Month: May 2018

Aethertech Class – Play As a Mech

A popular class in MMOs is the “Engineer” or Mechanical class. Usually employing gunfire of some kind. GW2, Wow, and Tera all have Engineer or  Gunner classes. One of the fetishes for these classes is a big gun. Well, for the Aion Aethertech class, the gun is bigger than all the rest.

This Mech is not a mount, but actually the weapon for this class.

It flies, and glides and when you “Disembark” you are carrying a CypherKey, which only allows you to “Embark” to ride your Mech. The Mech skills include punches, rockets and rocket powered fists. And this is all out of the box at level 10.

Tera Gunner, eat your heart out. My “Gun” is bigger than yours.

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Spiritmaster Pets

So far I’ve seen four pets of the Spiritmaster: Fire, Earth, Water and Wind. The Wind Spirit looks like a small griffin with a white / blue mane. The Tempest and Magma spirits appear, depending on your Faction, at level 50.

At about level 25 I’ve seen these pets. I prefer the Wind pet, although they all probably do the same damage and I’m not clear on any reasons for choosing among them.

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New Internet Service

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Just switched to Spectrum 400mbps service. It’s great. 400 mbps down, 20 mbps up. And I hear a rumor that they are going to provide 1 Gbps service soon. My YouTube posts now complete in a reasonable time. Fibre comes to my street and the last 100 yards or so is coax. My service is about $70 / month for internet alone.

Check out your options here if Spectrum is in your area.

Not a paid endorsement, just a happy customer. The installation procedure is much more modern and up to date with Spectrum than with the local phone company, that is still operating with hand typed username / passwords to configure DSL modem. The Spectrum modem configure operation was a photo shot of the bar codes on the router into the installer’s mobile phone with their special app, and away we go in seconds. The local phone company has no plans for faster service, in spite of the fact that my house is only a little farther away from their fibre head end box.

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Character Boost Pricing

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I was just checking on some account services for some of my characters. These are ones that I’ve created a long time ago and need a coif and makeup.

Plastic Surgery is very like Wow’s Appearance Change and costs a little less. Rule of thumb: Game currency is a little more than a penny a coin. So about $10 on Aion and $15 on Wow. About the same.

But here’s where it gets weird. Say you want to play end-game and you don’t want to slog through all that leveling on the way and you have some coin to spend for that? On Wow a Character Boost will cost you $60. Since Battle for Azeroth is coming out and will raise the level cap to 110, I’m not sure what will happen. This price is for the level 100 boost that was active for Legion, the currently active expansion. So, $60 to start playing end-game content.

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Logging Your Public IP Address

I’ve recently had problems with my internet service. My DSL router is apparently re-syncing causing my public IP address to change. Apparently my ISP uses PPOE rather than DHCP, and apparently PPOE does not allow “Reservations”, which allows a client computer to use the same IP address if it reconnects within a given amount of time. Your home router uses DHCP, which does do reservations, so your computers LAN IP address does not change if the computer connects every 24 hours, which I understand is the default “Reservation” time.

Re-synching is not only a problem because the internet is out for a short amount of time, but also because the IP address change causes some games to require that you “Verify” your IP address by reporting a code that is sent to your email account. This is obviously an issue if the Re-Sync happens several times per day.

After quite a bit of research I found a windows service that logs the Public IP address to the Windows Event log every 15 minutes. I run one of my windows systems all the time, since it’s running Carbonite, so this system will run the PublicIpLogger program.

If you want to use the program, it’s on GitHub here. This is the forum post that mentions this program.

From Github, download the setup.exe file and run it. Then you can enter “view event log” into Cortana and you should see a choice to run the windows event viewer. The program logs your public IP address to the event log every 15 minutes.

 

 

As shown, under Application and Service Logs, find the PublicIpLogger events and there are a number of events that show the Public IP address, whether they have changed or not.

Enjoy,

:ww

 

Be A Glamorizer

My toons are level 50 plus and I’m farming “Main Sequence Scenarios” for Ironworks Gear for all my jobs. For some of the jobs, IronWorks Gear is very stylish. Paladin’s for example get nice looking black gear with blue highlights, like the rest of Ironworks gear. But Healer Gear looks like a Habit, and it’s a real drag for a man. So I decided to study up on Glamorizing my gear. In this article you’ll see that Glamours have changed. When first introduced to the game, there were three types of crystals, one for each Armor type – Cloth, Leather and Plate. But since path 4.2, it’s a much simpler system, and more accessible too. Glamour prism crafting used to unlock at level 50, but now you can unlock prism crafting at level 15, and in practice you can craft glamour crystals with two professions at about level 20, and at least one DPS job at about level 40 to farm the Wind and Ice Crystals is needed. More details later.

All the popular games have the ability to change the look of armor while leaving the stats alone. Wow calls it “Transmogrification” and Guild Wars 2 calls it Wardrobe. In Tera, there used to be a system similar to Transmog, but they removed that system and now you just wear a “Costume” that changes the look of your entire set of armor, or weapon. I guess Tera went big into “Selling” costumes to monetize the game. FFXIV sells “Costumes” too of course, they are just level 1 armor sets that can be Glamourized to any armor. You may have gotten a “Strife” armor box when you created your character.

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Why Use a Password Manager?

Why should you use a password manager? Well, here’s a reason.

So your password can’t be cracked.

and

So you can easily use a different password for every site.

If one site is hacked, then the bad guys will try your email and password at lots of other sites just to see if they get a hit. Same password on different sites? Bad idea.

Let’s look at the math of password cracking.

There are about 3000 common words in English, and most other languages.

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So if you pick, for example, an easily remembered password containing two words, with initial capital letters, and then follow those two words by three numbers, you get:

3000*3000*1000 possible passwords or:

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Sounds like a big number, right? Not really.  Not only can modern graphics cards whiz through these in a few hours, but if the website where passwords were stolen did not use a different “Salt” for every password hash, then they can “pre-make” a list of the hashes and then look for matches in much less time. Instantly.  It’s just a look in a table rather than a search with billions of calculations. Does the site where you last typed in your credit card “salt” their hashes? Salting is adding some gobbly gook to your password before they hash it. And the gobbly gook is different for every customer. Yep. Keeping track of passwords is that complicated. I’m not going to cover it all here. Just saying, it’s a complicated business and many companies short cut the process, or don’t use modern security methods to keep track of passwords.

Secure Passwords and Password Managers

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Recruiting the Realm

There is a Main Scenario quest called Recruiting The Realm.

Unlike most quests in the game, it’s not obvious how to find the folks that you need to visit. Except for Alphi, who is well marked. For the other targets, only the general areas are marked on the map, and especially in Limsa Lominsa, these folks are not trivial to find. There is a page for the quest with a list of the targets with their coordinates, but this is not that easy to use either. So what I’ve done is taken a picture of the mini-map for each of the targets.

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