April 11, 2008
First Sign of the End Times
Posted by Berry at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2008
Made of Awesome!
The wonderful Computer History Museum, just down the road from me in the old SGI HQ building, has just received a difference engine.
A modern, WORKING reconstruction of the famous Babbage Difference Engine, constructed by The Science Museum in London (who have the original, too), funded by Nathan Myrhvold of Microsoft riches. It's supposed to go on display May 10 for a year, and then will sit in Nathan's living room.
How cool is THAT?
Posted by Berry at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2008
Fun Game
I'm just a casual computer gamer. I tend to like puzzle games, and recently found a good one. It's not super hard, but just hard enough to engage my interest for a while.
I downloaded the "Cradle of Rome" demo from Yahoo Games. The conceit is that you're trying to build Rome from scratch, and you do this by accumulating resources by playing levels. The levels are three-in-a-row tile-matching sort of like Bejeweled and such, but have some interesting twists like chained tiles that won't let other tiles fall until they're cleared.
Now like most Yahoo games demos it timed out after an hour of play. However, this demo has a "Well, OK, five more minutes" feature, where you can play for another 5 minutes after it expires. And then five more minutes after that. And so on.
And the part that makes it interesting is that each time it times out like that, IT SAVES YOUR GAME FOR YOU.
Now this sounds like a pain in the anatomy, but I've come to regard it as a feature. Rather than addictively sinking into it for hours, it has an automatic stop that makes me think "is there something better I could do?"
If yes, I do something else. If no, I play another 5 minutes.
I'm half tempted to buy it on general "I like, I pay" principals and then NOT install the full version.
Posted by Berry at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2008
Leopard
Well, I've installed Leopard on my work iMac. It's mostly nice.
Pro:
* Time machine ROCKS.
* Spaces is very cool. Not really new -- I had similar functionality in X Window Managers 15 years ago -- but cool.
Minus:
* Synergy broke, but I wound up downloading SynergyXM, which is a GUI/Preference pane wrapper. Docco is a bit inadequate, but once figured out this is actually better.
* X11 won't let me drag windows all the way onto my second display. This is annoying, but I'm working around it for now.
* xemacs broke. A quick "sudo port upgrade xemacs" failed until I installed the developers tools, and then just fixed everything.
* The wallpaper on my second display got reset.
Overall, it's good stuff.
(Friday Update) Installing an updated but unofficial X11 solved the second display problem.
Posted by Berry at 01:01 PM | Comments (2)