Inspired by this comic, I decided to make a simple little Flash game. Check it out:
[/kml_flashembed]
I don’t know how many people use Coversutra (a companion to iTunes that allows you to search for songs from the menubar), but ever since buying a license a couple of months ago I cannot live without it. It has become as essential to me as Quicksilver, in a very short amount of time. So far, there are two things I don’t like about it:
1. It seems to have a few memory leaks, as it quickly eats up a few gigabytes of virtual memory.
2. By default, it is ugly as hell:
I decided that I had to fix it, so I went on a search for a better theme. I found this one, which is untitled but made by someone named Dustin on the MacThemes Forum. It makes the search bar much prettier (or at least, less likely to blind you):
In addition, the Left Side Mod is pretty handy as well, as it allows the text on the desktop to be left-justified, instead of centered:
I don’t know how many people use Coversutra (a companion to iTunes that allows you to search for songs from the menubar), but ever since buying a license a couple of months ago I cannot live without it. It has become as essential to me as Quicksilver, in a very short amount of time. So far, there are two things I don’t like about it:
1. It seems to have a few memory leaks, as it quickly eats up a few gigabytes of virtual memory.
2. By default, it is ugly as hell:
I decided that I had to fix it, so I went on a search for a better theme. I found this one, which is untitled but made by someone named Dustin on the MacThemes Forum. It makes the search bar much prettier (or at least, less likely to blind you):
In addition, the Left Side Mod is pretty handy as well, as it allows the text on the desktop to be left-justified, instead of centered:
I just submitted my first submission to Threadless, the crowd-sourced tee shirt company. People submit designs to the website, and then more people score each design, and after a week of voting the shirts that score high enough become actual tee shirts. It’s a pretty cool system, and the site has developed its own unique style, which is pretty cool. Check them out, and please vote 5 on my design (and check the box that says you would buy it as a tee, if you would be so kind).
I just submitted my first submission to Threadless, the crowd-sourced tee shirt company. People submit designs to the website, and then more people score each design, and after a week of voting the shirts that score high enough become actual tee shirts. It’s a pretty cool system, and the site has developed its own unique style, which is pretty cool. Check them out, and please vote 5 on my design (and check the box that says you would buy it as a tee, if you would be so kind).
I downloaded and played through the demo of Penny Arcade‘s new game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1. It’s pretty fun, and easy to get into. It has the comedy of a Penny Arcade comic, and the look of one, too. The graphics are not impressive, but they work. They’re very similar to the Sam and Max games, if anyone has played them.
The gameplay is very easy to understand. The exploring portion is point-and-click, while the battle screens work by selecting your attack and then the enemy to attack. Sounds simple, but it’s real-time. You have to manage up to 4 characters at once (maybe more?), while the enemy is also attacking you. It can get pretty hectic, but it wasn’t bad.
I would recommend downloading the demo to anybody, and buying the game if you like it, since it’s only $20 and available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, as well as on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
I have Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) running on Artemis (my desktop), but until a few minutes ago, it had no internet connection, due to lack of drivers for the wifi card in the machine, the Realtek 8185.
I’m used to not knowing how to do anything on Linux, and usually my attempts to make things work on the open source OS end in failure, so it’s pretty cool that I figured out how to get this to work.
First, I found this tutorial [link dead], which I followed word-for-word, with no results at all. Then I checked my chipset on the wifi card, and realized that the article is for the 8187, not the 8185. So I decided to take a leap of faith, and downloaded the Win98 drivers for the 8185 (Win98 because they are the version of the 8187 drivers the tutorial uses), and then followed the tutorial again, but with the new drivers instead of the original ones.
Guess what? It worked. Flawlessly. Artemis now has wifi under Hardy Heron, and I couldn’t be happier. Now for the graphics card and my mouse…
Edit: If this doesn’t work, try this method instead!
Fan ages – that is, custom-made, unofficial ages for Uru – have certainly progressed a long way. From my first age, Galamay:
To the Fan City of Ahra Pahts:
And now, Eh’ko and the Book of D’eux:
The two ages seen here, Eh’ko and The Remote Age Viewer, look absolutely stunning. They really are Cyan-quality work, and incredibly impressive.
Also, the Drizzle Project is a pretty impressive feat of fan work. Some hackers have managed to decrypt the MO:UL age files, and re-encrypt them using the old Uru encryption methods, meaning that we can put the ages that were once exclusively for MO:UL into URU:CC. I tried it out myself, and after one failure the first time, I got it working completely the second time around. It’s very fun to link to the ages and mess around with the settings just by tapping keys on the keyboard (such as swap the winter Delin for the summer one by pressing Q or W, or make animals appear in Negilahn), plus it includes the flymode patch, which means you can use flymode in these ages and see everything from any angle. It’s very fun, and I’d recommend it to anyone with Uru:CC and the MO:UL files.
I’ve updated my site to K2 RC4, which so far seems way more stable than RC3. The K2 guys could make this the final release without much more work, I think. The official K2 site doesn’t have a post about RC4, but you can download it from their Google Code page.
(K2 is the theme I use on this site)
There is now a trailer for the sequel to the Chronicles of Narnia, entitled Narnia: Prince Caspian. Looks pretty good, but I need to re-read the book to be sure about certain things. Oh well.