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There is this cool game called Borderlands, but it has this bug, where if you are playing multi-player it can randomly corrupt your save file, and cause you to loose your skill points! This really stunk for me, because I was a level 20 and was playing with a group of guys that were all level 20- and suddenly my character was broken.

So figuring I had nothing to loose, I copied the save file from my PS3, opened it up a hex editor, and shockingly found that the there was no check sum in place for the skill points! Using a simple hex editor, I was able to give my self back my skill points!

Here are the steps that I did to fix my player.

1) I played border lands until I earned 2 more skill levels.

2) Put one skill point on your “main tree”

3) Put one skill point on something else, for me this was “Iron Fist”

4) Quit the game

6) copy the save game to an external USB drive

7) copy the save file to your computer

8 ) back up the save file.

9) open the safe file with hex editor

10) search in the safe file for something like this: gd_Skills2_Brick.Brawler.IronFist
In my case I was playing as Brick, but the method should work for any of other classes. Just find the string that looks like the name of the skill that you put your one point in.

11) Look at the hex that follows the name “gd_Skills2_Brick.Brawler.IronFist “, for me it looked like this:
00 00 00 00 01

12) change the 01 to a 04

13) Now save the file.

14) Copy the save file back to your ps3

15) Start the game, load the save file.

16) If it worked, you should now have a 4 points in the skill that you used to only have 1 in.

From here, what I did was went and purchased a skill re-balance in the game, putting 1 point in a bunch of skills.
Then I saved the game, and repeated the process until I had all of my points back.

Hope this helps some people get back into the game

Note, you might be able to get the same done with this tool:
http://blog.gib.me/2009/10/31/borderlands-save-editor-revision-10/

But I’m on a Mac, and can’t run it, nor can I verify that works for PS3.

I posted pictures of my trip to Alaska on facebook.

You can look at them here, without a facebook account:

http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=1058704769&k=Z6G23VU3SV5AUCCBPF35WPV

I worked with a friend to make a new iPhone app called Home Rescue. It is a simple application that tells you if you qualify for the government mortgage bailout program.

Check it out here: http://itunes.com/apps/HomeRescue

If you agree that spelling is a skill, then I think you should agree that to mock and judge someone for poor spelling is the same as mocking someone for lacking any other skill.

I’m not investing my time in remembering the pile of special case / hidden pronunciation / inconsistent words that makes up the English language. Who decided that this was the most efficient way to communicate with written letters? If someone proposed something like this- I’d tell them they were nuts. Is this flawed language nostalgic? Artful? I say, keep the nostalgia and the art in the content of the words, not the arrangement of letters that makes up the work.

When you decide to mock someone’s spelling- I think you should consider if you would like them to mock your flawed skills. Spelling is a skill, some have it, and some don’t. It comes easy for you? Great. Not for me.  I could improve my poor spelling skills with lots of practice, and lots of time. I could sacrifice time from things that I actually care about. If you want me to care about spelling, how about you spend time and learn some of my skills.

Don’t push your flawed communication protocol on me.

I thought that since I’m such an iPhone fan boy my blog should work on the iPhone. Now it does, thanks to a nice plugin called iWPhone. Pretty simple, and pretty nice

I’ve been busy. I helped a friend build a game called EnterState. You can check it out on the Apple Store here.

Here is the “press release” for the app…

Traditional Board Game Designer Turns To iPhone Platform

Chris Handy hasn’t been play-testing with cards and wooden bits recently.  He has been leaving lots of fingerprints on his iPhone while heavily testing his new puzzle game series for the popular gaming device.

The concept is simple.  Chris has developed a volume of games called the “:60 Series”, or “Sixty-Second Series”.  These original puzzle games are fast-paced “brain games” that last exactly 1 minute.  If you are able to solve the puzzle in under 60 seconds, your score is equal to the time remaining on the timer.

The first two games in the series have just been released, with 2 more coming in April.  Kount is a button-mashing counting game in which the user must press 40 buttons in numerical order.  Each game board is randomly generated to offer fresh gameplay each time.

EnterState is a semi-educational puzzler in which you must “enter states” as they appear of the screen.  When “Nevada” appears on the screen, press the state shape on the map.  It’s that simple…or is it?

Think you’ve got an unbeatable score?  Each game in the series has a unique Friend Scores Rank System that keeps track of only YOUR friend’s top scores.

Both Games can be found in iTunes.

More information can be found at http://www.perplext.com

I’ve submited a new version of BoardGameGeek for the iPhone to apple, to address the issues created by the xmlapi updates at BoardGameGeek.com. The new update is in the hands of Apple, as soon as they release it, you will be able to update

Sadly, until then it will remain not working.

As a developer on Windows for the past 10 years(!) I had found a few tools that I wanted when I came to the Mac.

Here are some that I’ve found so far.

pthpasteboard, it tracks what you copy, you can call it back up to paste something that you copied, like N copies ago. Useful to me, because I am a terrible speller, so I’m always copying method names to prevent misspellings:
http://pth.com/products/pthpasteboard/

Open term here, when I browse to a place in finder and then I want to use the glorious shell that runs under Mac OSX  I can click this bad boy and get a terminal right there:
http://www.entropy.ch/software/applescript/

TextWrangler: nice text editor, with a nice command line app called “edit” which if you type “edit blah” it will open blah in it TextWrangler. Love that.

Then when I am in the shell, here are some goodies for my .profile file:

# sad, but  yes:
export EDITOR=”nano -w”

# mmmmm colors details humans!
alias ls=”ls -a -F -G”

# -w is required!
alias nano=”nano -w”

# invinite history! yes…
declare -x HISTFILESIZE=1000000000
declare -x HISTSIZE=1000000

# this fixs the darn too dark blue when I do ls
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=DxGxcxdxCxegedabagacad

# who ami ?
echo “Hello Ryan.”

What is missing? A good diff client, like beyond compare. I miss you BC2.

If you want to help out with Board Game Geek for the iphone, I’ve open sourced it.

http://code.google.com/p/bggiphone/