So I recently upgraded my phone from a Epic 4G to a Galaxy S3 and because of one of the Apps I was required to install for work I went ahead and rooted my phone and installed a permissions manager (the app is super intrusive and I feel it doesn’t need access to everything it was asking for).

The side effect of this is seeing the crap other apps are doing on my phone and it has been a real eye opener. My chief annoyance right now is the Flickr app. I installed it and set my login but have yet to actually use it for anything yet. But! I discovered last night that every time I take a photo on my camera, Flickr runs and tries to send phone ID and geo-location back to Flickr! Yeah, you heard me. WTF is up with that. I’m not even uploading these photos to Flickr. Never launched Flickr. WTF do they need to know where I am taking everyone one of my photos from!?! Needless to say I blocked all of these activities. But it’s still incredibly irritating and a massive invasion of my privacy seeing this activity on my phone.

I’ve been running this app for a good year or more now and have to realize that Flickr has been capturing data on everyplace I use my phone over that time. Color me seriously pissed to say the least.

Thanks for your time… and yes, I know the theme on my blog is still fubar. One of these days I’ll get to overhauling this mess.

Cheers!

Grrr.

So I noticed something weird going on with the right hand sidebar floating over the body text. Not sure what’s going on yet but I’ll try to fix it ASAP.

I may start posting some poetry here in the future. Maybe not. I haven’t decided yet. I don’t want anyone reading anything into it and beyond that I haven’t figured out how to get the music that goes along with it captured from my head to accompany the writing.

Let me stew on this, as I’m not sure if there is any good that come from this or not.

I’m also pushing out a backlog of draft posts from the last year in case the question comes up.

Over the years I seem to consistently get two e-mail questions…

The first is where to get a copy of Picture Publisher from. This makes sense I suppose since I maintain the only known repository for all of the Micrografx product updates. Even about.com links to my collection.

So, in answer to the question. Check E-bay. Corel appears to have been pretty thorough in recalling all unsold product from the retail channel so the chance of finding a stray copy of Graphic Suite on some store shelf is pretty much not going to happen. Even finding the demo downloads for Picture Publisher 10 have been getting pretty sparse. The only thing I would warn you about buying from E-bay is be mindful of what you think you’re buying. The primary listings I regularly see (as of mid 2010) for PP10 Pro are either a pirated/bootleg copy or a cracked version of the time-limited demo. Off and on there are legit copies of PP10 DCE version but that is just a feature crippled version of PP10. The next best bet is PP9 or PP8. Personally I felt 8 was a bit buggy and 9 wasn’t too bad. 10 Pro is the way to go if you can find it though.

The second question I get is why is the Game Zero site so ugly and bland looking. Well, that’s pretty easy to answer as well. The site was built from 1994-1996. The last significant visual design changes were made around 1995. What you are seeing on this archived site is a state of the art web design for 1995 that was created for optimal delivery and presentation for common modem based web users running at speeds of 14.4Kilobits or 28.8Kilobits with common screen resolutions of 640×480 and 800×600 (maybe even 1024×768 at best). Compare that to today’s speeds measured in MegaBytes and HD screens.

The next question that follows that is sometimes why don’t we update the site? Well, because it’s an archived site. The reason the site is even still up is because it is one of the only (if not the only) site with period reference for video game activity for the time span. Nearly every other site from that era is long gone and archive.org didn’t start indexing the web until late 1996. In fact archive.org didn’t even get around to start indexing both Game Zero sites until 1998 (that would be the U.S. site and the Italian mirror). Maybe some day if I have the spare time I might tweak some of the multi-page article navigation at some point to make the content more accessible but frankly it’s a low priority.

If you’re up to exploring though you can browse the Archive.org indexes for www.gamezero.com and our Vol.it hosted European mirror.

Thanks for stopping by.