Yacoblog - Games/Software

Warfish bookmarklets

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:00:00 -0600

One thing that has long bothered me while playing warfish is that when creating a tournament (or joining one that lets you invite players), they don't have an option to select all players with zero boots on their record. Well, I finally decided to write a JavaScript bookmarklet to accomplish this. If you drag the one or both of the links below into your bookmarks, when playing warfish and inviting players, if you click these bookmarks all of the players with zero boots (or less than 3) will be selected. I know most of my readers won't care about this, but I wanted to post it here for future reference. Warfish: 0 boots Warfish: >3 boots

Super Mario Live

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 19:23:00 -0600

This video is one of the BEST EVER!!! This game is how I spent a pretty large portion of my teenage years...sigh. Those were the days.

Xbox 360 is unstable

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 10:53:00 -0600

There are a lot of reports of crashes in various games in the new Xbox 360. One Xbox fan site even has a poll up asking, "Is your Xbox 360 defected or does it work just fine?". Currently 269 people have voted and 14% say their Xbox is defective. This is NOT a scientific poll because it would be very easy for sony/nintendo fans to pollute the results. However, there are a few folks that have posted videos/photos of their Xbox crashing. So the problem appears to be real, and can I just say that I'm not surprised? ;)

Xbox 360

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:33:00 -0600

I just read in John C. Dvorak's column that the new Xbox will have media capabilities (music, photos, movies, etc.), but will only work if you have a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC on your local network (if you have one). So the mod trend will continue. The current Xbox has an active community of people that buys and/or creates chips/software to modify how the Xbox works. The most popular mods are the ones that do what is mentioned in my first paragraph, except without the Media Center requirement. How long will it be before someone ports their current Xbox mod to the 360? Of course, Microsoft does all they can to shut down these 3rd party mods. They are stupid for doing so, but they do. I think Lego is much smarter in their approach to the situation: Allow the innovators to improve your product, and you will sell more product. And it doesn't cost you a dime!

Real player makes my head explode

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 10:19:00 -0600

I used to be a huge fan of real player, back when it was the king of the hill. They always had quick releases, and each release made streaming media faster and of higher quality. But, over the last few years, their aggressive marketing strategies have really bothered me. I hate that an installation of real player comes with a bunch of extra crap. Shortcuts all over the place, auto starting apps., etc.

I realize that if Real didn't market their product like this, Real player would be marginalized even more by Microsoft's monopolistic practices (with windows media player). I mean, let's face it. When was the last time you went to a site that required real player? It almost never happens anymore.
Well, I installed real player the other day, and yesterday I was greeted with the 'Real message center', or something like that. Normally I'd just remove it from my startup and go on. But this time I was very upset because the message center announced that I could get the SI swimsuit issue. Real, if you are listening (yeah right), please stop these aggressive adware moves!

Remove OpenOffice.org's annoying prompts

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 10:01:00 -0600

I use OpenOffice.org for 2 reasons. 1. I don't own Microsoft Office 2. I use Linux (most important reason, of course :)).
Did you ever want to get rid of those "Saving in external formats" prompts that bug you when you save a word document? Well, today I finally was annoyed enough with this that I searched the web and found out how to banish those 'errors' forever! Click Tools->Options->Load/Save->General, and under document type, pick Text document and then for 'Always save as' pick the version of Word you want. It will throw another 'error' prompt about how dangerous this is (aren't they proud of their product??), but if you click ok, you won't be haunted by the 'external formats' ghosts anymore. I rarely save spreadsheets in Excel format, but I assume this procedure will work for those errors as well.

Image transparency in The Gimp

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 20:44:00 -0600

As many of you know, I've been a Linux desktop user for about a year now. The only real option for image editing in Linux is the Gimp, and its not a bad program at all. But it sure can be a pain to find some of those common functions you learned in other programs...one example is transparency. If I had Paint Shop Pro in Linux, I'd have that licked right quick, but alas its not available. So after much searching in the menus (its not there), I embarked on a web search. Its not intuitive at all, but here's an easy way I found in an online forum:
First add an alpha channel (Right click --> Layers --> Add Alpha Channel). Make sure you have the color you want transparent set to the background color, then select the background with either "Select by color" (Shift+O) or with the "magic wand" (Z). Cut out the selection (Ctrl+x). Make sure you save it as a file format that supports transparencey (png, gif, etc.)

2 Player Settlers of Catan

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 21:04:00 -0600

Are you a Settlers of Catan fan? I sure am. Today I found a 2 player variant of this addictive board game (normally 3-4 players). The credit goes to db3000 over at boardgamegeek.com (unfortunately he doesn't leave any contact info...). But here are the rules. My wife and I played them, and it was very fun. The problem with 2 player SoC is that a player can easily get too powerful, because the board is too wide open. This game variation adds a dummy player that can only build roads, and its much more fun. The rules were designed around the base game, but we played it with the Cities and Knights expansion, and it worked just fine.

NationStates

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 12:10:00 -0600

My wife pointed me to a new cool online game the other day called NationStates. Its a game that lets you create a government in their online virtual world, and make decisions on policy issues and such. Its become very popular, now hosting over 11,000 nations. Here's an example issue:
A group of emergency room doctors has petitioned the government to introduce mandatory organ donations.
1. "It's not as crazy as it sounds," says Dr. Hack Longfellow. "Every day, people die because we don't have the organs to save them. Well, that and widespread under-funding of the health system. But the point is, if the government allowed us to take organs from dead people, we could save hundreds of lives a year. And come on, it's not like dead people need them."
2. "You keep your hands off my organs!" says alarmed hospital patient Zeke Longfellow. "They are my organs, and I'll do with them what I like. The government has no right to my body."
Check out my nation.

Trillian

Sun, 21 Jul 2002 08:36:00 -0600

Is everybody out there using Trillian? If you are, good for you. If not, you'd better have a good reason not to be... :)
For those that don't know what I'm talking about, Trillian is an instant messaging client that 'talks' to all the major IM services. I have used others like it before (Odigo, Jabber), but Trillian is the first one I've used that doesn't have troubles connecting to the services, and that you don't have to have a separate account to use (like Odigo).
Trillian can connect you to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, and IRC. Then you have all of your buddies in the same chat client! And they don't even have to know that you aren't using the same client software to talk to them. Of course, you have to have an account with the service you are trying to connect to before you can chat with people on that service. That's not a problem though because they are all free, and Trillian has a create account button that sends you right to the correct website to get an account up and running.
Trillian's buddy list shows all your buddies in one window, and there is an icon next to each name that shows what service the buddy is using. You can group your buddies however you want, like by connection type, or the standard buddies, family, and work, or do custom groups.
Trillian is skinnable, and there are quite a few skins to chose from on their site. If you are into skinning, Trillian's interface is rendered with XML pages, which is very easy to set up. But of course, like all skinnable programs that I've seen, it takes a lot of work to get a skin done. The only complaint I have about the skins available for Trillian right now is that a lot of them lack the features I want. Trillian's skinning process lets creators add whatever controls they want, so people often leave out features that they never use. For example, I love to have a send button in the chat window. The reason is that I often copy and paste text to the chat window, and I then like to just hit the send button. I am not using the keyboard when I copy and paste, and if I don't have a send button, I have to reach down to hit enter. A minor inconvenience, but annoying nonetheless.
The last thing I want to talk about is Trillian's emoticons. I haven't used the other IM clients enough to remember how they work, but I know that AIM only has 16 emoticons to chose from. That has always been my biggest complaint about AIM. Well, most trillian skins have 4 or 5 times that ammount! I love that! I like to use emoticons to show emotion when I chat, and with AIM I always found myself saying, "I wish they had an emoticon for 'I'm sort of excited about that...'". Well with Trillian, I rarely can't find the emoticon for what I am trying to portay. The only dumb thing about Trillian's emoticons is that, like with everything else, the skin creator can put whatever emoticons in they want. Well, sometimes the emoticons you get with a skin are down right stupid. One I used even had 5 or 6 pictures of obscure people I don't even know. I found a program some guy wrote that lets you change the emoticon set for a skin, which takes about 1/2 hour to do. But after going to all the work, it didn't work. In fact, it broke the skin I was using, and I had to change the .ini file for Trillian to show a different skin before I could even load Trillian again.
In closing, I must reiterate that you have to go get Trillian, if you are an IMer at all. Even if you only use one IM service, Trillian is the coolest client out there and is worth replacing whatever client you are using at the moment.

PHP 4.2.1 and Apache 2.0.x

Wed, 29 May 2002 10:25:00 -0600

I had an adventure this morning to get these two programs to work together. I found documentation on the Internet that explained how to get PHP 4.2.0 to work with Apache 2.0, so I figured I'd try it out.
The problem I ran into was that I was supposed to add a line to apache's loadmodule section in the httpd.conf file. I was supposed to point to c:\php\experimental\apache2filter.dll for the php4_module, but this file didn't exist. I checked in the PHP zip file I downloaded to make sure it hadn't somehow been missed in the unzip process, but it wasn't there either.
To make a long story short, I downloaded the archive for PHP 4.2.0 (from php's website, in the 'archeological section'), and it had apache2filter.dll (along with a few other experimental dlls). After some more configuration, I finally had PHP up and running with Apache.

SpamMotel

Sat, 25 May 2002 10:54:00 -0600

I want to reaffirm my belief that Spam Motel is an Awesome service! This is a service that really lets you take control of your email address, blocking all spam. Now, it won't do anything for existing spam you are already getting. In other words, if your email address is already on a bunch of bulk email lists out there, Spam Motel won't help at all. But for any future email address communications (giving out your email address), you will be in complete control.
What it does is let you make a new email address for every service or website that requires an email address. All email going to that address (an @spammotel.com address) will be forwarded to your real email address. The beauty of it is that you can also attach information to that address, like "this is from classmates.com". Then when you have 50 or so @spammotel.com addresses on your account, and you get emails forwarded to your real address, you will ALWAYS know who originally was given each address.
So, when some evil website sells your address, you will know exactly who did it, and then you can go delete that address and flame the heck out of them. You also have the option of putting a filter on that address (it works best if you do it in your email client) so that you will never get email through that address unless it comes from the original source.
Once again, I LOVE this service! Its completely free, and it has many cool tools. One is a little client that you can run within Windows to create a new address. Another cool feature is your web based account manager that lets you see all your email addresses (the @spammotel.com ones), and see stats for each one. You can add/remove addresses at will from within your account manager.
This service is still a little buggy, but it has no problems that you can't work around pretty easily. I have sent emails to the owner numerous times, and received a response within 2 or 3 days.
So, you no longer have to use the "this is my spam email address" approach anymore. Because that approach works, but you really have no control over that 'spam' address. Once it gets out, into evil spammer's hands, the game is over. You will always be wading through spam, unless you get a spammotel.com account.