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I’m a Valve fanboy, and the iDispenser is my altar

I have to admit that I was pretty excited when Valve announced they were going to release the iDispenser. I’m about as big a Valve fan boy as they come (despite occasional outbursts indicating the contrary). I knew when it was released I was going to rush out and buy one.

Sure enough, a few months later I was camped out at the local Valve-store from 3am the night before to secure my own iDispenser on launch day. And boy, was it worth it. An iDispenser is something that you wouldn’t think you’d need, but you wonder how you ever lived without one once you’ve been using it for a while.

For instance: A couple of times I’ve been out and about, and someone mentioned that they “needed a dispenser, here”. BOOM. There’s me, all casual like, laying down a dispenser from out of nowhere. Or when I’m on the train how before I had my iDispenser, I used to just stare out the window in boredom. Now I can just use my iDispenser to occupy myself.

Modding the iDispenser

This was great for a couple of months, but I got frustrated with the limitations that were designed into the iDispenser. Little things, like how you could only dispense Valve authorized products like health and ammo from the iDispenser, and how you didn’t have a choice of which supplier you connected your iDispenser to - you’re stuck with the one that Valve has business arrangements with (Lockheed Martin for ammo, and Pfizer for health).

It was about this time that I heard rumors about how the open source iDispenser community was finding ways to modify and unlock iDispensers. “Cool” I thought. So I downloaded the unlock utility, ran it and had my iDispenser modded in about 15 minutes. Nice and easy. It’s really quite powerful what’s under the hood. It’s basically running a stripped down Unix OS underneath that pretty analog gauge meter and particle beam interface. Before long I had installed a webserver, scripting languages, and was using my iDispenser to connect to the office coffee machine to tunnel caffeine over SSH to output it from the iDispenser. It’s cool that this hardware Valve has put together to serve up health and ammo is so flexible that it can be used to dispense pretty much anything.

They bricked my iDispenser! @#$%!

Now that was great - FOR ABOUT A WEEK. Obviously Valve and their partners make a lot of money off the iDispenser - not just in initial sales, but also in ongoing account subscriptions. I had expected that they wouldn’t exactly be keen on unlocked iDispensers being out in the open, but didn’t expect that they’d go to such lengths to discourage the use of modded, unlocked iDispensers.

So when I saw the recent iDispenser firmware update pop up to auto-download, I was a little hesitant, but I figured that about the worst that would happen is that I’d have to format it and just set it up again from scratch.

NOPE.

The firmware had some malicious code that basically corrupted the flash boot sector beyond repair if it detected the iDispenser was unlocked - I’m not just talking about messing up the unlocking, or temporarily disabling the iDispenser - I mean IT DESTROYED IT. It’s basically a turned what used to be one of the most useful items in my life into a worthless 4 foot, 150kg pile of red scrap metal. The worst thing is that there is no come back from this - the warranty is totally voided by unlocking it, and Valve even states in the small print that they reserve the right to do exactly this if they deem necessary. Grrrr.

Turns out that Valve was really out to make an example of everyone who was messing with their business model, to act as a deterrent to everyone else in the market. Way to piss off your best customers! While everyone who didn’t unlock their iDispenser sure as hell isn’t going to now, everyone who used to be a passionate user has now been totally turned off using Valve devices and won’t even bother touching them. In addition, the amount of bad press they are getting over this means even the general mom and dad market they were trying to tap into has totally shunned them now after the expose special Fox did on the fiasco.

At least I’ve still got my old Tribes 2 portable inventory station, which is working fine even after all these years. And it actually does more than the iDispenser did anyway, even if it isn’t as pretty and the UI isn’t as flashy. Dynamix was never such a dick about modded inv stations either. They even encouraged it to some extent. It is getting a bit outdated though, which is why I bought my iDispenser in the first place.

It’s just annoying that there isn’t much else in the market to compete at the moment.
Bah.