Jan 20, 2006
GlitchNYC has moved
After a long and sordid love affair with blosxom, my poor little 133 mhz
server decided it didn't want to run perl cgi scripts with lots of
plugins and tons
of I/O for every single user that visited this site. Blosxom finally
slowed to a crawl, and I needed to look for options.
Being a blogger interested in open source, it didn't take me long to
hone in on wordpress, and I've been happily using it for a few months
over at http://www.glitchnyc.com.
In fact, I was so happy with it that I also used it to power the sites
behind the GlitchCast,
a music podcast featuring new and independent
artists, the GeekQuiz, a
weekly quiz show for geeky podcasters, and the
Transit Strike
Podcast, which covered the events following the Transit strike in
NYC in December 2005.
If you're looking for new content, please head over to
http://www.glitchnyc.com
If you'd like to get in touch with me, please use the contact page over
at http://www.glitchnyc.com/?page_id=132
12:18 am | permalink |
/technology/web |
0 writebacks |
Oct 26, 2005
The GlitchCast
The new
GlitchCast site at
Glitchnyc
I've had several ideas for podcasts brewing for months, and I've finally
gotten the first one together. The
GlitchCast is a
podcast that will feature new and independent music. I'll be playing the best stuff I can find on the
podsafe music network
and encouraging independent artists to put their stuff up there so everyone can play it.
It's already working! I've gotten the amazing Edie
Carey to upload her songs and I'm working with Candid (who I interviewed
in the second episode) to get their best stuff up there for people to play. I've also got some crazy ideas about getting
comedians to upload their performances to the podsafe music network for podcasters to play, and I'm already working with
quite a few here in New York towards that end.
If you're sick of radio and want to find some new, indpendent music, then this show is for you, especially if you're running
your own podcast. Everyone I play and feature on this show will be podsafe!
Check it out at http://www.glitchnyc.com/GlitchCast or you can subscribe
to the feed here. I recommend "iPodder Lemon" automatically downloading your podcasts.
6:40 pm | permalink |
/technology/podcasting |
0 writebacks |
Oct 19, 2005
Firefox Hits 100 Million Downloads
Congratulations to the
amazing team at
SpreadFirefox.com and the
developers of Firefox. They've
hit
100,000,000 downloads, and 1.0 hasn't
even been out for a year.
We ran our NYTimes
ad back in
December of last
year, when we had around 10 million downloads and the uptake has
continued to accelerate ever since. Yes there
have been
several revision to Firefox, and updates are counted as downloads, but
this is still a staggering number of people using and downloading a
program.
If you're not using Firefox yet, go
get it now. It's
better,
it's more
secure
(sick of spyware yet?), and it will always be
free.
3:16 pm | permalink |
/technology/opensource |
0 writebacks |
Oct 17, 2005
Cool Katamari Tee in Pre-Orders
After
spending most of last weekend
playing
Katamari Damacy I had to
preorder one of these t-shirts depicting the Prince and his rolling ball, with the caption, "This is how I roll."
Katamari Damacy is the most inventive and addicting game I've played for the PS2 and this amazingly designed shirt is, as Cory
Doctorow calls it "A
true nerd pride item", but they won't manufacture it unless they get enough pre-orders.
Link (via
BoingBoing)
9:15 am | permalink |
/technology/games |
0 writebacks |
Oct 14, 2005
"From here on in, I shoot without a script."
The
Rock Opera "RENT" defined a portion of my life. It led me to an understanding of the
world around me, and of myself, that may have taken me years longer to come to on my own.
Silly and trite as it seems to feel this connected to a musical, the abstraction of themes
and emotions
through music allows you to imprint
on a story in ways that you simply can't with words alone.
Everyone affected by RENT has their own stories, and feels their own personal connection to
the words, the music, and the feelings that they evoke. It's as much a story about love and
life, as it is about grief and loss. It's also a connection to who you were when you
first really heard it, and first felt these things with the characters.
Not your average musical.
Over the years, I've drifted from the theatre, especially from the musical theatre, and
RENT has become somewhat of a footnote in my past.
When I heard that the movie was being made, 9 years late, I was more than just miffed. I
was virulently angry. They'd taken a young, twenty-something cast and let them become
thirty somethings. They'd replaced the spit-fire Mimi and left everyone else in, trying to
play "young." I'm
still a big fan of Anthony Rapp and Taye
Diggs, but Adam Pascal is the
consumate tool now; a Broadway pretty boy.
So when I watched the trailer
tonight, I was not expecting this. I was not expecting to be
taken back 10 years.
I was not expecting to be moved.
They'd taken moments, tiny moments from the show, and expanded them into heart-wrenching images.
The loss is so
tangible, so real, even in just these 2 minutes, that you can't help but feel for this
little family.
Watching some of the videos on the rent blog I
suddenly understood why so many of the original cast were returning. They simply couldn't
let this story go. They had so much to say, so much to bring to it, that they had to see it
through. For the first time in 9 years, they were finally able to finish the story that
Jonathan Larson left unwritten when he passed.
The cast has been documenting the process on the
blog the entire way through shooting, and
hearing them talk about their characters and what they hoped to accomplish with this film
has brought me full circle. I am now more excited about this than any other movie in the
next year.
Add to that the fact that listening to RENT has been synonymous with Thanksgiving for my
best friend and I since 1996 (and he is *not* a fan of musicals) and that the movie is
coming out November 23rd. I will see this movie the day before thanksgiving,
barring an act of god.
11:00 am | permalink |
/technology/film |
0 writebacks |
How Eric Got His Game Back
Okay. I'll admit it. I don't play video games.
There. I said it.
I'm a supergeek who hates halo. I'm the sole square-enix fan that has
yet to finish Final Fantasy 7 let alone any of the games that
followed. I'm the only dork more likely to win the Olympic gold in
high-jumping* than to frag someone in quake deathmatch.
I just don't have the time.
I live to create, to be productive. If
I'm sitting in front of a 70 hour RPG, I know exactly where those 70
hours are going, and the sound of the "Toilet of Lost Time" flushing
haunts me every minute I play.
If I'm in front of my computer, at least then I'm
trying to get something done, even if it doesn't always work out that
way.
The first game I ever loved.
This isn't the way it's always been. I grew up loving every game I could
get my hands on. It didn't matter if it was even fun, I played it for
the sheer love of playing. I spent a great deal of my childhood in
front of my 8-bit altar, and my first true geek "call-for-help" was to
walk a friend through the second quest of the Legend of Zelda.
Sometimes I miss the hours spent in front of my games with no thoughts
of what I could, or should be doing. Don't get me wrong, I still love a
good game when there is company around, but then it's a social activity,
something to do while hanging out.
No, if I was going to really enjoy solitary gaming again, I needed to
find some time that was already wasted and idle. Time when I really had
nothing better to do.
How much does it cost to get your childhood back?
Eighty
Dollars.
I got a Game Boy Advance SP last Christmas, and I've played it every day
on the subway
since. I've got absolutely nowhere to be, except on that train. No one
is waiting, there's noting better I could be doing. It's the perfect
subway pastime.
The games I had were good, and they kept me occupied. I enjoyed the
Mario RPG
and grew to understand why the original Pokemon game was so addictive
that it spawned a TV show and a multi-billion** dollar empire. I
played through the new metroid and regained my uncanny knack for
working the D-pad and the B and A buttons.
These were
fun diversions, but they weren't quite what I missed.
And then Nintendo released "The
Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap"
This is
how games are supposed to be. For the past month, I've
poured
myself into this game, struggling with puzzles, searching dungeons over
and over until I found the one hidden corner I missed. I've spent days
thinking
about what I could try next to beat a mid-way boss and then found myself
giddy when I figured it out. This wasn't just hacking up octorocks and
tectites with my sword. This game actually required you to be smart and
think of things in new ways. This game was enriching.
Zelda's updated
look is clean and fun, but familiar.
I have yet to finish the quest, and I don't mind telling you that I'm
stuck again. This game is damn hard. But it's damn good too. Possibly
the best
single player game ever made for any console, and coming from an 8-bit
connoisseur, that's not a statement I make lightly.
If any of you grew up loving Zelda, or simply spend your days waiting
for your train to bring you home, seriously, drop the $80 and pick up
a GBA SP and this game. Your train rides will never be the same.
*I should note that I have zero aptitude for high-jumping.
**I also have no idea how much Pokemon has made for Nintendo, between
the game, the shows, the cards, and the toys. Billions doesn't seem
impossible.
1:21 am | permalink |
/technology/games |
0 writebacks |
Oct 07, 2005
Disappearing Flash in Firefox? A quick Adblock fix remedies the problem!
As savvy web surfers begin to upgrade to Flash 8, they're in for a bit
of a rude awakening. If you're using Firefox and
Adblock (which you
should be!) and upgrade to Flash 8, suddenly flash movies disappear.
Instead of the expected movie, you get simply blank space.
What's happening is a conflict between Adblock and Flashplayer 8.
There's no update yet from either Macromedia or the Adblock
developers, but luckily, you don't have to uninstall either tool to fix
the problem.
All you have to do is disable "obj-tabs", those
little "Adblock" tabs that hang off the edge of flash movies. These tabs
give you easy access to block annoying flash movies, since right
clicking on a movie will activate Flash's own context menu, rather than
the Firefox menu where your Adblock tools normally are for images.
In lieu of the obj-tabs, you can click tools->Adblock->"List all
blockable elements" or hit ctrl-shift-a to bring up a list of everything
on the page that Adblock can filter out.
Turning off Adblock's obj-tabs is easy. Just click
Tools->Adblock->preferences->"Adblock Options" and then uncheck "show
obj-tabs." Refresh your page and voila! Flash is back.
2:05 pm | permalink |
/technology/web |
0 writebacks |
Oct 06, 2005
Wallace and Gromit Come to the Big Screen
I've been a Wallace and Gromit fan (and a fan of AArdman
Animations) for
quite a few years now, ever since catching the original trio of shorts
on PBS.
Chicken Run, the first feature film offering from Aardman Animations was decent, but far from the whimsical,
oddball fun that Wallace and Gromit always seem to find themselves in.
Finally, Wallace and Gromit have gotten their own feature film and I was
so excited upon hearing that news a year ago that I forced myself to forget about the project so that
time would pass more quickly. My theory was that my swiss cheese brain would drop that tidbit of information,
and Wallace and Gromit would simply be out the next time I
thought about it.
Amazingly the tactic worked, and the movie is now in theaters! You can
bet we'll be going to see it soon, perhaps in Rochester on our trip this
weekend.
In the meantime, you can read the outstanding and lovingly written
New
York Times review, play around at the official site
watch
the
featurette at apple, and check out lots more great
shorts by AArdman Animations at AArdman.com
1:47 am | permalink |
/technology/film |
0 writebacks |
Oct 04, 2005
del.icio.us links
Selections from my del.icio.us
bookmarks
Usually found by
watching the feed of what's popular with other del.icio.us members, Oishii!
Patek style tenor
banjo
Good
site for an alternative tuning and style for the tenor banjo. This style
should be more familiar to guitarists wanting to switch back and forth
between instruments
GTD
Introduction - PigPog Creativity Wiki
GTD
- Getting Things Done - is a book by David Allen, giving a series of
principles for managing the day to day tasks and projects we all have
to do.
Directions
for making Dried Apple Shrunken heads for Halloween
Peach
Saves Mario's Ass - Kotaku
New
mario game staring Princess Peach for the nintendo DS
Mario
Unleashed - Google Video
Live Action Mario,
Luigi, and Princess Peach take on the marimba.
NYC2123
An excellent cc-by-nc-sa graphic novel,
formatted for the PSP but also great for reading on the web
Tobby
Pachi
Fun
little flash game were you launch a little dog off a springboard to
collect gems and rescue the girl. His ears flap in the wind as you
launch him towards spikes and over obstacles. Cute.
Fluff
Radio
The Fluff
Radio Review - A live music, comedy, and talk radio podcast
created by the same fine folks that brought you Fluff In
Brooklyn - http://www.fluffinbrooklyn.com
Writerisms
and other Sins
A Writer's Shortcut to Stronger Writing by
C.J. Cherryh
Werewolf - A
free, simple, party game
Werewolf is a simple game for a
large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no
equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just
sitting in a circle. I'd call it a party game, except that
it's a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second
1:11 am | permalink |
/technology/web |
0 writebacks |
Oct 01, 2005
Missed Invention Opportunities: HandEase
Years ago, while carrying home tons of groceries in the cheap, thin bags
that Key Foods gives you, I was struck by an invention idea. The thin
bag handles were cutting into the joints of my fingers and no matter how
I shifted, it hurt like hell. All it would take to alleviate that pain
would be some sort of stiff layer that distributed the weight from a
fishing-line thin razor of pain to a more manageable handle.
Rubber tubing seemed ideal, and I envisioned cutting a garden hose into
6 inch sections and then slitting it down the side so that you could
easily pop the bags in, grab them, and go.
Having spent the first few years of my employable life working front end
at Price Chopper, I figured that front end staff (such as register
workers and cashiers) could churn these things out from cheap garden
hose and then sell them for a dollar a piece at checkout. All you'd need
would be a good pair of shears to cut the hose and you've got brand new
revenue stream built upon your existing stock and labor.
There's a hook in the sale too - you can sell these little hand
protectors as reusable items and invite shoppers to bring them next
time, but you know they'll forget. For a dollar a pop, how many people
will just throw them in again with the order when they forget?
Yesterday, I realized that I'd been beaten to the punch. Whole Foods
offers these same devices (but mass produced in cardboard) for free as
you walk out of the store. They're called Hand-Ease, and there's only an
email address (handease AT cox DOT net) and the store logo printed on
them, but I was able to find the website through
google.
Designed as a circle that folds easily into your hand with two creases
running down the middle, and made of 100% post consumer cardboard,
they're much more environmentally friendly than my idea, and stores can
simply order big boxes of them as an added incentive for customers to
shop there. Brilliant work.
5:58 pm | permalink |
/technology/gadgets |
0 writebacks |
Sep 29, 2005
The Image to ASCII Converter
As a user of BBSes back in the pre-internet days, I have a special
appreciation for ASCII art. Back then, image files were a download you
needed to wait hours for (uncompressed bitmaps being prevalent) and then
open in a viewer program, either in dos or windows 3.1 if you were
lucky.
Instead, images were cleverly crafted from letters, numbers and symbols,
squeezing some semblance of UI and page design out of the text only
format of most BBSes.
Now, most ASCII art is relegated to .nfo files provided by warez
distribution groups. Amazingly, the artform continues to advance - I've
seen some of the most impossibly intricate designs weaved around text in
those files, despite the crude nature of using other text as images.
A few days ago I added the Image
To ASCII HTML Converter to my
del.icio.us bookmarks
(which you can subscribe to a
feed of
if so inclined). Today I finally got a chance to run an image through it
that's well suited to the artform. Without further ado, I give you the
"ASCII snakey worm thing!"
......................................................
......................................................
......................................................
........................... ...............
....................... :C@@@@@@@@@@@O: ...........
.................... c8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@C .........
.................. c@@@@@@@8o:..c8@@@@@@@@@O. .......
................. O@@@@@@O :8. C@:o@@@@@@@@@8. ......
................ .8@@@@@@8 c@O .@o:@@@@@@@@@@O .....
............... C@@@@@@@8 .@O .8.c@@@@@@@@@@@. .....
.............. :@@@@@@@@@O o: :@@@@@@@@@@@@: .....
.............. o@@@@@@@@@@@8o::o8@@@@@@@@@@@@@. .....
.............. O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@C ......
.............. 8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8O8@@@@@@@O ......
.............. O@@@@@O8@@@@@@@@@@o8@8@@@@@@o .......
.............. O@@@@: o@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8c .........
.............. C@@@@8C. ::cccoocc. ............
............. C@@@@@@@@8O: .................
............ c@@@@@@@@@@@8 ........................
........ .C@@@@@@@@@@@@@@o ........................
....... C@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@c ........................
...... O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8 ........................
..... c@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@. .........................
..... O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@O .........................
..... 8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@c ..........................
.... :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@: ...........................
..... :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8. .................
..... .@@@@@@@@@@@@@c ...... ..............
..... .8@@@@@@@@@@c :O@@@@@@@@@@@@@Oc ............
..... O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@O ...........
..... :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8 ...........
...... o@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@. ..........
....... :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@c ...........
......... :O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8c ...........
............ .............
......................................................
......................................................
......................................................
8:57 am | permalink |
/technology/web |
0 writebacks |
Sep 28, 2005
Is Capsaicin the Next Ecstasy?
Capsaicin, the "active ingredient," to so speak, of Cayenne Peppers is
powerful stuff. Eating it can cause you to break out in a sweat,
screaming "whooo!" while your eyes water. Turned
into a spray as mace, it can bring you to your knees. Formulated as a
nasal spray it can... Clear
your sinuses?
Amazingly, the answer seems to be yes. Capsaicin nasal sprays are said
to be Drano of the nose, fixing sinus problems that were incurable with
conventional medicine. I actually recommended them to my mother after
she lost her sense of smell last year following repeated sinus infections.
Here's where the twist comes in.
As you might expect, blowing capsaicin up your nose f-ing KILLS. Anyone
who loves spicy food knows breathing out through your nose while eating
something really hot is a bad idea, and that's just a whiff of the
stuff.
My good friend Sandra tells the story of trying Sinus Buster after
getting some from its creator, Wanye Perry on her
myspace
blog. It's no big surprise that it hurt. The surprise is that she
went back for another hit, and couldn't quite explain why.
She's not alone. Lots of people have commented that Capsaicin not only
cleared up their sinuses and relieved sinus headaches, but also gave
them a feeling of focus and wellbeing.
OnlyPunjab
explains that the rush is due to the natural flood of endorphins
triggered by the pepper spray, likening the feeling to that experienced
by those who have gotten multiple tattoos or piercings, or long distance
runners.
Capsaicin nasal spray is like an instant runners high that just happens
to clear the sinuses.
Add to that the fact that endorphins are natural performance enhancers,
and it's easy to see why athletes are using sinusbuster
or another
similar product before every workout. Skeptics will note here that
firing burning pepper spray up your nose repeatedly sounds like a pretty
classically bad idea. It turns out that for all the pain capsaicin
causes, it produces almost 0 irritation to the skin or membranes it is
applied to. All that pain is caused by a chemical reaction, and
capsaicin is even marketed as a topical pain relief ointment under the
brand Capzasin-HP.
It doesn't take long for word of a safe, natural high to spread, and you
can bet bottles of this stuff will migrate from the locker room to the
club pretty quickly.
I wonder how long it will be before we see batches of people outside the
clubs in NYC going *sniff/snort* "Aughhhh ohhhh yeah!" and then shaking
their heads and pumping their fists in the air, conquering the pain and
then enjoying the immediate rush.
1:47 am | permalink |
/technology/gadgets |
0 writebacks |
Sep 09, 2005
Open Source Games Roundup 2005
Whew - so it's been over a year and a half since I last
looked at open source games at glitchnyc.com and the landscape looks
quite different than
it did in early 2004.
In January 2004, I was wowed by:
February 2004 brought:
I would have liked to continue doing monthly spots on great open source
games but the truth is that I've been too busy to play many games at all
aside from killing time with my GBA on the subway.
One of the difficulties in writing this article is that there is no real
resource for finding great open source games. What I'd love to be able
to do is sort games by release date, user rating, and other measurements
such as look+feel, gameplay, and addictiveness, but currently I have not
found such a site. Happy penguin
makes a
good go of it, but you can't sort all titles by average rating or even
really browse past entries. Ideally, I'd also like to be able to filter
by titles that have been rated by 10 or more users so that the games
rated "5 stars" by the developer or a single excited fan don't float to
the very top of the list.
That said, there is quite a bit of development going on the open source
game world, if poorly publicized. As with all open source projects, 90%
of them don't really get off the ground and stagnate after the lead
developer gets bored or hits a development hurdle. I'm a big fan of the
SDL engine, which is the multi-platform, open source answer to DirectX.
SDL has been stable for a few years now, and the games built on top of
that engine which are the exception to the "90% rule" are starting to
emerge.
I've found some fun diversions by browsing the games section of
sourceforge.net, so without further ado, here's some new ways to waste
time on your computer (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux).
Globulation 2
This realtime
strategy game is part risk, part civ III, and part boogers
No really, your army consists of little red slimeballs which walk around
and build inns, hospitals, cities, and more. The tutorials are a bit
slow, so you might have better luck just starting in and figuring it out
as you go, but I definitely had a fun hour creaming the blue army as my
cities and armies grew to massive size.
- Gameplay
- 6 of 10 - Too slow for my taste, but being able to give general commands and let the little units get to it was fun.
- Visuals
- 7 of 10 - Fun colors and clean graphics, but nothing spectacular
- Addictiveness
- 6 of 10 - When I have another hour to kill, I'll revisit this game
Armagetron Advanced
http://www.armagetronad.net/
Ride your light cycle, and trap other riders with the wall you've
left behind
Everyone gets busy, and the lead developer of
Armagetron
had to take a year off
developing the game, which brought about a new fork called
Armagetron Advanced
and a flurry of
development activity. A year later, the lead developer is back and has
joined up with the "AA" project.
The result is a much more slick game than I reviewed last year, and the
online play has been tweaked and perfected. Battling against other
players no longer depends on your luck in "making the turn" but is now
back on solid strategy and good reflexes. To compensate for network lag
in this precision timing game, when you're playing online, if you go
headfirst into a wall, you get a short window of time to turn.
Turn the wrong way or fall asleep at the wheel and KABLAM! If you manage
to tap out the right direction in time, you'll "just squeak in" and get
another chance to go after your opponent. It's really addictive, and if
I wasn't writing this article, I'd be playing right now.
- Gameplay
- 10 of 10 - it does exactly what it should, and it's dead simple
- visuals
- 8 of 10 - depending on the 3D card in your
computer, this game can look anywhere from okay to fantastic. It's
still simple colored walls trailing from a "cycle", but the cameras are
intuitive and don't distract
- addictiveness
- 10 of 10 - There's always someone
better than you waiting online to whup your butt and teach you some new
tricks. I think this game is as much fun as Unreal Tournament or Halo
without the headache inducing jump-strafe-fire madness. Left and right
are the only keys you really need to know, although the brake (back
arrow) helps.
Secret Maryo
http://smclone.sourceforge.net/
This Super
Mario Clone will feel very familiar to anyone who ever owned a Nintendo
Super Maryo is an SDL powered Mario clone which does more than pay
homage to the original. If this were any company other than Nintendo's
material, they'd be looking down the barrel of a lawsuit right about
now. Luckily Nintendo has been fairly tolerant of fan projects,
providing they change the name of the project enough to not be a total
rip-off.
I have a few pet-peeves with this clone, as the art seems a bit slapdash
and the physics are a bit off from the original (most notably, Mario
jumps quite a bit higher than he did in the original games.) I only got a chance to play through the first few
levels of this one, but
it seems like a fun throwback to have on your laptop.
I'm also excited to see the engines and code behind this one develop
further and be available for use in new, creative side-scrolling
platformers. Some of the best games ever were built in 2d, and frankly,
it hurt my head less when the 3D camera wasn't flying around willy nilly
trying to follow the action.
- gameplay
- 4 of 10 - The controls react well, but I'd like to see the physics either match the original or be based on the real world.
- visuals
- 5 of 10 - The hand-drawn feel is okay, but
this could be a much better looking game. I feel like the graphics are
a place holder while they get the rest of the game in place.
- addictiveness
- 6 of 10 - I can't get enough Mario, so I'll probably play this one again, but I'd rather be playing with a joystick.
Scorched 3D
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
The classic DOS turn-shooter is back
with great 3D graphics
Turn your tank with left and right, raise and lower your turret to aim,
and increase or decrease power with plus and minus. All set? FIRE! Be
careful though; if you miss, your enemies get a shot at you before you
get another chance. There's tons of different weapons and levels to play
here, and this is a great game for 2 or more players on a single
computer or online.
If you can't see, hit the number keys to go through the different
cameras. I would have certainly liked some of these key-hints in game.
I'd say any game with more than just the arrow keys and spacebar to use
should pop up an overlay with the keys when you hit F1 or escape, but
that's just me.
Once you get the hang of it, the game is a ton of fun, and it can be a
hoot to play with a bunch of friends online, taking aim at each other.
If you've ever played worms, that game was actually a fun-filled clone
of the original Scorched Earth.
- gameplay
- 8 of 10 - there's a bit of a learning curve as you get adjusted to all the keys, but it's pretty simple at the core.
- visuals
- 8 of 10 - lush 3d landscapes are an awesome
improvement over the 16 color DOS game from 1992, but, at least on my
comp, the frame rate was a little low. Maybe I shouldn't be running at
1400x1050 on my laptop.
- addictiveness
- 9 of 10 - This is another one that
keeps bringing you back. You can pick up this game and play a 5 minute set
or play for hours and hours online. Scorched 3d is also a great game to play with a group while chatting.
Battle for Wesnoth
http://wesnoth.org/
Turn based overhead army command in a
world of fantasy
I've actually played this game the most of all the ones reviewed here.
Launched into different scenarios of war, you must summon troops, deploy
them, and then complete your mission.
Part of the reason I've spent so much time on this game is the fact that
it's too damn hard. Even on easy it takes me almost an hour to complete
each mission, and I consider myself a fairly able tactician. I'd like to
see my troops be a little more autonomous, and be able to build up to
more and more challenging enemies and tasks, and I'm sure that as the
game matures the balance between challenge and fun will settle out. There
are already a considerable number of downloadable quest files which are
a bit more fun than the tutorial mission.
Anyone who enjoys risk will probably enjoy this game, but be prepared to
sink quite a few hours in.
- Gameplay
- 6 of 10 - the game does what it's supposed to,
but it could really be a lot more intuitive. Right clicking on
everything to select a menu is okay, but the troops should be able to
think for themselves when not directly told what to do. It'd help if
they weren't total wimps too.
- visuals
- 8 of 10 - I actually really enjoy the looks
of this game's top down perspective, and my complaints about the
story-art were put to rest with the most recent revision. This game is
really starting to look professional.
- addictiveness
- 7 of 10 - Considering that I want to
get back to playing this one and try to find a quest that I can
actually succeed at, I'd say the replay value is pretty good, and it
can only get better as more players and developers create quests.
The Quake III Engine
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/20/1329236&tid=112
ID Games classic FPS is now free and open
source
I'd be remiss not to mention this development in an open source game
roundup. Quake III Arena, the game engine that has powered the last few
years of great networked first person shooters is now available for
anyone to build upon. The announcement was only made in August 2005 at
Quakecon, but being able to build on top of such a robust, mature game
engine is going to be a boon to the open source game community. I expect
to see quite a few games based on the QIII engine by the time I get to
the next OS game roundup. I've never been a great fan of First Person
Shooters myself (I burned out on Doom and Heretic back in 1997), but
fans of the genre will love getting to play this game again tweaked for
their system (you should see what people are doing with Quake II, open
sourced a few years ago.)
There's also the potential for this to power non-fps games like MMORPGS,
much in the way the Crystal Space 3D project has spawned the game Planeshift.
There's nothing playable to rate here yet, but I'd keep my eye on any
derivative projects in the next few months.
Stacker Blocks 3D
http://stacker-blocks.sourceforge.net/
Tetris with beautiful 3D graphics
Who doesn't love Tetris? Who doesn't love beautiful 3D graphics. This is
a rehash of a classic, but it's quite playable, and you really just
can't mess up familiar falling puzzle blocks. If you like the game, this
is a slick little desktop version.
- Gameplay
- 7 of 10 - Plays just like the classic using
the arrow keys. Fast response, nice grid and highlighted drop column
make it hard to mess up.
- visuals
- 8 of 10 - The 3D here is both tasteful and
serves a purpose. Getting to see the sides of the blocks helps your
brain put together what goes where and whether you're lined up with the
correct column or not
- addictiveness
- 8 of 10 - Come on. It's Tetris. This is one of the most addictive games on the planet
Open Mortal
http://openmortal.sourceforge.net/
This parody game fulfills one of my boyhood
dreams
Mortal Kombat once ruled the arcade, packing kids around to see the real
lifelike bloodsport controlled by joystick wielding, button mashing 13
years olds.
Mortal combat was obviously just a collection of images crudely
blue-screened and then played back to match the action on screen.
We had a photo developer next door to the arcade in the mall where I
grew up, and I always thought they could make a killing by taking the
proper snapshots of you in different poses and then put them into a
"skin" file to create your own custom Mortal Kombat.
That idea has finally come to pass, and you can play as any one of a
bunch of nerds, dorks, and dweebs as they knock eachother about in true
Mortal Kombat style.
Best of all, now that we've all got digital cameras, you can take the
proper pictures and you and your friends can star in your own Mortal
Kombat game!
- Gameplay
- 5 of 10 - It's a bit clunky, and I don't know
any of the combos yet, but it plays just like the original MK did. If
it's going for accuracy to the original console, it's probably more
like an 8 of 10.
- Visuals
- 9 of 10 - Let's be honest. I don't love this
game for the beautifully rendered 3D. I love it for the plethora of
funny pictures, and the ability to add your own.
- Addictiveness
- 6 of 10 - MK was one of the most
influential fighting games of all time, and I'll certainly be back to
this one. Once you get your own characters loaded in, I bet this is one
hell of a game to have at parties! (Author's Note: it appears that some
coding is needed to actually load the characters in. I'd be great to
have a "character editor" much like the quest editors available for
many games.)
Roundup Wrapup
Well, that does it for this Open Source Games Roundup. Thanks for
reading, and hopefully you found at least one diversion in this bunch
that suits your fancy. If not, check back at Glitchnyc.com in the next
few weeks. There were a lot more games than I could feature all in one
article, and I'll have another roundup on the way once I get some time
to take them for a spin.
2:54 am | permalink |
/technology/opensource |
0 writebacks |
Aug 26, 2005
Delicious Links
Over the past few years, I've changed the focus of this blog to match my moods and interests. I've also grown my own sensibilities about what
"personal publishing" should look and feel like and what I aim to do here.
In doing that, I've dropped many of the "cool links" I used to feature. There's plenty of blogs that do that
sort of thing (boing boing and slashdot spring to mind), and I
didn't want to simply repost their stuff with some added comments.
That said, I still find a handful of cool sites a month, and my bookmarks were getting really out of hand (and out of sync) between my work
and home copies of Firefox.
http://del.icio.us came to the rescue, and provided me with a way to archive and access all my bookmarks in
one place. It even integrates
with firefox through a very
unobtrusive plugin, so all I have to do is right click on any webpage
to add it to my list of cool links. I also "tag" the links I put up there so it's easy to search for them later without remembering exactly
what they were called.
When I post a link, it gets added to both my "home" and then general tally of what people are looking at. When sites are getting noticed and
bookmarked by a lot of people, they move quickly up the ranks at del.icio.us. Watching that feed through Oishii! has been fun, and I've found
some amazing sites for CSS web design, acquiring software and media, and other fun stuff. Because the Oishii feed tracks sites that are being
bookmarked now (and not just the most popular overall), the signal to noise ratio is just slightly better than random. Which is just about
how I like it. These aren't the sites that everyone knows about yet, but damn some of them are neat.
Because del.icio.us provides RSS feeds of just about everything, it was easy for me to syndicate into my blog. It won't show up in the feed,
so I may occasionally cross post some of these links here in the main story section, but if you go to http://www.glitchnyc.com and look on
the right you'll see a new "del.icio.us" links section that features the 5 most recent sites I've bookmarked.
To give you a taste of what's in there, here's my latest 5.
2:48 am | permalink |
/technology/web |
0 writebacks |
Aug 12, 2005
Love Song for A Web Server.
Modest at the time of its assembly, the little workhorse serving these pages is chugging away at 133 mhz. By comparison,
the slowest desktop I would consider purchasing this year is 2800 mhz. Beyond that, it's got 128 megs of ram and a single
hard drive. Not exactly what you would call robust.
Everything says it should have crumped or become obsolete ages ago, but it's biggest problem right now is not wanting to
come back on without an fsck after a hard power outage. Between the influx of searchers from google images and the ever
increasing traffic generated by simply being around for a few years and consistently writing articles, it's pushing over
50000 pages a month and at least 5000 unique visitors.
Not bad for a little 133mhz machine.
This would seem simple if all it was doing was pushing out static HTML and images, but amazingly, all of the pages it's
serving are dynamically generated, either by php or the blosxom cgi script. My photo archive is even tied into a database
backend, something that anyone planning a web sever deployment will tell you you need extra processing, memory, and
throughput capacity to handle.
Still going strong.
So thank you, little web server, for chugging away in my basement apartment back in 99 while I learned linux, for staying
up years at a time even though something's a bit awry with your harddrive, and for making it through this steady ramp up in
traffic. I promise I won't get you slashdotted, but somehow, I feel like you could handle it. Tough little guy.
You've even gracefully handled multiple domains, and running HomelessConnectNYC in a pinch seemed to be effortless for you. Nice work.
(As an aside, my little server owes most of its success to the sleek and stable software that makes the most of its meager
hardware, those bastions of the Open Source movment, Apache, MySQL, the Apache JAMES mailserver, and GNU/Linux.)
1:49 am | permalink |
/technology/opensource |
0 writebacks |
Aug 03, 2005
Google for Dorky Teen
Hahaha... I was just looking at my webstats and I got a bunch of hits
for the search terms Dorky
Teen (no quotes). Turns out I'm #2 on google
for that search. Hahaha, well, at least its true. I mean, the dorky
part... Can I even call myself post-teen anymore? I'm going to be 25 in
a month and a half. Wow.
3:59 pm | permalink |
/technology/web |
0 writebacks |
Aug 01, 2005
Samba Not Authenticating to Windows Domain?
I've been bashing my head against the keyboard for a few days at work
wondering why our intranet, which is running samba to serve files and to
check usernames/passwords against the Active Directory server, suddenly
stopped working. I'd figured
this out a few weeks back, so having it
just break suddenly and not cooperate when I did the "fix" again and
again was trying to say the least.
Today, I finally stumbled upon the actual culprit. There is some
incompatibility between Windows 2000 SP4 SR1 and the newer builds of
Samba.
If you've found this article, chances are you were running wbinfo -u and
got the error "Error looking up users". If you turn the debugging level
on winbind up, which I did, perhaps a bit clumsily, by editing
/etc/init.d/winbind, and changing
daemon winbindd
"$WINBINDOPITONS"
to
daemon winbindd "-d 100"
you'll
find the error NT_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES
Although I'm not exactly certain of the cause of this, it seems that the
samba daemon is somehow confusing the SP4 SR1 windows box, which
summarily closes its doors for a bit.
Luckily there's an easy fix. Simply set
client schannel = no
in the global section of smb.conf
Link
to the forum where I found this fix. Many thanks to Gerald (Jerry)
Carter <jerry <at> samba.org>, for the excellent tip!
11:57 pm | permalink |
/technology/linux |
0 writebacks |
Jul 15, 2005
In a World of Pure Imagination
We're off to see Willy Wonka tomorrow, and I'm half excited and half terrified that it won't be as clever and
original (if disturbing) as the first.
A simple comment on Kate's blog solved
that:
jellybeanmaggie
2005-07-15 11:02
Just saw it- you'll love it. The Oompa-Loompa songs.. soooo much better! Hurray for Danny Elfman! Anyhow,
dont want to ruin it for you, hope all is well! Enjoy the movie :)
Okay. NOW I'm excited!
8:07 am | permalink |
/technology/film |
0 writebacks |
Jul 08, 2005
Delayed Gratification
Thanks to iWOOT (I Want One Of
Those,) Jon and I got bit by the
gadget bug this week, and we've been eying the remote control planes
since Saturday. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This story really
starts about 15 years
earlier, in the slightly
musty basement of my Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe was a wiry, pipe smoking man and a wicked sense of
humor whose mouth opened diagonally in a funny (and slightly but
wonderfully insane) way when he laughs. My impression of him as a kid
was
always mixed with a caricature of "old age." His skinniness,
leathery skin, and fungus encrusted nails made him seem just about as
old as anyone was supposed to get.
15 years later, he is still beating us all at horseshoes and swinging
from the branches of our neighbors tree. Like many of the older
generation of my family, he's seeming younger and younger as our
age-difference ratio shrinks.
The world is a bit distorted when you're young, though, and
almost universally, everyone has a "you didn't get me that pony"
moment - the moment when (often irrationally) you felt the world was
utterly unjust. Mine centers around Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe made the most magnificent RC planes; giant wing-spanned models
that looked as though they could fly 1000 feet, and hung them from the
rafters in that musty basement. He showed them to us sometime around
1989, and I immediately asked what every 9 year old would.
"Can we fly them?"
Even then, I knew it was unfair and irrational to feel cheated when the
answer was no. He'd put countless hours into building and perfecting
these beautiful things, and explained that the two times that he'd taken
them out, they'd crashed And been shattered to smithereens.
But I was 9, and it all seemed horribly unfair at the time. I would
never get to know what it was like to be at the helm of a something that
was flying effortlessly above.
So, 15 years later, when the prospect of getting an RC plane up in the
air for under $50
became a possibility, it's easy to understand why I jumped at it.
Jon felt the same, and there was no time to order and have them
delivered while he was here in NY, so we went out and made our purchase.
I
remembered seeing a shop wit all sorts of RC planes and boats in the
window somewhere near my work, and indeed we
found one on 30th and
8th.
The proprietor was a bit brash, but after listening to his spiel for a
while, we walked out happy in our purchase of 2
MegaTech
Firefly's.
The color choices were green and orange. This is "always wearing at
least some orange" Jon we're talking about here, so it's no surprise that
I got the green one, and its neon glow appealed to my late
nineties design sensibility.
We immediately took them up to central park and few them around in
sheep
meadow. Jon's transmitter was bad, so it would only fly about 20
feet before spiraling to the ground in "safe landing" mode, but mine
climbed and climbed up into the sky.
They work much like the mini-RC cars, charging off the transmitter and
making 4-6 minutes flights off of a 2 minute charge. They're amazing fun
and I think I've got the RC bug. Even with their limited
controls, there's something about the feeling of flying that's
incredibly
freeing, and there's no denying the satisfaction in realizing a
childhood fantasy.
We exchanged Jon's faulty model right after going to the park, (American
Hobby Center was slightly grumpy but ultimately very accommodating) and
will
probably break them out again tomorrow. I can't wait! Ahh the beauty of
delayed gratification.
1:22 am | permalink |
/technology/gadgets |
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Jul 01, 2005
Blosxom Time Bug and Changing Lots of Permissions with a Shell Script
You may have noticed Glitchnyc.com was a
blank slate for the past few hours.
The server went down, and since it's up for around a year at a time, I've never gotten around to worrying too much about what happens when the power drops and I have to worry
about a reboot. I simply restart the mail server, apache and mysql, and everything is good.
The only catch was that this time, blosxom came back empty. I've seen this before, but as you may know if you know me personally, I have a memory like swiss cheese, so the fix
had fallen right out of my head.
I looked at my file permissions, and my paths, and even blew open my permissions on my testing directory with a chmod 777 -R. After that, anyone, including the webserver,
could access anything it wanted in there. Still no luck. Both scripts (testing and live) were affected, so I knew it wasn't just a weird corruption of a file, but I was still
at a loss.
After a few hours cleaning and getting things ready for company as well as having some dinner, I sat down to see if I couldn't figure it out.
I scanned the blank site and noticed that the calendar said "September, 1997."
Ohhhhh.
All of my articles are time sensitive, so that I can "time bomb" the occasionally piece here and there (for example, if I pre-date a Christmas article for Dec 25, 2006, it'll
show up on Winter Capitalism Day [to steal a phrase from Christin])
Since everything on the server was effectively marked "in the future," nothing at all showed up. I fixed the time, and in doing so, fixed the site.
Now I just had to reset all the permissions on my testing site.
chmod -R 664 testing
Well, that didn't work. Although the files have decent permissions, (6 - owner can read and write, 6 groups can read and write, 0 everybody else can do squat) the directories
need execute permissions to let users (like the webserver) in.
I needed a way to just change the permission of the directories and their sub directories, but not the contents of those folders.
A few lines of bash scripting, and it was done.
#!/bin/bash
# first find *only* directories in this dir and up to 6 subdirs.
# with the command:
# find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 6 -type d -print
# They will be listed with their position relative to this dir
# for example:
# ./technology/web
# which is handy for scripting
for i in $( find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 6 -type d -print ); do
#change the permission of every $i
#which is assigned to be the value of the condition evaluated above
#try
#echo item: $i to get a better feel for this if you're confused
#change the permissions of every directory so that apache
#(and in this case, everybody) can read its contents
chmod 777 $i
#close up the loop - for non programmers, this will repeat to the top
#until there's no more output from the "find" command above
done
now just change the permissions of the script file
chmod 770 fixPermissions.sh
And run it
./fixPermissions.sh
Be careful that you'll want to run it *inside* the appropriate directory, as any directories it files will have their permissions altered. You may have to adjust the last
"parent" directory by hand.
1:01 am | permalink |
/technology |
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