GREAT little conceptual/visual 3D building blocks game. Find out it you’re right brained. Quite fun – beat it in about 30 minutes, and on puzzle 8 – even figured out how to do it in 12 blocks instead of the 16 they think it took. 😉
This is one of the better flash games I’ve played in a while – quite fun and really great graphics. http://www.gettheglass.com/
So, I’m in the market for a nice low-end laptop but there are about a hundred different kinds of graphics cards in those laptops.  Even from the same vendor there are very cryptic model, performance, and feature specifications.
Question is: Which ones are actually good? It’s useful to know specs, but that doesn’t actually tell you how fast are they really (i.e benchmarks). Turns out, there is a great website that collected all this info in an easy to compare table. This has been needed for a long time:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
Ohhhh, this is awesome.Ever wonder what all those folks with the Chinese/Cantonese/Japanese/etc tattoos say? What about the characters stickered on the side of the kids rice-burner? If you think the English translations of assembly directions for your Korean made VCR were indecipherable or hilariously badly translated – just check this out. This guy has a blog that has the REAL translations of these things. I was laughing silly by some of them until I realized that these folks are stuck with these things FOREVER.
I was going through and cleaning up all my old bookmarks (yeah – we’re all ‘going’ to do that one day aren’t we?) Here’s some for your clicking enjoyment. I’ll put more up as I keep cleaning.
Well, I had the weekend off, so I decided to go visit something I hadn’t been to in a long time – a gamer’s convention. How I do miss the sights and … smells of the oft under-hygiene-oriented gaming world.
PAX is run by the Penny-arcade guys (www.penny-arcade.com) and they have the convention each year in Seattle (www.penny-arcade.com/pax). So I loaded up the car, plunked in the latest Harry Potter audio book (17 cds!) and headed to Seattle. They had 3 big focus points: console games, pc games, and the old traditional board/tabletop/model/card/DnD games rooms. For $20 it was a very worthwhile, affordable, and well-run event.
There were a lot of free-play console and pc stations to just jump down and start playing a lot of the latest games – all networked and ready for fun. I found this to be really cool feature because there were lots of games there that I’d heard about, but never played (Katamari Damacy was one I had been dying to try). In the PC world, there were lots of high-end boxes and laptops donated by local companies trying to drum up exposure -for you to free-play games on (Half-life 2, CS source, BF2, etc). I have to say I stayed true to my addiction and kept playing Counter-Strike Source most of the time; but I got to do it on some truly outrageous hardware. Playing CS source on a 17″ ATI x800 laptop (which I had considered buying) was a great experience. CS Source with a sub-10 ping time at 1600×1200, full detail, 4x anti-aliasing at a 80+ frame rate is something you don’t get to do very often.
They had tournaments on all the different games all day long – both console and PC. Mario Kart derivatives, CS source, etc, but what is most amazing is it was not just the newest stuff. I wandered into a Quake 1 tournament at one point. I didn’t even know people still played that. For each tournament you played/won you got points to redeem at their redemption spot. They also had arcade games there – various DDR’s as well as other ‘interactive’ games of this sort.
Fun as that was, it wasn’t all just games. I arrived just in time for the two guys who do Penny-arcade to draw Monday’s strip with the crowd. They answered questions and did the strip from concept, sketches, to final mock-up in front of us. That was cool because they only use Photoshop. They had a merchandise room and folks giving out all kinds of stuff – T-shirts, stickers, etc. I did manage to get an event-shirt which was pretty sharp.
I got a few autographs as well – including one of the penny-arcade guys. I met the guys that did Red-vs-Blue (www.redvsblue.com) series and got the signatures of Griff and Gus who did the famous Mac gamer video. They had a really funny t-shirt (with a famous quote from the series “I would just like to let everyone know that I’m a girl, and I like ribbons in my hair, and I want to kiss all the boys.”) but they were out of my size. The guy from TechTV (Kevin Pereira) was there doing a lot of interviews, and he was everywhere. Every time I looking up I found myself in the line of camera fire – you might check out and see if you see me in the background somewhere. Finally, they had a Karaoke contest at night (which was hilarious), a classical pianist come in and did an arrangement of FF7 music, and then some rap band. I passed on the rap band because I thought they sucked; but that was me.
I didn’t leave till 11pm which meant I didn’t get back into Portland/bed until 3am – but it was worth it. Oh wait, and I didn’t even tell you about the board-gaming folks. Oh my, that was an experience in humanity in all its smelling glory. I guess I’ll have to add that later…
One of my hobbies is collecting Anime cels – specifically from my favorite series: Tenchi Muyo. I had a couple of cels for a long time that I hadn’t put up yet. I don’t have flatbed scanner to use, so I used my digital camera and a little fixup in Photoshop. Check them out in my projects page, or on my Rubberslug account here.
Wow, wow – I am amazed by this thing.
The technology to do this has been around for years; but nobody has put them together until now. It is a map that has taken satellite images and overlayed them on topographical and street maps. You can zoom around in 3D, pan, and explore the entire world with actual satellite images overlayed on it – all for free.
I was just using it to plan out some possible photo shoot locations for my trip to Bend this weekend. It helped me see where some good sunrise/sunset shots might be taken from without even leaving my chair here in Portland. This is really close to real-time updating globe described by Neal Stephenson in his book the Cryptonomicon. If such a technology existed for the masses, you wouldn’t even really need CNN anymore – just go look at the events unfolding yourself. Imagine watching battles, demonstrations, parades/festivals, all in real-time from home.
It has made me realize again and again how much our society is in desperate need of some new tools to make sense of these new capabilities. Well, not new, but emotional, moral, and spiritual tools that people need when given these major shifts in information available to each of us. Human beings need a way to make sense and assign value to the many events in our lives. As a chaplain, I have been seeing this dynamic powerfully at work in the hospital. People become paralyzed and act very irrationally when they can’t make sense of what is going on to them. How do we go about avoiding this fate as we advance in technological understanding?
Awesome! How about a summary of all the math used in the Simpsons!
Explained are some of the more nuanced and especially complex examples. A good one that appeared in the Homer^3 episode is the equation 1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12 that floats through the scene and seems to disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem (but does not). Way fun!
It’s no secret my favorite game is Half-life 2 – especially Counter-strike. Unfortunately, there are some fun bugs in HL2, and here’s an interesting list of bugs with pictures and/or demos of them happening.