I know that this blog seems dead, but I did not forgot about it. I hope to get new material to post soon.

Nova Squadron: Italian guild on Star Trek Online

“The Nova Squadron” is part of a bigger community called “Dark Sith Lords” born five years ago on Star Wars Galaxies (damn NGE for ruin the game!) and that encompassed several games like Star Trek: Elite Force II, RF Online, Counter-Strike Source, and World of Warcraft with the currently active guild “Genei Ryodan” on Hakkar-EU server.

“The Nova Squadron” will look forward to play guild organized events like away team missions, raids, and PvP events; these guild events will be held approximately between 09.00 pm and 00.00 am GMT+1.

Star Trek Online has not been launched yet, but the guild is looking forward to join in the upcoming Closed Beta; still, since it is part of a community, “The Nova Squadron” is already using some services like the forum and a dedicated TeamSpeak Server.

“The Nova Squadron” is mainly looking for Italian players, but it is open to English-speakers too; they’re actually looking for nice people who want to enjoy the game and like to play in a friendly environment.

If  you are looking for more information, you can visit the Nova Squadron’s forum and if you are interested to join, you can register to the Nova Squadron’s forum and post a presentation of yourself.

Over the last few months I started to explore the various services to see if and how they are useful to broadcast whatever message I want to communicate.

The experiment of course started on my main blog, Silicon Gadget, with the RSS Feeds managed by Google FeedBurner, a service that allow to easily set up the RSS feeds stream on any major RSS reader. Than I opened a Twitter account so my readers that love to follow tweets can be informed from that platform when I publish a guide or a review on the blog. Of course Silicon Gadget has its own page also on Facebook, so people on that platform can receive the updates too. Finally I have activated Google Friend Connect, the bar on top of the site and the box on the right sidebar; this last service not only allow the readers to comment on the specific guides and reviews, but also on the whole blog in general and additionally they can see what other sites the other members like.

Of course such services are available for this personal blog too. I have the RSS Feeds, a Twitter account, a Facebook page and I am offering the social tools of Google Friend Connect (see the above bar and the box on the right); additionally I have a LinkedIN profile where I keep record of my resume.

Is it worth to be present on all this services? Since all the tracking services are opt-in anyway (so people have to decide to follow me on these platform and I can’t push them to) I think it is indeed useful to whom is interested to listen what I have to say; eventually the true question is if it is possible to keep all these fronts up-to-date to be indeed useful.

The RSS feeds were the easiest to keep updated since Wordpress, the platform I am using on both Silicon Gadget and here, automatically update its internal feeds and Google FeedBurner automatically pick them within minutes. For the Twitter accounts I had to install a plugin for Wordpress, Twitter Tools, so whenever I publish a post on any of the blogs a tweet will be automatically generated on the relative account. The Facebook’s pages are more particular: on my personal Facebook page I can automatically import a RSS Feed (for months it was the Silicon Gadget’s feed, but now I am automatically publishing the feed of this blog), but for the Silicon Gadget Facebook page I have yet to find a way to automatically import the feeds; actually in this last case is good that I have to update the page manually since I want to keep it clean and show only the guides and reviews that merit to be read (while on Silicon Gadget blog itself I may also publish some collateral post like the news about my updated PGP keys). Google Friend Connect is a case apart since it is you readers who have to interact with it.

So, is it all good? Well, it depends … on you. Do you find useful to be able track my posts from different platforms? Do you still prefer to pay a visit directly on my blogs? Is it there any other platform that you use and that you would like to find me there?

GRRollSystem is a mod for “casual raiding guilds” that focus on 10-men raids.

GRRollSystem is born to accommodate the upcoming new drop roll system for the Artanis’s guild Genei Ryodan (an Italian guild on Hakkar-EU): the base of this drop distribution system has always been the standard /roll (that return any number between 0 and 100) from each raid member interested on the specific drop; with the new raiding season the roll system will be extended to cover “Reputation Points” that the raid member can earn during the raids.

Basically, raid members can earn (at discretion of the raid leader and the guild officers) “Reputation Points” for good deeds toward the raid (like showing in time, donating Flasks to the Guild Bank, etc.) and every time they need to roll for a drop, their total “Reputation Points” will be added to their roll.

GRRollSystem is capable to automatically intercept the rolls that raid members make and sum them with their relative “Reputation Points” and then, with the push of a button, it can assign the drop to the appropriate raid member.

While this system is not a full DKP scheme, it still allow the guild (and the raid leader in particular) to reward good standing players with easier access to new equipment.

As mentioned GRRollSystem is born to be used within the Genei Ryodan’s raids, but since it may be useful for other 10-men raid guilds, Artanis decided to publish it on Curse.com.

Anyway, I am making this post to let you know that I made some update to my PGP key. The ID, fingerprint, and main e-mail address are still the same, but I revoked some subkey related to old e-mail addresses and added some subkey to new addresses.

You can find more info on the PGP key page.

You probably heard it on the news and if you need more info you can search news aggregation sites like Google News.

The earthquake had its epicenter in the city of L’Aquila, the capital city of the Abruzzo region, and it is responsible for the deaths of 90 people and about 40,000 people become homeless.

I want to dedicate a moment of silence to all those poor people.

You probably know me for my main web site: Silicon Gadget, a blog dedicated to both news and guides about computers, software, and tech gear in general.

“Why make a new site if you already have one?”, you may ask. Well … behind the simple and short articles I post on Silicon Gadget there is a lot of time spent on reading materials scattered all over the web and often I think: “uhm, this is a nice topic to speak about … to bad it is not on target for Silicon Gadget”.

So here I came with a solution: why not open a new site where I am free to speak about anything not related to electronics?

Probably I will not be able to update this web site as often as I wish, but you are more than welcome to come as often as you want to visit it directly or you can subscribe to the RSS feeds to track the updates from your reader.