Since November 2009 I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 with a bunch of online friends and while the game is not without its problems, I have absolutely fallen in love with its party and matchmaking system. It’s great to be able to just hook up with a bunch of friends and not have to concern [...]
This entertaining illustration accompanied the 1998 San Francisco Chronicle article The Penguin That Roared by David Einstein. This was the same year the term “open source” was introduced by Bruce Perens et al (Eric Raymond). Note the incorrect usage of the term “freeware”.
Collaborative software and its uses is one of the areas I’m personally quite interested in. Have you heard of real-time collaborative editors?
I’ve experimented with real-time collaborative text editors going back to at least 2006 (starting with MoonEdit). This was precisely the reason I was not impressed by Google Doc’s initial concurrent editing functionality, even though [...]
The picture below is of a OSP DD-502 electronic drum kit which is demonstrated in a video review by Your Sound Shop and is descriibed as “an outstanding kit providing excellent quality at an entry level price”.
However, before I’d go off and buy a particular drum kit I’d be sure to do my research (a [...]
A little bit more than a week ago I was at a friend’s place and for his birthday he had been given the video game Guitar Hero including a guitar controller.
Up until that day I had been a bit reluctant to actually pick up the guitar and play the game out of fear for “looking [...]
This is closing credits theme (also referred to as the main theme) from the movie Enemy of the State, originally composed by Trevor Rabin and Harry Gregson-Williams, played by Gustavo Vieira using a Roland XP-80 keyboard with an extra Orchestral Soundboard and recorded/mixed using its build-in sequencer.
Yesterday evening Canvas/Panorama broadcasted the VPRO/Tegenlicht documentary “De Ijsland-ervaring” (The Iceland-experience).
The creators of the documentary travel to Iceland to try and answer the question: What happened? An economist, a philosopher, a comedian, a young activist, a fisherman and a coffehouse owner answer the question in their own way.
They also interview Eva Joly who, at the [...]
I got a bit annoyed with NoScript last week due to the continous white-listing while randomly surfing the web, so I reluctingly decided to pick the dangerous Allow Scripts Globally option. However, this has introduced me to an annoyance far greater and that is: websites overriding copy/paste functionalty using JavaScript.
Yes, this is actually possible and [...]
I wanted to comment that I don’t think it’s entirely fair that the commentators from ESPN in the video below completely neglect to notice or mention that the BYU players involved also didn’t quite play by the books.
If you’ll look closely you’ll notice that Carly Pain from BYU elbows Elizabeth Lambert in the chest, though [...]
Apart from the fact that CNN’s video site just isn’t very interesting (for now I won’t go into reasons why), it also has a few minor issues that combined make for a genuine usability disaster.
————————————————————————————————————-
Problem #1: When a video is done playing, all player functionality is disabled and after a few seconds the player automatically [...]
I stumbled on this video about the leasing by solar companies of solar panels in California while reading an interesting article about Dave Chameides (also known as Sustainable Dave) and his year long experiment to figure out what things one can do to help the environment without drastically changing your entire lifestyle (basically, amass less [...]
From watching videos of crashes in Race Driver GRID I went to watching videos of real-life crashes. The one below is not exactly a spectacular crash, but the whole ordeal that follows is quite interesting nonetheless.
After installing the Karmic beta (more on that later) and subsequently reinstalling Jaunty, all of a sudden I’m having some odd problems with my multi-monitor setup that I did not have before. That last point is what makes it so annoying.
This despite the fact that I personally haven’t touched anything else. I’m using the [...]
A few days ago I bought the first Assassin’s Creed. Overall it’s a fantastic sandbox style game, but most of all it’s absolutely beautiful. However, it fell well short of what it could have been, playing it one could really see that it had a lot more potential.
The major reasons for falling short were:
The investigations [...]
I was browsing the website of the Computer Graphics Society and came across a behinds the scenes article on the animation movie 9. The movie appeals to me quite a bit as it combines two of my favorite subjects, computer-generated imagery (specifically movies) and the end of mankind as we know it. I’ll put it [...]
I went from researching computer graphics (more on that later) to pure unadulterated procrastination by watching a bunch of This Week in YouTube episodes from Mahalo Daily.
In one of these episodes they featured footage of a woman attacking a guy on a bus, it wasn’t really much of a fight as the guy could easily [...]
A contributor on the RaceSimCentral (RSC) forums by the nickname of HighGear_IceMan has posted an extensive series of comparisons on the evolution of graphics in some of the most popular racing games:
Screamer, Moto Racer, Ford Racing and Test Drive Off Road
Psygnosis F1, Lankhor F1 and NASCAR Racing
V-Rally, Sega Rally and Rally Championship
ISI/EA F1, Ubisoft [...]
I recently bought GRID, the latest sequel in the Race Driver series by Codemasters. It’s a stunning and also quite fun arcade-ish racing game.
The good:
Stunning graphics
Awesome damage modeling system
Flashbacks (the ability to go back in time)
The little indicator that indicates your chances of making the next turn (yellow, orange, red) — though one could argue [...]