I’m willing to bet that anyone who owned a commodore 64 back in the 80’s played the sword of fargoal at least once, and I know the folks I hung around with played it constantly. No one I know ever actually won, but now you can finally achieve Fargoal nirvana, or at least try, with this recently released Fargoal remake for the pc. I admit I was skeptical, but it turns out to be a nice blast from the past playing this again. (and no, I have not yet won, though I have gotten pretty deep into the dungeon several times now).
Archive for October, 2003
I noticed something slightly depressing about myself yesterday. I used to be one of those people who took stairs in leaps and bounds, 3-4 stairs at a time on the way up and basically a controlled fall on the way down. I was trudging up the stairs to work yesterday morning and realized that it had been literally ages since I had last done that in either direction. Without even really noticing I have been slowing down. Of course I forced myself to bound up and down stairs for the rest of the day and subsequently managed to screw up my knee taking a long set of marble stairs. Aging sucks I tell you, we need to get Bush out of office quick so the gene therapy/embryonic fetus researchers can get to back to work 
…on usenet. Today’s example:
The graphics and sound effects are good, and I especially love the
vaporized blood that explodes from enemies when you shoot them. Very nice
touch.
oh yeah, you just gots to love the vaporized blood effects!
I shouldn’t tease the guy though cause the truth is I notice stuff like that in the games I play too. It’s just that I had one of those ‘this is surreal’ moments when I was reading his review. He was talking about the just-released Call of Duty which I will almost definitely be picking up, unless the multiplayer gets poor reviews.
Check out this most excellent visual iq test. Be warned, this could take a while depending on how high your visual IQ actually is, in my case it took almost 30 minutes to complete, and to be honest the last 5-6 questions I had no clue what the connections were. But I scored a very respectable 117. No mensa society for me, but nothing to be ashamed of either. I’m a little relieved actually, given what I do for a living if I had scored poorly I would be off to the mall to look for a job in retail
Or not. Seen those eye-catching new tv ads for Apple’s iPod, with the folks getting their groove on in silhouette on a bright candy colored background? Note how spastically they rattle their ipod around. I challenge anyone who owns any brand hard drive based mp3 player to violently jiggle their player around like they do in those commercials. I guarantee what you’ll have after a few minutes of that is one dead music player. It’s really kind of absurd. It’s a shame too because on one level the ads are actually pretty cool.
Check out these babies. RC tanks with IR guns? Imagine a pitched battle on the kitchen floor with maybe a few cats around to act as force majeure. Fun, says me. I’m going to order a couple.
One in three children born in the year 2000 will develop type 2 adult onset diabetes. 1 in 3. I don’t know what it’s going to take to wake folks up to this epidemic - news like this is occurring on a weekly basis and yet we see nothing in terms of a concerted response to the problem. As one who suffers from this I can tell you while it’s not the end of the world, it is the end of the pizza and pasta, and it’s no cakewalk. Spread the word, get people off their asses and off their high-carb doritio and McDonalds french fry diets.
Of course on the positive side, since an ever-increasing number of folks are suffering from this, there’s hope that increased funding and research will lead to a cure for me. Got to look for the positives after all
I picked up a new toy for myself, a Nueros mp3 player. I chose the Neuros after much consideration, in fact I even went so far as ordering an iPod and then cancelling it before going with the Neuros. Now that I’ve had several days to play with it I can make a few observations about it.
Firstly, the main reason I chose it over the iPod is because it is both a solid state flashram based player and a hard drive based player. The unit consists of multiple pieces, the ‘brains’ of the unit and then ‘memory’ modules, which can be solid state or hard drives. I read and heard a number of horror stories from folks with dead iPods warning that jogging with an iPod leads to premature death, and my main use for this thing was for excercising, hence the cancelled iPod order.
Things I like about it:
- Expandable - you can buy additional modules to your heart’s content
- Best of both worlds - exercise safe, but tons of storage also available
- built-in fm receiver
- built-in fm transmitter - tune it and broadcast your mp3 collection to your car or home stereo - this works really well
- handles voice and line-in recording - this also works really well
Things I don’t like:
- USB 1.1. Yup, it is frigging SLOW. Fortunately they’re moving to USB 2.0 so soon I will be able to trade in my 20gig usb 1.1 drive for a USB 2.0 one, but for now, it is fricking slow. And I would greatly prefer firewire.
- The software bundle so desperately wants to be iTunes on steroids but it’s really pretty weak compared to the real deal
- Swapping modules is a real pain in the ass. The mechanics of it are simple enough but getting the solid state module to remember the music you have in it is a slow, awkward struggle
- It’s big. Really big. Compared to an iPod, it’s ridiculously large. Fortunately the solid state module is small enough, but with the hard drive module attached the thing is huge
- Like the iPod, it has no user servicable parts, meaning you can’t swap the battery yourself, you have to send it in for service. At $12 this is not expensive, but it’s a pain in the ass nonetheless
So. On balance, I’m pleased with the purchase, though I will reserve final judgement until I have a USB 2.0 module on the thing. Now to find the perfect pair of ‘earbud’ headphones.
Oh and I should mention that these things are on sale right now, the bundle I bought usually goes for just over $400, but they’re 50% off as they clear inventory to make room for the USB 2.0 models, so if you’re at all tempted, now’s the time to go for it.
I just had one. Got up Saturday morning to nasty wet rainy miserable weather. Ok, stuck in the house, I’ll work on a few niggling computer projects. First up, fix this tablet pc I got. Go to boot it, stylus is stuck in it’s recepticle and I manage to break it off such that the business end is stuck inside the tablet, rendering the thing useless. Doh! Time to dissasemble.
Meanwhile, I’ve been charging my new toy and it’s time to fill it with music. I start transferring mp3’s from cd archives onto my main desktop because it works sort of like iTunes does on a mac, you need a computer based music archive to synch it with. I note that this seems to be taking an inordinately long time but I’m engrossed with the tablet. I manage to disassemble it and retrieve the business end of the stylus without too much trouble, but when I puncture the lead seal on the end of a new tube of crazy glue it pops like a zit and splatters minute but annoying quantities of crazy glue around my work area, including quite a bit on my fingers. Which of course stick together. At least it narrowly missed splattering on the tablet’s screen, but now I was pissed.
After some cleanup I check up on the mp3 process and realize something isn’t right, file transfers are going really slowly. I flail around and decide ehh, it’s windows, reboot usually clears up these indsiduous issues. One reboot later I have a pc that….won’t boot? Wtf? Now I am fully angry, the technology is collapsing around me.
An hour of digging later, I conclude that one of the drives on the system, a 120gb maxtor, is on death’s door. How do I conclude this? It won’t reliably mount, and at one point during this process I discover that when it won’t mount, if I pick it up and drop it on my desk from an inch or so up, it mounts. I spend the rest of my Saturday trying to find drive space for about 80 gigs of stuff, (mostly mp3s), a process that’s constantly interrupted by system lockups and long silent ‘i’m just trying to mount this drive again’ pauses by the PC as it struggles to work with the dying drive.
To cap the day off, by Saturday night I can tell from my swelling glands and scratchy throat that I’m coming down with the cold that’s been making the rounds. Oh…and though I finally coax the tablet pc into running chkdsk, it still won’t shut down without locking up. Sigh.
I guess on a slightly positive note, the cold leaves me with Monday off, so there’s something
So, it’s time for a website redesign, a process which I will begin this weekend. Got a favorite website or a particular style you’re fond of? Post a link and maybe I’ll use it as inspiration as I hack together the new version of Daves-Place. One word of caution, I think I’m going to go full bore on the standards compliance this time around, meaning those few of you who are still showing up using Netscape 4 in my logs (you know who you are, mom need to get busy with the upgrades.
Masses of storage that is. Ok it’s a bad pun, but check out theXimeta NetDisk. I’m beginning to think this is the way I should move in terms of storage. Instead of stuffing multiple large capacity drives in each of my primary boxes (linux server, media box, gaming rig) I should move towards a networked attached storage model - one huge storage array and each machine sharing some partitioned space on that device. The Ximeta device isn’t quite right for that role, they max out at 160 gigs and at $300 cost a little too much, but the model is right -ethernet attached storage is clearly the way to go. What I really need is a drive array that uses Ximeta style firmware, ie a box I can stuff 800 gigs or so of drives into that sits on my network at the switch. Anyone know of such a device?
From the ‘I told you so’ department, check out how a recent review describes the emergence of RSS as a standard. I’m telling you, this is the next web browser - first email, then web browser, now this. If you haven’t already spent some time getting comfortable with an RSS aggregator, you’re missing out on a fabulous time saving tool. I also stumbled across another handy and recently updated list of available aggregators, though my opinions remain the same - FeedDemon on pc and Netwire News on OSX.
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