I’ve written about Keepass in the past, it’s a fantastic little tool for storing and generating all the multitudes of passwords and login credentials one must keep around in the web world. Last time I mentioned it I linked over to the Mac/Linux porting project, and I noticed today that this has moved and it’s gotten a new and much nicer home on the web. Check it out if you need a really good password manager. Free, open source, etc. The windows version can be found here.

Civilization is the second finest computer game ever made (X-Com being the finest). If you’ve never played it and you like strategy games, well, you’re missing out, and the barrier to entry just got even lower - go check out Vox Imperium, an impressive implementation of the core gameplay elements of the civilization series that runs right in your browser. Make sure you’re using a modern browser to check it out, as usual I’ll recommend Firefox.

For more than the 12th time, and the 2nd time in the past month, the check engine light has popped on in my Mazda3. This is the final straw for me with this car. It’s had this history of doing this since the day after I drove it off the lot. My warranty is up at 50k miles and after that it’s going to cost me a minimum of $85 to get it looked into, so I’m going to get something else before I hit that number, which at the present pace would be sometime in the next 7 months or so.

It’s really a shame. Other than this issue, and the fact that Mazda stubbornly refuses to release its roof rack kit in the US despite offering it in every other territory (including Canada), I’ve loved the car. And to be fair to the car only one of the check engine light incidents have been serious (a part related to the fuel system failed, but it was a sensor), but the fact that they can never make the issue go away for good is troubling and at this point I’ve lost faith with the car. I’m also not going to eat the cost of getting it looked into every time it pops on when my warranty expires.

The question becomes what to get next. I have three cars on my list, all 3 from the last time I went through this - the Honda Element (practical but not very fun to drive), a Subaru WRX sports wagon (less practical but still fun to drive), and…a Mazda 3, but possibly the Mazda Speed edition this time. It may seem nuts to go for a car that’s done me wrong, but the issue I am having with mine is an abberation. No one else is confronting this kind of trouble, I just have lousy luck.

My plan is to see what the dealership will do for me (ie, give me a great trade-in on this car because Mazda sold me a lemon) and if they work a decent deal with me I will go for it. If they won’t, right now I’m feeling like the Honda is the way to go. It’s cheaper than the WRX is and most importantly it doesn’t take premium fuel, the cost of which really adds up over the lifetime of a car. Of course if Mazda does right by me, who knows, maybe I will go for the premium guzzling Mazda3 speed edition because hey, I’m 40 this year and deserve my mid-life crisis car

Feel free to suggest alternative models to consider. At or under $30k, no German cars, and some element of the practical ‘place to stick Soolin’ are all factors which will limit my choices.

I’ve written about outliners a number of times here, and today I happened across another great resource. It’s another directory of available outlining software. This one is pretty extensive, has write-ups for most of the outliners it covers, and tries to cover all platforms, including PDA and web-based tools. It’s wiki based so in theory you can contribute to the resource, and it also has coverage of ‘antique’ outliners. Check it out of you’re a fan of this kind of tool.

If you grew up playing quarter munching arcade games in the 80’s chances are good you have a taste for a well designed shmup, and if you do, you owe it to yourself to check out Shoot the Core and most especially their database of available shmups, currently listing 950 games and growing all the time. My fave for today is APOCALYSPE: DEUS EX MACHINA, a robotron-inspired 8 way shooter.

Almost all of this stuff is for the PC, sorry mac/linux folk. A lot of it is also demo or commercial, but there are free and open source ones in there and some of the demos are very generous. Besides, some of them are well worth the purchase price.

Enjoy!

A computer adventure game, that is. The genre has mostly died off in the commercial space, but there are still plenty of fans, and Indy Gamer blog has pulled together a list of the top 20 free adventure games for folks to check out. Some of these rival the quality of commercial releases, and many of them are worth a look if you’re a fan. These are mostly PC only, sorry mac folk.

The indygamer blog is a pretty cool source of news on independent games development if you’re a games geek like me and such things interest you, by the by.

If you download video frequently you probably run into the problem of not being able to play back the downloaded file occasionally. Maybe the audio works but not the video, or the opposite, or maybe you get nothing. When that happens it’s time for forensics, and if you’re like me it also frequently means, ‘ehh, who has the time,’ and passing on watching the video. I noticed another tool you can use for analysis of these files today, mediainfo, a free, open source, somewhat cross platform (windows and linux) video forensics tool. Check it out if this is something you run into. It’s also useful if you frequently do transcoding so you can play files on your ipod, psp, gp2x or whatever.

When I was in NY, my monthly heating for my tiny little cottage was as high as $250 a month to feed the natural gas fueled stove that heated the place. Given this, I was afraid the heating bill for my 3 bedroom, uninsulated, no storm window, breezy 3 bedroom, turn of the century farm house were going to be north of $500. Happily it’s turned out that ~$300 is about as high as it’s going to get. Nothing to sneeze at but man, it’s a relief. Granted, I’ve had to make some sacrifices, sleeping in the living room for the last month and a half and sealing off the unheated (aside from by convection) upstairs rooms, maintaining a max 62 degree setting on the thermostat, and clothing myself in multiple layers to keep off the chill, but most of that I’m used to from my years in Maine anyway so all things considered this is great news.

So over on the superb boardgamegeek.com there’s a long list of free computer implementations of boardgames. This is a great resource and there’s plenty to choose from, from old classics like risk to more recent games like settlers of cataan. Many of these are windows only, but just as many are browser or java based and thus run on all platforms. A few I’ve played and enjoyed include Pioneers (a settlers of cataan clone), SpaceHulk-SP, Invade Earth (a risk 2210 AD clone), and Heroquest, an amazingly complete clone of the old Heroquest dungeon adventure game. There’s tons more at the link above and the chances are good that there’s a board or card game to your taste.

Remember being a kid and getting your big wheel going fast enough that you could pop the brake and spin out like mad? Check out the KMX Karts series of tadpole bicycles. I’ve been looking into getting a tadpole bike of late and found these folks while researching. There are some great quicktime .mov files of the bike in action offroad, jumping, and powersliding. The thing looks like an absolute blast, and the entry level model is actually really inexpensive relative to the normal $1200+ other tadpole bikes run. This is not what I’m going to buy for myself, I’m getting a touring/commuter bike, but man these things are tempting as a second bike.

So there is now a public beta for the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG. I signed up a couple of weeks ago and got my access key last week, and I spent a good bit of this weekend playing it. If you’re interested, you can sign up for your own on this page.

While it’s definitely still rough around the edges - there are periods of intense lag that I can only resolve by logging out, there are tons of little scripting errors which lead to ‘general error!’ messages while doing quests and investigating things, and the character animation seems off and somewhat disconnected from the world, it’s still very fun. It’s also cool just to be able to run around inside a 3D version of middle earth, and the graphics are very good, definitely a step above Worlds of Warcraft from a technical perspective. Art direction on the other hand, I’d still give a very hearty nod to WoW.

I can sum the gameplay up with: it’s a competent copy of WoW and the diku-derived gameplay that preceeded it. It doesn’t add much new to the experience but the setting and the competent execution make it worth checking out.

I guess the highest praise I can give it is this: I’ll be buying it, preordering in fact, to take advantage of the $9.99/month subscription offer if you preorder, versus $14.99 if you don’t.

You need a PC to play. If you decide to download the beta, do yourself a favor and use the torrent link. Their downloader stinks.

Check out System Information for Windows (SIW), a free, very handy little system information tool. It’s tiny and standalone (no installer needed), meaning you can tuck it on your thumb drive. Next time you’re at a friends house and need to know the specs of their machine, pop this up and you’ll have everything you need.

Originally spotted via downloadsquad.

Another in a long line of oddball health issue for me. This time around it’s a rotator cuff injury. It’s kind of funny - I’m pretty sure I sustained this by using the long version of the stick which I use to throw the ball for Soolin. In warmer months I use that thing for a half an hour twice a day and it’s done in my arm. I get sharp severe pains when I move my arm to certain points in an arc, and most especially if I try and lean on my right elbow or lean back on my elbows. It sucks. It also means I can’t use my rowing machine or weight bench. I made a trade for an elliptical trainer with a friend of mine to help deal, meanwhile though in the past 2 months I’ve gained ~7 pounds or so.

Meanwhile I have no way to throw the ball for Soolin. I’m going to stop at a sporting goods place on the way home and pick up a lacrosse stick and see if my arm can handle it.

So, we launched a week and a half ago. My time is starting to become my own again after about a month and a half of super busy, super stressed, work till 7 every night activity. I’d link to it but I don’t want to show up in the referrer logs and besides, without an account it mostly just looks like a website. What we launched was a heavily customized instance of drupal designed to serve as the core of the college’s new web content management system. The customization involved a lot of work around managing hierarchical web content and managing the permissions on that content on a very granular level. We also spent a lot of time on a collection of features designed to facilitate social networking amongst the alumni of the college. ~21k new accounts were added to college systems as part of the launch, and we’re storing a ton of data about these folks and providing them with a set of tools that allows them to choose who can see what information about them on a very granular level.

So. Overall I’d give us a ‘B.’ The launch went reasonably well considering we had absolutely no testing period, and considering that a week before launch I uncovered an ‘oops we crashed the database server and hosed the data’ bug that I thought was going to kill me.

This is just the first phase and there’s a lot more to come. Figure on me disappearing again into a hole of ‘too busy for anything else’ starting mid-late July as we launch services for academics at the college.

I love working in higher ed. The title of this piece was scrawled on the bathroom stall I was standing next to while washing my hands this morning. No ‘call so and so for a good time’ here, thank you very much.