Notum Wars Reviews

We were way too late in contacting the press, which is why we’re only getting print reviews now, 2 months after the launch. Reviews are pouring in no that the press realized what we did just before Christmas, and I’ve listed a few scores below.

Check out gamerankings.com for more reviews once this entry gets outdated. In addition, we’ve gotten some cool awards last year:
Best MMORPG 2002 – Jive Magazine
Editor’s Choice Award – IGN

Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries Mini-Review

And here’s my mini-review of MW4M: I didn’t like MW3, and never played MW4 for lack of a good computer. So my MechWarrior experience is from back when MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries was hot, and boy, was that a great game. The good news: MW4M is almost as much fun as MW2M was. The missions have a little less variety, my favourite Clan Mech (Nova) isn’t available, but the controls are almost identical, the graphics are much improved, although not top-notch anymore, and it’s still very hard. I did a citycombat mission yesterday, and it was great, jumping behind office blocks for cover, running thtough the streets with guns blazing. This title makes up for the disappointing MechAssault (shame on Microsoft for that one. We’d like to call it MechInsult), a worthy heir to the throne of best Mech game.

Spam Killers

With more and more people getting annoyed at spam, and realizing that for some reason I don’t have a problem with it, they ask me what I do about it. I’m using three tools to fight spam:

despammed.com

Get an email address at www.despammed.com. This is a good address to give in cases where you’re afraid it might be seen by spammers, e.g. on web pages, in forums, in usenet news or on mailing lists. The guys at despammed have some good spam detection tools and very little spam gets through there. Don’t use this address in day-to-day conversations with friends, though, because mail going through there takes quite some time to get to you.

Spam Assassin

I collect all my mail accounts on a central server (eressea.upb.de) using fetchmail, and run it through procmail. That way, I can run mail through special filters like Spam Assassin, a very clever program that gives your mail a spam score, depending on how many spam-typical things it finds in the text. You can decide what to do with mails that score more than a certain number of points, either mark the subject so it says ***SPAM***, or simply throw it away for good.

ASK – Active Spam Killer

ASK checks all senders against a whitelist of people that are allowed to send mail to you. If somebody is not on that list, they get a message asking them to please reply to that message, and if they do, ASK will put them on the whitelist, and the original mail gets passed on to you. That way, each new sender needs to register with your ASK protection once. Most spam doesn’t have valid return addresses, and never gets authenticated. And if someone does, there’s also a blacklist to block him from ever sending you anything again.

Those tools together, when used correctly, can eliminate almost all your spam, without losing important mail. You need to have a Unix account somewhere, of course. I don’t know of any good software that would do the same thing on Windows and not cost a lot of money.