Google Acquires Twitch.tv
Coming off last week's DOTA2 International Tournament 4 (TI4), we now know how big online PC gaming really is. Didn't think that many people were involved? Ha. Think again, and check the stats, noob! Google has now finally purchased one of the biggest game-streamers there is: Twitch.tv
They purchased it a little late in my opinion, the industry may be at its peak this year and in 2015. There's still room for profits, but if they didn't have the foresight to buy them out last year or the year before, I'm not sure they'll have the foresight to manage it, or get out in time to make that profit they're chasing. I'm sure they're not in it to help the gaming industry, considering Facebook beat them out over the Rift, and I haven't seen many investments in computer gaming recently. Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope to see them at TI5, at least they will draw bigger sponsors and vendors next year.
Moisture Minder Wally
One excuse I have for not blogging the past month is that my water heater failed, and started gushing water directly out of its side. I woke up to one of my small dogs lapping water in the bedroom. I thought to myself in a daze, "I don't remember bringing his water bowl in here, and the direction I'm hearing it from doesn't sound like he's drinking from the toilet, heck he's not even big enough to reach it. He must have peed and is drinking his own pee off the floor. Gross." As I rolled out of bed and set my feet on the tile, they submerged about 2 inches in water. Hot water. I still wasn't sure what was happening, as I stood up, I could hear a faint gushing of water. Sometimes I can hear my upstairs neighbors flush their toilet, or even taking a shower if I listened very carefully (which I don't often do, don't worry) but this was alot louder than those sounds. I walked toward the gushing sound, opened the utility closet, and saw the water rushing from the side of the tank at about the same rate as your shower faucet would be on full blast when filling the tub for a bath. It was that fast. Long story short, I cut the water feed, then I cut the breakers and electricity to the whole house, because to my horror, I saw a surge protector floating in the water with about 7 wires connected. The water covered the entire floor of every room in my 1,200 sqFt condo, I was moved into my parents house for the full month, and it took another 22 days to complete the full restoration of all the old formica cabinets (2 baths and kitchen). The dogs are okay and everything is back to normal.
The point of that story is to let everyone know about this product I read about that would have saved me from all of that crap: The Wally Moisture Minder
You connect a central hub unit to your Wifi, install the app, and then place the wireless sensors anywhere in your home that you are worried may leak one day. The sensors send signals to the app within 5 minutes of detection. It would have saved me alot of time and heartache if I had this product installed at the base of my water heater utility closet that morning. It would have gone off after about 5 minutes or less, and I may have mitigated the damage to only that closet, and been able to replace the water heater. Instead, I had to replace over $17,000 worth of cabinets, furniture, and flooring. I was also out of my home with construction and restoration workers in & out for over a month. Not the best experience. Like a carbon monoxide or smoke detector, everyone should have at least 1 or 2 of these things installed. Technical Papers for the Wally
Online Privacy 2014
Are we still talking about this? I hate to include this in this week's blog, but it's still all over the news. Can everyone just accept the fact that nobody will ever have true privacy? If you want privacy, move to your own island, get off the grid, stay off the internet. I've said it before and I'll say it again: As soon as you go "online", you're signing an invisible TOS that specifies you may fall victim to cybercrime, spammers, hackers, and any other type of electronic evil entity (EEE) you could imagine. Stop doing questionable things online, stop being paranoid. Remember the early 90's? When you would log on AOL 3.0 just to talk to your friends about your day? Join chatrooms to discuss hobbies or other cool stuff? I don't remember being concerned about privacy back then, do you? Why do we have so much to hide today? It's because we've volunteered all of our most secret, private information to go up "into the cloud". WE put it there. Nobody stole it from us. There's nobody to blame here. Would you stop trusting all the banks of the world because the one you used got robbed? No, you wouldn't, so stop crying about the entire internet being insecure. I'll try not to rant about this topic anymore but it just keeps popping up, so I thought I would address it again. If I change my opinion or some hacker/privacy invincibility software finally gets created, I'll post about it. Until then, get a VPN and be smart with your sensitive data. There's not much more we can do.
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