Groundbreaking News (2-7-10)
Within the last 24 hours, a lot of crap has happened that the Community needs to be aware out. Here is the brief timeline of events:1) Versatile receives a message from Zax of Tunngle that there is a Versatile Clone that has Youtube videos and 2 blogs similar to that of the underground.
2) Versatile sends a long letter to Youtube account AsphaltClips demanding answers. See blog article on this.
3) Within two hours of sending the PM, AsphaltClips owners deleted the account.
4) The two other blogs http://earthshattering.wordpress.com and http://versatile32.wordpress.com were Underground clones. I wrote a message to the community to review both blogs and flag the sites for Wordpress team to review.
5) On 2/7/10 (sometime between 10:30 to 1:00pm GMT -6), the authors have deleted both blogs. A perfect day for Superbowl Sunday and for clones to be eradicated!
It turns out that the twitter and email accounts have also been deleted. There goes my shot of getting some answers. Versatiletaco (and team),if you are reading this blog, all I want to say is how dare you tread upon us. I am concerned about your childhood and I wonder if the education you spent money on was a waste based on your actions. - Versatile
Introduction:
If you’re making a video tutorial about a software program, you are probably going to need a screen recorder to make it professional. What if you’re writing a text tutorial? If it’s all text, the reader will have a hard time making sense of it, so you’ll want to include some screen capture images, right?
A friend told me about Jing, which is a free screen capture program. It can record videos and still images of your computer screen. Click here to get Jing.
Ground Breaking Update (2/6/10): Asphaltclips Youtube account was deleted within 2 hours of me sending a personal Youtube message.
(2/7/10): Sometime between 10:30am and 1:00pm GMT -6, both clone wordpress accounts have been deleted. See the proof here and here.
Added new Youtube Video to help put a nail in the coffin. If you are VersatileTaco (and team), you do not want to skip this video. You will enjoy it, guaranteed. – Versatile
It turns out that VersatileTaco is alive. He rejected my Tunngle friend request!
2-9-10: Youtubers speak out! See one person’s take on cloners.
Revisions:
2-6-10: Initial release. I am still in disbelief. Expect more to follow.
2-7-10: The Underground has won. Thanks to all. The clone blog and youtube accounts have been deleted. Power comes in numbers.
I am so pissed today that words cannot express clearly enough how I feel. Zax from Tunngle sent me a PM today telling me to check out this Versatile “clone” he found on the Internet. I took a look around, and I am still in utter disbelief. If you got http://versatile32.wordpress.com/, you will notice that the website is very similar to ours!!!! In fact, the way he did the format and everything is an exact clone of The Underground.
Revisions:
2-6-10: Draft release because I could not wait. It’s currently 1:40AM at time of this posting.
I will add more details to this post later in the day after I have some more rest. I still think the title of this article is “clunky” so if you can help me think of a better title, please post it in the comments.
In the meantime, please watch the Youtube Video and you will understand what I did here. This is a great breakthrough for all PS2 enthusiasts across the world.
Video Tutorial
For the month of February, we have 6 wallpapers duking it out to be part of the next Youtube video tutorial. Who will win? It will depend on the community. The poll ends midnight February 9th. Make sure you vote for your favorite one!
Wallpaper Contestants:
1) Versatile’s Submission:
2) Ice’s Submission:
3) Seb’s Submission:
4) Denton’s Submission:
5) Inspector71 Submission:
6) Sarge198’s Submission:
Now vote!!!! See the weekly poll!
Fileplanet is doing a promotion right now for the beta client and giving away keys. Get it while its hot! You can get your beta key here.
Revisions:
2-2-10: Initial release.
Per suggestion of Awsome26, this weekend is going to be a Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne weekend in Tunngle. Throughout the weekend on Saturday and Sunday, expect a couple of us Tunngler guys trolling in the room. We will play all sorts of custom maps, including DOTA.
If this sounds like fun, by all means stop in and we can have a quick game or two. Old school gaming lives on thanks to community involvement. If this turns into a success, expect more games in the future.
As usual, if you have Xfire, by all means join the Xfire tunngle group! You can find it here.
CONTEST ENDS MIDNIGHT (GMT -6) ON 2/5/2010
POLL ENDS MIDNIGHT (GMT -6) ON 2/9/2010
FINAL VIDEO TO BE RELEASED THE FOLLOWING WEEK
Revisions:
2-1-10: Initial Edition.
Comments on last month’s contest:
Last months contest was so piss poor that I decided to bring it back up in action again. Let’s have more than 2 submissions, please?
Objective:
For a certain time period, users are to submit their best wallpaper. Once all wallpaper submissions are received, a poll is created and the community votes for the best one.
The wallpaper with the most votes gets to be featured in the next Youtube video.
Prize:
If you are the winner, you get personal satisfaction that your wallpaper is featured in not only a video, but also in a follow-up article. If you have a website, Versatile will promote that too as part of the winning spree.
Contest Rules:
1) Users are to leave a comment to this blog article with a link to a wallpaper. Wallpaper preferred resolution is 1280×720. Please get me a link to the closest resoultion as possible.
2) Images are not to be pornographic. Please use discretion. Your video will be observed by kids, teenagers, parents, adults, young, old, male and female.
3) Only one image submitted per unique commenter user name. Therefore, pick your BEST and FAVORITE wallpaper choice. If you can’t make up your mind, list all your wallpapers and I will PICK one wallpaper that I like and put it into the poll.
3) The contest will run for 5 days. This contents ends at midnight on the date specified at the top of this article.
4) After contest is over, I will run a poll for all submitted images. Poll will run the following week, to end at my discretion at midnight ofthe day of my choosing (GMT -6). See top of article for deadlines.
Why do this contest?
- It’s fun.
- Brings community involvement. Anybody can participate.
- The winner will have the joy of seeing THEIR submitted wallpaper featured in a video. Is that not cool?
- I love bringing joy to people. The video helps the general youtube audience, and the wallpaper is just an indirect way of me saying Thank You for all the readers of this blog.
Extra Notes:
Oh so often we get so stuck in a daily rut in our lives, and hardly have the time to live a little. Want to break the mold? Then play the contest game! If the participation is even poorer for February, March I will make a dedicated Youtube video and see if this will be a game changer or not.
Do you like this idea? Think the rules needs to be changed a little? Let me know! Time is wasting! Let’s see those wallpapers!
With February rolling around the corner (with respect to my time zone of course), I thought it be nice to share another update as to what is going on so far with the Underground.
As usual, I have no updates from the other Underground authors, so if you are reading this and you are part of the staff, please leave a comment with an update on your activities.
For me, its been busy. Youtube account GameDexterity has now 2 new guys added to the team, Awsome26 and Gizmo, both of which are guys I have met through Tunngle months back and are eager to help me grow the Tunngle population which is always a plus.
My partner Hellome7 is doing a series of Adobe After Effect tutorials, which is great because for 2010 if there is any one program I want to become better at that would be After Effects. You could say that I am sick and tired of relying on templates or other people to do the work for me. I would gladly do the design myself if I knew how to do it. 
In other news, I will be in Atlanta between Feb. 11th and the 16th for this trade show I am part of representing my company. If you are in the Atlanta area, maybe send me an e-mail and we can meet up for lunch?
The Underground book is currently on a stand still, only because I got stuck with some hardcore work and other personal events. There are two chapters remaining, and then its officially done, unless Voltaire wants to add in some more content. Within sometime this week, I will review Chapter 4 and get that done. Year 2010 the book will be published, it is just a matter of when.
This summer I will be taking a family trip out to Vietnam for vacation so I will be gone 3 weeks in July. With that said, my goal is to have the book done before then. We’ll see what happens.
As usual, February brings upon a new Youtube Wallpaper contest. Be on the lookout for that sometime this week. I am going to squeeze the deadlines and make it even shorter, so I can get the video out even faster. This time I will participate so now we will have at least 3 wallpapers instead of a meager 2 contestants last time around.
Plus, expect a new newsletter, more STD articles, console tutorials, and more articles that make you go “Yup, I definitely need to do that!” type of material.
I got two experiments going on right now that I want to reveal the results of in February, as well as some more unconventional thinking articles. Sounds good, right?
If you got any comments, leave a reply and let me know what you think. Every day is a new day of opportunity.
Define STD: STD for The Underground Blog is short for Savvy Tech Dude/Dudette. The STD story is my attempt to share some insight into some of my practices, as well as others as to how they are using technology to make their life better, saving money, or perhaps bettering the environment. (Hopefully, I can find a female contributor… 
)
Frequency of Story: When it feels right.
Personal Comment: I really love the STD idea, and with topics so broad, I can go anywhere with this series. The question is, how far down the rabbit hole do you and I want to go? 
In the meantime, I encourage all forms of interaction. Please sound off in comments, I’d appreciate it. If you have an idea, or want me to consider something different, I will. If you want to spread the word, be my guest. As time goes along, I’m asking for people to contribute, or if you want to be interviewed (I’ll protect your identity), then we can dig deeper. Please consider my offer, thanks!
Near my house Blockbuster was going out of business. About two weeks ago, it shut down for good, but through this experience I wanted to share a heartfelt story that despite a recession going on, there are still individuals willing to spend money on movies and not have to resort to downloading. It’s called buying something because its such a ridiculous deal.
Revisions:
1-25-10: Initial release.
I was testing this game recently and discovered that by default when hosting a LAN game online using Tunngle, it likes to use your default IP address assigned by your router. An example would be 192.168.0.1. This is irritating because you want the game to recognize your Tunngle IP address. What to do?
