http://www.nintendo.com/g…-Game-0000-1849
I have in my hand what promises to be the greatest four player experience (involving the Gamecube and Gameboy Advance consoles) since Crystal Chronicles. It is here; we must play!
So when is good? Saturday works for me.
http://news.independent.c…ticle337149.ece
Blurb:
The intervention by News Corp in the traditionally open-access world of the web – in particular the alteration of personal user profiles – provoked a storm of angry posts in online “blogs”.
Who couldn’t see this coming when News Corp bought (the now ironically named) MySpace? Will this sort of thing create a backlash against efforts like Gmail, livejournal, and blogger? When will people say “this is my information!” or “this is our information!”.
http://www.greaterunion.c….asp?movie=5934
I saw Chicken Little in Digital 3D at Innaloo with Heidi and Phil. The movie itself was quite amusing with a hole swag of popular culture references (which may make it fairly dated in future), but I was (initially) more interested to see how the 3D presentation worked out.
When buying the tickets we had to pay an extra $2 each and were given cheesy polarised glasses (Gosh, they look just like Chicken Little’s!). These glasses worked incredibly well. We sat in the most central seats we could find (not difficult as the cinema was nearly empty) and the 3D was very clear. Another thing that stood out was the clarity of the image (probably due to the digital projection).
Recommended viewing. The biggest shortcoming of the film (to me) was the characterisation of the father. His personality seemed inconsistent with his apparant past.
I kept the polarised glasses to play around with. I figure that I can try to polarise projected light with one pair and view it with another. Maybe if I get a couple of flashlights and print stereo images onto transparent film…
Update: uploaded photo.
http://palgn.com.au/artic…65905a7e95318d2
Aren’t a bunch of these games available for less money on other platforms (especially PC)?
I guess like petrol prices, it feels a little weird to see 3 figures. I really hope this isn’t a trend for the entire market. Videogames already seem overpriced to me (especially compared to other media such as music and video).
On the other hand, if this is a trend it might expand the smaller (cheaper) games market. Personally I’d be more inclined to put down $20 for a racing game with 4-5 good levels than $100 for a racing game with a hundred mediocre levels. I’d also prefer to spend $60 for a good handheld game than $120 for a good television console game.
http://www.livejournal.co…games/8935.html
Thanks to Michael for this link. It’s a brief guide to making and selling a “casual game” from John Passfield of Krome Studios fame. My favorite bit is when he writes:
The game was now available for people to buy. And buy they have!
Inspirational stuff! Probably because it includes the nitty-gritty which makes it feel possible.
http://www.brother.com.au…SubCategoryID=3
I was looking for a cheap laser printer that “just works” under Linux (Ubuntu). I happened to be at Officeworks and saw the Brother HL-2040 on sale for $AU149. A flyer for it mentioned Linux support (via driver download) so I figured I could return it if it didn’t work at all. The only shortcoming was that the Linux driver only supports up to 600dpi (also clearly mentioned on the flyer).
Setup was very straight-forward and the instruction manual was surprisingly useful. Unpack, shake drum to distribute toner, insert drum, insert paper, plugin, press the “GO” button, watch Brother test page get printed.
Now to see if it works from Ubuntu. “System > Administration > Printing”, “New Printer”, “Use another printer by specifying a port:”, “USB printer #1”, “Brother”, (now the tricky bit) “HL-5140”, just use the recommended driver, HL-5140 shows up in the Printers window, double-click, “Printer > Print test page”, watch Ubuntu test page get printed.
The tricky bit was finding the correct driver. The HL-2040 wasn’t listed in the printer selection dialogue, so I did a quick google to find a compatible printer driver. Got all the info I needed in a reply to a post on Rachel’s Knowledge Base
Conclusion: Cheap, easy to set up, works, quiet. Limited to 600dpi, but what do I care? Recommended.
Update: Downgraded to Recommended (from Highly Recommended). Printing is normal volume (not super-quiet) and the the “economy” modes don’t seem to work under Linux. Excellent value at $149 though.
This inkjet printer is irritating me. It probably hasn’t been used for a year and the print heads are all clogged up. I’ll be doing a lot of printing over the next few weeks, so I would get something new provided it didn’t require too much time/effort.
Anyone have recommendations for a cheap (< $AU400) B&W laser printer that works well under Linux? Shopbot was a good starting point, but doesn’t give much user experience. I was thinking of a Samsung.
Update: I think that I’ll get the Samsung ML-2250.
Update: I just picked up a Brother HL-2040 from Officeworks for $AU149. I was there to get some folders and it was cheap. They mentioned Linux support on the data sheet; I’ll find out I guess.
Well, not really; I’m officially on leave. However, today was my last day at ViSLAB and it feels a little odd to be heading back to Perth after just one year.
Read all about it on my work blog.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I’m up to chapter 6 of “Manna”, an online book by Marshal Brian, the founder of How Stuff Works. It’s quite an interesting view of a future dominated by robots and shaped by a human greed and (conversely) ideology.
Recommended reading, thus far.
I needed something to backup my thesis and collected reference papers (just in case something happens to them during the move back to Perth). I considered getting a DVD writer, a flash-based MP3 player, or a portable HDD.
I wanted something that I could use to move stuff from place to play, so a DVD writer wasn’t really convenient. I didn’t think that I would use (any of) the extra features of the flash-based MP3 player and storage was fairly limited. So it was down to the Seagate 5GB Pocket Drive and a 20GB Pocket Drive from Dick Smith. Since the 20GB was only AU$20 more (at AU$197) I decided that it was much better “bang for buck”.
Here are some photos of the unit with size comparison to standard (issue if you were in the US Airforce in the 80s) items:
Anyhow, after I got the 20GB portable HDD I connected it to my machine (running Ubuntu) and expected it to “just work”… nothing happened. It wasn’t formatted, so I found the where plugdev connected the device:
ls -la /dev/* | grep plugdev
I created a few partitions (one for Linux-only and one for Windows-also) using fdisk. The partition table now looks like this:
Disk /dev/sdb: 20.0 GB, 20000268288 bytes 64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 19073 cylinders Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 4769 4883440 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 4770 19073 14647296 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Finally I formatted the partitions to make them usable:
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 sudo mkdosfs -F32 /dev/sdb2
Updated: fixed mkdosfs command (thanks Steve!)