What to do?

So for reasons I won’t elaborate on, I’m effectively unemployable in the adult world, and this leaves me extremely existentially frustrated. I also “lost” the genetic lottery in almost every way; I’m not attractive, nor born to rich parents, nor innately talented at anything in particular, etc., etc., etc.

Pretty much the only things I do have are an absurd amount of free time, a love of technology, and a somewhat analytical mind. And while I’ve never really pursued programming in the past, I’m so bored now, that I’m starting to teach myself a handful of languages (java, python, ruby, and possibly C.)

However there’s a pretty big problem. One of the biggest hurdles with this, is that while following tutorials, and completing exercises in books are fine, when it comes time to do something on my own, I lose focus.

See, I don’t really have a reason to learn to program, there’s nothing I actually want to make/program for myself.

So what apps out there are people still waiting for?
What apps do you need that don’t exist yet?

Please feel free to leave any comments, suggestions, etc., just know that being poor and unemployable, my access to hardware is limited. I can try writing android apps if that’s what people want/need, because I have an android phone, but I can’t really do the same for iOS, since I don’t have any apple mobile devices. And of course I can try to learn Objective.C to write mac apps if there’s a killer idea, but it wasn’t immediately on my list of languages to learn.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any suggestions anyone might have, cheers

lotro on mac, cont.

Just a small update, thanks to WM Magill for pointing it out in the comments on my last post, Turbine has officially released the mac client for download, here’s the comment with links to everything:

See this thread: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?486784-Thanks-Turbine-for-the-Mac-Client

And the announcement is buried at post #15 of this thread: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?483496-Timeframe-Mac-Client&p=6505137#post6505137

And there is new Mac Technical Support Thread: http://forums.lotro.com/forumdisplay.php?710-MAC-Technical-Support

Note the Mac client is a full 16GB DMG file download!!! (and to quote Sapience — no Pando, no Happy Cloud).

Lotro on mac…

UPDATE, October 24, 2012: Looks like the patch this morning changed things again, and the converted beta client works again!

UPDATE, October 17, 2012: Looks like the hotfix this morning changed the launcher, and the following no longer works, sorry everyone

So this is yet another really esoteric post that maybe a dozen people in the world will care about.

Anyway though, I go back and forth with playing the “Lord of the Rings Online” mmo, and yesterday they launched their newest expansion, “Riders of Rohan.”

And during the beta period for RoR, the developers made available a beta version of an upcoming native mac client, but when the expansion launched yesterday, the mac client was nowhere to be found.

Now, this won’t help anyone that doesn’t already have the beta client, but if you do, here’s how to convert the client to play on the live servers, though warning, it’s a long, awful process.

1. Right click “LotroLauncher.app” (it shows up as “The Lord of the Rings Online™” in the /Applications folder) and select “show package contents”
2. Navigate to “Contents/Resources”
3. Open the “TurbineLauncher.exe.config” file with a text editor
4. Change the following line from the “beta” value to the “live” value:
   BETA: key=”Launcher.DataCenterService.GLS” value=”http://GLS-bullroarer.lotro.com/GLS.DataCenterServer/Service.asmx”
   LIVE: key=”Launcher.DataCenterService.GLS” value=”http://moria.gls.lotro.com/GLS.DataCenterServer/Service.asmx”
5. Change the following line from the “beta” value to the “live” value:
   BETA: key=”DataCenter.DefaultCenter” value=”BULLROARER”
   LIVE: key=”DataCenter.DefaultCenter” value=”LOTRO”
6. Save and close the “TurbineLauncher.exe.config” file
7. Right click “lotroclient.app” inside of “Contents/Resources” (like before, it shows up as “The Lord of the Rings Online™”)and select “show package contents”
8. Navigate to “Contents/Resources” again, so your path will look something like this:
   /Applications/LotroLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/lotroclient.app/Contents/Resources
9. In that folder, delete all the .dat files. Yeah, this is where the process really starts to suck, but there’s really no other way to convert the beta client to live.
10. Download Crossover 11 trial and install it
11. Run Crossover and select “Install Software” from the “Configure” menu, and search for “Lord of the rings Online” under the “Community Supported” list.
12. You guessed it, install Lord of the Rings online via crossover. This will take a few hours if you have to download the installer, though you can elect to use CD/DVD installers if you have one.
13. While the Crossover installation is running, run “LotroLauncher.app” and let it download whatever files it can. When I did this, it only downloaded three of the dat files (this is why we’re installing via crossover, to get the rest of the live .dat files):
    • client_cell_2.dat
    • client_local_English.dat
    • client_map_2.dat
14. Once the crossover installation finishes, navigate to the lotro installation folder, it should be something like:
    ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Lord of the Rings Online/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine/The Lord of the Rings Online
15. Copy every .dat file EXCEPT THE THREE LISTED ABOVE into the native mac client here:
    /Applications/LotroLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/lotroclient.app/Contents/Resources
16. Run “LotroLauncher.app” again, and it should connect to the patch server and start downloading all the patches for the live data files, this might take a few hours again depending on server load and the speed of your internet connection.
17. Once it finishes patching, login and enjoy the game!
18. Wm Magill in the comments pointed out a step I forgot to mention, if you ever logged in with the beta client during the official beta, then you need to delete the following preferences file before attempting to login to the live servers:
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.turbine.lotroclient.plist

Anyway, like I said, totally esoteric post, and really an awful process to make it work, but hey, there you go, for the few people that ever follow this, you can play Lotro on mac with a native client now!

Mountain Lion

So I’m assuming the only people that visit this blog are here for the post I made about automating colorfulsidebar for OSX.

Anyway, this is just a quick update, since I finally upgraded to 10.8/Mountain Lion this week (and oh what a massive nightmare it was, ultimately I had to format and do a clean install) and everything (simbl, colorfulsidebar, and my launchagent .plist file) still works for me.

There was also an update to colorfulsidebar back in July that restores colored icons to the open/save dialog boxes, so make sure you grab the new version.

For Sale…

Well, sadly it seems my luck in life never improves. I’ve been unemployed now for almost 3 years with no sign of ever finding work, so I’m hoping I can sell my car to help with my expenses.

So, anyone in the USA (willing to either pick up the car in California, or pay for the transportation expenses) that might be interested, I have a posting of my car on craigslist here:

http://inlandempire.craigslist.org/cto/3182953641.html