nath0rn atm

Recently there has being a rather large movement of people towards spreading the information about what I think should be known to everyone who has an internet connection in Australia. If nothing is done, the Australian Government will implement a nation wide internet filter. With the “save the children” ploy and being targeted at the ignorant masses, this can have a devastating effect on the quality of the Internet in Australia and freedom of information available to people. This filter not only has shown to be ineffective in trials, it will also slow down the internet by around 70%. The “black list” wont be available to the public, and there is no known reason or why a web site can make it to the list, other then the fact it is not deemed suitable for Australian viewing. There was a black list leaked which contains several harmless sites including a Brisbane dentist and a school canteen along with several youtube videos.

We are staging a city protest tomorrow, at 10AM outside the Casino! Please come along and check it out and bring your friends! Spread the word. There will also be another protest in March.

This really isn’t a step in the right direction for any freedom of information/speech! So take a stand, and help spread the word. If nothing is done, within two years this filter will take place without any vote or consent from the Australian people. Bellow is a video from the website containing information about “Project Freeweb”.

Project Freeweb – For the Freedom of the Internet from Anon VonAnon on Vimeo.

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018 

The last entry I’ll write about in my web privacy effort is worth mentioning I think, Suicide Machine provides facility to totally obliterate your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn (never used that one) accounts by killing all your virtual friends and eventually, yourself. So if you are serious about removing your internet identity and starting fresh, then this is certainly the way! I enjoyed the humor elements to it too!

So I have my tweets destroyed, Facebook deleted (well, after two weeks of not logging in, everything will be removed) and the MySpace totally gone. Once the Facebook two week grade period is over, I’ll make another one, but just for the purpose for people to contact me and redirect to this site. So from now on! Sensible tweets and facebooking, kthx sirs.

On my Internet privacy binge, I’ve come across something interesting called Google Dashboard. Logging into this will reveal to you what information under your Google account is kept, and where! Interesting to see the results.

There is also a section which shows everything you’ve searched for on Google, with dates and times… I suggest to turn this ‘feature’ off by pausing web history! Be aware though, that none of this will apply to you if you don’t have a Google account, or surf the internet with your Google account logged in!

I knew it’d happen sometime, so I guess now is the time. Facebook was exciting to get in touch with friends you lost over the years, but there is a point where it turns into a privacy concern. MySpace as well, totally toasted !!! I may as well blast all my tweets and start afresh too! Also a note with the twitter thing, if you have one it’s best set to private I say. I found some sites on google that collate and cache your tweets and put them on their own site. Rather rude considering the Twitter user agreement claims all tweets belong to the author.

What Facebook doesn’t seem to publicise too much is the fact you can delete your account, and remove everything on there. Surely that beats the deactivation if you want to leave the thing for good. Check out this URL for more info http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account !

The only other social network / thing I can think of that I am still apart of is the Deviant Art. But I never check that, or go there… and personally I’d rather have that preserved as internet (embarrassing too) memories! Oh god how annoying I was !!! (And probably still am LOL). So to recap, totally destroying my internet identity as an attempt to regain control over what Google (and anyone looking) knows about me.

In other news, I am really getting involved with 3D Game Development for a Uni project, as well as working on some side project(s). Stay tuned!

Despite the lack of posts, this site has managed to sneak its way to 5th spot on the Google search for “Nathan Sapwell”. I guess a good way to start the show. ;o

This year I should get some stuff happening here with what I’m doing at the moment on and off the computer. Will be good to keep track of it all. Take care! Wow also check out the amount of Sapwells on the facebook. Scary ;s

ps: Thanks vraj for the post idea ;o

A while back (2003ish I think) I wrote a DLL extension for Game Maker. Although a lot has changed Game Maker wise, I thought I’d give it a home and a permanent link due to people in the forums still asking about it. You can download it here. Game Maker Text to Speech DLL.

All help/support should be included with the file. Please don’t ask me for help, since I’ve lost my knowledge of Game Maker from being away from it for so long. Who knows, I might make a return.

Just got back from the comp !!!

How it worked was, there was nine problems presented and in a five hour gap you had to solve all these problems with a chosen language (java, c/c++ and c#). I was teamed up with an old Uni mate, and a new person who I met, Anoop. We all worked wonderfully together and tackled the problems. Pretty exciting too since we could see the scores of the people participating in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Tasmania and New Zealand in realtime.

I arrived late at 10:20am, however just on time for the practice questions. We blazed through them, no problems. Then, the pizza lunch. But me being picky with my foods, ditched the lunch to go print some ’secret notes’ for the competition  !!! Wasn’t going to miss out on much, probably all this meat shizznit. The stealth notes printed I entered back into the lab with my team to prepare for the comp around 12ish.

So we started out nicely, wrote some algorithms down on paper, sorted out what we thought would be easiest to solve… ended up with 0 problems apparently solved, even though we had working solutions (well, we thought we did) for four of them, they didn’t run with the extra test cases on the “Judges Machine”. However some cool things were happening, we were supplied drinks of our choice (soft drinks, etc). Sugary food was provided along with apples and bananas !!!

But really, this wasn’t a waste of time at all !!! Learned a lot, also recieved the following things:

• A stress ball
• Certificate of Participation
• Free ACM Membership
• Something for the resume
• Told Anoop about the Temple, things like that. He said he will check it out since that’s what he was looking for.
• Thought I could write about this here, to keep a record (so I can look over it around the same time next year )
  

Will hit it up next year and actually practice this time. The team who won (Six questions solved) practiced hardcore for a few weeks straight, and will head onto the nationals I think. Good luck to them!

Now time to sit and relax, space out. Maybe play some more Final Fantasy Dissidia!!! Awesome game if you are a Final Fantasy fan.

So I got a new domain, and some hosting. But overall, I feel pretty ripped off.

I could have just got a domain name cheap and hosted it all at my home, but I don’t really think that would work. And besides, apparently I have infinite storage and bandwidth, so ugh, see where this takes me !!!

Also too, apparently this server is ran by 100% wind energy, saving the world bro !!!