Today I played The Big House which is a free, online Myst-type game. It was fun. This is the end screen, which I thought was funny.

Posted on Jul 09.10 to Technology | No Comments »  

Woot!
Play it here.

Posted on Jun 24.10 to Technology | No Comments »  

Everybody knows that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will be compared to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Now that I’ve played both, I feel qualified to comment on a comparison. While it’s only a demo, the Bad Company 2 demo has already taken up several hours of my time. You get 1 map and 4 classes and it’s still fantastic.

Graphically, I can’t say if it’s better or worse than MW2, but I’d lean toward worse for understandable reasons. First of all, I have only seen one map, and it is a snowy winter map which gives this blue and washed-out vibe to the gameplay. Secondly, the maps are much larger in BC2 than MW2, so some sacrifices, I’m sure, had to be made. Player models are less rich in BC2. Debris is less interesting to look at. There are a few points in their favor, however. Anything that isn’t a player but is moving, looks great. Almost everything in the environment is interactive in some way, even if it’s just blowing it up. When a something explodes in a building, for example, walls crumble and debris goes flying. As it’s moving around, it looks great. The one gripe i have about MW2 is the token flying stuff like leaves and papers tend to have an ugly 2D feel and an unrealistic black outline. Either way, I still give the significant edge to MW2 graphically with an asterisk noting that BW2 is just a demo and has only 1 map at this time.

The most important factor, in my opinion, is gameplay. User controls are really important. They can make or break a game. I mean, that’s one of the biggest reasons that the Wii is so popular — the controls are great. With MW2 and BF2, the controls are really similar. Sure, maybe a different button swipes your combat knife or works your gadgets, but fundamentally similar. However, the biggest difference is strafing. Holding straight ahead with the Left-stick moves you forward, right? Well in MW2, you can lean that to the north-east, or north-west and expect to step forward and to the right, or forward and to the left respectively. Expect to have to work that right-stick a lot more in BF2. I’m sure it’s just because I’ve played more MW2, but its controls seem to be what I prefer. I mean, I’m pretty good. I’m not great, but I must be doing something right.

The bottom line is this — if you want a great team-based, objective-based FPS, you will really like BF2. If you like a run-and-gun shooter with a good deal of chaos, you’ll like MW2 better. Each has elements of the other, but BF2 does tactical better and MW2 does aggressive combat better.

Posted on Feb 02.10 to Technology | No Comments »  

I plan on re-writing this in PerlTK so it has a bit of user interface, but for now I thought this app was pretty cool:
To use this, you’ll need sox installed. While I linked to the sourceforge site, you’ll probably want to get the “sox”, “libsox0″, and “libsox-fmt-all” packages from your package manager.

Anyway, here is my linux command line guitar tuner called ptune.

Posted on Dec 10.09 to Technology | No Comments »  

A while back I finished a book on my Kindle called Uncubicled by Josh McMains and it rocked. Now, Krimsin’s Reviews is having a contest to give away a SIGNED paperback version!

I even wrote a review at Amazon for the story, because I enjoyed it so much. You should check it out. If you don’t I’ll have to get my keyboard out…

Posted on Jul 07.09 to Technology | No Comments »  

Apparently, the e-ink used in an Amazon Kindle scans just fine. Also, you can get to a minesweeper game by pressing Shift + Alt + M. This is my first game, and I won!

Kindle Scan

Posted on Jun 01.09 to Technology | No Comments »  

In 1983, Apple released the LISA computer, which shipped with a 5 megahertz processor. To run the recently-released game Crysis, the minimum system requirements say you need at least a 2.8 gigahertz (or 2800 megahertz) processor in order to run the game.

That would mean you would need 560 Apple LISA computers to run this game. Sounds like a lot, right?

Wait for it…

LISAs cost $10,000 in 1983 is the same as $21,744.28 in 2008.

So if you need 560 computers that cost $21,744.28 each, that’s $12,176,796.80. Let me spell that out for you: Twelve MILLION one hundred seventy six THOUSAND seven hundred ninety six dollars and eighty cents.

Someone check my math please, my head is spinning. We’re not even talking RAM here, just pure processor power.

Many sites estimate the play time of the single-player mode in Crysis to be around 10 hours, which would make this game about $2,174.43 an hour, or $36.24 per second to play.

I’m not even sure why I decided to share that, but I thought it was cool. Anyway, here are the references:
Apple info: http://library.thinkquest.org/22522/timeline4b_en.html
Crysis system req: http://www.crysis-online.com/page/system-requirements.html
Inflation calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
Crysis play time: http://www.crysis-online.com/forum/index.php?topic=661.0;wap2

Posted on Dec 08.08 to Technology | No Comments »  

Well, my 12seconds.tv video updates work now! We figured out the problem was with my Facebook applications, so I tweaked some settings. In fact, I even posted the fix to the GetSatisfaction site, just in case others have similar problems. Awesome… I <3 12seconds.tv.

More people should use it…seriously.

Posted on Nov 10.08 to Technology | No Comments »  

So, I upgraded to the new WordPress version. I had some problems logging in at first, but then I realized I forgot to disable my Akismet plugin. After I termed that plugin, I logged in and applied the new Akismet plugin and I’m up and going.

I think I’ll let The Wife see how this one works and see if she’s ready to upgrade or not. Personally, I think the word count and auto draft saves are reason enough to upgrade.

Posted on Oct 13.08 to Technology | No Comments »  

Laugh all you want. Go ahead and make some crude joke about what YOU think I can do in 12Seconds. You can even make it naughty and filled with innuendo, poking fun at how I…well, poke fun. It won’t affect me. I’m a bigger man than that (both literally and figuratively, though I’m working on the former.)

Anyway, the point of this post is to announce yet another widget I’ve added to the blog. See that thing over there on the right, with the video? Yea, that’s the 12seconds.tv widget that links to my updates.

As many already know, I’m trying to implement many more zen practices into my life and part of that includes appreciating the little things in life. 12seconds.tv seems like a great place to start…I mean the little things is what they’re all about; 12 seconds at a time. So, what I’ll be doing is having a regularly occuring (how often is yet to be determined, possibly only when the mood strikes me) segment called Things That Do Not Suck. You can easily find these episodes, because I’ve tagged the videos as “ThingsThatDoNotSuck”. They’re pretty easy to find on 12seconds.tv, like this.

I’m already an admitted addict to many of the new micro-blogging/micro-social-media tools. At work, I log my progress with ididwork.com, whenever I’m at a computer, I use twitter, and I’ve been using 12seconds.tv since late August and I think I’ve uncovered another addiction…at least these obsessions are free of charge. Much cheaper than crack, anyway.

Posted on Sep 12.08 to Technology | No Comments »