Bag of Beans

This is an amusing spoof of all those MMORPGs that have degenerated into little more than the constant need to level up and to farm gold. It eliminates all of that tedious work and lets your character level up without you having to expend valuable free time.

Progress Quest is a next generation computer role-playing game. Gamers who have played modern online role-playing games, or almost any computer role-playing game, or who have at any time installed or upgraded their operating system, will find themselves incredibly comfortable with Progress Quest’s very familiar gameplay. Progress Quest follows reverently in the footsteps of recent smash hit online worlds, but is careful to streamline the more tedious aspects of those offerings. Players will still have the satisfaction of building their character from a ninety-pound level 1 teenager, to an incredibly puissant, magically imbued warrior, well able to snuff out the lives of a barnload of bugbears without need of so much as a lunch break. Yet, gone are the tedious micromanagement and other frustrations common to that older generation of RPG’s.

This section of the FAQ cracked me up:

Q: I’ve been running PQ for years now, and my character is eighty-somethingth level, and now the game crashes or I’ve been thrown into the Hall of Infamy or some other random badness is going on. What can I do?
A: You are witnessing a form of senility and/or corruption and/or loss of bladder control brought on by the decrepit age of so ancient a character. (Equivalently, this is a limitation of the program which has no remedy.) It’s time to make way for a new generation of adventurers!

• Link

The Ethical Hacker Network has some tips on using Google queries to check the security of a site. The article is an excerpt from the book Google Hacking for Penetration Testers.

Although we see literally hundreds of Google searches throughout this book, sometimes it’s nice to know there’s a few searches that give good results just about every time. In the context of security work, we’ll take a look at 10 searches that work fairly well during a security assessment, especially when combined with the site operator, which secures the first position in our list. As you become more and more comfortable with Google, you’ll certainly add to this list, modifying a few searches and quite possibly deleting a few, but the searches here should serve as a very nice baseline for your own top 10 list.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

This is quite an entertaining music video of one man playing all 37 parts of a song using only his cello.

I thought it would be a fun project to write and record a pop tune using nothing but cellos, then make a video of the performance. The original goal was to keep everything entirely acoustic, with no recording studio effects or other processing. I quickly abandoned that idea to get more variety of sounds, but everything you hear was played entirely on my cello. There are 37 separate cello parts recorded on 23 tracks using 37 plug-in effects.

I don’t know if I should be embarrassed to admit I spent hundreds of hours on this project, or proud to have paid so much attention to detail. You be the judge. So pick a media version your computer supports, crank the volume up to 11, and let ‘er rip.

• Link (via Digg)