Now this is sweet. The old classic boardgame Axis and Allies, developed in java for all platforms. Anyone care to take me on? You have to be russia 
Kidding aside I would love to try this if anyone is up for a game.
Archive for January, 2004
I exercise for about an hour 6 days a week. Usually I watch tv while I’m on the treadmill. Sometimes I play videogames. It’s possible I will be able to combine these activities shortly since a clever company appears to have invented the perfect exercise machine. It goes for about $600 and will hook up to my ps2. I hope sears carries these; I’ll be on the lookout for them so I can try one out. If it works in theory I can replace the weightlifting portion of my exercise with 20 minutes of Gran Turismo 3. Who says convergence is a meaningless buzzword!
I keep forgetting to mention that I put up images from my trip to Seattle a couple of weeks ago. You can check them out in the image gallery. For some reason I took a host of images of the Seattle zoo and not many of the family, but there’s some interesting pics and as a bonus the world’s blurriest graduation photo ever. There’s also a few cool pics of our hike up Tiger Mountain and various shots of Seattle. So, check em out if you’re interested, and of course witty comments are encouraged.
Lest anyone think I’ve forgotten to finish the redesign, or am finished and left it in a state of ’somewhat suck;’ I’m still working on it. No need to email me more reminders This weekend is a 3-day weekend so I’ll be spending some time on it. One of the things I’m going to add is more pictures to the randomly cycling ones on the top right - if you have something you’d like to suggest, send it along or post an url and I’ll get it in there.
Tomorrow is the day. After months of rumors, speculation, anxiety, and the departure of my boss (who I really liked), tomorrow we find out the reorg plan for IT here at Bowdoin, and which of us still have jobs after all is said and done. I’m very confident that I’ve made the cut since I was asked to re-think my job title and submit an updated one earlier this week, but I’m still uneasy. Partly because change is always difficult and it’s human nature to avoid it, and partly because some of the management and responsibility changes could go badly for me. So. Wish me luck. Tomorrow at 3 P.M. I’ll find out what the deal is.
I’ve mentioned RSS readers and FeedDemon specifically several times here. It’s gone gold and is now commercially available. If you’re running windows this is the by far the best RSS reader at present - go grab yourself a copy. It’s well worth the $30 price. There’s also a 30 day demo so you can get a feel for how it works before comitting to the purchase. As usual, for mac users I’ll point out that Ranchero’s Netwire news is superb. And for everyone I’ll once again chant: get with the program, RSS is a just vastly superior way to conduct your daily net surf. Once you’ve gotten used to it you”’ never switch back
Check out this excellent hi rez panorama of mars that folks have put together from the photos the new mars mission is sending back. Cool stuff, even if the place looks pretty damned inhospitable. You’ll need to have the quicktime plugin installed to view this.
Take a moment to look over This explanation of ‘Peak Oil,’ the moment in time when we have reached maximum efficiency in the production of oil, and what might happen afterwards. While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the assumptions in the piece, it is thought provoking. It also provides possible insight into the ‘lets get a foothold in the middle east’ policy we seem to be following these days.
Check out this 3d visualization tool. It allows you to explore xml datasets in 3d. It’s very similar to touchgraph’s cool java-based tool, only nicer looking but with less functionality. As a first pass though it shows great promise, I hope they stick with it and fill out the feature set. We’ve experimented with toolsets like these, using them as navigation aids on projects like the Romantic Audiences Project.
Analysts are speculating that the price of HDTV sets are going to drop in price faster than had been expected, largely due to new technology Intel is bringing to market this year. This is cool news, I had been planning on getting an HDTV set this year; competiton and an alternative to DLP sets are both welcome. You can read all the details if you’re interested, if not, just keep an eye out for LCOS-based televisions this summer.
Check out this < a href="http://www.empiresmod.com/index.php">excellent new mod for battlefield 1942. It mixes realtime strategy play with the fps action of bf1942, and they’ve managed to make destructable buildings, something I didn’t think could be done with the bf engine. Well worth checking out despite some first-release glitches.
A word of warning - don’t buy keyboard/mouse products from Gyration. They make a line of radio frequency keyboards and mice with 30-100 foot ranges depending on the model. I bought one to work with my living room home theater pc and man what a piece of crap. For $100, I got a keyboard that would only intermittently connect to the base station and a mouse that for the first 2 days completely refused to work. The mouse did eventually start working automagically one morning, and I did get the keyboard to finally connect to its base station, but even when it was connected and 3 inches from the base, it would miss literally 1/3 of the key presses. The thing was completely useless. Fortunately Staples let me exhange it for a Logitech. It doesn’t have anywhere near the supposed range of the Gyration, but the thing actually worked right out of the box.
Subsequent research on various htpc forums has shown me that while some folks are very happy with their Gyration products, there are also a lot of folks like me who have had or are having nothing but problems with their products. My advice? Stay far away.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to score an IBM versapoint or Slitek Airboard off of ebay. They’re cult favorites so it’s pretty competitive bidding on them, though it does look like I will be able to get one for less than I initially paid for the Gyration.
MAN is it cold here. Today we hit a chilly high of -19 degrees, and it’s possible we will hit -40 tonight. This is the coldest I can remember it being in the last 5-6 years, and it’s possible we’ll break the all-time record tonight. A pipe is frozen in my house because of this, and my saturn’s heater can’t keep up with the cold. I let it warm up for 15 minutes or so before setting off, but by the time I get on the highway the engine temperature is down from where it started during the warmup. At least it’s starting though. This is projected to last through the end of next week right now, though we’ll get a brief respite on Sunday. I feel very sorry for the Patriots and Titans, who play tomorrow. If they’re lucky it will hit 0
There’s a new bit torrent client available on sourceforge called azureus. It’s fantastic. It’s the first client to have a really decent GUI, plus they’ve added a number of very excellent features, including built-in irc chat, personal torrent serving, extensive monitoring tools (those alone make the thing worth grabbing) and a novel scheme to help make the leechers suffer for their greed. My advice? Grab this stat, then wander over to sharingthegroove.org and get yourself some (legal) killer live music. Or head over to file rush and get the latest game demos, or at least use it the next time you’re trying to score some demo and you don’t want to wait on fileplanet for 45 minutes hoping your turn will come up. Or maybe tv is your thing, if so check out sites like digital distractions or tvtorrents.com - who needs a vcr when there are sites like this?
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to torrents, but hopefully it’s enough to get people started.
One of my new year’s resolutions might be obvious from the state of this website - I’m resolved to posting more frequently and in a more organized fashion to the site. The redesign was the first step along that path, as I keep mentioning there’s more to come.
The second one is even less interesting - I have a very wierd diet. I’ve come to rely entirely too much on cheese as a source of nutrition so I’ve resolved to eat at least half as much cheese as I have been. I haven’t quite figured out what to replace it with yet so it’s been a struggle so far but I’m sticking to it. Anyone have a suggestion for a good, healthy source of protein to replace the cheese with? Please don’t mention nuts, I am eating enough almonds for 10 people.
Now this little number would be extremely useful. Imagine being able to share usb peripherals between many machines easily. As long as this requires no software on the client machines, this is a perfect solution. No word on price or specific technical details but I will be keeping my eyes on this one; I need a way to share a laser printer amongst linux and windows desktops. I hope it’s in the $50 range.
I happened across a notable quote today that I first encountered in college. It’s from Tom Robbins, and it goes like this:
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
I love that line, being playful, rebellious, and hopelessly immature myself
I found it on the sometimes amusing quotationspage.com
I’ve mentioned a few times how I think it’s like that over the next 5-10 years LEDs will come to replace the incandescent bulb in most uses. The New York Times has a pretty good article that covers the basics on how this transition will take place and why. An interesting tidbit - this has the potential to cut your electricity bill in half. Worth a read if the subject interests you. Note that you probably need a (free) account on nytimes.com to use this link.
Suspect that someone besides you is using your wireless access point? You might find airsnare handy. It’s the only free windows program I’ve come across that seems worthy in this category.
Do you find window’s search feature to be a slow, useless piece of crap? I definitely do. Give locate a try, for simple file searches on the system it’s super fast and there’s none of the useless interface clutter one finds in the MS search function. It doesn’t search the contents of documents the way the MS one does - it’s a straight port of the unix locate function - but the windows function is to slow to bother with anyway so you lose nothing by making the switch. There’s something to be said for small, elegant code.
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