Planet Open Clip Art Library   

How To Cheat at Robo Defense on Android

So far, there's only one game on my Samsung Moment that I considered worth paying for. I paid $2.99 to get the full version of Lupis Labs' Robo Defense.

It's a tower defense game with lots of degrees of difficulty, different maps, and you can spend points earned in the games to buy upgrades like increasing the speed of fire of your rocket launchers or increasing the strength of your guns. You play again and again, gradually beefing up your strength so you can complete more and more difficult levels.

But what if you want to get your fire rates or bullet strength up to massive levels without having to spend all that time accumulating the necessary points? I Googled for cheat codes, but all I found were game sites saying they didn't have any yet.

I'm not an Android developer, but I had seen a file on my microSD card with the filename "robo_defense_full.bak". I decided to look at the guts to see if it could be used. Loading it up in a plain text editor showed some odd characters. I wasn't sure what it all meant. So I opened it up in a hex editor (using HexFiend for Mac).

Of course, the "Edit this file at your own risk!" at the beginning was fun, but I decided to poke around. as I did, I noticed that all of the upgrades were listed (as Rewards). On the line marked 456 on the screenshot above, you'll see an entry start: ADReward:Faster Antiair Reloadw.........t. But if you look at the hexadecimal information to the left, those dots are represented as 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 16. The number 16 in hexadecimal is 22 in decimal, which is the level my Faster Antiair Reload was at. As I went through the file, the pattern was the name of the reward, then the 8 dots represented by 08 00 00 00 02 00 00 00, then a hex code with the level I was at.

I made a backup copy of the file, just in case I screwed things up, then I changed a number of my levels, randomly picking levels between 55 and 99. I saved the file and then uploaded it to my microSD card, replacing the original. I unmounted the card and ran the game. No dice.

I deleted the game and its internal data files, then downloaded it again from the Android store (using the "my downloads" option on the menu). No dice.

So I tried wiping the file from my SD card and deleting the game, then redownloading the game and seeing if I could get it to start from zero. That worked and it created a new robo_defense_full.bak file. I erased that and replaced it with my hacked version.

When I started the game again, I had bullets at level 154, explosives at 104, antiair reload at 119, etc. I could basically play level 80 with a couple of rocket launchers and a couple of antiair guns because I pretty much killed everything the moment it came on screen. Sadly, now that there was no challenge, the ability to win the game with a handful of towers got old fast. The game I'd spent hours and hours playing was now a bore.

So, if you're bound and determined to cheat, I've just told you how. But hopefully, you'll view this account as a cautionary tale and choose not to do it.

November 21, 2009 04:53 AM

Digital painting

When Mo was enthusiastic about tablet improvements in Fedora 12, this made me dust-off my own device, but only a few days later when Kaio pointed to the small and awesome MyPaint I got hooked, liking a lot how it feels like real drawing/painting.

And my first drawing with it, my first digital painting ever, is something I think is not entirely bad:

Speaking about graphic applications, I found somewhat funny (and somewhat sad) to see how Ubuntu is again following Fedora's footsteps, this time by removing GIMP, with a similar line of reasoning ("we" wanted to free space on the Desktop Spin for more apps and ended with a 650MB .iso and 50MB is unused space). At least they got Slashdot headlines with this move and somewhat compensated our own negative PackageKit headlines (wait a bit to see the headlines when they will follow with the PackageKit thing too).

PS: thumbs-up for doing at last (post-release) the right thing with PackageKit in F12.

November 20, 2009 11:15 AM

Kinda like Fedora

I admit it, I'm a little jealous of the Fedora feature of being able to install signed packages without a password prompt. I set out to get close on Ubuntu. The way that you edit the PolicyKit practices towards package install is to edit the file /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/. If you look at the action for "Install packages" you can change <allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active> to <allow_active>yes</allow_active>. Then software center works as expected.

November 19, 2009 05:44 PM

Is there such thing as bad publicity?

I know there is a famous quote saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity and one day after the release the news about PackageKit allowing unprivileged users to install packages without root permission made a larger number of [negative] comments than the release announcement itself on such sites as LWN or Slashdot, which I am not convinced is a good thing for publicity.

But surely I am glad I got to keep my public presentations about F12 in advance last week, so I didn't get laughed-out of the presentation for such a "feature", for which I wouldn't know how or care to defend.

Now I promise, my next post will be on a more positive note about the release!

November 19, 2009 09:01 AM

Thusnelda

Among the large number of new features in Fedora 12 there is Thusnelda, the new and improved version of the Theora encoder, which is supposed to bring either better-looking videos or smaller files at the same quality.

As the Theora videos I create are mostly screencasts made with gtk-RecordMyDesktop (image quality from Istanbul is unacceptably low), I have no idea how I can take advantage of any of those optimizations (probably one of them is active by default, without any control from me).

But what I can tell, is a decrease in quality: screencasts recorded now are jumpy, the image freezes for a bit, then jump forward, skipping some important frames. No ideea if this is caused by the aplication, libtheora, X.org, video drivers or something else.

Ideas?

November 18, 2009 02:08 PM

Resize BootCamp Partitions using CampTune Freeware

After realizing I hadn't given my BootCamp partition enough room on my new humongo-drive (upgraded from 120gb 5400 RPM to 320gb 7200 RPM), I went looking for a way to add a few gigs to it. The solutions were wide and varied. Most had to do with cloning the partition's contents, killing the partition, making a new one with Boot Camp, stopping the Windows install, and then restoring the old Windows install.

That was a lot of work and a lot of hassle.

Then I found someone recommending CampTune. It's a free download and "pre-release" but it works fine. It's a working Linux ISO file you can download and burn to a CD-ROM with your favorite disc creator package (or Disk Utility).

Once it's burned, hop into System Settings, choose the "Startup Disk" option, and set your machine to boot from CD-ROM next time. Boot from the CD you burned and you'll go into CampTune, which has a very simple interface for changing the respective sizes of your Mac and BootCamp partitions.

When you're done, everything should work as normal, although if you created a VM in Parallels or VMWare to use your Bootcamp partition inside OS X, you may need to recreate the VM.

That's it. Pretty simple, huh?

Don't be scared off by the "pre-release" status. It's been that way for over a year now and I think Paragon just decided the market for people wanting to resize their BootCamp partition wasn't big enough to charge for it after all, so they just left a good release candidate up as the free download and moved on to other projects. It worked well for me.

As always, don't mess with the internal structure of your hard drive without having made backups first.

Good luck! Have fun!

November 17, 2009 02:33 PM

Beer 12

Fedora 12, Beer, Today, 18:30, La Berbecu, Bucharest, reservation for "Adrian"... 'nuff said

November 17, 2009 09:02 AM

Enough with the previews, let's get to the real thing

Even if the release counter still says "Fedora 12 Constantine arriving in 2 days" (one day and a couple of hours by now), we already launched F12 in Romania, taking advantage by the invitations to speak at a couple of local events.

Now the photos are up in the gallery: those from the RLUG meet are a few and more serious, I was speaking and ave played more conservatively with my camera:

Then it was more relaxed to the Firefox anniversary, where the audience was formed mostly by students and we had Mozilla sponsored pizzas, beers and cake:

The slides are available for download in PDF.

November 16, 2009 01:36 PM

Are you generative than consumptive in your field?

Anselm just posted what appears to be a random thought on twitter: Are you more generative than consumptive in your particular field? ... Create more than you consume? In open source, I often rephrase this question as "Are you a source, or a sink?" There are many people in the community who contribute ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

WSGI + Basic Auth

I use the logged_in_or_basicauth snippet for a lot of my work, and had had some problems with it since I started using mod_wsgi in place of mod_python. Thanks to this post, I now know why my basic auth under mod_wsgi isn't working: lack of WSGIPassAuthorization On in my Apache config. Thanks ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

PowerPoint, in a sentence

PowerPoint is a way to make gibberish look important.-- my 12 year old daughter, Alicia

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

MrSID SDK Improvements

For a long time, I avoided MrSID like the plague. After trying to do *anything* useful with it, I finally gave up; the requirement for old versions of gcc, non-working on 64bit, etc. really gave me a negative impression of the SDK for MrSID reading. This was especially painful when ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Code Sprint: Day 3

Yesterday, I got to sit down and do some real performance testing with the MapServer folks. After rebuilding a local copy of the Boston Freemap on my laptop, I was able to share it with Paul, who ran it through Shark to find out where the performance killers are. The ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Toronto Code Sprint: Day 2

Day 2 of the code sprint seemed to be much more productive. With much of the planning done yesterday, today groups were able to sit down and get to work.  Today, I accomplished two significant tasks: Setting up the new OSGeo Gallery, which is set to act as a repository for demos ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Toronto Code Sprint: Day 1

I'm here at the OSGeo Code Sprint in Toronto, where more than 20 OSGeo hackers have gathered to work on all things OSGeo -- or at least MapServer, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. For those who might not know, a code sprint is an event designed to gather a number of people working ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Geodata Cost Recovery: Eaton County

I was pointed out to Eaton County's GIS Data Prices last night, and all I can say is how disappointed I am that people can still feel that this is an appropriate way to fleece their taxpayers. The data is collected, reproduction costs for the data are probably in the ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Yahoo! Maps APIs, aka ‘grr, argh!’

I have a love/hate relationship with Yahoo!'s mapping API. It's lovely that Yahoo! believes, unlike Google and other mapping providers, that their satellite data is a suitable base layer to use for derivation of vectors. This openness really is good to see -- they win big points from me in ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Making a Big OSM Map

Mapnik is a great tool. It allows for all kinds of neat toys to happen, and the recent work in SVN has really opened up the possibility that Mapnik might be a potential solution for a rendering engine in a lot of areas that it has previously left alone. (Support ...

November 14, 2009 09:00 PM

Cost of War

What if, invested that in education for the more than 60% youth under 20 years old in the arab world…

#costOfWarTotal { text-align: center; width: 270px; font-weight: bold; } #costOfWarTotal_Total { font-size: 1.3em; font-weight: bold; color: #990000; } #costOfWarTotal_Link { font-size: .7em; }

November 14, 2009 01:36 PM

Open Letter To Costco: Enough Italian Salami Already

I shop at Costco. You can't beat their prices on diapers, cheese, and some other things my family uses a lot of. It's where we bought my sons matching outfits earlier today (to my great combination of dismay and glee). But there have been two sore disappointments with the Costco in Everett, Washington.

1. You never know when they'll have Triscuits (my wife's favorite cracker). Sometimes they do, most times not, and this drives us into the arms of WalMart because they have the best prices on Triscuits for normal consumer size packaging.
2. In 6 years, they haven't carried a decent brand of salami that didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth. I'm just not a fan of Italian salami and they seem bound and determined to keep expanding their selection of Italian lunch meats and Italian-branded lunch meats like turkey breast and pastrami from Columbus meats.

Why is it that they have like 8 types of Italian salami in the Everett Costco, but nothing simple and domestic? I get the worst aftertaste from Italian salami. I'd kill for them to simply carry Oscar Mayer hard salami or the same hard salami I can get in the deli case at Safeway.

I understand that products come and go, but on my last visit, in the premium lunch meat aisle there were the Kirkland lunch meats and then all the other lunch meat and salami were Italian or from Italian meats companies. Even their pastrami and turley breast were from Columbus. What gives?

I love Costco. My dad got me a membership when I went off to college 23 years ago and I've been a member ever since. But this obsessions with Italian meats in the deli section has got to stop. Give us some good old, plain old salami. No fancy imported stuff. I'd love some kosher chubs I could hang to dry in my kitchen, but failing that, just something along the lines of simple, domestic hard salami like Oscar Mayer.

Thanks Costco!

November 14, 2009 08:52 AM

Kindergarden drawing

It started today when Kushal told us in #fedora-art about his brand new Wacom tabled and how he want to learn to use it. Obviously, his first drawing was a simple house, drawn in the most traditional kindergarden style. Fun!

Not being able to resist, I cleaned the dust on my old tablet, plugged it in, and drawn my own naive house:

Then, we took the challenge to tatica, who was also on the channel, so she made one too - they should put they drawings online any time now...

Now here is the thing: we know Fedora 12 rocks on tablets, so we have a meme for harmless Friday fun, all of you in the community having a tablet, plug it in, start GIMP and draw a kindergarden style house and post it (at least Mo and Kaio are tablet owners, so I count os some follow-ups).

November 13, 2009 12:44 PM

Syncing iTunes & Samsung Moment on Mac

I recently posted my solution to connect the Samsung Moment to a Mac laptop using Snow Leopard via USB. Once that was done, the question was how to get my iTunes music and playlists from my MacBook Pro to my Samsung Moment.

I use iTunes to manage my music collection, both stuff purchased from iTunes as well as my older MP3 rips from CD and MP3s I've purchased or received free from Amazon.com. A while back, iTunes moved to a DRM free format for most new purchases and you could upgrade older purchases for 30 cents a song. The Moment will play the DRM free AAC format (M4A) from iTunes. But there's one problem, the built-in music player on the Moment, as well as two others I tried, will not recognize the information tags in the M4A format. Fear not, though...

CONVERTING ITUNES M4A TO MP3

Go to the Preferences pane for iTunes. In the "General" page (main page), go to the section that lets you specify what to do when you insert a CD. There, it has a button for "Import Settings". The default is iTunes AAC format, but you can set it to MP3. Once you've done that (you can also specify a variety of bitrates and other info), you can go into your music library, right-click on any song that's listed as "Purchased AAC" format ("Protected AAC" still has DRM), and convert it to MP3. You can highlight a large number of songs and perform this right-click action to batch convert them.

After this, I found that the three Android music players (the built-in one, MixZing, and one I can't recall) I tried would not read ID3 v2.x tags as iTunes wrote them. I ended up deciding to use MixZing because it handled the index display of videos as well as music and was better than the "Gallery" built-in video player that just shows you icons with no titles.

To import my music and my iTunes playlists, I found that DoubleTwist worked very well. It recognized my Samsung Moment and imported my iTunes Playlists with ease. It generated .m3u playlist format lists that the Samsung could understand, and dragging the playlist to the Samsung in the program took care of importing the playlist and all the associated music files.

A Playlist Caveat

If you want to import existing playlists, you're going to have to update them with any files you converted, otherwise they'll still sync the m4a version of the song to your phone. This isn't terrible. It still plays. It just comes up as "Unknown Artist" from "Unknown Album" with "Unknown Title". So if you're just shuffling your playlists and never look at the song info, who cares? if you want to know the name of the song/artist that's playing or play a specific song, then you need to convert the songs and fix up the playlists.

Two downsides. One, it will not convert/unprotect videos from iTunes that have DRM. So, for example, the free episodes I got of "Handy Manny" and "WordWorld" on iTunes won't play on my phone without some additional and illegal massaging. On the other hand, the music videos that came with the "Madagascar 2" soundtrack got upgraded to DRM-Free when I did the big batch of upgrades. So the will.i.am "I Like to Move It" music video transferred over and plays beautifully on the Moment's AMOLED screen.

Second downside is the way it handles podcasts. Rather than separating them out, they're incorporated into the music catalog. So, my "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" audio podcasts are found under the album of the same name with "NPR" as the artist. As for my "Sesame Street" video podcasts (for my 4-year-old), they only come up in the "Movies" section under the general "iTunes" heading. They're not in the "Movies" or "TV Shows" lists, so they can be a little hard to find.

On an upside note, if you give a YouTube video URL to DoubleTwist, it will download the Flash .flv file of the YouTube video to your hard drive. Putting the files on your Moment can take a while, though, because it re-encodes the videos into an MP4 format before transferring them. Since the Moment works with YouTube, this is only valuable for being able to watch YouTube videos when you don't have an internet connection (like when you're on a plane) or you're in a poor coverage area. I'd love to know if any of you have suggestions for a quicker method for downloading and converting YouTube videos, or a faster .flv to mp4 conversion method.

It also seems to do the conversion on the fly, so if you're rotating videos in and out and back in again, you may want to use a separate converter to do a permanent conversion from the Flash .flv file format to one your Moment can play. I tried transcoding with VLC and that was difficult to produce a video VLC could play back, much less my Samsung Moment. Quicktime Player's "Save For Web" option in the file menu worked very well. I selected the "save for iPhone" option and it created a good quality m4v file that my Moment would play.

I also copied over some other videos I had in other formats (collected over the years) directly to the card. I was able to play the .wmv and .avi format videos, but not the .mpg. Of course, these formats can have various underlying codecs, so don't take that as a blanket statement, but it's a decent place to start. Of course, if videos won't play on your Moment, but will play in Quicktime, you should be able to use the "Save For Web" function to convert them to a format your Moment will handle.

Hope this information helps you. Cheers!

November 10, 2009 09:30 PM

What is a Defect Report?

Once in a while in looking through bug reports I find one that makes me go, "Wow, that guy knows how to report bugs!" The report is clear, specific, and easy to drive to a solution. Then I look at the vast number of bug reports that languish in the bug tracker and realize that making good bug reports is a skill we need more people to have, if we're going to succeed at improving Ubuntu's quality.

First, I think we need a better term than "bug report". The way we use launchpad, "bug report" is a broad term which could include everything from a packaging change request to a support request to a plain old complaint. Let's just consider those bug reports which describe a distinct, confirmed breakage of the software in question. In software quality circles the term "Defect Report" is used, and that sounds suitable.

Lots of people have written about how to make a good bug report, but in thinking about it there's one thing above all which defines a good report: The original reporter is not needed for any further work on the bug. In other words, all the data necessary to characterize the bug is there, it's pretty clear what has broken, and the steps to reproduce it are known so we can verify the fix solves it. If there are bug reporting guidelines or troubleshooting procedures for the software package in question, they've been followed.

If you think about how often we have to ask the original reporter to supply more information, try testing some configuration variations, and so on, you realize that a lot of bug reports don't meet this criteria! In fact, if you think about it, these really are what you'd call support requests... where the (implied) request is for support in how to craft a valid defect report. ;-)

November 10, 2009 07:43 PM

This time for sure, we are going on air

A couple of weeks ago I made noise about our series about Linux/FLOSS airing on the national television, but to much disappointment it was unintentional false news. Today I received apologies (which in turn I return to my mislead readers) and a confirmation: it will be diffused this week, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 17:00, in fact they will have two segments about us.

Too bad the date and time is totally inconvenient for me, struggling between day job and a Fedora 12 presentation. After the first failure I am ashamed to ask people to record the show again...

November 10, 2009 11:05 AM

Fedora 12 previews

I know the parties are supposed to take place after the event, but this time we got the opportunity to talk about Fedora in general and the goodies in Fedora 12 in particular at a couple of events taking place a few days in advance of the general availability, but the distro is "gold", we are close enough, so will go for it, together with Adrian.

First, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 19:00 we are invited to keep a short (less than 30 minutes) presentation at the first RLUG meeting (this is supposed to become a tradition and I am glad we are one of the openers). Here the audience will be comprised of a highly experienced crowd, so I look forward to a challenging experience.

Then Saturday 14 November 2009 at 14:00, together with friends from the local openSUSE community, who also have a launch, we are guests at a larger Firefox 5 years anniversary, event sponsored by Mozilla. Here we will also have a short presentation and will take advantage of Alex's presence, who is a key contributors in both Fedora and Mozilla local communities.

Is still early for this, so this is not decided yet, but we may also have a beer meeting in the very release day (we geeks are immune to the AH1-N1 hysteria which conquered the city :D). More details about that to be announced at a later date.

November 10, 2009 09:41 AM

Brown explosion

I didn't turn Ubuntu overnight, I am the same blue zealot at the core, but I find nothing short of amazing those earthly warm tones of the autumn[*].

[*] I know some people not happy with their distro being brown and prefer Fedora only for its color (yeah, really!), but this is wrong, there are not "good" or "bad" colors, its about how are you using them, you can make bland or beautiful images with any color.

November 09, 2009 02:09 PM

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

The running joke in our local community is that not officially being an Ambassador but doing a lot of Ambassador work I should become one, but I refuse to apply for the title - I guess this makes me a half-Ambassador :p Still, the meme is not limited to that, working also for users, so I can join in:

name: Nicu Buculei
nick: nicubunu
IRC channels: #fedora-art, #fedora-design, #fedora-ro
location: Bucharest, Romania

And trying to add to the meme, the most awesome thing I learned today about our community: one of the members of our local (Romanian) community as a day job as a violin player in the Bucharest Philharmonic. How cool is that? I love this diversity and looking forward at chatting and drinking beers.

November 09, 2009 11:20 AM

Mill

Been experimenting with turning logs into lumber using this horribly awesome juryrigged sawmill.

    

Steve Langasek cut down a walnut tree in his yard and gave me the wood. Apparently hardwoods require 4 years to dry after slicing into boards. Maybe I can turn it into some nice toys for Dutch one day.

November 09, 2009 05:17 AM

Book of Inkscape

Just got the new Inkscape book. Dutch says he thinks it's great and all but does it remove red eye?

November 09, 2009 04:35 AM

This is a small world

This morning when going to work I somehow noticed (I usually don't look for such things) this small poster glued on the wall of a building close to my office (less than 50 meters away):

Noting out of the extraordinary, some small firm advertising for pet services, but what drew my attention was the drawing in the top-right corner with a dog head. It was looking familiar, as it is one of my drawings published at the Open Clip Art Library and it made my day!

I made it years ago, exercising original drawing made with the mouse, so the result is not great, but I submitted it to the library anyway, as I do with all my drawings which are not made for a specific project. And I found awesome how a little graphic contributed to an international project found its way back to a few meters away of me. Either the world is very small or what we are doing is really useful for the people.

Now to be honest, I can't say for sure if the image is taken from openclipart.org, from my own website, where the images are also available, or from one of the many other websites redistributing, grace to the PD dedication, the openclipart.org content. But this is irrelevant, the goal was achieved.

PS: is not wise to base your company logo on Public Domain clipart, but for very small companies this is not a real problem, they don't have real branding.

November 03, 2009 10:28 AM