I’m sure I’ll use this in the future: FlickrDown.

Because the wife needs a new phone, and because it was too good a deal to pass up, I just bought a Sprint HTC Mogul PPC 6800 on EBay.

$149.99 original price with Buy it Now.
-$15.00, -10% coupon in my ebay messages
+$6.99 shipping
= $141.98 paid.

(in 60 days)
-$45, -30% Microsoft cashback.

Overall amount: $96.98.

This Windows Mobile 6.1 device should be a good upgrade from my WM2003 Palm Treo 700wx, but I think the feature I’m most looking forward to is the GPS — and there’s gotta be some auto-geotagging settings.

Call of Duty 4 is a pretty freaking sweet PC game, and a blast for LAN games. The problem with LAN games is that if you have a relatively new install of Call of Duty 4, you are at a disadvantage. One neat thing about the game is that as you play multiplayer matches, you unlock new weapons and perks. A player who recently installed the game cannot use these weapons or perks.

For some reason, the makers of Call of Duty 4 did not include a way to play with all weapons and perks as part of their game. After some research, it seems as though the only way to accomplish this is via mods, namely the PAM4 Mod. The following configuration works with the latest version of Call of Duty 4 (currently 1.7), and is taken from Team Warfare League forums.

1. Download the PAM4 mod for Call of Duty 4 (aka CoD4).

2. Extract to {game_dir}/Mods/pam4, creating the directory. So the directory structure should look as follows:

   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/mod.ff
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/pbbans_lg_none.cfg
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/pbbans_lg_twlcod4naladders.cfg
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/pbbans_lg_twlcod4naleages.cfg
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/pbsvlog.cfg
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/README.txt
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/ReadMe1.txt
   {game_dir}/Mods/pam4/z_srv_pam401.iwd

3. Open the game and enable the mod. If you’re using dedicated, read this or this.

And that’s all! Works great. It should not have been this hard to find, btw.

SSL is a fairly recent addition (seemingly) to the usenet client arena, most clients that support it have only added support within the past two years or so. I’m giving NZBPerl a try, mostly because it’s the only one that fits in natively with Torrentflux b4rt. NZBPerl “technically” supports ssl (with the –ssl switch), but in practice it hangs and never really accomplishes its tasks. It’s all over teh interwebs that NZBPerl doesn’t quite work with ssl, but since the author last released in late 2006, it’s not likely to see an update to properly support ssl.

I spent about 4 hours over the weekend playing around with the source to no avail. If I could find a working patch, I would have applied it and submitted it upstream… that would have been ideal of course.

So I instead used the haxy method, wrap the nonssl nntp requests in stunnel, therefore effectively accomplishing the same goal. Here is the setup I used in Ubuntu:

# superuser assumed
apt-get install stunnel4
vim /etc/stunnel/snntp.conf
# put in the following
foreground=yes
client=yes
[nntp]
accept  = 127.0.0.1:119
connect = SECURE_NEWS_SERVER:563
# /put
stunnel4 /etc/stunnel/snttp.conf 1>>/var/log/stunnel.log 2>&1 &

Then in Torrentflux-b4rt, enable NZBPerl (ensuring prereqs match first), set the server hostname to 127.0.0.1, add your username/password to the list, and give it a try. Of course inspect /var/log/stunnel.log if there are any issues. Worked like a charm for me.

It looks like there was recently some downtime on Xbox live I wonder if this means banhammer part 3 is upon us? Historically it seems to follow major updates or periods of downtime. Time will tell.