A great development community has formed around the pumpkin studios game Warzone 2100. I actually bought this game back when it was originally released, and enjoyed it despite not being a big fan of the genre. Pumpkin Studios released the source code to the game and since then folks have been working on it. On April 1 they released version 2.06 and it’s worth checking out if you’re an RTS fan or just looking for something new and fun to tinker with. The game has a number of features that are still uncommon in modern RTS games, including the ability to develop custom vehicles made up of various components you research, a heavy emphasis on sensor systems and using them to coordinate attacks, and a focus on tactics more than strategy. The game has aged really well too, still looking acceptable despite being ~8 years old, and it has network play and an extensive single player campaign. It also has a really good user interface. It takes a little while to get used to but once it clicks you’ll find it a lot easier to understand than many RTS interfaces. The only downsides are that the original movies that were used to advance the plot in the single player campaign are not present (they’ve been replaced with text explaining what’s happening) and that the game was made back when 800×600 graphics were super high end, so if you crank up the resolution your units are very small and hard to distinguish - is that my artillery or my repair bot?

Anyway it’s a tiny download, it’s  available for PC and Linux, and a Macosx version is coming soon. One tip too - you can’t control the resolution in game, you have to use switches, so for example on my windows box my alias looks something like this:

"C:\Program Files\Warzone 2100_205_rc1\warzone2100.exe" --fullscreen --resolution 1680x1050

Ok so these aren’t technically podcasts, but for an absolute treasure trove of spoken word content, head on over to the Project Gutenberg Wiki, and use their filtering tools to find spoken word content. You can look at the full view, or filter on numerous criteria, so for example the Sci fi content (look for the speaker symbol adjacent to the title). The John Carter Warlord of Mars series for free? Count me in! Do note one issue however - this is all fan produced material and the quality can vary. Some readers are fantastic, others less so, and a couple of times I’ve run into folks who do a decent job but have one of those voices that just grates on you. Preview what you plan on grabbing before grabbing the whole thing is my advice.

So I’m not generally in the habit of making household cleaning recomendations, and anyone who has visited me over the years knows that I’m a bachelor and my house reflects that in the grand sense of the word, but man, the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is awesome. I was first clued into them because of the issue of hand grease accumulating on laptops and being difficult to remove. The Magic sponge does work wonders on that, but I’ve also discovered it’s great for other things, like cleaning off a greasy stovetop, scouring soap scum off of a bathtup, removing marks off of walls, and generally it can clean anything that I used to scrub and curse at. They’re not that expensive and they seem to work wonders - well worth trying the next time you have to clean up your stove if for no other reason.

Despite being skeptical that these sorts of things actually amount to much, I signed this ACLU petition that will be delivered to the signers’ respective congressional reps on June 26th as…call it a symbolic gesture. The way the neocons have been running roughshod over the constitution is appalling and anything to try and make it clear how unhappy this makes me seems worth trying. Consider doing so yourself, it takes only a moment.

Here’s a simple bit of flash based nostalgic blastemup fun for a friday - berzerk+robotron+smashtv+stylized graphics= Boxhead == fun.

I’ve mentioned handbrake in the past - it’s a great DVD ripping utility with an easy to use interface. Despite being easy to use you might still find this great tutorial on how to rip a DVD using it. It’s published on a mac site and uses Mac screenshots to demonstrate, but Handbrake is available on all platforms and the basic steps remain the same no matter which platform you’re on. Free, open source, cross platform, and easy to use.

An odd observation from me, but there’s a short article over on sciencedaily the gist of which is: wet your sponge and microwave it for 1 minute on high power to kill 99.99999% of the bacteria in it. A nice simple household tip - healthier dishwashing and no more smelly sponges will be the result.

This piece could have been written by me, and if you collected all my musing on type 2 diabetes over the past couple of years you’d have something pretty close to what’s covered in it, but it’s well worth a look for anyone interested in the issue or worried that their diet will make them susceptible to the disease. As I’ve harped about, diabetes is an epidemic in the west and there’s a growing body of evidence that excessive high fructose corn syrup is a/the significant contributing factor to this increased incidence. The linked article touches on this and other details.

So I’m cruising home from work on my bike on friday. I have a pannier with a shoulder strap now to hold my laptop and sundries. I take a sharp turn at speed, maybe 15 miles an hour, and intentionally lock the rear tire to make it skid out, which it does. As I finish the turn I go to apply power again and there is a horrendous clanging noise and I skid to a stop. The shoulder strap got sucked into the chain, which caused the plastic buckle to pop free. The plastic buckle got caught up on the spokes on the opposite side from the chain, making a perfect loop around the tire, wrenching off the bike computer sensor, destroying the expensive rubber dust protector grommet on the rear hub, bending the fender and fender mounting hardware, and generally making a nuisance of itself. It sucked! It took me a while to work it out of the bike. The good news is it doesn’t seem to have damaged the rim or spokes, which I was sure it had done at first based on how tightly it was compressed against the rim. The tires are inflated to 75psi (that’s no typo - I was surprised too), yet the laptop strap had compressed the rubber tire flat against the rim. The bad news is I have to bring the bike in to get the grommet replaced, which will take a while since the part has to be ordered from Germany. It also ripped off several bolts that hold the rear fender secure, so now it rattles like an old jalopy. I tried several hardware stores and Walmart on Saturday morning but had no luck. I’m going to try another tonight.

All in all a major bummer. It could have been much worse so I guess I should count my blessings and move on. I can’t ride it in the wet until I get that part from Germany either.

Bat slips out of batter’s hands and flies into the crowd. Crowd reacts.

So, this is pretty slick.  A coworker pointed out to me today that the folks who originally  made winamp have gone on to make a really slick little multi-track audio editing application, reaper which is a deal at $40 and free and fully functional until you pony up. I’m no expert in audio editing tools but it compares nicely to Audacity, which is what I’ve been using for my modest needs over the last couple of years. I’m having to do a good bit of screencast tutorial building at work and that led me to look for something better. Worth a look if you have a need for solid audio editing tools. Right now only the windows version is out but they promise an osx version shortly.

One of the classic 80’s arcade games, Tempest, has had innumerable remakes and riffs on the general concept over the years. Today’s fun link is a 2d take on the core Tempest gameplay elements - a grid, enemies that make their way down it towards you, and spikes that can block your shots and your ability to escape the level. Great graphics, decent sound, and nice tight fast paced gameplay. Check it out! (pc only, tiny download).

Wow, talk about an end to an era - Paizo, the publisher of Dragon and Dungeon magazine, has announced that they will cease publication shortly after at least a 30 year run. While I haven’t opened a Dragon magazine in at least 10 years, there was a period between jr and sr high when I anxiously awaited the latest issue’s arrival at my library, and I periodically campaigned with my mom to get me a subscription. She wasn’t having it since Dragon was always ridiculously expensive. Despite this I ended up with quite a collection of issues that I picked up over the years, and they’re still sitting in a crate amongst my game collection.

The Dungeons and Dragons brand is still going strong (they’re at version 3.0 and rumors of the announcement of version 4.0 abound), so it’s not clear why the magazines are being killed off. There are rumors that Wizards of the Coast is planning to build a paid online service, so maybe this is related to that. Or maybe in the age of the internet it’s about younger gamers not reading magazines about their hobby. Whatever the cause, it’s a  bit of a shame to see it fade into the sunset.

A word to the wise - at one point TSR released a CD ROM collection of the first several hundred issues of Dragon. After publication of the collection they discovered they had violated innumerable copyrights and had to pull the collection. It’s now a collector’s item, and should you ever happen to see it at yard sale, grab it. It’s easily worth $300. I mentally kick myself every time I reflect on this because I passed on picking it up for $30 on clearance at a Gamestop back when it was first published. Who knew!

Anyway, to Dragon and Dungeon I bid a fond adieu.

Check out this excellent Linux distribution family tree and timeline. It’s been making the rounds so chances are you’ve already run across it but this is so cool I couldn’t pass up mentioning it. I’m currently running the Debian-derived Ubuntu, but for years this site ran off of Redhat 4-5-6-7. For a good part of the Redhat years I tried to get going with Debian but always failed to get x up and running on my video cards. Knoppix was the first Debian-derived distro I could run, and I almost switched to it from Redhat at one point back in ~2003. Looking over that chart brings back a lot of memories, too, of me tinkering with all the different distros over the years trying to find the one true distro to rule them all.

Anyway, worth a look, Linux fan or no, just to get a sense of the history of it all.

If you’re a valve customer who’s paid for a game using their Steam content delivery system, be aware: once again Valve has been hacked, and this time it appears customer credit card information has been stolen. I’m pretty pissed off about this. I’m a valve customer myself, and you would have thought that they would have learned a lesson about the importance of strong network security after a hacker broke in a couple of years ago using trivial means and stole their source-code and released it online. But no, apparently they still have a cavalier attitude towards security despite having millions of customer credit cards. Making matters worse, their response to the issue has been abysmal - basically the community is outing them, otherwise they would not have said a word about it to date.

Anyway be aware. I’ll follow up as more details emerge, but it’s possible if you bought from them that your credit card is on the p2p networks or sold off to some russian crime syndicate or whatever.

[via joystiq] (and Tony who mentioned it to me yesterday)

If you’re a valve customer who’s paid for a game using their Steam content delivery system, be aware: once again Valve has been hacked, and this time it appears customer credit card information has been stolen. I’m pretty pissed off about this. I’m a valve customer myself, and you would have thought that they would have learned a lesson about the importance of strong network security after a hacker broke in a couple of years ago using trivial means and stole their source-code and released it online. But no, apparently they still have a cavalier attitude towards security despite having millions of customer credit cards. Making matters worse, their response to the issue has been abysmal - basically the community is outing them, otherwise they would not have said a word about it to date.

Anyway be aware. I’ll follow up as more details emerge, but it’s possible if you bought from them that your credit card is on the p2p networks or sold off to some russian crime syndicate or whatever.

[via joystiq] (and Tony who mentioned it to me yesterday)

I should have noted this earlier since I promised to do so. The former members of the Next Generation Online podcast, which was my favorite gaming podcast, have moved on to a new venture, the Game Theory Podcast. It’s been great so far, featuring an interview with a senior executive from each of the major console manufacturers. My earlier comments about the Next Gen podcast still apply, so rather than repeat them, I’ll just suggest you use the link above if you’re curious about it.

I’m a big fan of macromate’s Textmate text editor on OSX, it’s displaced Jedit as my primary text editor. Blogmates, a free new blogging extension for it, showed up in my RSS feeds today. Textmate already had a blogging extension (bundle in textmate parlance) but this is superior. It adds a control palette with several tools and a view into your blog’s recent posts etc. If you’re on mac this is worth a look.

Today’s the day - The Children of Hurin, a ‘lost’ work of JRR Tolkien, is available. Apparently this was a major unfinished work that JRR Tolkien spent a good piece of his life working on, and now one of his descendants has spent a good piece of their own life completing it. The pre-release buzz has been really good. You can get your own copy for around $15 using the link above. I’ll post a review after I finish it - of course I’ve had it on pre-order for months, given how influential Tolkien was in my early development.

…courtesy of 1up. Retro gaming is ‘in’ these days as each of the new consoles (Wii, 360 and PS3) offer download and play services which feature much content from earlier consoles. 1up has started keeping track of the weekly releases on these platforms plus on the Gametap service (something I’ll need to write about soon - I’m increasingly loving gametap and it’s well worth the $5/month I paid) with screenshots and brief writeups of each game. Check it out!