Battle for Wesnoth

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

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

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.)