Oh, shit, shit, shit…another One-Hour Special, I’m afraid. Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that my work hours suck, and they do have an impact on this column at times. But I do endeavor.
The tagline from yesterday reflected the reason why the column was late being posted. I name my files “newsMMDDYY.txt”. In my state of exhaustion, I accidentally named yesterday’s column “news052502.txt”. By reflex, I mailed Widro and Ashish the last column in the directory without looking at the filename, which was last Wednesday’s column. Naturally, Widro spotted this and e-mailed me. Naturally, I was at work by the time he woke up. So, I wasn’t able to mail him the correct column until about 3PM Central. My bad. I’m just glad I was able to mail him the right column after having to drive past the anti-abortion weirdos who didn’t have enough sense to get out of the rain with their poster-sized graphic protest pictures. I was tempted to tell them that not only am I in favor of abortion at will, but I’m also in favor of making it retroactive to the age of 35.
Okay, now on to the mess…
THE PIMP SECTION
Gamble is back, and he’s rockin’ the trailer like he usually does. I would, however, like to acknowledge that sometimes, fans sometimes catch on to things that we writers don’t. Lee Baxley, for one, said that the events of Raw perfectly set up a Lesnar face turn. I didn’t even think about the possibility of that one, despite the fact that it’s obvious when you look at it.
Norton provides a wonderful riposte to Chris Jericho’s spleen-venting viz. the IWC.
Hyatte is our lord and master, and no one had better say different.
SMACKDOWN REFLECTIONS
Up in my neck of the woods again, and I blew it off despite Flea willing to pop for the ticket (see yesterday as to why). I don’t see why Flea should have to pop. WWE knows the score. Different levels of comp give them a free pass in this column for different amounts of time. I’ll add the next level: One night with My Beautiful and Beloved and I’ll disappear forever. Hey, it’s worth a shot. So, instead of finding the Greatest Pair Of Legs This Side Of Tina Turner in my bed, it’s over to the Torch for SD results I go, and naturally there will be spoilers.
First of all, let me just say that if you love the cruisers, catch WWE Epilepsy this week. It’s so loaded with Cruiser LUV that you’d think you were watching a loop of the first hour of Nitro. At least they’re getting some broadcast play somewhere.
Prototype alert! And thank God it’s Angle there for him, who sells for the kid like there’s no tomorrow. There’s even scenes of the locker room congratulating him on his effort afterward, even Undertweener. You can see the wheels clicking…”Okay, it worked for Lesnar. Now who’s the next guy on the assembly line?”
Stupid Sketch Alert: Jamie Knoble offers to share Nidia with the cameraman filming their sketch. So this makes them trailer park trash? Hell, this was normal behavior in the late 70s and early 80s. You know, it makes me sad to think that most of the people reading this column aren’t aware of a world before AIDS. I blame the Boomers. They ended up f*cking over all of us my age and below. They got all the good drugs, all the safe promiscuous sex, and most of the good music. And I’ll still be working when the majority of them are leeching off Social Security. Dear heavens.
Storm, Christian, and Test officially form an alliance courtesy of Mark Henry and Rikishi. You know, this doesn’t necessarily mean Team Canada Mark 3. It could just be that they don’t like incredibly fat guys.
Torrie, Dawn Marie, and My Beautiful and Beloved in a catfight? Okay, I’ll tape it this week, but that’s as far as I go.
Jericho gets to be someone else’s bitch, but since that’s the main event, I’ll leave the identity of the butch in mystery for now.
PIRACY 101
Due to numerous requests, I’m going to do a short piece on what you need to set yourself up to get software, music, and movies for free.
First of all, there’s the major rule of thumb: Usenet for software and recently-released movies, KaZaA for short films, and Gnutella for music. You’re going to need to set yourself up with access to all of those for proper piracy. There’s also certain pieces of hardware that you’re going to need…
Hardware Requirements:
Some sort of broadband connection is an absolute must these days. AT&T, my current provider, has a surprisingly good news server. I’ve had good results from RoadRunner in the past, although their news server does a barf about twice a month. Other broadband providers, I’m not sure about. Check out DSL Reports for more info on your local DSL and cable systems.
Next, you’re going to need a CD burner that can copy disks protected by Safedisk 2.51+. It’s becoming the most common CD protection around. I even replaced a perfectly-good Yamaha CD burner because it couldn’t copy those CDs. My personal choice right now is the Hi-Val 40X12X48. You can get it at CompUSA and MicroCenter, among other large dealers. This is mainly so you can copy commercial games you or your friends purchased for legitimate backup purposes (legitimate, my ass).
Large hard drives are incredibly important. One CD of info will take up over a gig and a half as you’re processing it. I personally have two 80G drives in a RAID array, and it’s still not enough sometimes.
Usenet And Its Abuses
Usenet is still a useful entity despite the advent of Peer To Peer software. Games get there faster than to anyone’s hard drive. The first thing you’re going to need is a good newsreader. I’ve been using Agent for years, and the new 1.91 version has support for the yEnc text encoding scheme that’s becoming popular. Key generators and cracks for Agent can easily be found at cracks.am (as they can for other software mentioned here). It’s a bit of a bitch to set up at first, but once you have it going, it’s almost completely automatic. Definitely read the Help file before you start.
So, now that you have Agent up and running, where do you go? Here’s a short list of groups you should try out first:
Software
alt.binaries.cd.image
alt.binaries.cd.image.clonecd
alt.binaries.games
alt.binaries.games.worms
alt.binaries.images
Movies
alt.binaries.vcd
alt.binaries.svcd
alt.binaries.vcd.svcd
Just a little warning: some ISP newsfeeds do not carry the alt.binaries hierarchy. Let’s hope yours does.
KaZaA Sucks
KaZaA is pretty decent, but it’s loaded with spyware. Fortunately, there’s a solution to that. KaZaA Lite is a specially-modified version of KaZaA without the spyware. It hooks you up into the FastTrack network like KaZaA and works exactly like KaZaA, so there’s no problem using it. It’s even up to the latest version of the KaZaA official client.
Which Gnutella Client To Use?
My favorite is BearShare. Be careful, though, only to install BearShare and its desktop icon. The rest is spyware.
Now that you have that set up, and you’ve downloaded your first CD, you’re going to need some software to burn it. Here’s the absolute minimum:
CloneCD: A program designed to do 1:1 copies of CDs with incredible accuracy. Powerful and simple to use. There’s a great CloneCD usage forum over at CD Freaks frequented by Olli, CloneCD’s author. CD Freaks also has links to a lot of info about CD burning that will help you.
Fireburner: Most programs and movies you download from Usenet are in bin/cue format. Fireburner is designed to burn bin/cue files.
Nero: You may have received this program with your burner when you purchased it. Its advantage is that it can create VideoCDs from MPEG files. Many commercial DVD players can play VideoCDs.
WinRAR: Most of the stuff you’re downloading from Usenet is compressed using the RAR format, so you’re going to need a proper decompressor. It can also do Zips with no trouble. Sometimes you’ll see stuff in Ace format. For those, grab a copy of WinAce.
Fosi’s main download mirror: A selection of a few dozen small utilities. Grab PowerDVD from here. You’ll need it to play VideoCDs on your system. Also, if you want your GUI to look great, grab a copy of Window Blinds from there, install it, and head over to WinCustomize to grab some different looks for your system. Not necessary, but at least it’s not the same old boring-looking Windows.
Windows Commander: Once you run this directory manipulation tool, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
All of those programs that I mentioned are the absolute minimum you’re going to need to start being a software pirate. There’s a lot of info on the newsgroups on how to do this, FAQs and such. Just a reminder: when you download stuff, read the posted .nfo files very carefully before you start. They’ll have things in them like program keys and important info (like the fact that Neverwinter Nights and Warcraft III have to be purchased in order to play multiplayer).
If you have any questions, please, don’t hesitate to mail me. Hopefully I’ll have enough energy to answer you and help you.
Unfortunately, I’m already late for work, so You’re A Moron gets postponed until Tuesday. I’ll turn it over to Grut now, and he’ll lead into Ashish and Hyatte, and they’ll flip it back to me next week. Hopefully, it’ll be a lot better than this one. Well, off to work…
About Eric Szulczewski
