Good news and bad news. The good news: the torrent RSS feeds have been fixed. The bad news: our IRC server is dieing a slow and painful death. We’re currently evaluating options and hope to move to a new IRC server by the end of the week. We’ll have details here when that takes place. If you have suggestions for IRC hosting that won’t break the bank we’d love to hear from you.

In other news, we’re evaluating several gamehosting companies and hope to have a Hak5 gameserver soon. We’ll most likely rotate the game every month and schedule an event where the Hak.5 crew will join in the fragging pleasure.

Thank you everyone for the awesome feedback on episode 9, your continued support means so much to us.

–Darren

Tonight Hak.5 will be featured on the pilot episode Torrent, a new show on G4TechTV. From the website “Torrent is a weekly one-hour television Internet-culture show for tech-savvy audiences looking for unique first-person pop-tech stories from around the world“, however Torrent’s host Amber Mac does a better job of summing it up on her blog.

The pilot episode airs on G4TechTV in Canada at 8:00 PM EST and more information can be found at Torrent’s official site.

We’re excited to be featured on such a unique community driven show and hope everyone has a chance to check it out.

–Darren

Is the 5th really coming up that fast? Yikes! Render farm to full speed! We just wrapped shooting what we believe to be our best episode ever and can’t wait to release it. Videora and VirtualDub are standing by ready to encode the xvid and mp4 as soon as I finish some final touches. Running time is creeping up on an hour so be prepared for a power packed episode.

Now I know we’ve made a promise from day one to release quality tech/entertainment on the 5th of each month, but I’ll level with ya. The 5th is going to be a crazy day for us for many reasons and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. So we’ll be releasing on the 4th! I don’t have a firm time since I’ve got a business trip that day so expect it some time that evening (EST, -5 GMT of course). For the most up to date happenings head over to the IRC chat in #hak5 on irc.techphile.ca. That’s where we’ll be holding the usual release party. If you’ve never joined us in chat for a release party before tomorrow is a perfect time to join the crew and see how much crazy fun it is.

Now without further adieu, production note screenshots hot off the timeline.

Rob Fuller joins Wess with a fantastic segment and a sexy laptop.

Back in the control room things go very wrong. Wess and Darren plan corrective action.

Wess, Jenn, and Darren all remind you to trust your technolust. It’s like using the force!

Thank you everyone for your continued support, it has pushed us to make the show better with every pixel. We hope to see you on the 4th for a rockin’ release!

–Darren

Yes, you read the title correctly. I’m actually doing production notes. Been a while eh? Yes, I did just write eh. I blame our special guest this episode. So far everything is running smoothly. I’m very happy with the way this episode is coming out. We have some really solid segments either in the can or on the deck, and our sketch shoot tomorrow is going to be so much fun. We’re also happy to be harboring a Canadian in studio. Yes, the clever Jenn Cutter of OpenAlpha is joining us for some Hak.5 and OA fun, and she brought Guitar Hero. Wess has been practicing his micro to no end, it’s amazing he’s available to direct a segment at all .

Jenn Cutter and Tux school Wess

I love the image quality of Jenn’s Canon XL2, but the green lens flare has got to go!

Can’t wait ’till the 5th!

–Darren

Friday night I was on the Computer America show to talk about Hak.5. Unfortunately the show was plagued with technical difficulties throughout the night. Half hour in the board operator could not get me on as the phone network was down in their area. Finally, co-host Carey Holzman calls me from his cell phone, puts it on speaker, and holds it next to the mic. It works slightly better than tin cans and string.

Download the train wreck here: Hour 1 MP3, Hour 2 MP3.

We’ve been invited on again and I’m sure next time it won’t sound so horrible.

Hak.5 will be on the Computer America radio show with Craig Crossman and Carey Holzman for at 10pm EST (-5 GMT)/ 7pm PST. Computer America is “America’s longest-running nationally syndicated radio talk show about computers”. You can tune into the radio broadcast if it’s carried in your area or listen to the Internet stream.

I’ll make the MP3 available here tomorrow. This is a live call in show so feel free to join in!

–Darren

Last month we got very excited to find that issue #648 of the Amazing Adventures of Superman included references to TWiT, CommandN, and Hak.5.

On a recent trip to Toronto for Call for Help the infamous Sean Carruthers of Lab Rats suggested that we autograph a number of copies to benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A limited edition eight copies have been autographed by Amber MacArthur (CommandN, TWiT), Darren Kitchen (Hak.5), Leo Laporte (TWiT), Mike Lazazzera (commandN), Wess Tobler (Hak.5)

The top three bidders will get theirs also autographed by Hak.5’s Alli and a special TWiT Pocket Protector autographed by Kevin Rose, Patrick Norton, the Woz, and Leo Laporte plus bonus TWiT swag.

All the money raised will go to benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation in their ongoing fight to protect your rights online.

Head over to ebay and bid for this unique podcast collectible!

PS: I had so much fun photoshopping Sean Carruther’s original image that I couldn’t resist turning it into a desktop wallpaper. 1024×768, 1280×1024

–Darren

After waiting for so long for the ISP hosting our forums to come back online we can’t wait any longer. The forums are back, hosted at dreamhost. They rock and I’ve got nothing but nice things to say about them. Unfortunately we had to start from scratch so I hope you’ll understand as we rebuild the forums community.

–Darren

It’s the 5th! Hak.5 episode 8 will be released today. Come join the party in #hak5 on irc.techphile.ca!

I’ve just returned from a trip to Toronto and already I’m missing the T.O. Thankfully I drove back with a trunk full of Canada’s finest Hops and Barley. I did two segments on Call for Help, episodes 340 and 344 which will air March 10th and 23rd respectively, and one live episode of The War Room with Jenn Cutter.

So back in the states and ready for action, Wess, Alli and I are shooting the last segments of Hak.5 episode 8. We hope you’ll join us for the regular online release party on March 5th in #hak5 on irc.techphile.ca. We’re working on setting up a LAN (Or would that be WAN?) party & VOIP madness that night. I’ll keep you posted on game, servers, etc when I get the deets so prepare for a good old fashion Hak.5 fragfest.

As for the forums… FileFarmer has still not responded and I think it may be time to fold our cards. I’m not giving up on retrieving our database but at this point I feel the community has been disrupted for too long and if starting from scratch is what we have to do, we’ll just have to bite the bullet and do it. On that note if you’ve got forum software suggestions other than phpBB I’d love to hear them.

Take care all,
–Darren

After many many emails, support tickets, and voicemails the ISP hosting our Forums, Web Chat, and direct download links for episodes 1 – 5.5 have contacted us. They are aware of the problem (Finally, it only took over a week of bugging them) however they aren’t sure where the problem stems. They have not been helpful at all. At this time I’m just looking forward to getting access to our server so that I can download our PHPBB database and move it to another server. Libsyn has done a great job of hosting our direct downloads and I will be moving episodes 1 – 5.5 there.

FileFarmer, the ISP in question, has not given me an ETA on the server being back up. They claim they’ve got green lights on all of their servers. If you read the forums over at filefarmer.com you’ll see that we’re not the only ones having problems with their service.

I’ve got to say up until lately their service has been great. They were willing to work with our enormous bandwidth requirements and were generally responsive. That level of support has obviously changed. I’ll continue to hound them about the server. If you’d like to give them a little nudge, their email address is filefarmer@gmail.com

I do not want to use the backup copy of the forums DB I have locally since its outdated. Several posts and user accounts would be lost if I were to restore from this backup on another server.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I hope you understand as we work through this bump.

–Darren

We are aware that our forums and web chat are down. Both of those are hosted on our Hak5.tv domain. I have contacted the ISP and that server should be up ASAP. Until then we apologize for the inconvenience.

Keep trusting that technolust,

–Darren