Month: February 2005

Hunter S. Thompson, RIP

Posted on by Nimgimli

‘Gonzo’ Godfather Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

Well this is sad news. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had quite an impact on me back in my younger days. For a while, Thompson was my (anti?)hero, after a fashion. Just his complete disdain for what anyone else thought about him and his writings…I found it….freeing.

Oh well, on the other hand, I can’t see him sitting around, growing old and weak…

Vendetta-Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

I spent the weekend sucked into Vendetta Online, a MM-Space Sim. It falls somewhere between EVE-Online and the classic single player game, Elite. You can sign up for a free trial (8 hours of gameplay) and after that it costs $10/month. There’re clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linus. I’ve been playing it under Linux and it works flawlessly.

The developers are really active and take player comments seriously. I’m not sure its quite worth $10/month yet, but I may sign up just to help support them, since the game has a lot of potential and I want to see them make it.

Battle for Wesnoth

Posted on by Nimgimli

Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty nice open source, turn-based fantasy strategy game. Yeah, its a little old school, but I’m finding it incredibly addictive. It’ll run on just about any contemporary OS (Windows, OS X, Linux and a slew of others) and its released under the GPL (meaning, its free). Very much worth checking out if you have fond memories of Warlords, Miltary Madness or Age of Wonder.

Bread

Posted on by Nimgimli

I bought a bread making machine. I love good bread, and I thought for a long time that these machines were a gimmick. But then I tried some, and it was SO good. Bread so yummy that it seems a crime to spread butter or jam on it. I wanted to be able to have bread that good whenever I wanted.

So as I type this, my first batch is in the machine. And I’m fretting…

Its the yeast that has me worried. I used to homebrew beer so I got fairly intimate with yeast issues. But this is so…automated. And the poor yeast is just dry little pellets. I felt the urge to make a nice starter to get it awakened and ready to do its thing!!

In beer making, there are many strains of yeast and which one you pick has a very real impact on the resulting beer. I’m not seeing any evidence of that in bread making, and I wonder if it just doesn’t matter, or if it just hasn’t been explored in ‘home bread making.’

Firefox fun

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a huge fan of Firefox, the open source web browser that leaves Internet Explorer looking sad and pathetic. So I was thrilled to find this mega-thread filled with lesser-known tips and tricks for using it. An example, contributed by Jim Roberts:

If you hold down the CTRL key and left click on part of a web page, that section of the page will be highlighted. If you right click on the selection and choose ‘View selection source’, the source code for that part of the page will be displayed.

Tons of neat tricks like this one in the thread. Now I love Firefox even more! (Yes, I’m a total fanboy.)

And then there was Make

Posted on by Nimgimli

O’Reilly was at LinuxWorld and browsing their booth, an odd little volume caught my eye. It was issue 1 of Make. If you are a geek, you need this. It’s just filled from cover to cover with strange little projects. Kind of like what Popular Science was 20 years ago, y’know?

Check it out.

Binging on Linux

Posted on by Nimgimli

You know how life throws odd random events at you sometimes. A friend gave me an Ubuntu LiveCD about a week before I was set to go to LinuxWorld. I was only going to LW because it was local and because we do run a few linux servers at work. I figured I could pick up some tips on security or whatever. Plus, it’s always a nice way to recharge your geek batteries, going to an event like this.

Anyway, so I had this LiveCD and I figured, what the heck. And was pretty darned impressed with what I saw of UbuntuLinux. Next thing I know, I was installing a PowerPC version on an old Mac. Then I was salvaging hard drives out of my old PC’s looking for one of a decent size.

And here I am on my ‘gaming rig’ but now its running Ubuntu (dual boot…I still need to play games and poker in Windows).

Honestly I started out just doing it for the geeky fun of doing it, but for whatever reason, the fonts, at least on my LCD screen, are SO MUCH crisper and cleaner under Ubuntu than under Windows, that I’d keep it just for that. And plus, I was checking out Mono at LinuxWorld and I think I want to poke around with it a bit. Granted, Mono runs under Windows or OS X, but I want to develop with it under linux then see what the porting is really like.

But that’s fodder for another post.