Published on August 9, 2005
in Gaming.
The original Avalon Hill Dune boardgame is a well regarded and influential game still held up as a paragon of elegant game design to this day. It’s based on the novel, not the movie, and is long out of print in english, though you can buy a copy of the game in french for around $50. It turns out there’s a free network, hotseat, and pbem capable version of the game available for win32 from this site. If you’ve balked at paying upwards of $70 for your own copy or if you just want to play, this will fit the bill. If you’re interested in further details on the game itself check out the boardgamegeek.com link above, or this site, which has some history, a variety of downloads, and links to other Dune sites, including where to order the french version.
I’m fortunate enough to have scored a copy of the game in english years ago off of ebay for less than $20 due to a fluke - basically ebay’s systems went down for a day and I won the auction by default because no one could bid during the critical last few hours of the auction. I felt bad for the guy auctioning it off but elated that he abided by the terms of the auction. I’ve never had a chance to play it though. If anyone cares to challenge me in the computer version, throw down the gauntlet and we’ll see who deserves to control the spice.
I bought a really nice Dell widescreen monitor a couple of months ago, the Dell equivalent of the Apple Cinema Display 20″ (but for only $380, hence why I bought the Dell - they use the same flat panel from the same vendor, though apple puts it in a nicer case). All in all it’s been great, but I’ve had one recurring problem with it - it’s a royal pain to get games running at the correct resolution with the thing. Unlike CRT’s, LCD’s really only look good in their default resolution, and most games do not come with settings for the 16×10 aspect ratio and 1680×1050 resolution of my Dell. Enter widescreengamingforum.com, a wonderful community knowledge base of all things widescreen gaming. If you have a widescreen monitor and you’re struggling to get a game running correctly with it, there’s basically a 100% chance that this site knows the answer (though sadly the answer is simply ‘it’s not going to happen’ often enough).
Published on August 9, 2005
in General.
I’m back. Going to take me a couple of days to get back up to speed. I’ll post at greater length about the vacation when I upload the pictures from it, but in brief it was fantastic - 5 days of camping on the shores of Lake George NY. The sites are only accessible via boat and we had no campers adjacent to us for all but one night this year. The weather was almost perfect - One 1 hour thunderstorm was the only precipitation we got and for most of the days it was north of 85 and occasionally north of 90 degrees. Boating, swimming, snorkeling, cliff jumping, tubing - it was all on the agenda. It was so much fun we’re going to try and do it again the 2nd week of September.
I’ll post a couple of other things today as well.
Want to record video of stuff you’re doing on your computer, for training purposes or a presentation or whatever? Check out camstudio, a wonderful free little utility. You can record any region of the screen or the entire screen at once, and output to any video codec you have installed in your machine, or to a Flash swf file, and you can record voiceover or text annotations as well. This compares extremely well with the commercial alternatives. The only problems I’ve run into relate to the fact that I have multiple monitors attached to my machine. Well worth a download. We’re going to experiment with it for documentation of weblogging and image gallery usage for students at skidmore. They rarely read the documentation we write so we’re testing to see if they’ll watch the video clips instead.
Published on August 2, 2005
in General.
Combination of super busy at work and just about to leave on vacation. As of tomorrow I’m gone for a week, camping on Lake George. I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post as per usual, my backpackit site has like 40 things slated to go on the weblog. In my absence, check out the new photo galleries which I did finally manage to start catching up on.
Rogers Rock camping trip from early July, which has one of the best photos of Soolin ever taken (by Lisa Goldberg, not me)
Tube trip down the Batten Kill River (starting with the last photo on the first page and going on from there) - with pictures of Andrew’s new black lab pup Stan. Soolin swam for about 3 out of the 4 hours of the trip, her stamina amazes me.
A hike to the summit of peaked mountain. Beautful hike. Probably the best moment of it though was when Soolin ran up ahead of me. Suddenly I heard shrieking - I ran up to see what was what and a couple of folks were freaking out about the dog, the guy had toppled over into a creek in shock. They were from an urban area and when Soolin came running up over the crest of a hill they thought she was a bear attacking them (!!!). It was all I could do not to laugh, meanwhile all I was thinking was ‘I’m going to get sued!’ They ended up being cool about it though. Downside was Soolin spent the rest of the hike on a lead.
That’s it. I’m gone for a while and then back to an intensely busy work scene so this place is liable to be quiet for most of August.
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