and CloudFlare. Zero spam gets through to the site. A majority of spammers (about 3,000 a month) are blocked at the DNS level by CloudFlare — these spammers do not even see the site, it 100% blocks them with no effort on my servers part. The rest is normally caught by NoSpamNX. I don’t have a log that shows how many NoSpamNX blocks, as it simply does not even let spammers post. Akismet caught the rest, about 14 last month, which is fairly average. Continue reading →