Kaisergemuese has a nice introduction and screencast about PulseAudio, a proposed new sound daemon for the GNOME desktop. A third of the way in it looks really cool, but only if you have multiple soundcards....
That said, I'm only 5 minutes into the 14 minute screencast :)
Bummed about your caffeine curve? Here's a good primer on how to give it up (coffee and / or caffeine that is).
Found footage of TimeShift showing off some graphics, gameplay, and some of the uniqueness that this game adds to the standard FPS.
I haven't read more than the headline, but when you see that GAP was caught using child labor to make GAP kids clothing you have to chuckle, then look up "ironic" in the dictionary again.
This is a quick plug for a friend of mine who is running a film course in Abbotsford. Check out Glass Planet FilmWorks for more details.
The JoCo Primer - Listening Suggestions is a great selection of music from Jonathan Coulton, whose work you'll be familiar with if you have a) finished Portal or b) are familiar with this troubador of John Hodgman (from the Daily Show and The PC Guy from the Apple ads).
Thanks Darren for pointing me out this guy existed.
As they generally do, Ars Technica has produce a fantastic Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard review.
Foose Fooled is a short video on youtube of a prank pulled on Chip Foose of Overaulin'
As with the last awesome picture I posted, it's hard to describe just how awesome this is.
So, when did Luke, Vader and Chewie have a band?
Very cool... no more needing a mac or PC to install custom apps on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Check out this Instant Jailbreak for iPhone and iPod touch which lets you do it all by visiting a webpage on your iPhone or Touch's Safari web browser.
It'll be very interesting to see what happens with the next firmware update...
Engaget has the Leopard vs. Vista: feature chart showdown. Some interesting stuff in there, and some (of course) stuff that's subject to your own interpretation.
OMG! OMG! Finally, a Crysis Single-player Demo Released. Look for fast download links in the comments... I'm pulling it down at 590KB/sec right now, so please wait until I'm done the rest of the 1.7G file :)
Now that GIMP 2.4 is out the GIMP 2.4 Release Notes have some nice demos and screenshots of the new functionality and features.
Well, I see that Spore is on Track for Spring Release. I guess I'll believe it when I see it, and if it does come out, that's good I guess, as there's lots of games to deal with and spring will be the time I'm ready and done with TF2, HL2*, ETQW and friends.
Darren pointed me to an article proclaiming that a Molson beer contest confirms Apple iPhone coming to Canada in January. $800 though, that's a bit steep (assuming that's the the retail price). Are they going to be selling for $200 less in April though?
Still, good to know things are heading north. Big questions now are a) will the carrier be Rogers and b) will they come out with an unlimited data plan...
The oops list is an amusing collection of "oops" pictures, comics, etc. Lots of aviation related stuff, and you know how bad it is when you combine "oops" with "huge chunk of flying steel".
While you're waiting for the I am Legend trailers, check out Jumper Trailer - World Premiere found in the Digg comments. Looks very cool. Why haven't I heard about this yet?
There are Two New I Am Legend Movie Trailers out. Good luck getting to them as they appear to be dugg, slashdotted, or reddited or something now.
Update: Found some on YouTube.
Yay, Gmail gets IMAP. Apparently it'll be rolling out in to everyone in the next few days.
I think I posted about this guy's review of The Orange Box a bit ago, well, here's a list of all his reviews, of which all that I've watched so far, are hilarious.
Found via digg is a KDE 4 Beta 3 - Screenshot Tour for those of the KDE persuasion.
A selection of greate wildlife photos from Nick Brandt. I love the use of Black and White personally. Definitely inspiring work for anyone with access to African wildlife and photography :)
The iPod Death Clock displays how long your iPod (based on serial number and a few usage questions) will be in this world.
Thanks today (tonight) to Oneiros (again) for the last few tips and tricks getting Portal finished, probably the first game I've completed in single player since.... quake 2. Anyway he pointed me to Half-Life 2: Portal, a hack to allow you to use the portal gun in other Source based games (ie: HL2, HL2:Eposide 1,2, etc).
Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Linux Client Released. That about says it. Hopefully the performance under Linux will be as good as windows, but right now sadly my Linux box is a bit old for gaming :)
Stuff like this Mac OS X Leopard - Guided Tour show once again why Apple is the king of marketing. I watched the movie and even though I have never used any of the features they show, nor have ever wanted them, I so want a mac running Leopard right now. The goodness wasn't only in the demo, but also the slickness of the features. Timeline, ichat, stacks..... all soooo slick. Am I right or am I right about this?
Course, I want to be able to play more than 3 games, so sadly it'll doubtfully replace my windows gaming box. But a nice macbook pro? Hmm.....
TUAW also has some thoughts.
Never heard of this game before, but check out the trailer for Bionic Commando. Wow, beautiful environments, cool looking grappling from destroyed building to destroyed building, and nifty physics for dispatching your enemies. All platforms as well, which is nice. Interesting to see more when it is closer to being released (no date yet).
Gizmodo has their Google Phone Wishlist and some great ideas about how google can integrate their various services into a cell phone.
Anyone want to get me a really great birthday present? Or need a bit of spare hard drive space for music, movies, porn, or (if you must) real data? If so, check out the Apple Xserve RAID 7TB that's on sale on eBay. If you live in the UK mainland you even get free shipping.
If you've got bandwidth and HD space for another game demo, check out Hellgate: London.
Press The Spacebar 2000, a flash game. So simple, and yet, so fun! (and potentially keyboard destroying :)
Non-GNOMEers can check out the KDE 4.0 Beta 3 Release notes.
Wake Up! - the essence of catness. Spoken as the owner of three of the little buggers, I can attest this has happened more than once :)
Thanks Darren!
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes says he admits that Leopard has more “Wow!” than Vista … in theory anyway and goes on to enumerate some of the bits (a nice summary by the way). One thing really stuck out for me though.:
Google Map Addresses
View a detailed map of any address in Address Book. Just hold down the Control key while clicking any address and select “Map of” and Safari will show you its location in Google Maps.
[Note that this is one of those re-tweaked features - I believe that this is already in OS X Address Book but uses MapQuest instead of Google Maps. But yeah, it’s cool. Why can’t Outlook Express/Windows Mail have this?]
Isn't this basically the feature in MS Office where it would parse out addresses / phone numbers and make them yellow and clickable to add them to your address book or something? And wasn't this the feature that when it was announced (2002 or 2003 probably) had people up in arms about invasion of privacy, Microsoft stealing our data, etc etc? Sure it's slightly different, hooking into maps, but still... a bit of hypocrisy mayhap (not on Adrian's part as much as the net in general giving Apple/Google a big pass and coming down harder on MS for some things).
Ubuntu has released the Gutsy Gibbon into the wild, stories, torrent links, screenshots, and reviews are everywhere.
I thought it'd end up being a joke, but check out how this guy Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome (note: some spoilers) to get the 'gnome achievement'. Absolutely hilarious, and skillful. Note that the gnome also has his own blog about the whole thing!
Found 10 Reasons to Learn Ruby, and even if Ruby isn't your can of beans, it's got some nice and simple introductions to some of the more powerful features of the language (which I've read a couple of books on but have yet to really dig into.
Being I just bought The Orange Box, I find the Zero Punctuation: The Orange Box review that Darren pointed me to.
Ha ha! "Force feedback codpiece".
Darren passed me on the best news I've heard all day.... the Apple Hot News that a third party SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be available in February. Should be sooner, and it'll be interesting to see how they make it open to developers, without putting way too many hoops to jump through for developers. Putting some of the iPhone apps on the Touch would be great as well :)
Also while you're at it, availability in Canada and unlimited data plans would be great!
Some of The Best of Maury Povich, including such classics as the pickle girl, 11 paternity tests, and so on.
The 10 Most Asinine Movie Twist Endings, for all your quick-and-dirty list material.
Apple Answers Leopard Questions and gives some interesting insight to what's going to be out in less than 10 days.
Amusing little thing: 25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer. Of note for me is:
* You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
I still have the concert tickets from when I got into the second row at a Garth Brooks concert back in the mid-90's (and got to hug Garth Brooks's Mom as well, but that's another story :)
LinuxGames has the news on the Linux demo version of ETQW for my non-Microsoft shackled friends.
Interesting project... Brian Auer asked people to edit his photo. He got back 28 Ways To Interpret A Photo.
You think you're passionite to your hobby? This guy makes his own swords.... from scratch. Scratch!. Like, from the ore scratch. Smelting it himself from scratch.
Now that's cool
I wish someone had explained things like this back when I was younger :)
Found another nice little article with 10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT. Everything from the insanity of management to the pain of babysitting ancient, unmanageable servers years out of date and out of support but still running business critical services. :)
No idea where this is from, but this 2.5 minute video on What TOP GUN is really about by Quentin Tarantino is absolutely hilarious (and makes total sense :)
Phil Hofsetter goes to some lengths to figure out mod_php, LightTPD, FastCGI - What's fastest?
Ooooohh..... going to be an unproductive night now that the Unreal Tournament 3 Demo Download is available..
CryTek has released some screenshots of Detail Levels Compared. Gotta say the DX10 version looks very very nice... note the rocks in the left foreground in the different detail levels.
Star Trek casting details emerge. Scott Simon Pegg as Scotty (he's the skinny guy from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) and John Cho as Sulu (Harold, from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle).
Speaking of upcoming games, there is a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Demo Download over at fileshack.
Well, the real version of Portal is out, but those who want a bit of problem solving in the browser can play Portal: The Flash Version. Kinda fun, thanks to Darren for sucking away my work hours :)
Shacknews has a Unreal Tournament 3 Preview. With this, Orange Box, ETQW, and Crysis either just out or coming out soon, it's a good season for gaming!
Jailbreak Guide for the iPod Touch over at TouchDev.net. Looks like it's still a bit convoluted and sounds like you still need a Mac to do it though. Hopefully it'll just get easier (or heaven forbid), get blessed by apple to allow access into the device without jumping through hoops.
Nice article on ars technica saying how you should use a blocklist or you will be tracked... 100% of the time if you're on P2P networks.
# If you don't use a blocklist, you will be tracked. Every one of the researchers' test clients that did not use a blocklist soon connected to an IP address found within those lists. It turns out that 12 to 17 percent of all IP addresses on the network belonged to these blocklisted ranges.
Found a "How I Learned to Love Testing" presentation via RailsEnvy. Interesting talk, rails focused, but easy enough to bring the philosophy to perl, java, .net, etc etc etc. It's a 30 minute .mov BTW.
Readers of XKCD will be happy to see that wetriffs is live.
A triplet of gaming news from shacknews.
Interesting look at how to Double Your Salary* (*Without A Second Job) from Men's Health. It's not a get rich quick thing, just an interesting avenue to pursue for some extra money. I almost didn't post it except for this line:
He simply found capitalism's G-spot and started rubbing away.
Comic from Joy of Tech to help you rationalize your piracy.
Cool look at where the best websites of 2001 are now: Internet Allstars ‘01: Where are they now? Interesting... most of the sites I didn't use, with the exception of a couple. I do miss the unadulterated music that was AudioGalaxy though, a lot of uhmm.... a friends mp3 collection was created with help from AG.
Found this through reddit.... the The Right Brain vs Left Brain. Displays an animation and depending if you see it moving one way or the other shows you are left or right brained. I was surprised, turns out that (at least according to this test) I'm right brained, which does not include things like logic and detail oriented (ie: coder qualities) but instead I fall into the "uses feeling, 'big picture' oriented, and fantasy based" category. Very.... odd. I'm interested to see how other people I know react to it, and if they fall into the category they think they do.
Oneiros pointed me a few days ago to what Scott Kurtz called a Brent Sighting. Nope, it's not Brent but your friendly neighborhood Arcterex, back in 2000. Glad to see this has popped up again :)
Remember a while back there was some buzz about a big-ass X-Wing model rocket (where "big-ass" is like, 21' long). Anyway, it got launched and flying! Well... kinda. Check the video :)
Futurama: Bender's Big Score video preview found on reddit.
Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently Serialized on BBC Radio. Link in the story is for RM only (bleah) but there are links to more useful file types in the comments.
Demonoid Aftermath: An Open Letter to the CRIA.
The record labels cry about downloading cutting into the profits of the sales of albums. They put out “greatest hits” albums by 20-year olds with 2 or 3 albums under their belts, released with one new track to try and sucker the fans that already have both albums into spending another $20 for one new song, or re-releasing a 3-month old album with a “previously unreleased bonus track”. Then they can’t understand why people aren’t buying them, and cry foul that people are downloading the one new song instead.
Some great tips for business writing. #2 is my favorite, my biggest bitch to a buddy of mine who occasionally asks me for my opinion for written business material is he's too verbose and wordy. Maybe this will help convince him! :)
Speaking of service packs, istartedsomething notes that Microsoft posts more Vista pre-SP1 ‘wonder patches’. These are performance updates that are going to be in VIsta SP1, but are being released early. This is most likely because some of the issues that Vista have are beyond aggravating for people (like the 'calculating time remaining' bug that was fixed with the last set of hotfixes that were released).
Jon Patch has The word on Acceleration and FSX SP2 for all you flight sim fans out there.
Very interesting, and scary is "Stupid In America" - Full 20/20 Documentary. Basically it's flame bait to some, and no doubt lots will be screaming about it. However, taken at face value, it is not a bright look at a) schools in the US and b) teachers unions.
Interesting look anyway.
Darren passed on the rumor that Holt Renfrew Insider Says iPhone Coming to Canada in Two Weeks. Interesting to see, fingers crossed after I had a chance to check one out recently.
Just saw the best catdoor hacking project ever, where the catdoor won't open if the cat has a mouse in it's mouth.
Perez is the best in celeb gossip, according to him. However, Britney’s New Nickname is hilarious. "Unfitney". Ha!
Dang, wish I knew how people got on Betas like that for Crysis! Check out the Crysis Multiplayer Beta Impressions over at shacknews. Sounds like fun, but way taxing on your hardware :)
Photoshop Insider has a nice roundup of blogs.
Nice article on EBays Billion Lesson in the Value of Hype, talking about how they paid $3b (that's with a 'b' as in 'bbbbbbillion') for skype, and discovered, unsurprisingly, it wasn't worth quite that much.
It’s almost impossible to pay for a deal through “synergies.”
Nice post by Raymond Chen about pushing operating system limits, in saying that if you're pushing the OS limits, nesting things 255 levels deep, or adding more than 65k objects on a form, you're probably needing a bit of redesign. Definitely a good point, though he does not that that is a big 'probably' as I'm sure there are cases where programmers are needlessly hindered by random OS limits.
Case in point, a story from back in the day.
When I first embarked into the IT world I was doing tech support for the Real Estate board, and eventually a bit of programming. This programming was done in a basic-type language whose name I don't remember, and it was used to do screen scraping and data manipulation from a dial up program (ie: call in, do a search, get the results, format them, output to a file for upload to a different system).
One day they wanted me to move from the text based language to a different system, again, similar but slightly different. Many times I really needed to compare code from one program and use it in another... a simple operation these days, and it's pretty common to compare two source files at a time. In this system, instead of a nice system where you could open the code in notepad (or edit at the time), it was:
Granted, that's not an OS limit, but a application limit :)
An Aperture User Looks At Adobe Lightroom is an interesting look at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from the point of view of an Apple Aperture user. I've never used Aperture (it's Mac only) and am quite a dedicated Lightroom user for my photo organizing need. Some of the points noted are fairly "getting used to" based. I'm personally used to some of the UI bitches he has, but everyone will have their own interpretation.
Noted deficiencies are ability to upload to flickr (meh) and lack of dual monitor support (agreed).
Definitely a good look and review though.
Whoohooo, found a New Wall-E Movie Trailer. Wall-E is the new movie from Pixar.
Simple question, sexy answer :)
Wow, lots of interesting stuff in The 7 Strangest Post-Sitcom Careers (where are they now). Via Digg.
Ars Technica: A day on the Surface: a hands-on look at Microsoft's new computing platform. Interesting...
Mutating Pictures is a project to see if random images are interpreted as faces. There is a 'hot or not' style rating system to allow the system to know how good or bad the results are.
