More goodness via Alice:
Alice came across a picture of herself in Second Life with her avatar hanging on the wall, by a player named always_black.
She then links to a story he wrote and calls it the best piece of gaming writing I ever did read.
And I agree. Go read it.
On the advice of two cow-orkers, who coincidentally had the same printer, I purchased a Canon PIXMA iP6000D today. (Canon has a crappy website, btw).
I, however, forgot to see if it has Linux drivers available. (It doesn’t).
It’s for the wife more than me, as she needed a color printer, and the sample 4×6 photo I saw at the office was good. I’ve printed out 8-10 4×6 photo’s after hooking it up, and it’s phenomenal. It’s amazing how far the technology has come. I printed off a bunch to hang in my cube at work. I’m quite interested in seeing how an 8×10 looks.
I’ve hooked it up to Kelly’s computer, and shared it over the network so I could print from my MCPC. I have a wireless Netgear print server around here somewhere, I’ll have to give that a go.
I’m annoyed about the Linux thing though. Now I have to transfer my pictures from my main box to my MCPC to print. But the printer does have a 7-in-1 card reader, so I can always just stick the memory card in if I want, though it looks like I’d have to press a bunch of buttons on the printer which doesn’t look the most user friendly way to do it. Ah well.
Almost a month ago Icculus announced in his .plan file he was porting a game called Second Life to Linux, and included 3 screenshots.
Second Life is a fascinating experiement in the MMO genre. In some ways made for developers, it lets you own land, create and trade various items, all with a built in content creation tool. From the What Is page:
It is a palette for creative self-expression like nothing you have ever seen. Jump in, find a sandbox, and start building.
Icculus’ timing was amazing, as Cory Doctorow, Copyfighter, EFF employee, and sci-fi author, was having a book release party in the game.
Already available for Mac OS X and Windows, I’m anxiously awaiting the Linux port to try this out.
The EFF, in celebration of their 15th anniversary, is sponsoring a Blog-a-thon.
I can’t say it any better than they did:
We want to hear about your “click moment” — the very first step you to took to stand up for your digital rights — whether it was blogging about an issue you care about, participating in a demonstration, writing your representatives, or getting involved with EFF. As a thank you, we’ve enlisted an independent panel of judges to choose from among your posts for “Most Inspirational,” “Most Humorous,” and “Best Overall.” At the end of the Blog-a-thon, we’ll announce the names of the three bloggers with the best posts on our website and in our weekly newsletter, EFFector. We’ll also publish the three best posts on our site and send the authors a blogging “kit” as an extra thank you: an EFF bloggers’ rights T-shirt, special EFF-branded blogger pajama pants, a pound of coffee, and a pair of fuzzy slippers.
I’ve been thinking about my story for the last few days since I first came across this. It will definitely be up by Aug. 2nd.
The trailer for V for Vendetta has been released. Available in standard Quicktime, or 1920×1280 HD in Quicktime 7 using the h.264 codec.
I had read the graphic novel over 10 years ago, and bought it and re-read it 3 weeks ago. I absolutely love the author, Alan Moore, and this particular story – though his books are 10x better than the movies that are turned out based on his source material, as he’s never been involved in any of the movies made from his books.
The imagery and themes seem very true to the comic book, though I’ve heard a few things about the movie that don’t ring true.
We’ll see – the Wachowski brothers adapted and produced it, and it stars Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman.
Alex just finished his Little League season. There was one particular mother who rode her son to no end. About halfway through the season, he snapped, and told her off publically during the middle of the game. She rode him about where he stood at the plate, his constant strikeouts (poor kid was stressed by her, there wasn’t any pressure there, really), and his fielding. During one game, after striking out for the second time, she pulled him off the bench and told him she was going to teach him how to bunt since he couldn’t get a hit, and practiced that until the inning ended and they had to take the field.
Now, I’m no perfect parent either – there is no question I could be more active, and practice with my son more, or offer better encouragement.
But then I read this story about a Coach who paid one of his players $25 to hit a disabled child in the head with a bat. This coach had two daughters on his T-ball team, and didn’t want to coach an 8 year old disabled child. (Via Bob Mould’s blog)
These poor children.
Via Slashdot, comes a story at the Guardian that the BBC’s free downloads of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s symphonies have become the most popular songs ever legally downloaded.
Amazing:
Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.
What does this teach? Free music works. And Classical has proved it – the music industry is amazed by it. And scared:
Not everyone was so positive. Some from the recording industry expressed concerns that the BBC was setting itself up as unfair competition in the recording market.
Mr Cosgrove said: “I would be worried if the BBC repeated the experiment. We would take an extremely dim view if it happened repeatedly.” But, he added: “It’s caused quite a bit of controversy – but it has also provided us with an amazing piece of free market research. I don’t think anyone had any idea in their wildest dreams that there would be this level of response. Yes, the downloads were free – but if charged at a commercial rate that would have been a huge amount of revenue.”
You know what music industry? Screw you. This music is in the public domain, and you haven’t served your market for offering classical music downloads as the article says. Once again, your arrogance has failed you.
Kudo’s to the BBC – They put on the concert, broadcast, and distributed it. And consumers listened and downloaded and the BBC gained customers.
And I was one of them, I downlaoded it.
Two Minneapolis Star Tribune writers have a back and forth discussionon what they like and don’t like about 89.3, The Current.
It’s an above average article, and while I agree with most of it, there are parts I disagree with, though it does give you a good feeling for the station as a whole.
JB: What I want from a radio station is a DJ I could talk music with. On the Current, I could definitely talk music with Mary Lucia and Bill DeVille — my two favorites. I loved the other day when Mary said, “I’m still loving this, and I’ll slap anyone who says otherwise. Here’s the Redwalls.” And I could talk with Mark Wheat and Jill Riley, who I think is really improving. But for Thorn [DJ Skroch], I think our conversation would have to be via e-mail.
CR: Ultimately, I don’t care what their personalities are; I care about what they play. Bill DeVille definitely gets my vote in that department. I did a road trip on July 4th and didn’t once put in a CD thanks to him. He played sets such as Boomtown Rats with Betty Serveert with Gram Parsons with one of those especially weird new White Stripes songs.
I installed a Netgear XE102 powerline to wireless adapter this morning to see if I could get my X-Box a better wireless signal.
Installation was a snap – I’m very imperssed how far powerline has come. Plug the powerline adapter into the wall, plug an ethernet cable into the same adapter in my den and into a switch. In my living room, I then plug in another adapter, and voila, instant wireless range extender. No setup, just works. And my X-Box went from poor to good signal quality (I’ll talk about my X-Box Media Center Extender experience in another post later).
Tied for the best experience with the installation, was the bright yellow business card I found in the Netgear box. With a big Netgear logo at the top, there is a paragraph of information underneath it that informs you that software used in building the product uses the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License. It also gives you a link to download the sourcecode on Netgear.com. (Ironic that a source code link directs you to an ASP page).
Bravo Netgear! Bravo for calling out that you use open source in a document external to the manual or just in a website like some of your competitors.
