Paperghost.com

Hello! Today I'm giving a workshop at BSides London called The Writey Writer's Guide to Writing Writerly, and this is the temporary landing page for a shortened URL. In the near future, this will serve as a handy resource link for those who attended. Nothing to see here (yet), but there will be very soon...

You need to repair the fence before raiders trash it. A quarter of your group is sick with food poisoning. The one science guy you have needs to make antibiotics for the infected members of your team, but you're low on ammo so he needs to sort that out instead. The car broke down so you're on foot for today, but if you walk to the nearest supermarket to pick up as much food as you can carry you won't be back until after midnight and hit a fatigue penalty. That one racist guy is picking a fight with the kid ready to up and leave and take half your stuff with him. There's a militia at your gate asking for food in return for a safe evac within a month, assuming you can last that long. DEAD STATE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. This turn-based combat zombie apocalypse sim has gobbled up 90+ hours of my time this year, and I'm surprised to see only one other person on my Steam friends list who owns it (and that was because I bought it for them). Staggering out of a bur...

Steam updated the look and feel of the Store page , along with some fairly major revisions to how things work. Some things to note: 1) A while ago, Steam altered the tabs on the front page. In terms of what was on sale,  you used to see the new releases tab before anything else , then could dip into best sellers. At some point, they changed it so you'd  see top sellers first . This used to grind my gears for a number of reasons, and it has been  covered extensively elsewhere . The way the tabs function has now changed again, so you default to "POPULAR new releases". To see what are presumably not high selling new games, you have to scroll to the bottom of the game tiles then click the "See all new releases" button. You're then taken to a feature-bare page of games, but at least you'll see new games which aren't AAA blockbuster pre-orders. As a final note, things like daily deals are currently way down the page. This all seems like a really...

Many moons ago I took part in an episode of Gamespot's Reality Check, on the subject of Watch_Dogs and videogame hacking . Out of that came a shorter segment based around good and bad examples of hacking in videogames. Fair warning: it mainly looks at the trend of turning hacking into minigames, instead of titles which are primarily all about hacking like Uplink. A couple of games not mentioned up above were given a shout-out in a  spinoff blog from way back when. And yes, I really did sit there for an age trying - and failing - to figure out the hacking minigame in Alpha Protocol. Bonus points for mastering this on a PC with mouse and keyboard. The (rather distracting) mouse pointer which controls the right box often ends up moving outside the terminal screen, resulting in two eyeballs trying to track two boxes and an increasingly distant pointer crawling across a sea of flashing green letters and numbers. The frequent reward for managing to not get a migraine in the fi...

I didn't intend for the face to face meetup I had with the BBC to turn into some sort of  gonzo summing up of the last ten years of my life, but looking at it - with pictures of Batman and giraffes as you scroll down the page alongside tales of Chunkylover and the Nigerian Astronaut it's difficult not to feel that your life is pretty weird. Ten years in infosec is nothing, really, given many people have done it for that length of time three times over or more. But when you thought you'd be getting paid money to make bad movies or paint pictures riffing on the best aspects of high renaissance art via comic book sensibilities, it feels a lot longer. I'm a "Veteran" now! I'm old! I might grow a beard! I'm still pretty new to the infosec scene, but I think I earned my blogger Vet stripes thrashing it out with all those incredibly rich Adware companies of old at a time when hardly anyone else was, and in very public fashion I might add. I also managed...

Hooray! Google have finally dropped their idiotic names policy on G+. Unfortunately it's a massive hack job and fails in almost every way imaginable. I'd much rather be called "paperghost" than "Christopher Boyd" on G+. With that in mind, it should be a piece of cake to change it, right? The first problem is a total lack of clarity on the part of Google with regards how to change your details, what works and what doesn't. A quick look at the Google posts on this one [edit - I had links but in keeping with the G+ tone they've fallen off and don't want to stick] and you'll see the first issue: people simply don't know what to click on to change the public facing name.  You'd think this rather basic info would be right there on the Google posts about this brave new world of customisation, but nope...nothing. First port of call is trying to change the name in the custom url pop up, seeing as it's likely the first name related ...

The best of the best from the recent Steam Sale. I bought a lot of stuff, but I'm only mentioning things I've played since picking them up. 1) One Finger Death Punch All you do is hit left or right. "All you do". If you think your reflexes are up there with Neo then feel free to give this a shot. It's like Space Channel 5 with punching. 2) Doom 3 BFG Edition You have to understand, playing this game all those years ago freaked me the hell out, even while running it on an underpowered Pentium 2 (or whatever it was). I never managed to get more than a few hours in before saying "nope" loudly and doing something else instead. Weirdly it feels like I'm cheating in the new edition due to being able to wave the torch and the gun around at the same time. I'm too fast. I should be more sluggish. Maybe that's just the Pentium 2 talking. 3) Ghost Control Inc. Okay, a bit of a cheat here because I don't remember if I bought ...