Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Rogueish Ranting

Maybe not so much with the ranty but I am somewhat annoyed about some software ....
The catalyst for this was Rogue One .... Nothing wrong with the film, it's an amazing film. One of the best of 2016, possibly the best Star Wars movie. Episode VII was more fun and definitely brought back the little kiddie feelings with the Millennium Falcon chase early on ... and all those references. Rogue One had the storyline. A gritty war movie set in the Star Wars universe ? It pulled it off incredibly well.

Last night's plan (with no streams happening) was to sit in the pooter chair watching Rogue One. Why not in the telly sofa seat ? Dunno really. (It might have been something to do with me being in the Motorsport Managers a little too long !)

Anyway. I got a piece of software called Cyberlink PowerDVD with the bluray drive that I bought with my PC.

DO NOT GIVE CYBERLINK ANY OF YOUR MONEY !

Hold on Sleepy, why so angsty ? Apparently, the Cyberlink software goes beyond what other software companies do (cough-Apple-cough) and disables itself when new versions come out. I have PowerDVD 9, the latest one is PowerDVD 11. It claims to be under attack from other software in your machine. "The integrity of this software is being threatened by your antivirus" or some similar message. It goes away a little if you disabled the Windows firewall (don't do this, even if you're like me and have a router providing a hardware firewall) but it's still dead software.

I don't even have antivirus on this machine. I know. Silly. But it seems like most of the impact Anti-virus software actually has ... is to cripple the performance of your machine. Or it will cripple your machine without warning, due to false positively identifying Windows files as viruses. So I just run Windows Defender and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware.

That said ... I'm careful on what websites I visit, with Ad-Block Plus and uBlock active on Waterfox on the desktop. That's the first line of defence. The second line is to run a full MalwareBytes scan every time I go to a suspicious site (like if I've mistakenly clicked on a MailyDail link - you know who I mean ! Don't give them traffic, definitely don't look there without an adblocker - you pick up nasties). I'll also run the MalwareBytes scan every time I download programs from the internet.

You cannot be too careful with downloading software. I've had Nasties on my machines a few times in the past. They either get in through trojan software (an app pretending to be something else that carries something extra) or in drive by downloads (the poisoned ads I mentioned).

Yep - always be suspicious, especially when downloading software from third party websites where the act of installing the software bypasses all of the protection you get from Windows/Mac.
Yep. Software off the internet is definitely a mine field ...

Bluray software ?

Yep. PowerDVD was complaining that something was trying to hack it, which is code for the publishers disabling your software. A couple of other attempts failed but it does look like something by Leawo works. It pulled the menu page up for Rogue One at least. And it was good hearing the opening titles for Mysterious Cities Of Gold again. (I used it for a test of whether software was good). I didn't actually watch them cos the moment had gone by then !

Other stuff happening ?

I'm enjoying resting up. I've been watching stuff from the tv box, playing the games, watching the streams, listening to the music. And trying to leave my battered bits alone so they heal. I think that's working.

TV - motor racing (Chinese GP was good in the end), Star Trek Voyager (excellent), Earth Final Conflict (decent, feels like lots of filler and an unnecessary final season)
Streams - HeyChrissa with the Mass Effect Andromedas is a big reason why I bought that game. And then there's Radderss fighting through Witcher 3 (I don't engage with that game so much for some reason)
Playing the games - it's been mainly Motorsport Manager. It's a very easy game to play and my current game is doing really well building up in the lowest leagues. I'm farming the achievements ... I think I'm the 0.1% of a couple of the really tough ones to get ... And then there's Space Explorer in Mass Effect Andromeda. That'll be a good game to lose myself in. It's not perfect but it errs on the fun side with its bugs.
Listening to the music - oh yes. Lots of music :-).

And there was an impromptu sing along to Youtube last night too that ended at maybe 2am with 03.45am No Sleep. Oops.

Rogue One will probably get watched on Friday when there are no streams again. Why watch prerecorded when there is live entertainment to enjoy ?

And there are 2 streams going at the moment ! Off to enjoy :-).

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