Author Archives: Donncha

I made our little Minecraft server a whitelisted…

I made our little Minecraft server a whitelisted one this morning after I read about this hacking on another server. 3 guys were able to login and change all the signs in the world.

That unfortunately is a bug of vulnerability in Minecraft but if they can’t get in they can’t do it. I’ve added everyone who has been on before (or who I know is interested), so if you want to join us, get in touch with your Minecraft username.

Make Android screenshots without root

Sometimes you can learn useful things from a bad thing happening. Yesterday came the news that 21 popular apps on the Android market had been copied. They were uploaded again to the market with similar sounding names but loaded with a trojan.

That installed a rootkit on your phone to get root access and then sent private data to a remote server in the US. All the apps have been removed, and the developer accounts banned but of course it’s a bad day for Android. 🙁

Anyway, this Symantic post explains how to know if you’ve been unlucky enough to download one of these apps. Open up Settings->Applications->Running Services and look for “DownloadManageService”.

I did that and found a service I didn’t recognise, ScreenCaptureService. What? In the past I had to root my phone to take screenshots. How do I do it now? A quick search and I found this thread. Apparently pressing the back key and power key starts the service and this post explains that pressing Back and Home takes a screenshot! This is a Froyo, (Android 2.2), feature and a welcome one but I wonder why it’s not documented?

Screenshots are stored on your SD card, in a ScreenCapture directory. The screenshot above was created with it. No root required!

What does Battlefield 3 look like?

You’ve already seen this video but I had to blog it just because I posted videos of BF2 the other day. It looks amazing doesn’t it? Can’t wait!

Check out this article too which covers the demo shown to people last night at GDC. (Thanks Swordsman75 for tweeting that article!)

PS. don’t forget to read Chris’ comment on Woody’s BF3 video. Classic YT rant on a misinformed video. Click on here and look for ReddDragons for all the hilarious replies!

There’s also a Battlefield 3 subreddit to subscribe to too!

What does Battlefield 2 look like?

Battlefield 3 is coming out in about half a year but many players have never seen or played the previous game. Battlefield 2 came out in 2005 so graphics are nowhere near as sophisticated as in today’s games. What surprised me is just how dated Karkand looks. All simple textures with wide open uniform spaces. The Dalian Plant map looks quite nice however.


Medic montage on Strike at Karkand


More medic gameplay on in Karkand


BF2 – Dalian Plant ownage

While “researching” this post (aka “watching gameplay videos on Youtube”) it struck me how sophisticated the Xbox 360 and PS3 were on release. Even on max settings the graphics in Battlefield 2 are nothing special by today’s standards yet the exact same console hardware is running Bad Company 2!

Strike at Karkand will appear again in Battlefield 3 so get a head start by playing it in BF2 or watching some of the gameplay videos on that map on Youtube!

Minecraft: Gargamel

  1. Launch Minecraft and make sure you update to the 1.3 beta.
  2. Go into the single player menu and create a new world. Use “gargamel” as the seed.
  3. Get out of the dark cave (exit high up on the left) and go, ‘Wow!’

I’m not going to post screenshots, even though I want to. Don’t want to spoil the surprise! More seeds can be found here and I found this one here.

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