I’ve been playing Fallout Shelter for a while now, first on my phone (until my vault got big enough to crash the game constantly), then on an iPad Mini, and now also on Windows, where despite its tablet origin, it doesn’t support multi-touch on my Surface Pro. Fortunately, the keyboard controls are so nice that I don’t mind.

I made a few in-app purchases, because I like to pay what I think a “free” game is worth if I keep playing it. However, the items purchased are tied to a specific vault, so if you have 3 vaults and want to buy pets, you have to make three separate purchases; you can’t buy N pets and divide them between your vaults. Worse, if you delete the vault or the save file gets corrupted, you lose your purchases. For the final straw, the basic Lunchbox purchase is a total crapshoot, emphasis on the “crap”; you can spend real money and get nothing worthwhile. The only nice thing I can say is that the new Starter Packs appear to be guaranteed to have useful content, but if you buy an N-pack, they still all go to the same vault.

People quickly discovered how to read the file format and wrote a variety of tools to edit saves, but the most-recommended one runs under the Android emulator. I didn’t care about most of what the tools do, and I have an aversion to downloading anything that’s advertised as a cheat tool, because malware, so I poked around until I found the cleanest solution that used simple command-line tools. Specifically, OpenSSL and JQ.

After a little tinkering, I knocked together a simple (okay, it’s gotten rather elaborate…) bash script containing some common operations. Specifically, decrypt-and-pretty-print, convert to survival/normal mode, rename your vault, “buy” a bunch of lunchboxes and resources, and apply arbitrary JQ filter expressions from a file (for more complicated modding).

As for moving the files around, the PC version puts them in a quite sensible location. The iOS version is only accessible if you’ve enabled iCloud sharing, and then you have to go hunting in obscure sub-directories to copy a save from your iDevice, and to sync it back, the only way I’ve found is to copy it somewhere else, delete it from inside the game, copy it back (possibly increasing the last few digits of the filename), and then click the iCloud checkbox on the now-empty save slot (waiting a bit to give iCloud time to copy back and forth).

If I get motivated enough, I’ll sort through the Dweller data and make a tool to batch-rename them and sort out their relationship data (the game prevents direct incest, but after playing for a few months, I haven’t the slightest idea who bred with who). [update: turns out they don’t accurately track parentage. If a parent dies or is kicked out of the vault, the next person to arrive will inherit their id number, effectively adopting any children.]

Bad time to cover your face?

(via)

Sigh. My neighbor’s son is rapping in the back yard while shooting hoops. Badly (the rapping, at least). I presume he’s wearing headphones, since all I hear is his attempt to sound black.

Small plug for a book of poetry by my old Japanese teacher, Yumiko Tsumura. Scheduled for release in November.

The County called my home phone number this morning, instructing me to stay indoors with my windows closed. I can’t imagine why.

The closest point is a good 20 miles from my house, but part of what keeps Salinas cool and damp in the summer is the wind coming in from the ocean, so while the fire won’t come anywhere near me, the particulate matter will.

It doesn’t look like they’ve caught the person whose illegal campfire started it.

Last year, the little-known idol group Tsuri Bit got a lot of attention at a live appearance where 14-year-old member Sakura Ando demonstrated that she was not only lovely and lively, but also stacked.

They were surprisingly subtle with this year’s summer-bikini song (pretty much every idol group does one of these now…). Rather than giving her jumping jacks and other obvious titty-action moves (like Erika Yazawa in pretty much every Idoling!! video), they simply put the rest of the group in bikini tops that masked their relative development.

If you’re over a certain age, this picture is sure to be triggering. You’ve been warned!

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1. Create gmail account.
2. Use it to sign into Pokemon Go.
3. Power-level using a GPS-spoofer to constantly "visit" areas densely populated with pokestops.
4. Sell account.
5. Profit!

It looks like the folks at Niantic didn’t have anyone onboard with experience at handling the inevitable issues with running an MMO. Besides just trying to reliably run a 24x7 online service for the biggest mobile game launch ever, there’s “my friends started at launch, and if I want to train at gyms and take them over for my team, I need a well-stocked high-level character”. People foolish enough to start playing the game now cannot compete (you get nothing if you can’t win a fight, and you can’t beat critters with 10x your combat points), which means the only portion of the game open to them is the basic “gotta catch ’em all”. Which they made more difficult in the latest release, rapidly using up your precious supply of pokeballs, primarily acquired through microtransactions (2.76-5 cents per ball).

If you’re near an area with a lot of pokestops (or spoof GPS to visit them…), you can pick up balls and other goodies for free, but there’s nothing even vaguely fair about their distribution around the world. It more or less comes down to how many people in your area tagged locations in Niantic’s previous game, Ingress. In my neighborhood, that means a handful of badly-painted transformer boxes, fountains (one of which is allegedly in the changing room at Marshalls), entrance signs for public parks, a sandwich shop, and some benches at a golf course. In downtown Palo Alto, it means “at least three pokestops per block”.

The team has promised that Real Soon Now they’ll be introducing inter-player trading, which means even more opportunities for professional farmers running on hacked platforms. Hopefully before that gets too far out of hand, Niantic will hire a few clued-in MMO veterans with the estimated $10,000,000/day they’re grossing.