Teaser: Weeburg Day 2

With reinforcements having arrived over night and more on the way, the battle has resumed.

The action began with a heavy bombardment by the Rebels' massed batteries which has cleared the opposing artillery from the ridge.

Already the Dominion's field hospital is busy. 

More tomorrow!

T.H.I.N.G.S. Wave 1

It's a "No Board Wednesday" Special Feature!

T.H.I.N.G.S. Wave 1

Manufacturer: Milton Bradley

Year: 1986

This review is going to be a little different than usual as I will be covering a collection of different small games. This line of small wind-up dexterity games sort of exists in the crossroads between my toy collecting and board gaming hobbies, for reasons you'll see pretty quickly I think. 

This entry will focus on the first four games that were released under Milton Bradley's "T.H.I.N.G.S." line. After the success of Mattel's M.U.S.C.L.E. toy line the late 80's found itself awash in strange toy line acronyms. T.H.I.N.G.S. stands for Totally Hilarious Incredibly Neat Games of Skill. The four games listed below comprised the first wave, and are by far the most common of the line. I will show off the second and third series in another post next Wednesday. 

All of my T.H.I.N.G.S. games are complete, and are in their original packaging. In most cases the packaging is pretty beat, but I'm not all that worried about obtaining "nicer" copies of the boxes. As far as price goes I'll mention it when I can remember, but for many of these, especially this first wave, I honestly don't remember. 

Game: Sir Ring-a-lot

Personal History:

Sir Ring-a-lot was the only one of these games that I had as a kid, and I really have no idea how or why I got it. I seem to remember that these were reasonably popular when they came out, as I knew a few people that had them and I can remember seeing them at toy stores at the time. I remember playing with it a lot, and getting pretty good at it. 

My original Sir Ring-a-lot is no longer in my possession. I've described on this blog before how sloppy my handling was with my toys as a kid, and this was no different. When I found my Sir Ring-a-lot as an adult it was missing all of the rings and had no box. Without the rings it's essentially useless, and it ended up getting sold in a lot of incomplete T.H.I.N.G.S. games that I had gradually accrued. 

Gameplay:

The game features a knight holding a lance who, when a button is pressed, raises and lowers. When the game is wound two bats with magnets at their feet fly around the top of the game's tower. Each bat grabs a metal ring as it passes, dips slightly in its flight as it passes the knight, and then deposits the ring on a platform on the other side of the tower. 

The goal of the game is to raise the knight just as a bat passes, hooking the metal ring it carries so that the ring slides down the lance. 

Thoughts:

The mechanism of this game works very well, and it's possible with enough practice to get a pattern down that gets you every ring most of the time. Occasionally a ring will fall early or twist weirdly when the bat grabs it, making those rings impossible to grab, but that's a relatively rare hiccup in what is otherwise a winnable little game. 

I also appreciate that you are a character in the game. Some of the games from this line have you interacting as you. That's fine, but I much prefer when I get to play "as" something, as it adds so much character to these little games. 

Game: Flip-O-Potamus

Personal History:

Flip-O-Potamus seems to be the second most common one of these games behind Sir Ring-a-lot. It's pretty easy to find, and I've actually owned a few just because it's either come as a lot with something else, or because I found a nicer copy on the cheap. I imagine its visual similarity to "Hungry Hungry Hippos" probably helped sales. 

Gameplay:

A tray on the bottom of the game opens up, revealing a set of blue marbles and a flicking device. When wound the hippo opens and closes its mouth. The player attempts to flick the marbles into the hippo's mouth before the timer winds down. 

Thoughts:

I find that this game is one of the least functional. The dispensing device is supposed to allow the balls to roll one at a time onto the flicker, refilling automatically with every flick. This doesn't usually work as planned, instead just flicking extra balls out of the tray and making you scramble to grab them before they roll off the table. The flicker also does a horrible job of sending the balls straight. in a game that should be mostly about timing, it's actually  50% about whether the ball even travels in the direction it must to be successful. 

What this game has that most of the others don't, however, is a wonderful little tray for the parts that holds them in place when you're done playing. The flicker segment slides into the base of the device, keeping all of the balls contained in the game for easy transport. I wish this was feature that all of the games had because it's very very easy to lose stuff from pretty much all of them. 

Game: Grabbit

Personal History:

This was the T.H.I.N.G.S. game I wanted the most as a kid, and it was also the one my neighbor friend had, which of course made me a little jealous. This copy was easily purchased online, and fairly cheaply as part of a lot. 

Gameplay:

You play as a frog which, when a button is pressed, "leaps" up. If the button is pressed quickly enough the mouth of the frog also closes when it jumps. When the mechanism is wound the tree at the center of the game rotates. As the tree rotates you attempt to leap up and "eat" the bugs which are hanging from the edge of the tree, attempting to eat as many as possible before the timer runs out and the tree pops off of the base of the game. 

Thoughts:

I actually think that Grabbit stands as the best example of what this line of game toys is. The game is colorful and attractive, with plenty of cute little design elements. It plays well, with a mechanism that you can actually get better at and demands some amount of deterity. It explodes at the end, which is something that many of the games do. Really it's just an all around fun package and hard not to love. 

This is also the only other game in the first wave where you are a character in the game, which as I said above I'm a big fan of. 

Game: Eggzilla

Personal History:

Eggzilla is the only T.H.I.N.G.S. game I ever bought without a box. This was very early in my collecting of these. At the time Eggzilla didn't show up on Ebay all that often, although it's a little easier to find now. It was paired with another boxed T.H.I.N.G.S. game in the auction, so I was happy to pick it up. 

As luck would have it a toy collecting buddy of mine found just the box for Eggzilla at a garage sale or something, and had the presence of mind to pick it up since I had just been talking about collecting these. It was one of those crazy moments where things align just so.

Gameplay:

Eggzilla is very different from pretty much any other T.H.I.N.G.S. game. you are given five pieces of eggshell. The pieces, when fit together properly, will form a shell with the base of the game. The Eggzilla figure is pushed onto the base of the game, and the game is wound. The player has until the timer runs out to completely construct the egg around Eggzilla. If he is able to do so a magnet at the top of the egg pulls the little spike out of the top of Eggzilla's head, and this stops the timer mechanism. If the player cannot build the egg in time Eggzilla shoots off of the game base, destroying the egg. 

Thoughts:

I'm really bad at this one, so it's probably my least favorite, even though it's technically a better game than Flip-O-Potamus. The little magnet trick at the top of the eggs is really a great feature and works like magic. This game is unique in that it's the only one in the range which comes apart so completely and basically uses both of your hands for the action as opposed to pressing a button or flicking a lever or catapult. It's also just about the only one I ever find just one piece of for sale, and thats the little Eggzilla figure itself. It seems that more than a few people kept the little guy but discarded the rest of it, and as such you'll sometimes find just him in Ebay auctions.

Final Verdict:

I'm not going to scores these like I usually do the games I review, but I'll say that I love this first wave as a group. Besides having a nostalgic connection to a couple of them I think they're just great toys that ooze that simple 80's charm that so many products of that decade have. There are a number of other gimmicky plastic games that came out between the mid 70's to mid 90's, but T.H.I.N.G.S. is just about my favorite line of that type, and this opening assortment is more than enough to cement them in my mind.

Next week I'll show of the second and third waves. These games get a little weirder moving forward, and one is almost impossible to track down. Stay tuned!

New Method For The Mouse Acceleration!

Good news, everyone!  Povohat found another method to perform mouse acceleration!

Using the interception library/driver, povohat wrote a program that reads in mouse inputs and modifies them using the same variables and math as his other driver.  Basically, this means we now have a mouse acceleration driver that no longer requires test mode.

We've been testing the acceleration program/implementation for a few weeks now, but I only got around to adapting the GUI for it yesterday.  I've been passing out builds to people looking for any issues, and so far it seems good.  Here is the latest test build (or mega.nz mirror).  If you find anything wrong, let me know!
(01/03/16 fixes: Added support for 2000hz mice in graphing, fixed crash that happened during Windows startup, and tweaked timing of starting new instance of interaccel.exe when using global hotkeys (to avoid short duration of all accel being off). Thanks nGolf and The Man for the troubleshooting!)
(12/19/15 bug fix: opening profiles no longer makes the GUI become useless. Thanks nGolf for the troubleshooting!)

Installation instructions are contained in the readme.txt.  The only hiccups we've noted so far are when the driver doesn't install properly.  Some antivirus products seem to sandbox the download and prevents it from installing, so keep an eye out for error messages.  Notable changes to the GUI include:

• Added tooltips for all numeric inputs.
• Added hyperlinks to this blog and www.mouse-sensitivity.com.
• Added customization wizard to help newcomers have a starting point. (Calculates accel and post-scale values based on your DPI, sets sens-cap to 2).

Ewh from esreality was kind enough to test the input lag of this method of acceleration versus not having it installed.  The raw data is here, and we were happy to discover that the interception driver doesn't add any input lag!  His methodology for testing is the same as this post on esreality.

Next steps to take are: further testing to verify that the GUI isn't broken horribly, get feedback from people on how the wizard settings feel (they aren't too far off from what I'm using, just that they scale to your DPI), and contact anticheat vendors to make sure that the intercept library isn't on a blacklist of sorts for them.  The last thing I want is to have anyone get banned for using our mouse accel implementation, but it seems unlikely that it would happen.

Note regarding anticheat:  It has been over a year since we put this out, and many people have been using it on many games and anticheat services.  None have detected any cheats related to the interception driver (nor should they).  There was a DM on a forum in Feb 2015 of an ESEA admin suggesting to not use this driver, but I know multiple people who have been using the driver on ESEA for multiple months without issues.  Absolutely no problems have been reported with Blizzard's Warden, VAC, Punkbuster, Fairfight, or anything else.

Any and all feedback is very welcome!

McGuire House Rules For Love Letter

Love Letter is a simple card game for 2-4 players that takes about five minutes per round. I prefer it with at least three players. It is a great game to play with children as young as seven years, or with adults when waiting for something or between heavier games. You can even play it standing by simply holding the discards in one player's off hand and the draw pile in another's off hand.

There are many versions of the game. We prefer the American standard "Princess" version because the nonviolent theme of courtly love and intrigue and fact that over half of the characters depicted are female makes it a refreshing change from the violent/male themes of many games. However, we introduce house rules based on other versions to improve the balance. We also use the version that comes in the velvet bag instead of a box.

(Yes, even though it contains many female characters, everyone in the game is still clearly European. Ironically, the original featured all Japanese characters. If you're looking for more ethnic diversity, then this isn't the game for you. However, the standard version is still way ahead of the other Love Letter themes, such as The Hobbit and Batman, which lose the female characters.)


Although the game works by elimination of players, it is so fast and the theme so friendly that even younger children do not seem to be upset on losing. The strategy of the game is based on information. You play your cards to discover information about others or hide information about yourself. 

After two months of play I feel that I've largely exhausted encountering new strategic situations. However, going through those motions remains pleasurable in the same way as checkers or mahjong without all of the fuss. If you're looking for a more in-depth experience under similar mechanics, then Coup and Citadels are great next games. I'll discuss our Coup modifications in an upcoming post.

Base Rules

The base rules for the American, Princess-themed (standard) version are:

"Love Letter is played in a series of rounds. Each round represents one day. At the end of each round, one player's letter reaches Princess Annette, and she reads it. When she reads enough letters from one suitor, she becomes enamored and grants that suitor permission to court her. That player wins the princess's heart and the game.

Taking a Turn

On your turn, draw the top card from the deck and add it to your hand. Then choose one of the two cards in your hand and discard it face up in front of you. Apply any effect on the card you discarded. You must apply its effect, even if it is bad for you.

All discarded cards remain in front of the player who discarded them. Overlap the cards so that it's clear in which order they were discarded. This helps players to figure out which cards other players might be holding.

Once you finish applying the card's effect, the turn passes to the player on your left.

Out of the Round

If a player is knocked out of the round, that player discards the card in his or her hand face up (do not apply the card's effect) and takes no more turns until next round.

Honesty

A player could cheat when chosen with the Guard, or fail to discard the Countess when that player has the King or Prince in hand. We suggest that you don't play with knaves who cheat at fun, light games. 

End of a Round

A round ends if the deck is empty at the end of a turn...

All players still in the round reveal their hands. The player with the highest ranked person wins the round. In case of a tie, the player who discarded the highest total value of cards wins.

A round also ends if all players but one are out of the round, in which case the remaining player wins. 

The winner receives a token of affection. Shuffle all 16 cards together, and play a new round following all of the setup rules.

The winner of the previous round goes first."

House Rules

We change the components quite heavily in our rules.

Rule and Component Changes

We replace the red cubes, which are ugly and prone to scratching the cards in the bag, with decorative flat glass marbles used for flower vases. I wouldn't buy those just for Love Letter, but we have them around the house for use as counters in many games. So, we put a handful into the velvet travel bag.

Love Letter has a small deck that is constantly being handled. The cards are therefore more prone to wear than other card games. To protect them, we use matte card sleeves. Fortunately, the cards are the same size as those for Magic The Gathering, so it is easy to find inexpensive sleeves.

The sleeves also allow us to modify the cards by printing inserts to sit in front of certain cards. We use this technique to use the Princess-themed cards with the superior rules from the Hobbit-themed version, plus our own extensions.

You can simply write the new rules on index cards and insert them into the sleeves. We went the extra step of trying to match the art style as well, which I'll describe below.

The rule changes are:

• Remove the original two Baron cards.
• Add one High Baron, who acts like the original Baron: the higher card wins (nothing happens on a tie).
• Add one Low Baron, who compares like the Baron but has the lower card win (still nothing happens on a tie).
• If you draw both the Low Baron and the Princess into your hand, discard both and draw a new card. That's your entire turn...the Baron comparison doesn't happen.
• Add the Envoy. She carries the love letter from another realm. During the game she is in transit, so she is worth zero during comparisons. She arrives at the end of the game, and is suddenly worth seven.

Our modified card set, with the Envy in the center and the
blue card backs of the sleeves clearly visible on the borders.

When a Guard names a Baron, the guard must say which kind of Baron it is. That is, there are two distinct cards.

Here's how we produced the custom cards.

For the Barons, I scanned the original Baron, wrote the new text on it in Photoshop, and then printed it out in color and inserted that into the card sleeve. The result is indistinguishable from an official card.

For the Envoy, I replaced the artwork on the scanned Baron with an image from the Maiden Exemplar in Heroes of Camelot and then wrote the new text and number. The number font is "Bucephalus" and the rule and title text are "Black Chancery," both of which are available in free versions on the web. When printing, the cards are 63mm x 88mm. I backed the Envoy with one of the rule cards, but you can also use any Magic The Gathering card because the matte opaque card sleeves cover the backs completely.

Because these cards use copyrighted images, I unfortunately cannot distribute my high-resolution card templates. However, you can repeat the process that we followed or simply use hand-labelled index cards inside the sleeves. Of course, you can play Love Letter using a standard poker card deck and a key telling you what each card is for, but the artwork adds a lot of flavor and it is easier to learn the game with the rules right on the cards.

Two-Player Rules

The normal Love Letter rules for two players are the same as for more players, but three cards are discarded face up at the start of the game. While two-player under these rules is still enjoyable as a pastime, the moves frequently become forced because there is no choice of whom to target.

We modify the two-player game so that only one card is discarded at the start and that each player initially holds two cards in hand, and draws normally, to a total of three for each play. When one card is lost to a Guard or Baron that player is then down to a one-card hand instead of being immediately eliminated.

The per-card rules are then modified on the principle that they generally only affect one opponent card at a time, and the target chooses which one. Specifically:

• Guard names a card. If the opponent has one of that card, then that card is lost...if the opponent has two of that card (which can only happen with Priest, Prince, and Handmaid), then the target choses which to lose and continues with the other.
• Priest looks at one card chosen by the target player.
• Barons compare against one card chosen by the target player.
• Prince forces the target to discard one card of the target player's choice and draw a new one.
• King makes players trade cards. Each player chooses one card and holds it out, face down. They then exchange simultaneously.
• Countess must be played if she is in a hand with any of the prohibited cards.

If one player has zero cards that player immediately loses. Otherwise, the player with the highest value card wins the round at the end of the turn when the draw deck expires.

This introduces more choice into the two-player game and roughly emulates the amount of information and number moves that one would make in a four-player version.

---

Morgan McGuire (@morgan3d) is a professor at Williams College, a researcher at NVIDIA, and a professional game developer. His most recent games are Project Rocket Golfing for iOS and the Skylanders series for consoles. He is the author of the Graphics Codex, an essential reference for computer graphics now available in iOS and Web Editions.

PUBG / Player Unknown'S Battlleground PC Game Download Free

Screenshots:

PUBG Game you can find it on steam. 100 Players parachute onto a remote 8×8 km island for a winner-takes-all showdown Player have to locate and scavenge their own weapons, vehicles, and supplies and defeat every player in a graphically and tactically rich battleground that forces the player into a shrinking play zone. get ready to land loot do whatever it takes to survive and be the last man standing.

The Power unreal Engine 4 Creates a jaw-dropping visual experience with rich details, realistic gameplay effects and a massive HD map for Battle Royale feel like you're in the thick of the action as you play with high- quality audio, immersive 3D sound effects, and 7.1 channel surround sound.

Minimum System Requirements:

CPU: Dual core from Intel or AMD at 1.8 GHz. 

 GPU: Intel 512 MB 

Download Link:

http://www.phoenixos.com/en/download_x86

Website Updates, Part 1

I finished mapgen4 last week and wanted to "sharpen my tools" before I started the next project. My website is over 20 years old and spans 5 domains. The build process has grown over time, supporting all the different tools I've used over the decades.

There are a few features I've wanted to add to my static site generator:

1. Versioning of js, css resources so that I can increase the expiration cache time. This should improve load time. I've been doing this manually and want to automate it.
2. Dependency tracking, so that if something includes another thing, and that thing changes, the first thing gets rebuilt. This should reduce content mismatch errors.
3. Custom macros for each project that get expanded at build time. This should make it easier to write new pages.

The current system is mostly based on XHTML with my own custom tags. For example, <x:published> lets me mark a publish date at the top of the page, <x:draft> lets me mark the page as a draft/beta, and <x:nocomments> lets me turn off comments on a page. I use regular expressions and XSLT for transforming the XHTML into HTML, expanding the custom tags and also adding custom transforms for existing tags. I'd like to add project-specific tags to this.

I wanted to replace the sed + xsltproc bash script with a Python program. Once I have the XHTML read into Python, I can add versioning, record dependenies, and add custom macros. Also in Python, I can also manage the site build, including generating sitemaps for search engines, determining what to rebuild, and uploading to the server.

I decided to start with the code for processing a single XHTML file:

1. A bunch of sed commands to perform regular expression substitutions.
2. SmartyPants.pl for converting regular quotes to "smart quotes".
3. The xsltproc command.

What are the Python alternatives to each of these?

(1) The regular expression substitutions are easy to do in Python.

(2) For SmartyPants.pl, I evaluated the Python port, smartypants.py, which would allow me to run this step in memory instead of invoking a separate process. I like the library, and it offers many useful options that would be an improvement over the Perl script, including being able to exclude my custom tags. Unfortunately it doesn't produce the same output. Two examples:

• instead of <tag>Name</tag>'s (close) it produces <tag>Name</tag>'s (open)
• instead of "<tag>...</tag>" (open,close) it produces "<tag>...</tag>" (open,open)

When the character before the quote crosses a tag, it seems to not take that into account when deciding open or close quotes, and it ends up outputting an open quote when it should output a close quote. I looked through the Perl and Python code and couldn't figure out how the Perl code was handling these cases.

I decided to look through existing issues on the project page, and file one if there weren't any existing ones matching this situation. Unfortunately the repository has been deleted. The documentation says the maintainer is looking for someone to take over. So it seems like the project is abandoned.

I also started wondering if I can reimplement the algorithm myself. Before going down that rabbit hole, I decided to stick to abandon this change. This means I'll have to pipe everything through an external process, and I won't be able to handle custom tags.

(3) The next step was to look at an alternative to xsltproc. Python has a library called lxml that can do lots of nice things, including XSLT transforms. That means it should be able to take my existing XSLT file and apply it to the XHTML documents, producing HTML documents. But can it?

Yes! It worked beautifully. And it gave me back a parse tree which would allow me to easily add versioning and dependency tracking, the main features I wanted to add. Here's how I ran it:

# Load the XSLT, and allow it to use xi:include xsl = etree.parse(open(xslt_filename, 'r')) xsl.xinclude()  # Load the document, and allow it to use xi:include bxml = etree.parse(open(document_filename, 'r')) bxml.xinclude()  # Apply the XSLT to the document html = etree.XSLT(xsl)(bxml) sys.stdout.write(str(html)) 

The output was exactly the same as using xsltproc. I'm very happy with lxml! It's easy to use and allows me to add the features I wanted.

Except …

Switching from sed + xsltproc slowed down the builds quite a bit, from 0.2s to 0.7s for a single file. That means it no longer feels instantaneous. The full build went from 65s to 200s. I'm sure I can speed up the full build, but I don't have an easy way to speed up the development builds. The startup is too long, and I didn't find any easy ways to fix that.

So I decided to abandon this change.

It's always hard to abandon things you spent time and energy designing and implementing. But it's sometimes the best thing to do.

I stepped back and looked at my main goals:

1. Versioning of js, css resources
2. Dependency tracking
3. Custom macros for each project

How important are these? Can I implement them a different way, while keeping the development builds fast?

1. I don't need versioning for development builds.
2. I might not need dependency tracking for development builds.
3. I haven't needed custom macros so far and can live without them.

My new plan is to keep the sed + xsltproc for development builds, and inject version numbers for the production build only. I'm undecided about how I'll implement dependency tracking. In part 2 I'll describe how I implemented these. I will leave custom macros for another time.

2012

The new year approaches, and though I am not one to believe in any non-nuclear visions of the apocalypse, I find my very being vibrating with a sense of impending doom. Today I received an email from Gamefly entitled "We've Shipped: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." Thanks to the efficiency of the USPS, I still have two to three business days before my life is stolen from me. When I was fifteen years old, my life was taken for a summer by a beast known as Final Fantasy VII. When I was 22, I became enraptured with another devil known as World of Warcraft for six solid months. I'm 28 now, and I fear that a new game will steal my life for a period of time longer than is respectable. Skyrim approaches. My question is not which booze to pair with it, but whether there is enough booze to last its duration. And also how I'm gonna pay for it after I get fired for playing Skyrim instead of going to work.

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   • Payout method-Paypal
   • Payout time-daily
   
   

7. Link4.me

   Link4.me is another trusted and fast growing site.You can earn by creating an account for free.You have to shorten your long URL into the short one.Then you can paste it into websites, blog, and social networking sites.You can earn $9 for 1000 views.they offer 20% referral commission for the lifetime.
   When your earning will reach $5 then you can claim your earning.Paypal is the only method through which you can withdraw your earnings.
   
   • Payout for 1000 views-$9
   • Minimum payout-$5
   • Referral commission-20%
   • Payment method-Paypal
   
   

8. Short.am

   Short.am provides a big opportunity for earning money by shortening links. It is a rapidly growing URL Shortening Service. You simply need to sign up and start shrinking links. You can share the shortened links across the web, on your webpage, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Short.am provides detailed statistics and easy-to-use API.
   It even provides add-ons and plugins so that you can monetize your WordPress site. The minimum payout is $5 before you will be paid. It pays users via PayPal or Payoneer. It has the best market payout rates, offering unparalleled revenue. Short.am also run a referral program wherein you can earn 20% extra commission for life.
   

9. CPMlink

   CPMlink is one of the most legit URL shortener sites.You can sign up for free.It works like other shortener sites.You just have to shorten your link and paste that link into the internet.When someone will click on your link.
   You will get some amount of that click.It pays around $5 for every 1000 views.They offer 10% commission as the referral program.You can withdraw your amount when it reaches $5.The payment is then sent to your PayPal, Payza or Skrill account daily after requesting it.
   
   • The payout for 1000 views-$5
   • Minimum payout-$5
   • Referral commission-10%
   • Payment methods-Paypal, Payza, and Skrill
   • Payment time-daily
   
   

10. Shorte.st

    Shorte.st is another very popular and most trusted URL Shortening Company. Shorte.st comes as a user-friendly URL Shortener Service with many creative options for making money by monetizing the links you share. Shorte.st provides you an opportunity to earn from $5 to $15 per 1000 views for promoting their shortened links.
    For WordPress Bloggers, Shorte.st brings its WordPress Plugin which will help you greatly to boost your earnings. Shorte.st has a low minimum payout of $5.
    The payment is credited automatically on the 10th of each month. The payment methods include PayPal, Payoneer, and WebMoney. It also presents a referral earning opportunity wherein you can earn 20% commission on referrals for a lifetime.
    

11. Petty Link

    Shorten URLs and earn money with Petty Link which is one of the best URL Shortening for earning money online.
    Getting started is easy. You need to create an account, shorten your link, and start earning money. Petty is one of the best ways to earn extra money.
    You get to make money from home when managing and protecting your link. Using the Petty Link tool, you can create short links. What's best, you get paid. It's a completely free tool.
    You have to create an account, create a link, and post it. For every visit, you earn money. The payout is as much as $12 per 1000 views. Plus, you can get 21% Referral Bonus.
    It has the Petty Link Referral Program. Refer friends and receive 21% of their earnings for life.
    Its featured Administration Panel allows you to control all of the features with a click of a button. It offers detailed stats. You get to know your audience.
    It has a low minimum payout. You need to earn only $5.00 before you are paid. Payment method is PayPal. Moreover, Petty offers the highest rates.
    Plus, it has a dedicated support team to help you out in case you have any questions or issues.
    

12. BLV.ME

    BLV.ME is one of the most trusted URL shortener sites.It pays high CPM rate.You can earn $10 for every 1000 views.One worst thing about blv.me is its referral system.
    They only offer 5% referral commission which is very much low.You can withdraw your amount when it reaches $10.You can claim your amount through Payza, Bank Transfer or Skrill.
    
    • The payout for 1000 views-$10
    • Minimum payout-$10
    • Referral commission-5%
    • Payout options-Payza, Skrill, and bank transfer
    • Payment time-at the end of the month
    
    

13. Clk.sh

    Clk.sh is a newly launched trusted link shortener network, it is a sister site of shrinkearn.com. I like ClkSh because it accepts multiple views from same visitors. If any one searching for Top and best url shortener service then i recommend this url shortener to our users. Clk.sh accepts advertisers and publishers from all over the world. It offers an opportunity to all its publishers to earn money and advertisers will get their targeted audience for cheapest rate. While writing ClkSh was offering up to $8 per 1000 visits and its minimum cpm rate is $1.4. Like Shrinkearn, Shorte.st url shorteners Clk.sh also offers some best features to all its users, including Good customer support, multiple views counting, decent cpm rates, good referral rate, multiple tools, quick payments etc. ClkSh offers 30% referral commission to its publishers. It uses 6 payment methods to all its users.
    • Payout for 1000 Views: Upto $8
    • Minimum Withdrawal: $5
    • Referral Commission: 30%
    • Payment Methods: PayPal, Payza, Skrill etc.
    • Payment Time: Daily
    
    

14. LINK.TL

    LINK.TL is one of the best and highest URL shortener website.It pays up to $16 for every 1000 views.You just have to sign up for free.You can earn by shortening your long URL into short and you can paste that URL into your website, blogs or social media networking sites, like facebook, twitter, and google plus etc.
    One of the best thing about this site is its referral system.They offer 10% referral commission.You can withdraw your amount when it reaches $5.
    
    • Payout for 1000 views-$16
    • Minimum payout-$5
    • Referral commission-10%
    • Payout methods-Paypal, Payza, and Skrill
    • Payment time-daily basis
    
    

15. Short.pe

    Short.pe is one of the most trusted sites from our top 30 highest paying URL shorteners.It pays on time.intrusting thing is that same visitor can click on your shorten link multiple times.You can earn by sign up and shorten your long URL.You just have to paste that URL to somewhere.
    You can paste it into your website, blog, or social media networking sites.They offer $5 for every 1000 views.You can also earn 20% referral commission from this site.Their minimum payout amount is only $1.You can withdraw from Paypal, Payza, and Payoneer.
    
    • The payout for 1000 views-$5
    • Minimum payout-$1
    • Referral commission-20% for lifetime
    • Payment methods-Paypal, Payza, and Payoneer
    • Payment time-on daily basis
    
    

16. Linkshrink

    Linkshrink URL Shortener Service provides you an opportunity to monetize links that you go on the Internet. Linkshrink comes as one of the most trusted URL Shortener Service. It provides an advanced reporting system so that you can easily track the performance of your shortened links. You can use Linkshrink to shorten your long URL. With Linkshrink, you can earn anywhere from $3 to $10 per 1000 views.
    Linkshrink provides lots of customization options. For example, you can change URL or have some custom message other than the usual "Skip this Ad" message for increasing your link clicks and views on the ad. Linkshrink also offers a flat $25 commission on your referrals. The minimum payout with Linkshrink is $5. It pays you through PayPal, Payza, or Bitcoin.
    

17. BIT-URL

    It is a new URL shortener website.Its CPM rate is good.You can sign up for free and shorten your URL and that shortener URL can be paste on your websites, blogs or social media networking sites.bit-url.com pays $8.10 for 1000 views.
    You can withdraw your amount when it reaches $3.bit-url.com offers 20% commission for your referral link.Payment methods are PayPal, Payza, Payeer, and Flexy etc.
    
    • The payout for 1000 views-$8.10
    • Minimum payout-$3
    • Referral commission-20%
    • Payment methods- Paypal, Payza, and Payeer
    • Payment time-daily
    
    

Top 18 Free Websites to Learn Hacking this 2018

1. SecTools.Org: List of 75 security tools based on a 2003 vote by hackers.
2. The Hacker News: The Hacker News — most trusted and widely-acknowledged online cyber security news magazine with in-depth technical coverage for cybersecurity.
3. Makezine: Magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.
4. DEFCON: Information about the largest annual hacker convention in the US, including past speeches, video, archives, and updates on the next upcoming show as well as links and other details.
5. KitPloit: Leading source of Security Tools, Hacking Tools, CyberSecurity and Network Security.
6. HackRead: HackRead is a News Platform that centers on InfoSec, Cyber Crime, Privacy, Surveillance, and Hacking News with full-scale reviews on Social Media Platforms.
7. NFOHump: Offers up-to-date .NFO files and reviews on the latest pirate software releases.
8. Hackaday: A hardware hack every day.
9. SecurityFocus: Provides security information to all members of the security community, from end users, security hobbyists and network administrators to security consultants, IT Managers, CIOs and CSOs.
10. Metasploit: Find security issues, verify vulnerability mitigations & manage security assessments with Metasploit. Get the worlds best penetration testing software now.
11. Exploit DB: An archive of exploits and vulnerable software by Offensive Security. The site collects exploits from submissions and mailing lists and concentrates them in a single database.
12. Black Hat: The Black Hat Briefings have become the biggest and the most important security conference series in the world by sticking to our core value: serving the information security community by delivering timely, actionable security information in a friendly, vendor-neutral environment.
13. Offensive Security Training: Developers of Kali Linux and Exploit DB, and the creators of the Metasploit Unleashed and Penetration Testing with Kali Linux course.
14. Hack Forums: Emphasis on white hat, with categories for hacking, coding and computer security.
15. Hakin9: E-magazine offering in-depth looks at both attack and defense techniques and concentrates on difficult technical issues.
16. Hacked Gadgets: A resource for DIY project documentation as well as general gadget and technology news.
17. Phrack Magazine: Digital hacking magazine.
18. Packet Storm: Information Security Services, News, Files, Tools, Exploits, Advisories and Whitepapers.