I’ve had a paid GameTap account for a while now, and I’ve also been a fan of American McGee’s previous works, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Grimm games. I wasn’t disappointed.
If you don’t have GameTap, you can sign up for a free account and play the first episode. I highly recommend you consider getting a paid GameTap account, though. It’s a great service with lots of great games.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-07 | Filed under: Tech and games | no responses
This was the most interesting thing I’d read in a long time. The author obviously did a lot of research, and it’s very accurate; I don’t generally go into these sorts of articles (articles having to do with online/tech/internet related topics) expecting the writer to know more about the subject than I do, but that’s just what I got.
I have personal experience running forums, so I know that the one guaranteed way to get rid of trolls is to ignore them, and that’s essentially the conclusion the author came to. If someone goes to a Mac forum and posts a rant about how Windows is better than MacOS because “I can right click lolz” or something, and everyone ignores it, the troll will leave. If some idiot responds with a badly written, angry rebuttal, full of spelling errors (which is invariably what happens), that’s like setting out a feast for the troll.
Reading this almost made me want to write a story about these people. I found them very interesting, especially Fortuny.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-01 | Filed under: Other, Tech and games | no responses
I’ve started a new section of this site, called Talking in Circles Games. I’ve already released one game (interactive fiction), and I plan to release more in the future.
Honestly, I’m surprised it took me so long to do this. I’ve been making games on-and-off for a long time now. In elementary school I messed around with QBasic. In middle school I messed around with Visual Basic and Game Maker. In high school, Flash, Multimedia Fusion, then Python and C++. That whole time, however, I never actually finished a game. I came close a few times, but ultimately got tired of the project and moved on.
Currently I have a few projects I’m working on, including more (longer) IF works, and a graphical point-and-click adventure game I’ve been toying with for months. I plan to release them all as freeware, or even GPL where applicable and useful.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-06-17 | Filed under: Other, Tech and games | 6 responses
Yup, a Genius “MousePen 8×6.” I played with it for an hour or so in Photoshop. My first thought was that I wasted my money — the pen and tablet didn’t change the fact that I’m a crappy artist — but after I got the hang of it I began to like it. Sure, I bought the cheapest one I could find, and it skips around a bit, but it was well worth the 50$ I paid for it on Amazon. I can trace things fairly well now, I can draw some nice looking stick figures, and maybe one day I’ll get around to learning how to draw.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-06-14 | Filed under: Other, Tech and games | no responses
I just installed TinyXP on a system I’m building for a friend, and I was amazed. I chose the “BARE” install without IE/OE/WMP, and it worked like a charm. It booted very quickly, and the ram usage was just above 70mb total!
The idea behind TinyXP is that most of the useless junk that comes with XP is stripped out, leaving only the bare essentials. This leaves you with a functional OS that’s much smaller and faster than the original bulky XP.
Sure, it’s piracy (since you’re downloading a hacked XP ISO that bypasses registration), but I actually own a legal copy of XP. That doesn’t make using TinyXP legal, but in my mind it makes it morally okay.
If you need a really light and fast OS with a tiny memory footprint that won’t get in your way, I highly recommend TinyXP.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-06-09 | Filed under: Tech and games | 7 responses
I run several websites, a few of which have user-generated content and have to deal with spam. Because of this, I’ve occasionally had to use CAPTCHAs. If you don’t know what they are, they’re the little images with letters/numbers in them that you need to reproduce to prove you aren’t a bot. They’re generally thought to be effective, but can be annoying to end users. The acronym stands for: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (awesome name, especially the reference to the Turing test).
CAPTCHAs are effective. There are rumors out that they’re now easily broken by spammers, but this isn’t really true. While very dedicated spammers can break simple CAPTCHAs, anything where letters connect or are connected with a shape/line should be plenty to foil 99% of spam/bot efforts. It isn’t the fact that CAPTCHAs are perfect (they aren’t), but that they are good enough to eliminate the vast majority of bots.
They can be very annoying, however. The most extreme example I can think of is Rapidshare’s new system, which I generally have to try at least twice before getting right. This seriously pisses me off, and I’m not the only one.
That’s an extreme example, of course, and it’s also overkill.
This sort of thing is all most sites need:
It’s simple and effective. It’s breakable, under extreme conditions, but it’s a good compromise between the blocking of spammers and the annoyance of users.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-05-18 | Filed under: Tech and games | no responses
I got my invitation to be a beta tester for [true knowledge], and I’ve been playing around with it. Basially, it’s a search engine that can handle natural language search queries, and find relevant information even if the specific terms used in the search query aren’t found. This is a fascinating technology that I wish I knew more about, but from what I understand, [true knowledge] makes use of existing databases of knowledge, like Wikipedia and the CIA Factbook, as well as searches of indexed web pages, and it searches through this data to find information that answers the user’s query. The engine attempts to manage this by interpreting or “understanding” the user’s search query.
So far, I’m very impressed. It handled the easy stuff well, and even if it fails, it does so gracefully (gives you relevant search results, sometimes takes a guess). Since it’s in private beta right now and you can’t go try it yourself, you’ll have to settle for this video:
Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-05-14 | Filed under: Tech and games | 2 responses
