Just a head’s up - tomorrow, Thursday the 15th, the server is going down. I will be down at least a week and possibly even longer. This website and its domains, as well as the other services running here, will be unavailable while the server is down. Wish me luck in the move and hopefully the server restart will go smoothly

I’m moving my household to Greenfield Center NY starting this coming Friday afternoon, the 16th of July. As a result metamusing.net will be going down for at least several days and possibly for as long as a couple of weeks as I relocate the server that runs this site and get internet access up and running at my new house. Keep your bookmarks - either:

daves-place.dyndns.org

or:

www.metamusing.net

will be back up and running by the end of July, geek gods willing.

Check out Piecepack.org. Some clever boardgaming fans have designed a set of universal boardgaming components you can print out on your inkjet printer, and then held a series of design contests for games that use the components. There’s also a wiki that lists all the games available for the system as well as hosting a ton of other info. It’s all free - the only requirement is a printer and some toner or ink, and some friends to play with. If you’re not the type to spend the time to make up your own pieces, you can even buy preprinted sets and even sets made out of wood.

Why do such a thing? To broadcast MP3’s to your home stereo, for one. Or for the sheer geek joy of it Anyway, check out the Aurius, which is only $50, relatively inexpensive for this kind of device. Oh, PC only, no Mac drivers for now.

Sick and tired of heading to some website from a link only to discover you need to register in order to access the material? No more! Check out Bugmenot.com, a handy database of working logins for tons of websites. How these folks are managing to not get sued I don’t know, and this is probably illegal to use in at least some states, but damn it’s still tempting. Let your concience be your guide

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of wikis these days, in fact there are 4 of them running on this site without most of you folks knowing it. Anyway, I stumbled across a very handy one today at LinuxQuestions.org. Check it out if you’re looking for a useful reference resource for linux, or just to see how a well managed wiki can work.

What if you were a huge fan of the original 2D Zelda games on the NES and SNES? What if you thought the 3d versions released on the N64, while good, betrayed the spirit of the original games? If you were an enterprising programmer, you’d get to work on a re-imagining of the games in 2D. Cool, cool retro gaming fun to be had here, though the game’s not yet fully developed there’s still enough available to get a sense of it. Check it out if you grew up developing claw hands on the original NES controller pad

I’ve talked about the exult project a couple of times here - the reverse engineering of the original Ultima 7 so that you can play it on modern machines, including Linux and OSX. It’s a fantastic project and anyone with even a passing interest in computer role playing games is well advised to check it out. Anyway, there has recently been a new project undertaken by many of the members from the original Exult group to port the Ultima 8 engine. Not only will this enable modern players to play another of the seminal RPG’s from the golden age of Origin, it will also enable (possibly anyway) folks to play the Crusader series of games. The project is still in its early stages, but there are some screenshots on the Pentagram website to wet your appetite.

I’ve been researching the masters program I want to proceed with, and as part of that I’ve started documenting all kinds of resources I intend to bring to bear when I begin the program. This led me tonotebook, a cool wiki-like desktop app. In functionality it mimics some of the basics of a wiki, but since it runs on the desktop it’s extremely easy to get up and running. If you find yourself keeping notes on tons of sticky notes all over the place, you might find this a useful organizational tool. It runs on all OS’s, though for MacOSX you’ll need to have X11 installed.