Personal Blog of Robert Sanek.

I keep forgetting I have one of these. The last time I posted was (let’s check) last december. I’ve been slacking. Nobody reads this blog anyway, so you can’t complain.

In any case, exams in my school are finally over and I can focus more on what I want to do. Recently (as a matter of fact, just about a month ago), I started a clothing business over at www.roisai.com. So far, the site doesn’t get much traffic because most of my business is run through ebay. Ebay is a great place, btw, even if they do disadvantage smaller sellers and favor powersellers like crazy. If you notice, RoiSai is really just a little play on my name, where two “i”‘s are added just randomly. So I guess that’s coming along well, it seems like I’m always moving from one thing to the next.

In other news, I bought my first Apple product. I’m a bit ashamed, because I’ve been a long-standing opponent of Apple and basically one of the few people defending Microsoft. Anyway, my iPhone should come in very soon, I’m expecting it next week. So I wanted to ask whoever is reading this if they have unlocked and jailbroken their iPhone. I don’t have warranty on it anyway, but I wanted to know if it’s really as easy as it seems and it’s just something you can get done in 10 minutes. We’ll have to see.

I guess that’s all I wanted to say right now. Talk to you in another few months!

I’ve been playing a lot of the online browser game travian lately, and I thought I’d share some advice on when and how to start a new village, and what to do after it’s been founded.

After you’ve made your settlers and you have the CP you need, you’re ready to found a village. But where will it be? Unless this is your 2nd or 3rd village, you are pretty much free where you can place it (if this is one of your first villages, found it on a 4-4-4-6 space very close to your home village, preferably 1 or 2 spaces away).

I will give you my own advice on this, but feel free to disagree. I’ve just found this very rewarding for me. The only things that dictate where I put my villages are two things: oasis availability and distance. I usually am cautious to found villages more than 25 spaces away from a possible support village. Make it close, but not too close. If your villages are too close together, you’re not helping your raiding range and you’re not going to take any new oasis, both major drawbacks. I always make sure there is at least one open oasis in my new village’s 7×7, usually two. Three is unnecessary as you will find that upgrading a Hero’s Mansion to level 20 costs too much. Basically, an ideal spot for a village would be:

• Not many other players nearby, e.g. only 1 or 2 other villages in the new village’s 7×7.
• At least 1 and preferably 2 free oasis for the taking once your Hero’s Mansion is ready
• Relatively close to your other villages (this can vary per player, but I like to have my villages within 15 minutes of my merchants)
• If this village is farther away, go ahead and settle a 4-4-4-6. This will make it much easier to support other villages around it if you are planning to settle close to this area

If you have these specifications, you’ve got a good spot.

So you’ve decided to settle it now: You have your main building at level 1, but what now? Are there any guidelines you should follow for the upgrading of buildings? Here’s generally the actions I take in any new village. Below, buildings are described as Building (level to upgrade to)

WH, Gran (1|1)
Main (3)
Market (1)
Rally (1)
WH, Gran (6|3)
Main (5)
Barracks (1)
Main (15)
WH, Gran (12|6)
Main (20)
WH, Gran (20, 10)

Beyond this, specialization for each player makes a rigid structure of upgrading hardly useful. But this should hopefully get you started!

Also, if you’re looking for an excellent guide that will tell you how to rise to the top players in Travian, check out this guide. I was skeptical at first of buying, but have never regretted it later. It really gets you ahead of others that don’t have these resources, and you’ll be raiding and owning like crazy!

UPDATE: Even though it’s a good game, Travian is a serious time-waster and eats up more time than you’d think. After getting a free account over at RescueTime, I realized that I was spending WAY too much time on it. So long, Travian!

Lately, I haven’t posted much on the petaIMG blog or gone into depth about what happened. As you might remember, petaIMG is a project I started about a year or so ago with an aim to let people (initially just me) upload photos of all formats to a no-nonsese site: hot linking enabled, large file sizes, you name it. Our ToS doesn’t really impose any tough rules – and people decided to break it anyway.

At first I didn’t notice it, since I don’t go through random folders looking at uploads. But then one happy morning my host suspended my account on the grounds that the site was overloading one of their servers due to a violation of the ToS. I was very displeased to find out that I was suspended, but I give props to my host for getting me back online very fast. I love the people at hostmonster.

So now, I have an option: either individually go through every folder (there are 500 of them, ex | ex) and delete the files in question. Not fun, a horrible use of time. Or, I could just let the side be down and eventually sell it to someone.

Now I feel the most sorrow for users that loved the site and used it legitimately. Namely, the forum Inkscape has benefited from svg and svgz uploads. And that’s what I wanted the site to be – a nice place to upload obscure image files with large sizes. But those with bad intentions have to mess it up for all of us.

You can read the official statement over at petaIMG.com, but I want to know what the readers think: what should I do with this project? If I remove the images and restart the service, the same threat will be there, except this time the host might not be so magnanimous.

UPDATE: (December 2nd) I let the current files stay online, and I got smacked down by my host once again. I proceeded to delete all the files that have ever been uploaded to petaIMG, so that won’t be available either. If you’re still interested in the domain, site, or script, you can go ahead and email me.