I remember when I got my first tape deck and waited for the Mega Top 50 to be aired on the radio on Saturdays. Printed charts in one had and one finger on the record button. Patiently I waited till the guy on the radio announced the songs I wanted to record so I could play them on my Walkman on Monday when I had to go to school again.
When I got older CD’s came around and with the allowance I got every week I could buy an album once every month or so. If I remember correctly a double CD went for about 40 guilders back then. Of course I didn’t get a discman until a few years later so all I was left with was copying it to a tape again.
When I got into college a whole new world opened up. A classmate sold any CD I’d want for 10 guilders and a teacher sold Twilight CD’s. For anyone who’s thinking about sparkling vampires, Twilight was a monthly release packed with the latest games and software. I can’t remember how much they went for but they were cheaper than buying 1 game.
In my second year in college we got our first computer with a modem. A whole new world opened up, every song I’d ever wanted was just 20 minutes away, the time it took for my 56k modem to download 1 song. But because it took so long and my parents still had to pay for every minute online I still bought the odd CD from the guy at school.

Now why am I telling you all this? Well, selling those music or Twilight CD’s was something basically everyone could do. To download all you needed was a phone line and parents willing to pay the bills. Getting a drive that could burn discs was a one time investment.
But after that copying was effortless. And while I can only guess at the amount of money those people made back then I’m sure it was quite profitable if a 40 y/o teacher takes the time to do it.

Back to present day.
I currently have a 120mbit connection and downloading a bluray takes about 45 minutes depending on the time of the day. So basically I can download HD content faster than I can watch it. There’s no need for me anymore to buy discs from a guy at school. I can get it faster and for free online. And it’s easy.
You don’t have to be a computer genius to work some p2p magic. Everyone can do it.

Now lets assume Mr Teeven’s idea gets accepted and laws are put in place to monitor traffic and block sites like the piratebay. p2p traffic is filtered and blocked if needed.
Who will this affect? People who enter URLs in Google just to click the first link to go to the page they want and everyone else who doesn’t really understand the internet.
These are the people who won’t be able to download anything anymore. Even if Mr Teeven says that the law isn’t to allow record companies to sue the average user. In theory they’d be able to. And we all know censorship is a slippery road.
However, it will also affect the people who do understand the internet. While the vast majority of them will just download for their own convenience there will be people again like the guys at my school. Downloading, burning and selling. And if you’re not aiming to make tens of thousands a year the chances of getting caught are slim at best.

It’s not unlikely to see things like Twilight start up again. Compilations of this months games, software, music and movies. All neatly packed on a few DVDs for only 15 euro’s. Which is about 13-14 euro’s profit.
It will be profitable again and I’m sure there are people waiting eagerly to start burning those discs again.
And maybe we’ll even see software that encrypts all the traffic. Bittorrent can do this already. All it’s lacking is a decentralized point to get your torrents.

In the end the harder they make it to more they criminalize it. If people don’t want to pay a certain price for something and there’s an alternative (the kid next door with a VPN) they’ll get it there.
The solution to the problem is simple, innovate. Spotify is doing a great job and I’ve been a paying customer for a few months now. It combines a huge library with a clean and fast interface. Responsiveness is amazing for a streaming service and it’s only 5 euro’s a month.
Now all I’m missing is a legal way to get those songs on my iPod or a truly unlimited bandwidth plan for my phone.

Either way, politicians shouldn’t worry about things they don’t understand or lazy record labels wanting to make fortunes off of CD’s with 2 good songs and 13 filler songs.
Don’t start censoring or criminalizing people. Sharing music / video is here to stay. Either online or on discs from a shady guy in an alley wearing a raincoat.

This is where i get to the topic of this post. We have to decide if we want this kind of infrastructure for the price of losing some privacy. The chances of you becoming the victim of a crime committed by someone who would’ve been locked up thanks to this database are tiny. Especially with the minor sentences.
To go back to the topic of airport security i touched on a while back. Let’s assume a terrorist hides a bomb in his behind. Now we could cavity search each person who wants to get on the plane and we would all be 100% safe from assbombs. Only a handful of people would still get onto airplanes and besidesthe odds of being the victim of an attack are once again tiny.
Even if take in account ALL terrorist attacks on airplanes that chances of YOU being affected by that are tiny. Why do we need to increase security then? There will always be a risk.

The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a certain risk to everything you do. Get in your car, cross the street or do some work around the house.
But we all seem to take those risks for granted. Than why do we want all this other security for things that have a minimal chance of happening to you or someone close to you?
The same goes for the fingerprints being stored on the ID cards. It might prevent a few crimes but at what cost? Once they’re stored they never get deleted. Even if the government decides to abandon the project, who knows what will happen to the data that’s be created already?

A while ago someone mentioned how the Dutch government registered every persons beliefs once. The Germans were very happy with that in 1940. And no, this isn’t an overdrawn idea. I’m pretty sure when they started doing that nobody would’ve thought something like the holocaust would or could happen. Yet it did.
Who knows where we’ll be 50 years from now? Maybe you have nothing to hide now but what if laws change under a regime that doesn’t want the best for you? You won’t be able to stand up against it because all your data is already stored somewhere. DNA databases will come.

We have to put an end to it now. Vote for the people who respect your privacy. Way the the loss of privacy against the security you truly gain. Think for yourself.
Don’t believe all the terrorist bullshit they’re feeding you. Just think of the amount of attacks after 9-11. Madrid and London are the only ones that come to mind.
After all those threats and all those warnings. “But the government has stopped a lot of threats early”. Really? Where’s the proof? The odd maniac that got arrested isn’t that.
You could make a pretty powerful bomb with some easily available supplies and a recipe off of google. But it doesn’t happen. Yet we all give up more freedom everyday for a threat we most likely will never see ourselves.

So the next time you hear about a great new plan to protect you from a serious threat think about the odds of it happening to you or any other person. And then decide if it’s worth the price they’re asking.

If you fail at math or haven’t realized yet. 9 gold per green gem is at the very least 36 gold per stack of ore. You always get at least 1 green gem when you prospect.
So what this means is that whenever you see a stack of ore going for 36 gold you should always buy it out.
I’m currently buying out everything around the 40 gold mark since blue gems aren’t that expensive anymore either.
On average you’d probably get 4.5ish green gems / stack. So all blue gems are basically free.

This method is foolproof thanks to the vendor price staying the same. Or at least until blizzard thinks it’s time to lower the price. Something that will happen I suspect because blue gems sell for less than the greens now.
Of course results may vary and it all depends on the ore / gem price on your realm.
The best thing to do is to work out the average price of a blue gem on your realm, divide that by 2 and add 36. What you’ll be left with is roughly your break even point for buying stacks of ore.
You could also look into disenchanting if dust / essences are expensive on your realm.

A weird thing I did notice is that perfect green gems don’t actually sell that well. Not even the red ones. I didn’t sell a single one even though I expected the red ones to sell. Some perfect gems are even cheaper than their normal counterparts. I guess it’s due to people not looking for those. But feel free to try and see if you have better luck selling them.

So if you want to make some easy gold and have 30 minutes time to spend on checking out the prices on your realm you should definitely give jewelcrafting a try.
Good luck!

While this would work and my hidden data will be safe this of course is very inconvenient.
So why not have a clean laptop without anything suspicious on it and go straight to the nearest public accesspoint or open wifi network and download
all the data you couldn’t get through customs.
You just encrypt everything at home, upload it to a server somewhere and download it when you land.
The only reason to store things on disks or usb drives I could think of is if you have to bring in a lot of data. But than again, you can’t hide all those and not look suspicious.

The point I want to make with this is that you can’t control data. As long as breaking encryption takes years it’s impossible to control it.
This is the same on the internet as it is on airports.
Filtering internet won’t stop pirates or child pornography creators. They will just get better at hiding what they do and the ones who do get caught are just
small fish.

So, should they stop screening laptops?
No. But not because it works but because if they didn’t screen random people everyone would just be able to carry any data they’d like into a country.
And maybe they don’t catch the big guys they probably do get lucky every now and then.

I’m at a point now where I give the crawler an initial character to start with and it just crawls from there.
Picking up the guild and parsing all the guild members.
Whenever the crawler picks up a new character it will look at that characters arena teams and adds those characters to the database.
While it’s parsing them it will usually find new guilds and there we go, another load of characters added to the database.
So broken down to a flowchart it would look something like this.

Now you’ll notice there’s one big flaw. In order for me to find a character it needs to be either in a guild or in an arena team with a person who’s in a guild.
Also that guild can’t be a one man guild.

The only way I can think of to fix this is to manually add or allow those people to add themselves to the database.
But because I’m guessing it’s only a really small amount of people who aren’t linked on the armory I am not to worried about it.
The last time I ran the crawler I got about 10.000 characters which is quite a nice set to work with.

The crawler is written in Python because of the excellent libraries it comes with and the pace at which you can code.
The only problem I keep running into however is character encoding. Because people use weird characters in their names it sometimes breaks my code and I haven’t really figured out how to properly fix this. Maybe it’s the MySQL backend? For now I just found something that works to be able to add more and more scraping capabilities.

I’ve set the crawl rate at about 1 page every 2 seconds so I don’t spam the armory to much and it seems to be fine like that. Once you go below a second it tends to sometimes choke and cut you off. The bandwidth consumption isn’t that bad though since it’s only asking the server for the XML so it’s not loading all the images and other doodads.

So far i’m able to scrape most of the data I want from the armory. I can get all of the stats and the gear the character is wearing. As well as the glyphs and talent points. The only challenge that’s left seems to be the achievements but I’m sure I’ll eventually work that out as well.
Once I got a nice set of data I’ll probably upload it here so you can all take a look.

What glyphs do I make?
How many do I make?
How much are they worth?
How many should I post?

The biggest question is probably the first and it’s also the easiest to answer. Make them all.
Yes, even the shitty glyphs you think will never sell.
You’ll probably waste a few gold making glyphs that really do never sell but you only make them once and then just forget about them.

As for the second question. I currently make sure that every time I craft I end up with 5-7 of each glyph. Listing 5 of them on the Auction House.
I calculated the cost price for the most expensive glyph and set that as my minimum list price. Max price being 2 inks + resilient parchment + AH fee for the timeframe you choose.
Say you end up with 3.60 gold. Now you can choose to sell for 3.60 gold making no profit but not losing gold either. You can list for 4 gold and take AT LEAST 40 silver profit.
Or you can list for 10 gold and get AT LEAST 6.40 gold profit. Keep in mind tho that glyphs are bulk items. So I list mine for 5 gold minimum.

Now that you know the basics lets move on to the things that will make your life a billion times easier.

Add-ons!

I might make a post later with screenshots explaining everything in detail but for now i’ll just give you the list.

Postal – Or any other mod that can open mail for you.
Auctionator – Or any other mod that lets you post bulk items without setting a price for every single one.
KevTool Queue – This is the big one. It lets you queue all the glyphs you need to make without manually working out which ones they are.

In order for KevTool Queue (KTQ) to work it needs the following addons.

Skillet
Altoholic
Datastore

That’s it! You’re now ready to build your glyph empire and get all the gold you ever wanted.

First of all if you’re going to make gold on the auction house you’ll need a crafting profession.
Some work better than others but all of them have the potential to make you gold.
If you don’t have a profession yet I suggest you take a look at the economy on your realm.
Make a list of things you would generally make for each profession.
Think in terms of blacksmiths making belt buckles and tailors making spellthread.

Once you got that list go through the materials they require and note down your cost price if you bought your stuff on the auction house. (keep in mind that we’re not going to farm)
If you need to check what items are made of visit WoWHead
Then look at the price for the end product and decide if it’s worth your time.

If you already have a profession just take a look at the items you can make and decide what’s worth crafting.
Important is to think outside of the box. For instance, jewelcrafters might only think about epic gems because that’s what everyone is using right?
Wrong! People leveling in Outland get items with sockets and they generally don’t fill them with epic or even blue gems. These are the people buying your green quality northrend gems.
The cheapest northrend gem is still better than TBC epic gems.
People who just hit 80 might put blue quality gems in their gear because they’ll usually replace their gear with better items anyway.
So while there’s huge competition for epic gems the lower half of the market usually isn’t that populated and people don’t worry to much about buying 4-5 green gems in one go so you can post those in bulk.
This is just one example but if you do your research you’ll probably find more items that are worth crafting.

Secondly, don’t be greedy. Don’t go for huge profits.
Selling 20 green gems with 5g profit is still 100g profit for a few clicks of work. Depending on your economy this can be anywhere from 20 minutes up to 1-2 hours of farming.
My main market is inscription. Because of my lack of time I only really list them once every 2 days. But on average I have 1400 auctions up.
Of course the majority comes back unsold but I just get them out of the mail and re list them. Craft the ones that did sell. Take a look at the gold I made and go do something else.

So how hard is making gold and how much time does it take?
If you’re smart enough to search wowhead and add up some numbers you’re good to go and after spending the initial 1-2 hours of research to see what you should craft it shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes every 2 days. Of course you can choose to set your auctions to 24h or 12h but that’s up to you.

Happy Goldmaking!

Before I start I’d like to say that I’ll be using the term dead as it’s described in the dictionary.

dead (dd)adj. dead·er, dead·est

1. Having lost life; no longer alive. (1)

In February 2010 a citizens’ initiative called Uit Vrije Wil (Out of Free Will) further demanded that all Dutch people over 70 who feel tired of life should have the right to professional help in ending it (2)

We’re getting there but unfortunately a lot of people who don’t understand or don’t want to understand what it means for some people to be able to die when they want are the people who decide if a law gets passed or not.

Let’s just hope they’ll open their eyes and see that death really is part of life and should be, if possible, a decision that every person should make for themselves.

(1) Definition of Dead by thefreedictionary.com
(2) Right to Die on Wikipedia

Now that we got that out of the way it’s time to introduce myself.
Or no, wait, let’s not. It’s probably best to keep that for the “about” page so atleast there’s something to read there as well.

All my attempts at creating my own blog so far usually ended just after the second or third post. (Actually, the last blog on this page only had the default first post)
So why is this time going to be a succes?
I honestly don’t know, we’ll know for sure once i break the 3 posts barrier.
But because i’m planning to get a little bit more into social media I figured I atleast need a blog to link to from my twitter account because 140(?) characters aren’t going to cut it.

And yes for the few people who know me and are reading this and know how much I’ve hated social media in the past, I won’t have a hyves account with 3 million friends and spend 50 hours a week going through all their “krabbels” (the dutch equivelant of facebook status updates / comments (I think)).

Other than that you’ll mostly find things i’m interested in here.
Mainly computer and other techy stuff with the odd random post about weird things i think about.

First post done!
Time to sort out all these widgets and appearance settings.