TheBeast (Level 1)

After hearing @will's adventures in procuring some Dominion storage solution, I thought I'd share mine and see if anyone else has any novel approaches.

I'm using an awesome box from Really Useful Boxes - this 11L one, with the 16 part tray. Conveniently, each tray section is almost the perfect width for a set of cards. I also bag each individual kingdom deck in 3x4" plastic bags to keep them separate - they fit nicely and it makes it easy to just grab 10 different sets. I'm currently storing base, Intrigue, Prosperity and Seaside in it with plenty of room to spare - all the extra components seem to fit nicely too.

I don't necessarily need dividers at the moment because I never actively look for a particular set, but I'm planning on printing these awesome clean dividers at some point.

Some pictures:

After hearing @will's adventures in procuring some Dominion storage solution, I thought I'd share mine and see if anyone else has any novel approaches.

I'm using an awesome box from Really Useful Boxes - this 11L one, with the 16 part tray. Conveniently, each tray section is almost the perfect width for a set of cards. I also bag each individual kingdom deck in 3x4" plastic bags to keep them separate - they fit nicely and it makes it easy to just grab 10 different sets. I'm currently storing base, Intrigue, Prosperity and Seaside in it with plenty of room to spare - all the extra components seem to fit nicely too.

I don't necessarily need dividers at the moment because I never actively look for a particular set, but I'm planning on printing these awesome clean dividers at some point.

Some pictures:

After hearing @will's adventures in procuring some Dominion storage solution, I thought I'd share mine and see if anyone else has any novel approaches.

I'm using an awesome box from Really Useful Boxes - this 11L one, with the 16 part tray. Conveniently, each tray section is almost the perfect width for a set of cards. I also bag each individual kingdom deck in 3x4" plastic bags to keep them separate - they fit nicely and it makes it easy to just grab 10 different sets. I'm currently storing base, Intrigue, Prosperity and Seaside in it with plenty of room to spare - all the extra components seem to fit nicely too.

I don't necessarily need dividers at the moment because I never actively look for a particular set, but I'm planning on printing these awesome clean dividers at some point.

Some pictures:

There's a video of AirPlay working on one too:

I'm very interested in how feasible it would be to use these as a cheap Airport Express alternative, using them to stream music (either over AirPlay or XBMC) to all the rooms around my house.

Had a play with it earlier and it's a fantastic interpretation of the Flipboard style for smaller screens - the vertical 'flipping' takes a little getting used to after using the iPad version, but it's a really nice way to quickly thumb through interesting stuff.

Been having the same server issues since the US started waking up though.

Some of my favourites:

• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman) - A very interesting and amusing read about some of Feynman's various adventures.
• Freakonomics (Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner) - A high-level introduction to economics with some interesting and thought-provoking stories. Certainly has it's detractors saying it's misleading, but as a bit of an eye-opener, I can't see a fault with it.
• Masters of Doom (David Kushner) - The fascinating story of John Carmack and John Romero, highly recommended.
• In The Plex (Steven Levy) - An interesting insight in to what goes on inside Google.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson) - This is a must-read eye-opener to me - covers so much so well that you're bound to find something that really captivates you so you'll want to go discover/read more about it.

This looks neat, but if there's anything that proves that these tools like the Adobe AIR mobile interpreter are generally terrible, it's that a game this simple can't run on the original iPad when built on it.

@LtSquigs: @will: I find the game starts to get bogged down with 5 - it works decent with 4 but definitely at its best with 2-3 players - much more room for tactical use of cards and easier to manipulate your/your opponents' hands.

Having said that, it's probably a different experience if you play with 5 on Isotropic or BGA where it's generally much faster anyway.

Can't say I recall much oddities with Masquerade - other than the fact it can't be reacted to, it's generally just been used to pass junk around.

@MackieG: Just pull a random set of cards - every game will play uniquely - some will be really tight because there's only 3 sets of cards that anyone wants, and some will have a few cards that work really well together.

I don't think I've ever pulled a bad set - even when playing with people that overuse the Pirate Ship (Seaside expansion) it's hilarious.

For those that like to play board games on iOS - there's been a few interesting releases this past couple of weeks:

• Forbidden Island - a co-op game by Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. A lot simpler than Pandemic but a nicely designed game. Not given this a go yet but it looks nicely done.
• Ticket to Ride Pocket - An iPhone conversion of the iPad Ticket to Ride app. Seems nicely done and looks to have cross-play with the iPad app. Also, for $0.99 you can't go wrong.
• Elder Signs: Omens - A game based on Elder Signs, a dice rolling version of the popular Arkham Horror board games from Fantasy Flight Games.
• Tigris & Euphrates - A very popular board game - not one I'm a big fan of because it has a pretty dry theme, but this iOS conversion looks decent and I've heard good things - might be worth taking a look at it if you're in to games like this, or a fan of Reiner Knizia games in general.

A quick update on this in caes anyone else is looking.

I'm thinking of going with an all-AirPlay based system - it has some significant shortcomings but also seems relatively flexible.

• An Airport Express (might wait for the rumoured update) in each room, connected to a set of speakers - thinking of AudioEngine 2's.
• An AppleTV connected to my lounge TV.
• I can AirPlay to multiple endpoints from iTunes/Airfoil on my computer and control it using the Remote app on iOS.
• Can't AirPlay to multiple endpoints from iOS - which is a bit of an annoyance but not major.
• Can't AirPlay from AppleTV - so can't have TV sound around the house.
• Can't AirPlay from a standard line-out - so can't have Xbox audio over AirPlay - definitely a pain but hopefully someone will come out with some sort of relay device eventually.

I've been putting together a series of blog posts over on Giant Bomb on some of my favourite board games - thought the Tested crowd would be interested them too, so with the blessing of the mods over here, here's a few links to what I've written so far:

Giant Bomb Unplugged - Part 1: Ticket to Ride, Dominion

Giant Bomb Unplugged - Part 2: Deadly Diseases, in Space (Pandemic, Alien Frontiers)

Let me know what you think, and if there's anything you'd like to see me cover.

Posted some of this in Matty's G+ but figured it could be helpful here.

I've used 3 password managers so far:

• 1Password - this is by far my favourite. Easy to use, integrates really nicely with everything I use including Chrome, Firefox, Dropbox and iOS. Lets me access my passwords from anywhere by using the Dropbox web UI or the iOS apps. Biggest issue is the cost - to get the Windows/OSX app and the iOS app, it gets a bit costly. I believe the Android app is free, however.
• LastPass - been a while since I used this. I found it perfectly serviceable and having all my passwords available on the site was really useful. However, I found the web interface a bit of a pain to use and never got around to trying out their mobile apps.
• Keepass - This is a great open source alternative to either of the above. If you like using open source software and want to be sure your passwords are not being stolen by evil companies, this is a great choice. The issue with this is that having your passwords accessible to you wherever you are can get complicated. There's a load of clients supporting the system, so as long as you keep your database file somewhere like Dropbox, you can open it wherever you can install a client. The Windows client is nice, but I found the OSX client a bit poor, and I'm not sure how the mobile side of things stands up.

Here's a small challenge for you guys (and perhaps something that warrants an article at some point).

I live in a relatively small bungalow and am looking for some way to get audio around the whole house. The main specs I'd like a system to meet are:

• Relatively low budget. I'd love a Sonos setup but it's way too expensive.
• The system should be able to cover 3, maybe 4 rooms with relatively low amounts of wiring. Preferably all wireless.
• There's no need for any sort of zoning system. I just want audio that plays from one source to be coming out of speakers everywhere else.
• Each room is quite small and I'm no audiophile, so speakers don't have to be anything special.
• I'd like to configure multiple sources - mainly my TV and my computer - both of which are in different rooms. If I can use my iPad/iPhone as a source, all the better, but not necessary.
• A built-in/independent audio player that connects to my media server (UPnP) would be useful, but not necessary.
• Some way to have radio as a source would be nice, but not particularly important if I can use my computer.

So, any suggestions?

Regardless of how you interpret this letter; if anyone can phase out dated technology, Apple can.  
I can't wait to see Flash fade away myself - it's been going for the past 10-15 years: 

• First, we stopped using it for flash intros. Nobody liked those things.
• Then, we stopped using it for important navigation elements (This Jakob Nielsen article from 2000 sums that up well).
• No one uses it for layout/interactivity anymore. (Except for those odd few web developers that build websites for bands...)
• With the increasing adoption of CSS3 and faster JS engines, the need to use it for animation has all but gone (Example). 
• Flash's most recent raison d'être, video will (hopefully?) be replaced by HTML5 video - regardless of what encoding standard we end up using.
• Flash games have been around forever - will HTML5 be able to replace them? Frameworks like Akihabara are looking great, but probably not ready for mainstream.

 
We're not quite there with a lot of these things, HTML5 and CSS3 standards aren't finalised yet, let alone fully implemented in most browsers. But I think it takes someone as big as Apple to stand up and force these things to move ahead before we make any real progress. 
 
On Jobs' last statement; "Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future" - Adobe are pretty great at making tools. Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Flash - they're all industry standard applications. What could they do for the future of the web if they helped push for these open standards, building tools and frameworks to help developers build HTML5 video players, browser-based games (such as with Akihabara), and animations?

@FakePlasticTree: Yeah, fair point. It's pretty tough to brick an iPhone, and if you're on 3.1.3 already, you're not going to lose much. 
  
Interesting to see that there are actually 3.1.3 jailbreaks around (redsn0w) - I  had thought they were still being worked on - probably getting myself confused with unlocks.  
 
The only jailbreak app other than the carrier unlock I use frequently is SBSettings - allows me to quickly toggle things like a rotate lock, brightness, 3G and so on. It's not vital, but somewhat useful.

@lane: H.264 is an open standard, just patent encumbered so requires a license from MPEG LA to redistribute. I think if anything, Apple are major advocates of an open video standard.  
The Quicktime format is just a container format, nothing to do with how a video is actually encoded (they seem to push the use of H.264 for encoding Quicktime contained videos), it's used by Apple because its relatively good for storing lots of media-related metadata in a single file.

@lane: I realise flash on Android is happening (as I'm fairly sure Steve Jobs is...), the question being raised is how well it will perform. Hopefully, it'll be great, and we can all experience Flash on our Android phones. 
 
As for Steve Jobs (Apple?) pushing for openness; as mentioned in the letter, Apple did create the WebKit project, as well as being major contributors to open web standards such as HTML5. Sure, they have their closed systems which are doing extremely well for them, but it would be naive to suggest that they're in opposition of open standards.

Apple just released this letter from Steve Jobs on their stance towards Flash and Apple. 
 
A few interesting outtakes:  
On Flash on mobile devices

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?    

 On Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone layer

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.    

On open standards

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.    

Read the full letter here.

No. Wait for something that's tested and approved by either geohot or the iPhone Dev Team otherwise you'll risk buggering up your phone. Better safe than sorry, and you're not missing out on much.