The new year is a shop-a-holics wet dream come true with all the sales on there are plenty of bargains to be had unless you’re shopping for a new desktop PC.

You would think that a major name brand OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) PC builder, like Dell, HP, Lenovo etc… would be able to build and sell PCs cheaper than you could build one for given their purchasing power, economies of scale and all that. But they either can’t or won’t.

For example Dell is having a “sale” so I hit up their web site to check out their “discounts”. Dells cheapest bottom of the line basic PC, the Insperon 620s desktop is normally $798.99 Dell have “discounted” the Insperon 620s by $200, making it $598.99 which is still poor value for money. The advertised price, $598.99, is for just the desktop itself i.e. without any additional “extras” sans a monitor. Throw in a monitor for a complete PC and you are looking at $700.19.

Even with the “discounts” Dell are offering on the Insperon 620s desktop PC it’s still more expensive than building your own PC with off the shelf parts from online vendors or retailers, and I’ll prove it.

I’m going to use the Dell Insperon 620s (with a monitor) as a reference for price. I’m going to show you two builds, a budget build which will be significantly cheaper aimed at saving you money, let’s call it the “econo box”. The second build will cost roughly the same as the reference Dell Insperon 620s but it will offer you better value for money, let’s call this build “Starbug”, I like to name my PCs after space ships and characters in my favourite Sci-Fi shows.

The “econo box”

The ‘econo box” build includes a monitor and still comes in $100 cheaper than Dell’s “discounted” Insperon 620s which doesn’t even include a monitor!

CPU – AMD A4 3400 Dual Core Fusion, Socket FM1, 2.7Ghz
$75.00

Motherboard – ASRock A75M-HVS
$75.00

RAM – 4 GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR3
$29.00

HDD – Seagate Barracuda 500GB
$89.00

Video – Integrated
$0

PSU – Corsair CX-430 V2
$59.00

Case – CoolerMaster Elite 371
$45.00

ODD – LG GH24NS70 24x SATA DVD-RW Drive
$25.00

OS – Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
$99.00

Monitor – AOC N950SW 18.5in Widescreen LED
$85.00

Keyboard & Mouse – Logitech Classic Desktop MK100
$19.00

Total
$600.00

“Starbug”

The “Starbug” build comes in cheaper, but only by the smallest margin. You still get better value for money from the “Starbug” build with double the HDD capacity as well as wireless network connectivity so there is no need to run cables if your house isn’t wired up for Ethernet, most people already have a wireless router or modem/router because their primary PC is a laptop or there are other people in the house with a laptop that need wireless connectivity.

CPU – Intel Core i3 2100
$125.00

Mobo – Gigabyte GA-H61M-USB3-B3
$79.00

RAM – 4 GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR3
$29.00

HDD – Seagate Barracuda 1TB
$109.00

Video – N/A integrated
$0

PSU – Gigabyte 550W Superb
$55.00

Case – CoolerMaster Elite 331
$39.00

OS – Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
$99.00

Monitor – AOC N950SW 18.5in Widescreen LED
$85.00

Keyboard & Mouse – Logitech Classic Desktop MK100
$19.00

Wireless NIC – TP-Link TL-WN951N Wireless N PCI Adapter
$35.00

ODD – LG GH24NS70 24x SATA DVD-RW Drive
$25.00

Total
$699.00

Notes:

• Both of my builds and the Dell Insperon 620s are you bottom of the line PC suited to web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheeting (it’s not as dirty as it sounds), watching video, Skyping etc… it’s not a gaming machine although some low end/older games will run happily.

• If you don’t want or need to play AAA games then you could save even more money and run with Linux for your OS. Regardless of weather you choose Windows or Linux for the OS you can save even more money by using free and FOSS software. Instead of using Microsoft Office, choose Libre office. Instead of using Microsoft outlook for your email client, choose Thunderbird.

• All parts are from one of my favourite online shops PC Case Gear. If you shop around you could probably build these boxes a little cheaper depending on how much of a penny pincher you are which isn’t as silly as it sounds because Steam often have some decent games (that will happily run on a low end box) on sale for a few dollars.

• I haven’t factored in tech support (if you choose to build your own PC your probably partial to learning about PCs anyway) and all the other junk you get with a name brand OEM PC. Nor have I included shipping cost’s, if you buy all of your parts at once from the same vendor you will save a bunch of money in shipping costs.
  Even if you have a PC custom built it will work a lot better and last a lot longer than any OEM PC. Saving money is just one reason to avoid OEM PCs. There are more reasons to avoid OEM PCs and build or have a custom built PC built.

• The Japanese floods has caused a world wide shortage of HDDs, as a result HDD prices have risen significantly which has made these two builds more expensive than normal. Once the HDD shortage subsides you can expect to save even more money, up to $50 or maybe more and I’ll revise this article.

• All prices were current and all parts were in stick at the time of writing. Things change, parts may become unavailable for whatever reason and prices may go up but are more likely to go down.

• This is just a reference to illustrate that OEM desktop PCs are poor value for money and is aimed at the DIYer who is partial to learning new skills. Whichever way you look at it building your own PC is better tan any OEM PC.

The videos were posted on Vimeo, a YouTube alternative, which I now like even more than YouTube for one big reason; Vimeo supplies excellent information about the videos. Most importantly Vimeo will tell you how large a video is. YouTube fails to offer this basic but important piece of information. In fact YouTube fails to offer any useful information about any videos it serves up. Even the information about the video, which is user generated, is useless a lot of the time and doesn’t provide much if any interesting or useful data.

The fact that YouTube fails to notify users about the size of a video they are watching wouldn’t be a problem if everyone had unlimited data allowances but they don’t. Most internet plans have a data limit and more people than not are on an internet plan with a data limit.

I’m lucky enough to have an internet plan with an unlimited (in theory anyway) data allowance, but I still like to know how much data I’m using because that’s the sort of thing geeks are interested in. Unfortunately not everyone can afford the same luxury of not having to care about how much data they use. Any one with a data allowance knows what happens and how annoying it is when they exceed their data allowance.

Most people are smart enough to learn how to manage their data allowance, but it’s hard to manage your data allowance when you don’t know how much data you are using.

A 360p or even 480p video probably won’t make much of a difference it’s probably only tens of megabytes in size at the most depending on how long it is. A HD (720p/1080p) video is much larger. We are talking about hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes compared to just tens of megabytes.

So you can see how this is or could be a problem for some people. The solution is easy, display the size of a video on the video page. It’s a problem that is so ridiculously easy to solve that it shouldn’t even exist. It’s also why I’m going to be using Vimeo instead of YouTube from here on in.

I enjoy Supaplex so much that I wrote what turned out to be a long, and I think, pretty comprehensive history of Suaplex because there was a bit of misinformation about the history of Supaplex and how it came to be.

While I was researching for the article I came across a bunch of interesting Supaplex information scattered across the internet in it’s dark corners and an odd number of Supaplex websites.

I can count the amount of decent Supaplex websites on one hand and have digits leftover. There is only two decent Supaplex website on the internet that I came across. Maarten Egmond’s Supaplex Home Page was the best dedicated Supaplex website. Maartins website is only a fan site, it’s not official. The only official Supaplex web was launched by Michael Stopp (one of the original authors of Supaplex) Children of Supaplex web site which is more about the personal stories of people who enjoyed playing Supaplex rather than technical details, level solutions, or support.

The only other decent website with any decent amount of Supaplex information is bd-fans.com, it’s dedicated to Boulder Dash rather than Supaplex, the site pays tribute to Supaplex as the best Boulder Dash clone and has a good amount of Supaplex information.

So if there are already Supaplex websites on the internet why create another one? There are a number of reasons, three of them actually, why I launched THINK! Supaplex:

I think that I can build a Supaplex website that’s better, in every way, than any existing Supaplex website. A website that has lots of good information but is hard to navigate and read is nearly as useless as a web site that looks pretty but doesn’t have information, content is still the king of the internet which segues nicely into my other reasons for launching THINK! Supaplex.

But both the Supaplex Homepage and the bd-fans.com websites were incredibly out of date, they weren’t even remotely current. Each site had some good information about Supaplex that the other site didn’t have. Neither web site was comprehensive. I want to offer a comprehensive amount of Supaplex information in one place on one site, not have it scattered around the internet.

The third reason for starting THINK! Supaplex was because I have some original content that can’t be found on any Supaplex website or web page anywhere, like my list of Supaplex clones. And I have some more original content ideas for THINK! Supaplexx.

So I launched THINK! Supaplex. It’s still fairly new and a work in progress but I’m busy writing content and updating the site regularly.

The old adage that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” defiantly holds true in the gaming industry where clones are par for the course. Take a successful game, change the environment, enemies, weapons, story and maybe throw in a new game mechanic and bingo you have your own game.
A good clone can set the bar even higher and become more popular than the game it copied. Or it can be a complete failure that fades into obscurity.
Take ID’s Wolfenstine 3D for example, it never gained the critical acclaim it deserved. After Wolfenstine 3D ID released Doom which is commonly sighted as the game that put the FPS genre on the map. Doom was essentially an updated copy of Wolfenstine 3D. Since Doom there have been plenty of clones based it’s engine and the Doom engine that have reinvented the genre and taken it to new levels like Quake and Half-Life. Now the FPS genre is worth millions to the gaming industry.

If it wasn’t for clones games wouldn’t evolve, they wouldn’t get refined or polished, and the industry would be pretty stagnate and boring. You could also argue that the other side of the coin is that clones have the opposite effect, it’s clones that stagnate the gaming industry and make it dull and boring but I digress. That’s a whole other can of worms and an argument for another time because today I want to share the history of one particular game that proves clones can be successful. Released in 1991, it’s a clone of an equally legendary 8-bit game and a game that took puzzle games to the next level. It’s a game I still play to this day 21 years after it’s release; Supaplex.

The 80′s were the 8-bit glory days of computing an era that gave birth to some legendary games like Boulder Dash. Created circa 1983 by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray Boulder Dash is an arcade game where you play a cave explorer called Rockford. Your task is to collect enough diamonds to activate the exit while trying to avoid death by diamond, boulder, butterfly, or firefly.

On October 28, 1983 Liepa and Gray sold the Boulder Dash rights to First Star Software who to this day still own the rights to Boulder Dash. First Star Software released Boulder Dash in 1984 for Atari 8-bit computers initially. Boulder Dash would go on to spawn multiple official sequels, more than 50 remakes/clones and was (and continues to be) released on a wide range of platforms including the Apple II, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, ColecoVision home computers, NES, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, PC, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Symbian, Android, to name just a few.

I didn’t discover Boulder Dash until around 1988 when the family got it’s first computer, a Commodore 64 that came with hundreds of disks loaded with pirated games. I was too young to realise or care that those games were pirated, I just enjoyed discovering and playing new games. When I discovered Boulder Dash it became an instant favourite.

About the same time I discovered Boulder Dash a clone was born. In the summer of 1988 two teenage Boulder Dash fans, Michael Stopp & Philip Jespersen, launched a project to code a clone of Boulder Dash. Stopp says “there were really two reasons why we started to create our own Boulder Dash clone.”, he explains that “Having played and loved Boulder Dash for a long time, we simply couldn’t find a decent replacement for it when we switched from C64 to Amiga. I think there was no official Boulder Dash version in the early days of Amiga. There were other clones, like Emerald Mine, but they all seemed to have a number of flaws”. As good as the original Boulder Dash was it still had it’s flaws, Stopp & Jespersen thought they could do a better job of creating a game, a game that they would enjoy playing. So they did, they created a better game and they called it THINK! It would take about one year and 111 levels before THINK! was finished.

Some time after THINK! was finished the team decided to try and sell their game. The guys hooked up with a small one man Swiss company called Tension Software to bring their game to the market. In the meantime Tension Software sold THINK! to Digital Integration who suggested that the THINK! team work directly with them. The guys were able to get out of their contract with Tension Software because the contract stated that the game was to be brought to the market within 6 months which hadn’t happened. Tension Software was little more than a stumbling block on the road to getting THINK! released commercially.
There was one last road block stopping Digital Integration from releasing THINK! because of a trademark conflict with IBM who used the THINK (sans exclamation mark) as a slogan. To get around this issue THINK! was renamed to Supaplex and released in 1991 for the Amiga. You can still see references to the original name of the game in some levels.

Piracy was a problem even in 1991, it was a problem that affected Supaplex which had been leaked. It was discovered on BBSes or Usenet (via UUCP) that a cracked version of Supaplex was available illegally before it hit the shops. The team were under no illusions that Supaplex would get pirated eventually although they were disappointed it happened so quickly. Supaplex was only moderately successful commercially (possibly because of piracy) and was later re released for the budget market.

In November of 1992 Maarten “Elmer” Egmond came across a review of Supaplex, he was suitably impressed and picked up a copy of Supaplex for 13.60 Euros, about $17 (sans inflation, just over $30 including inflation) in Australian currency.
At the time Maarten was a hobbyist programmer in need of an ideas for a project. After pondering for a while about what to code he eventually decided that he wanted to figure out how Supaplex stored the levels so he could hopefully decode them so he could code a Supaplex level editor. To his surprise he discovered that it was relatively easy to decode the Supaplex levels, so he set about coding a Supaplex level editor. Maarten built some new levels for Supaplex with his level editor then the project stagnated until 1994 when Maarten got connected to the internet.

After getting connected to the internet Maarten decided to publish his Supaplex level editor and levels so he set up a web site, his reasoning was that although he didn’t know any other Supaplex fans it didn’t cost him anything (other than time) to code the editor or create the levels so “why not?”.
As Maarten continued to work on his level editor he learned that there were other people that enjoyed Supaplex thanks to “Hilde’s Supaplex page”, which is cited as being the first Supaplex fan page. Maarten started publishing other peoples custom Supaplex levels.
Some people started asking questions about the legal status of Supaplex. I imagine they were asking if what he was doing was legal, did Digital Integration mind what he was doing, did he have the code, could he provide a copy of Supaplex?

By this time it was nigh on impossible to purchase Supaplex legally except for maybe the odd second hand copy if you were lucky enough to come across a second hand copy. The questions that Maarten received prompted him to seek some answers. He was under the impression that Digital Integration was broke so he contacted the original authors of Supaplex to ask them if he could distribute Supaplex for free. They agreed to let Maarten distribute Supaplex for free, they were happy and enjoyed seeing that the game was still alive. So Maarten put up a copy of the game for download.

Later on Maarten discovered that Digital Integration was still in business, so he contacted them to ask if it was ok for him to continue distributing Supaplex for free. Luckily Digital Integration were kind enough to let Maarten continue distributing Supaplex for free.

Then something important happened. Maarten met Herman Perk who told him that Supaplex was actually running at twice the original speed. It was Herman that debugged the Assembler code, found the problem and coded a fix for it thus creating the first “SpeedFix” version of Supaplex.
Over time Maarten and Herman made improvements and coded additional features.

Maarten had plans for and started making Supaplex 2 which turned into Igor because of a legal issue, namely that Digital Integration still owned the rights for Supaplex and they had their own plans to make Supaplex 2.
According to Michael Stopp has said that “[Digital Integration] planed [sic] to release a 2nd part of SUPAPLEX and I even started to build some 20 new levels…” Unfortunately Supaplex 2 never happened because Digital Integration faded into obscurity.

So what happened to Digital Integration? How did they manage to fade into history? In 1998 Digital Integration became a wholly owned subsidiary of Titus Games plc (the holding company for Titus Interactive) then in 2005 Titus Interactive went bankrupt, it apparently didn’t affect Titus’ international subsidiaries, including Digital integration who were continuing to operate as usual using its own name and identity. I’m assuming the bankruptcy some how affected Digital Integration because since then nothing has been heard of Digital Integration who seem to have faded into history.

Supaplex is one of the earliest games that I know of where the developer has allowed their game to be distributed legally for free.
It’s more common now to see game developers release their games for free or for the source code of a game to be open-sourced.
For example ID Softwares John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major ID Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.
Consequently, many home grown projects have sprung up to clean up the code and port the code to different languages and platforms, Some projects provide major modifications to the core engine or updates to the game by improving or adding new game mechanics. Projects like ioquake3, and games like Urban Terror, Tremulous and Alien Arena are all based on ID game engines that have been open-sourced. Although the code for Supaplex was never open-sourced the game was haphazardly released into the public domain for free.

Supaplex is commonly cited as the best Boulder Dash clone ever made and is a bona fide classic so much so that Supaplex spawned clones of it’s own for various platforms like New Supaplex for Windows, a Russian Supaplex clone (that looks strangely like Igor with different graphics), MegaPlex a Windows compatible clone of Supaplex and WinPlex another Russian Supaplex clone. SwibPlex, a Linux port/clone. The Mac has it’s own clone called Inferon. Supaplex has even been ported to modern smart phones, I know of 3 Android Supaplex clones; DroidPlex!, and two different clones both called Supaplex. Apples iOS (the operating system that runs on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch hardware) has two ports/clones called Supaplex and Nanoplex.

I still enjoy playing Supaplex (it still runs on the most modern PC although you will need to run it under DOSBox) and have launched a new web site; THINK! Supaplex to, celebrate it’s 21st birth day. THINK! Supaplex is the most comprehensive source of up to date Supaplex information.

A legend lives on.

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Good luck cracking a password like that, if it ever did get cracked it would probably be useless anyway because I would have changed it. Unfortuantly not every service lets me choose a real secure password, shame on you! I admit that I can be a bit of a security nut, just a little bit anal. But I digress.

I love the ‘auto type’ feature in KeePass so much that I decided I’ll install it on my phone, so I did then I imported my passwords from KeePass. But when I tried to use a password I had imported it failed.

When I inspected the password it had been changed, there were a few characters missing or a few characters that had changed. So I tried a few different solutions but no matter what I tried tried it just wasn’t going to work.

The only solution that I could come up with that worked was to use simpler passwords but this would mean making my passwords weaker i.e. less secure, not something that was an option for me, I wasn’t about to go change 80+ passwords either just so that I could use KeePass on my phone.

I put the issue down to the fact that Windows and Android use different character encoding/character repertoire/coded character set, what ever. I gave up and forgot about it since it wasn’t that much of a problem for me I was just bored and wanted something new to play with.

Just a few days ago I was looking through my spam folder to see if Gmail had misidentified any legitimate emails, something that it does every now and again, it’s no major problem now I know about it.

There was the usual array of spammy hammy emails and emails that smelt phisshy that would probably taste like chicken if you could eat them. One email in particular caught my eye. It was a spammy email from myself, I was offering me Pfizer Inc, OFF 74%. Apparently my engrish is really bad. I thanked myself for the offer and passed up on the offer for The Best and cheapest herbal pills!

I decided that it was best that I change my password, except that changing the password meant that I would have to renter my password on my phone. Using KeePass to make it easy didn’t work last time and I didn’t feel like fart arseing about to try to get it to work again so that was out of the question. Nor did I want to choose a weak password.

So how was I going to change my password, keep it secure, i.e. a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish that’s next to impossible to type and hard to crack, and type it into my phone?

Then I had an idea, QR codes! Yes! QR codes to the rescue! A QR code would let me use a secure password and make it dead easy to use.

I launched KeePass and generated a new 132 bit strong password that I Ctrl+C’d & Ctrl+V’d into Kaywa’s online QR code generator to generate a text QR code that contained my hard to type password. Next I used QR Droid to scan the QR code using the phones camera, then I copied the text to the clip board so I could easily paste it instead of having to type it manually. And bingo! I had just updated my email password on my phone and it was dead easy. Then I updated my password in Thunderbird and everything was back to normal.

These acts need to die. We need to protect our rights to free speech and privacy. If these acts are passed into law it sets a dangerous precedent and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world follows. Nobody wants the internet to be censored.

Even if you do not live in America SOPA & PIPA, if passed, will affect you. The laws will affect everyone around the world in ways that are apparent and not so apparent.

If you haven’t heard of SOPA or PIPA please read these articles about it:

• House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse

• Protect The Internet

• SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet

• SOPA on OpenCongress

• PIPA on OpenCongress

Check out this info graphic, read what experts are saying about it, watch this short video:

Recently the Obama administration voiced it’s concerns about SOPA & PIPA and sided with the skeptics, while other members of Congress have back peddled hard on SOPA. These are only small victories in a larger war. Despite these wins we need to keep up the pressure.

Please do everything you can to raise awareness, to oppose and stop SOPA & PIPA. If you have a web site censor it, if you live in America email congress. Hit up americancensorship.org to find out what you can do to stop SOPA & PIPA. What ever you can do, do it! No matter how small your efforts will help to keep up the pressure.

This is why history is so cool, because it turns out the myth makes for a cool flash game. A 3 man Melbourne development team, wanderlands, turned the myth into a flash puzzle platformer for Ludum Dare 22.

The aim of the game is to touch the water (i.e. the river Pactolus) so that everything you touch stops turning to gold, then you have to touch your daughter/wife to pass the level.

It’s a brilliantly simple but challenging gmae. You can play Midas at Kongregate.

It works by shooting near-infrared lights at your eyes then uses two IR cameras to figure out where you are looking. It all sounds pretty cool, the only down side is that the tech requires extra hardware to work ergo you will have to pay a premium to get the tech when and if it becomes commercially available.

Checkout a demonstration of the tech:

The tech is still fairly new so it’s going to be exciting to see how it evolves. I think that Tobii’s biggest potential is not for lazy able bodied people but for disabled people. Specifically people who don’t have use of their hands or who lack the required limbs to use a mouse or track pad, although the tech would need to undergo some changes before Tobii would be really useful for a disabled person.

I can already think of a few ways Tobii could be improved.

Instead of having to press and hold then release a button the user should be able to click with a blink of the eye(s). For example blinking both eyes could be interpreted as a middle mouse button click, a blink of the left eye can be a left mouse button click and a blink of the right eye, yep you guessed, can be a right mouse button click. It would be cool if Tobii could detect the state of an eye i.e. when the user has one eye shut and work out which eye it is so that the user could close their left eye then use their right eye to look up and or down to scroll a page instead of having to use a touch pad to scroll up and down. If Tobii could detect the blink rate of the users eye then single and double clicking could become possible. Furthermore if you combine the blink rate and eye state then all sorts of different gestures and actions become possible.

I’d also like to see Tobii built into monitors and cameras or made into a third party piece of hardware so that it can be installed and used on a PC that lacks the hardware.

The only thing that I worry about is that Tobii will be sold like a hooker to the highest bidder and the tech will get locked down al la Apple which will stop the tech from reaching its full potential i.e. it will change from an open technology into a closed propitiatory technology.

There is no such thing as the last web page on the web, well not unless you count the newest page that was uploaded to the web but then there are likely hundreds and thousands if not millions of new web pages uploaded to the web each minute given that YouTube sees 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, but I digress. However there most certainly is a first. The first ever web page on the web, which still exists today albeit with a few updates from the original page, was an information page about Tim Berners-Lee’s new World Wide Web project.

In a draw I have about 100 CDs mostly MP3 CDs (from back in the day when I had an iRiver IMP 250 MP3 CD player) and a bunch of backup CDs so I got them out and went poking about.

The oldest CD I found was dated 2001, on it I found some of my earliest design work and photography from 1998/1999. The majority of the work wasn’t anything worth writing home about but I did find a few gems amongst my digital junk.

One of the finds was the front page to the very first web site I ever built, “James’ World”. Even by standards back then it was pretty bad. Don’t look at the source code it’s shameful I built the site in Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0. I’m glad now that it never went live!

Buried in other directories were some old web sites. Of all the web sites only one still worked, the second incarnation of my Groovy James web site. I don’t think it’s that bad even today.

Sadly I lost some old web sites to a HDD crash but luckily some screenshots of those sites survived. Here they are: