Technoheads.org

Thoughts, Work, and Coffee

The side of DRM we forget.

I’ve decided not to abandon all hope for the Xbox One just yet.

As the dust from E3 settles, it’s quite apparent that the new Xbox has taken quite a beating. The revelation that the console would feature a strict, one-copy-per-person game policy hasn’t been very good for its public reception, particularly considering DRM has never been a popular method of license-enforcement. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a blanket term for technology used to control the access to content after it has been sold, primarily for copyright reasons. The Xbox One, in particulary, needs to check-in with Xbox authentication servers once a day. In addition, games can only be traded once, and only then to people you’ve been friends with for more than 30 days. This news, coupled with the fact that the successor to the Xbox dynasty is $100 more expensive than its Sony counterpart, seems to doom the console before it even hits the shelves.

But isn’t that what Steam does?

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Hello, world.

I woke up this morning and decided that I hated everything.

If by this morning I meant some time mid-December, I’d be telling the truth. I was more or less tired of looking like a middle schooler to the internet, so much so that I stopped telling people that I had a blog. It had become something of an eyesore, full of outdated content and poorly modified php. So, I drafted a new theme from scratch, tore out some 30 unused plugins, and hid all my old posts (you can still find them if you search for them, though).

I set about coding this theme, which I now call Calcium, around the start of winter break. I was holed up in my house for about a month and, having completed finals and such, needed something to occupy my time. I had no obligations, I had no classes, and I had all the time in the world. So, naturally, I stayed inside and stared at my computer screen.

Looking at the github repo for this theme, my indecisiveness is more than apparent. I went through several design iterations, essentially starting over each time. I had a good deal of help from my less aesthetically challenged friends, which I greatly appreciate. The theme leans solidly on Skeleton, from which its name was derived, and takes visual cues from sites like Medium and Svbtle. After a few months of poking around, I ended up settling upon this.

There’s a lot to be done still (the “Contact” and “About me” pages are terrifying), but it’s at a place that I’m reasonably happy with. If you catch any obvious bugs, or have any critical feedback, please tell me. I’ll be updating the contents of this site over the course of the next few weeks, weeding out categories and pages and useless posts.

❖