Repeat visitors to the site will have noticed some changes, yet we’ve failed to offer a public explanation. Part of this is because we were first testing things out and wanted to see how it went before we fully commited, but now we’re ready.

Sixteen years ago we launched mendax.org – both a landing page for an abstract organization and the whisperings of an e-zine. In reality, the domain came to house a smattering of ideas and projects, loosely organized into what would become our blog – our central online presence.

When we thought to transition the site away from WordPress a few months ago, it provided us an opportunity to look more closely at the site’s various stages – periods in which we focused on one aspect or another. To be honest, much of the older content was poor, both in focus and presentation, and while we still use the site as more an avenue for spilling recent musings rather than publishing finely edited prose, we feel that the site has matured in recent years insofar as what we post.¹ Our focus has narrowed, even though our target audience still isn’t singular.

We considered rebranding the site several times in the past, and even made a half-assed attempt with the WyldKard.com domain name, but we never fully pulled the trigger. We realized it came down to sunk costs, but there remained an emotional attachment to the original domain.² Still, with several forces colluding at the same time, we recently decided to move ahead with scratching the old domain, which is why it now redirects to our renovated home, The Beast Within.

We say “renovated” instead of “new” because we decided to keep using WordPress after all, so moving all our old content was a fairly simple task.³ The Beast Within will continue to pay homage to the subtitle we’ve used at mendax.org, “A mental brouhaha”, for though we hope to continue focusing the content at the site, we’ll likely still jump around between various topics, as many bloggers are wont to do. In other words, we consider The Beast Within an evolution of the old site, not a displacement.

We hope to write a more concise mission statement moving forward. In the meantime, let us know what you think about the new look.

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We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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As we hadn’t updated our recommended iPhone apps compilation in some time, we thought that a quick refresh was in order, especially with iPhone OS 3.0 out, and a new iPhone just days away. With the iPhone 3G now a mere $99 (albeit with a two-year contract), many holdouts will undoubtedly be giving up their souls to AT&T, and will, in short order, seek out must-have apps to fill their new smartphone. If you want to get right to our complete list, take a look at mendax.iphone, but if you first want to see what changes we made to it, keep reading.

Replacements.

First up, let’s take a look at the apps we removed. iTalk was a nice audio recording app, but since Apple bundled one along with iPhone OS 3.0, iTalk is redundant.

We also gave ByLine another look, as it received a couple updates since we replaced it with Feeds, and surprisingly, Byline’s performance put it back in the lead. Both apps are priced competitively, but since Feeds’ integration with Google Reader appeared worse than quirky for us, we went back to Byline, which has thus far worked solidly both online and offline. As far as RSS readers go, ByLine definitely stands ahead of the rest (admittedly, there are few that support Google Reader integration, but we consider this a must-have feature).

We pulled another retro-glance with i.TV, which we initially supported as a great television programming guide before it started to suffer unbearable crashes. We gave it another look recently, and since it integrates television programming, theater movies, NetFlix, and remote TiVo programming, we decided to dump both Now Playing and What’s On in lieu of i.TV. It’s a real twofer, and so far, stability hasn’t been much of an issue.

On a recent trip across the country, we found ourselves scanning for wireless hotspots, and as anyone who’s used the built-in wi-fi tool under Settings can tell you, the out-of-box method is annoyingly poor, even if one resorts to the auto-alert pop-up when walking around. WiFinder was our previous winner for this function, but it didn’t let us join open networks despite advertising the feature – the join network button simply didn’t do anything. The icon for WiFinder was horrible besides, so we finally found a replacement, even if it’s not for free. WiFiFoFum handles wi-fi scanning admirably, and appears to be a great wardriving tool if that’s one’s purpose for this type of app. Even if it’s not, being able to triangulate the source of local wi-fi signals makes troubleshooting a local wi-fi network a much easier task.

Newfish.

Since our last update, we also added some apps that are simply fantastic, especially since we weren’t happy with previous apps that may have claimed to have similar functionality. For example, Bento is a great database app, which is cheaply priced and syncs with the desktop version. With a little time to set up database templates, Bento itself is a replacement for numerous apps in the AppStore that claim to handle inventory management, tasks, and other projects built around a database that users can’t edit. It took awhile, but there’s finally an awesome database app available.

We finally added Air Sharing to the list even though we’ve had it for awhile. Way back, we picked it up for free, but lost it and didn’t re-download it until recently. In short, Air Sharing sets the iPhone up to be discoverable, such that it can be used as a portable hard drive. The main benefit to this is that one can copy various document files to the iPhone via Air Sharing, and use the app as a document viewer when on the go. We’ve found that it can’t handle PDFs that are fairly large (at least 100MB), but does well with smaller documents. (Anyone know of Air Sharing Pro addresses this limitation?)

DVR Remote is an app we added to compliment Apple’s own Remote app. Rather than control apps on our computer, however, DVR Remote is used to control our TiVo, effectively acting as a replacement for the TiVo remote, and also letting us browse what’s on our TiVo as long as we’re in range of our home network. Flashlight is another utility app that we’ve used for some time now, and though all flashlight apps in the AppStore are similar, we’re happy with it’s zero cost and decent features.

Since the first iPump apps were available, we got ahold of a couple just to see what all the fuss was about, and we quickly decided that they were quality apps for the home workout (we bought the Kettlebell app, and picked up the Yoga and Stretch versions later on for free). Since, we decided to give in and pick up FitBuilder, which consolidates all of the iPump applications and allows one to set up great workouts. We think the app could be streamlined a bit more for usability, but the feature-set and number of exercises makes FitBuilder the best workout app out there.

Finally, the last AppStore app we picked up was Geocaching, which is the “official” app for the hobby with the same name. This purchase was more to prepare us for the iPhone 3G S, such that we can get our Geocaching groove on with full force, but with only one other real competitor in the mix, this app has an excellent feature-set for an excellent outdoor hobby.

Black sheeps.

As far as Cydia apps go, we decided to remove CyCorder as a recommended app, not because it isn’t a great tool, but because it’s unnecessary for iPhone 3G S users. If you’re still using an iPhone 3G or 2G iPhone, however, CyCorder is a reasonable stand-in. Obviously, the video quality isn’t the same as with the iPhone 3G S (it pulls approximately half the frames per second), but since video recording is otherwise impossible, CyCorder is a nice tool to have along.

We also pulled MobileFinder and OpenSSH from the list, because we simply never used them after our initial iPhone setup. Both apps, along with Mobile Terminal, are nice tools to have, but just as we rarely need a command prompt, messing with iPhone files at all is rarely a task we need to undertake. In circumstances where they are necessary, such as with moving Winterboard theme files around, they’re easy to install, but otherwise the icons just take up screen real-estate that we’re happy to use for other apps.

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When we began mendax.org in 1996, we had reasonably concrete aims for the site, but as with all things, situations change and end-goals shift accordingly. Where mendax.org was launched as the public face of a multi-person operation, we’ve been in a very different place for years, with content now produced almost exclusively by one author. This is especially true with today’s ease at placing online a personal vanity blog, making the undertaking of an e-zine, as in mendax.org’s original vision, a somewhat moot point; many earlier contributors have gone their own ways to launch their own sites, and as a part-time endeavor without the resources to launch in the “pro” blogging space, mendax.org has become a reflection of the thoughts and interests of its one-man post-writing machine team.

Yet still, we’ve had clear goals for mendax.org’s evolution, which we hoped to roll out in stages throughout 2009. Steering these ideas in the right direction, time considered, has still been a heavy task, however. This lack of time, compounded with the realization that we have other ventures we’d like to put a stake into, has made us realize that letting mendax.org continue on its enormously slow path to becoming what we intend it to become, however creative that product may be, is almost a moot endeavor. Why half-ass a project for years when we can reduce our goals considerably for a passing product now?

In other words, we’ve pretty much decided that we’re not going to keep pushing mendax.org on the direction we hoped to take it, and are instead leaving it where it is. That’s because looking at the state of the site, we see a decent personal blog and little else. Why mess with that, if we’d rather expend our energies on new projects, while leaving mendax.org in a relatively happy state?

To this end, readers will see some subtle changes at mendax.org to reflect its un-new direction. For most, the upcoming changes will barely be noticed, especially in regards to content and frequency of posts. In a nutshell, mendax.org’s purpose, if such a thing is notable, has merely been redefined on the author’s end. And that purpose, as we move forward, will be to continue with the same level of content from the clearly-stated perspective of the one-man writing team that’s kept mendax.org afloat for some time now. And what’s why as time goes on, even with “mendax.org” remaining as a legacy foundation, the site will probably, one day, be referred to only as the website of WyldKard.

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• For the Boleyn story, watch Tudors.
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  After slowly making our way through the available episodes of Showtimes’s Tudors, and nearing the end of the second season, we decided to take a brief break and watch The Other Boleyn Girl. How could a movie starring both Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johansson fail? Well, epically.At least compared to the story told in Tudors. While the movie has some great, arguably more historically accurate costumes, that’s about where the movie’s merits end.
• Further proof that print-publications are a dying breed.
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• Most self-described “hardcore” PvP gamers are likely full of shit.
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  Scott Jennings makes a great point about why Darkfall won’t make it in the end: …people enjoy hardcore PvP in the abstract. Or, to put another way, many more people believe they are ‘hardc0re’ then actually are. And they dislike being proved wrong pretty powerfully… The Mordred problem is simply that a great majority of the people who believe they are hardcore are not, and after being violently disabused of the notion, will leave.
• Pepsi beats Coca-Cola to retro-soda?
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  Apparently, Pepsi realized that people love soda made with cane sugar, and would rather drink these types of variants than the mass-market versions made with high-fructose corn syrup. While more expensive to produce, there’s clearly a market for this, which is why people seek out Mexican Coke in the States when possible, despite the cheaper canned or plastic versions being more widely available.
• Reassessing EVE. Or, Our EVE Experiment (mendax.eve?).
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  Our take on EVE Online has fluctuated worse than a woman’s pregnancy mood. Let us summarize: When we were first exposed to EVE through a friend, we didn’t think much of it. Giving it some more thought, however, we loved the idea of a graphical Trade Wars MMO. EVE even brought back memories of what we hoped Starshield could turn into (sans the quantum weather bit), and by the time our fascination with World of Warcraft (WoW) was coming into steep decline, EVE jumped back on our radar as the game to play.
• Sexy acorn mp3 player is probably very shitty.
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  We can’t help but love the aesthetic of this acorn-shaped mp3 player complete with wooden enclosure. Sadly, this baby only sports 1GB of data, and it’s not an iPod. Still, the concept is very cool, and one could imagine a pretty cool interface for this baby by changing the track, or volume, with a twist of the top.In any case, this mp3 player certainly beats the Shuffle’s form factor, and could be a viable alternative to Apple’s products.
• There is no financial Apocalypse.
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  On a daily basis, it seems that the media wants everyone to believe that the American way of life has ended. There are even comparisons, frequently so, about the state of the U.S. today and the state it was in during the Great Depression. There are even some who are convinced that we’re in a depression, and not a simple recession.
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  One of the primary reasons that World of Warcraft (WoW) managed to make MMOGs mainstream is because of timing. That’s not to say that WoW isn’t a good game in its own right, but chances are, if the stars weren’t in perfect alignment, WoW wouldn’t have amazed observers with its vacuum-like prowess at sucking in millions of gamers. Hardcore Casual’s syncaine wrote a great synopsis of these events: In short, late 2004 was a ‘perfect storm’ of sorts to launch an MMO.

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We finally got around to updating our recommended list of OS X applications, bringing the virtual “distro” of mendax.mac to version 1.16. Changes include the removal of ClamXav in light of the fact that we rarely used it. That fact brings us to the second reason for ClamXav’s removal: anti-virus apps for OS X are pretty much pointless. (And, it doesn’t help that many users of ClamXav have experienced some major issues with the program.)

While Remote Buddy still has many uses, the main reason we adopted it was for controlling iTunes from our iPhone. The iPhone Remote application has made this redundant, however, so we’re sticking with the newer, simpler solution. In the meantime, Remote Buddy no longer makes the cut. Besides, lots of people gawked at the 19.99 € price tag.

Azureus treated us well for some time on both the Windows and OS X platforms, but Transmission for OS X is simply simpler, with may features still packed in for handling all one’s BitTorrent needs. So, out with Azureus, and in with Transmission.

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• Blogo needs work.
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  After reading Apple Gazette’s fairly positive overview of Blogo 1.2, we decided to give the stand-alone blogging application a try. (We tried out ecto and MarsEdit in the past, and ecto still stands as our victor.) From Blogo’s screenshots, we were hopeful that the application could seriously stand against ecto, as it looks quite polished, with a nice feature-set and much better-looking UI than ecto, albeit one that could still use some polish.
• Comcast’s DVR is unbelievable shit.
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  It’s bloody amazing that though TiVo has been around for almost a decade, no one else has managed to duplicate TiVo’s experience. This leads us to many more questions, such as how, not long ago, was TiVo considered a company that almost went under? Let’s ignore that historical anecdote, however, and instead focus on the crux of the matter: TiVo is not only better than competing DVR products, but is light-years ahead of them.
• Gamers agree: Fallout 3 > Fable 2.
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  We didn’t like Fable 2, and as far as RPGs are concerned, we totally thought Fallout 3 trumped Fable 2 in every possible way.While our tastes are understandably subjective, we acknowledge that some people may actually like playing a game where the Sims meets fantasy, and where hack’n slash combat is practically mandatory to succeed. Still, we’re happy that the overall theme in the gaming blogosphere is that Fable 2 is not worthy of top honours, and is consistently pushed behind Bethesda’s Fallout 3 by reviewers.
• How Blizzard can fund a longer leveling game.
  Posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 in Newthink – Views: (150)
  Earlier this month, syncaine at Hardcore Casual suggested that because World of Warcraft (WoW) is a well-regarded PvE game, that Blizzard should have increased the level max beyond 80. The argument is that since the leveling game is where people tend to have the most fun because of questing options, and since characters at the level cap are forced to grind away for gear by running the same content over and over again, that a longer leveling game would make sense.
• Portability alone does not a laptop make.
  Posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 in Technocracy – Views: (144)
  Asus has prototyped a future laptop design that sports a trackpad that also acts as a screen. The idea is great, as it allows users to display widget-like information on the trackpad instead of taking up valuable screen real-estate. Interestingly, this is exactly the idea behind the OLO netbook and our own proposed iPhone-driven netbook.Adding a “data” screen is a natural evolution for notebooks, especially if it the screen doesn’t add bulk and is instead integrated into an existing component – in this case, the trackpad.
• Stand-alone web applications on the iPhone? Yes, please.
  Posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 in Newthink – Views: (171)
  With Apple’s market growth, everyone’s talking about what the company will do next. Daniel Eran Dilger makes his own predictions over at Roughly Drafted, and while we’re skeptical as to some of his points, we can’t help but be excited as to their prospects. From Bonjour discovery for mobile Safari (to control a variety of devices from the iPhone), to self-contained web apps, we love the idea of these possibilities.
• The Aliph Jawbone’s critical failure.
  Posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 in Technocracy – Views: (361)
  Back in July, we bitched about our Motorola H700 bluetooth headset dying. So frustrated were we with Motorola’s track record, we swore off buying another Motorola bluetooth product, and instead picked up the highly recommended Aliph Jawbone 2.Touted as one of the best headsets due to its noise reduction technology, the Jawbone 2 differs from its predecessor primarily in regards to size.
• The Mac Mini needs to eat the AppleTV, and shoot up with TiVo.
  Posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 in Newthink – Views: (164)
  At the end of an article at TUAW talking about the possibility of the Mac Mini and AppleTV both transitioning over to Nvidia’s Ion platform, Robert Palmer asks the same question we’ve been musing over: But what if the next-generation Apple TV and Mac mini were one in the same?Since the AppleTV is considered an Apple “hobby” product, without Apple’s full weight behind it, it stands to reason that the product is little more than a proof-of-concept with the need for forward movement.
• There won’t be a Mac App Store.
  Posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 in Technocracy – Views: (164)
  At TUAW, Mike Schramm muses over the idea of a Mac App store, akin to the App Store most iPhone users are tied to. The idea is that Apple could create a section in the iTunes store for OS X apps for desktop use, just as they have a section for iPhone software. While the idea is a nice one, it’s not about to happen.
• Why delete articles from Wikipedia?
  Posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 in Two Minute Hate – Views: (186)
  A number of people in the MMOG blogosphere talked about the deletion of MUD articles in Wikipedia this past week, after folks like Richard Bartle and Raph Koster voiced their complaints on their respective soap boxes. We quite agree with the two of them that deleting these kinds of articles, despite arguments about citation, do nothing but deplete the public record of a huge part of online gaming history.

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The World of Warcraft (WoW) highway is riddled with potholes. They’re not exceptionally big, but they’re not comfortable to drive through, either. A player can miss a few of them on their first travel down the highway to the level-cap, but the potholes become ever more apparent the more often one takes the WoW highway. For some legs of the trip, the potholes are a large enough problem that even fathoming a second trip down that leg is unquestionable.

That, in a nutshell, is our take on WoW. We keep up with WoW news only because WoW is the largest highway of them all, and the precedent its builders set influences the design decisions of all its emulators. And sure, we occassionally muse about what it would be like to delve back onto the WoW highway, but when we remember how annoying those potholes can be, and what damage they can do to the car that is our sanity, we shirk the amusement off and move on with our lives, hoping that a greater highway will ultimately be built.

One of the loveable lads at Penny Arcade recently mentioned in their podcast that there’s enough to do in WoW that he can avoid the parts he dislikes, but we’re obviously more discriminating. The mere idea of returning to Outland pains us, as does the horrible grinding required to max one’s professions, or obtain the gold necessary for an epic flying mount. Nevermind that once we’re at the end of the highway, there’s nothing but a painful cul-de-sac of daily quests to occupy us while we hope a garage door of an instance opens up so we can pray for epic drops or sad tokens. Oh sure, there’s the nearby PvP off-road trails that we can drive over to, but it’s poorly maintained and we’ll inevitably run out of gas before we’ve had our fill of fun.

That’s not to say we’d recommend a newcomer to the land avoid the WoW highway altogether. It’s like Niagara Falls – cool to visit once, but not so exciting that you’ll ever want to go back. What we wish we could do, though, is tell our past-selves what race and class to roll, and then live vicariously through the fresh journey ahead, because much of our chagrin towards WoW is due to the devolution evolution of character races/classes over the years. If we had only rolled one character who was supremely to our liking, who we knew would play the way we wanted him to at the end of the road, and if we only had to travel that great highway once, perhaps we’d look back now and say, “Heck, that journey wasn’t so bad.”

Alas, we’ve been on that highway plenty a time, and we’re tired of all that traveling, and all those potholes. Fundamentally, the highway is a solid, beautiful ride, but the longer you’re on that road, the less you want to tolerate as the trip goes on. From a distance though, the highway is worth studying, even if just to see the car-wrecks.

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• The Cataclysm cometh. Or, has it been gradually coming all along? – There’s a special place in Hell for those who destroy good lore. Sure, some lore tweaks are necessar…

Apparently, our earlier coverage of Chyrp didn’t push anyone to build any extravagant or even irregular Chyrp themes, and we still haven’t updated our broken theme for WordPress yet either. Yes, we expected to move onto something better by now, but we’ve been holding out for someone talented to bring the Redoable theme up to snuff, else move onto a premium theme.

We’ve strongly considered utilizing one of adii’s Premium News Themes, and an upcoming contest has our interest piqued. Of adii’s themes, we were most enthused by the Kineda Inspiration theme, but as it’s been discontinued, we’ve sort of been holding out on what else adii comes up with. At present, we’d still prefer a grid-based news theme, but with developer support, which the unfinished Kineda theme does not offer.

We do like adii’s Live Wire 2.0, both because of the color scheme and the reliance on smaller graphics for the “main” article. It’s also easy to see various recent articles without scrolling, and overall, the layout puts more emphasis on the textual content of the page versus some other premium themes. Still, we’re not entirely happy with the color scheme (which we could edit ourselves, naturally), and we still prefer the more grid-like layout the Kineda theme offered. Perhaps if the Live Wire 2.0 theme placed the “main” article in the center of the page, with other articles flanking the sides and bottom, we’re be more inclined to give it a go, but then again, this could easily become distracting as well. The lack of ad-space is also a bit disconcerting, and we’d prefer to see more places one could put smaller ads, without requiring to do so.

Nonetheless, adii’s themes have come a long way, and we can see using them both here at mendax.org, as well as on some other sites we administer. Should we not win adii’s latest contest, we may opt to hold out a bit longer for something closer to what we’d like to see in a theme, though we can easily see using something like Live Wire 2.0 and simply having it altered by a professional web developer.

As an aside, what most premium theme designers ought to do is showcase the configuration options of their themes, such that potential buyers can see what options they have for ad-space, feeds, columns, etc.

Anyone have other suggestions as to a theme we should consider?

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Macworld recently brought up MediaLink, an application by Nullsoft that allows streaming of multimedia files from one’s Mac to one’s television by way of a PS3. This is very similar to their other application, Connect360, which works by way of an XBox 360 instead of a PS3, and is an application that we thoroughly stand by. Ironic, then, that we forgot to mention it when we put together the original mendax.mac compilation of must-have OS X applications, but this oversight has since been corrected.

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