Castle! Defend your castle from the invading forc…

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Castle!

Defend your castle from the invading force (with a little help from gravity).

Pick the attackers up and toss them to score points. Once you have the Temple upgrade, drop attackers in your castle to convert them to the “right” side. Once you have the Archery Range, you can train your Converts to be archers by clicking on the red flag. Archers each require 200 points upkeep per level. After getting the Demolition Lab, click on a Convert to send him out on a suicide mission. Click the bomb-laden guy to set him off. The Workshop is where Builders are trained (green flag). They will rebuild your castle when it’s damaged, and require 50 points upkeep. The Manapool lets you train Wizards (yellow flag). Wizards also require 200 points upkeep, and can cast three different spells. Kill destroys a single attacker, Detonate makes him explode and take out attackers near him, and Conversion instantly converts an attacker. Keep in mind that if you don’t have enough points, your workers will leave.

Here’s something handy for people still stuck on d…

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Here’s something handy for people still stuck on dialup, or with cable or DSL where they frequently change the IP address assigned to you.

http://ipupdate.virtualave.net/cgi-bin/myip.pl
http://dynupdate.no-ip.com/ip.php
http://ip.ChangeIP.com/ip.asp
http://dynamic.zoneedit.com/checkip.html
http://checkip.dyndns.org/
http://ipdetect.dnspark.com/
http://www.dnsart.com/myip.php
http://www.dnsart.com:7777/myip.php
http://checkip.dyndns.org:8245/
http://update.dynu.com/basic/ipcheck.asp

These are all links to scripts that will show your current IP address. The first few return only the IP address, while the others provide other info. Some are just as simple as lablling the address, others also show the hostname or other details too.

I’ve been messing with a lot of DNS stuff lately, …

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I’ve been messing with a lot of DNS stuff lately, and thought I’d point out http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/. This is a site that encourages people to add LOC records to their DNS zones. Basically, this adds latitude and longitude data to a domain’s information. While the design of the internet makes physical location pretty much irrelevant, it can be handy. It is useful for visual traceroute applications, logging internet trends, and just plain old curiosity. In the future it could be used for many things, such as smart mirror selection. Rather than being presented with a page of 50 links and instructions to “Choose the closest server”, it could compare your location to the servers’ locations and choose for you.

It’s easy to add a LOC record to your DNS zone. ZoneEdit even includes an entry for it. If you don’t have your own GPS receiver, you can use Geocode Eagle to determine the coordinates for your address. If you’re not concerned with being perfectly accurate or don’t want to give away the exact location of your server for security reasons, AirNav lists the locations of US airports. Simply pick one in your city and use its coordinates. You haven’t given away anything about your server that some simple snooping on the IP range wouldn’t turn up, but you’ve made it much easier for the average person to know where on the globe your server sits.

If you have access to your own DNS zone and no extremely good reason not to, I’d like to encourage you to add a LOC record. It’s one of those things that requires very little effort but can provide great benefits. The more people use LOC records, the more useful they become as well. Maybe some day we’ll be able to create a geographical map of the internet because of this little bit of effort…

Fraud Info

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I’ve seen a lot of people get ripped off on internet sales. In some cases, better judgment should have prevented the sale. In other cases, businesses with a good reputation have suddenly started having problems. Here are some links that you may find helpful if you’ve had a bad buying experience.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/mailorder.htm
http://www.fraud.org/info/contactnfic.htm

Basically, they have to let you know if they can’t ship it within the expected time, and must cancel the order if they can’t ship it within a reasonable time. This expected time can be the actual status shown when the order is placed, or general comments like “Most orders ship in 48 hours”. If no delivery date is stated, they have 30 days. If they can’t ship it to you within this expected time, they have an additional 30 days beyond the original stated date. When they notify you of this delay, you can choose to cancel the order instead of waiting. If they can’t ship by the end of the additional 30 days, they must cancel your order unless you specifically tell them not to. The FTC can sue for up to $11,000 per violation of these rules, as well as other costs. You have the power to make sure companies don’t rip you off. Use that power if you need to. It’ll make online business better for all of us.