Kudos to gametap on version 3.0

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Gametap released their version 3.0 client yesterday and revealed a host of new services, including a free client which gives access to a set number of games each month for free to anyone. It’s all accessible via their website and is definitely worth checking out if you’re a PC gamer. I subscribed several months ago and while I wish they would provide better access to the .ini files of the games they install, and come up with a way to allow the installation of mods and patches, overall it’s a fantastic bargain. For about $80 a year I get access to over 1000 games ranging from classic arcade games from the 80’s to stuff released within a few months of retail release. There’s a lot of chaff in their collection but there are more than enough gems to make it all worthwhile.

As an added incentive to check out the service, they provided access to the remake of the original tomb raider game which has been getting great reviews. If you’re on a PC definitely check it out, free is free after all.

Freehand heads out to pasture

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It’s been years since I’ve used graphics tools on any kind of regular basis, it’s been even longer since I used Freehand, and I was never a real expert in vector graphics tools, but once upon a time I used freehand daily, and it’s with a minor twinge of regret that I note it’s passing in this entry on an Adobe blog posting. Back when the Freehand vs. Illustrator debate was often as acrimonious as the Mac vs. PC debates, and I used to engage in it regularly with my buddy Kevin. I never cottoned to the Illustrator interface was my main issue with it, despite using it years before I became familiar with Freehand. Freehand’s fate was pretty much sealed when Adobe acquired Macromedia a while back, though I guess there was some hope that as in past mergers and acquisitions that Freehand would be sold off to someone, a fate that befell it repeatedly – in fact, Adobe owned it once before. There’s more coverage over on Tidbits if you’re interested, and the two wikipedia entries have a pretty good rundown of the evolution of the tools and the brinkmanship that kept them competitive and steadily evolving over the years. My question is, where’s the pressure on Illustrator going to come from now?

My favorite pranks: Dave as network tormentor

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My favorite pranks: Dave as network tormentor

In the mid-late 90’s I worked for the nascent internet division of a communications company that owned small market television stations and newspapers. I actually helped found that division. This was in the dark days of the Macintosh, before Jobs came back, when their product was really starting to fall behind windows, when their product line ballooned to the point where I think they had a different model number for every potential customer, and (for a while), when they were still trying to charge $99 for the tcp/ip stack you needed to connect macs to the internet over a network (!!! – I can admit this now, I never paid, I considered it a ripoff and pirated it for everyone. Within a couple years they did the right thing and provided it as part of the OS). Anyway despite all these troubles we were a mac-only shop largely due to my efforts, and I sat in the middle of a networked web of 20-30 macs. This was also back when networks in an office were novel, and the PC guys from the parent company still didn’t have any of the PC’s networked.

One downside to being at the center of this hub of macs was that I was tech support for everyone. Macs used to crash at the drop of a hat or if you, say, sneezed while clicking the mouse, or most famously to me at the time, if you connected to the internet using pop3, disconnected, then reconnected. But I digress. The long and short of it was this was a huge pain in the ass, and I was supporting a lot of non-computer savvy folks. Mac’s ease of use actually worked against me in this circumstance, because any of the fool salespeople could download stuff like, say, a doohickey which would put candy canes all around the edges of their screens, but then their machines would crash, I would show up like the grinch and remove all their third party addon crap, reboot the machine, and viola, problem solved. Usually.

The problem was this lead to a sort of adversarial relationship with the staff – everyone loved their third party crap, macs crashed no matter what you did, and though my methods had the best of intentions and were generally effective at reducing the frequency of crashes, folks began to resent it.

Factor in my sense of humor and a little known and poorly documented feature of Appletalk (mac’s built in networking) back in the day and you get a long running series of my some of my favorite pranks. See, there was a method you could use to send a message directly to the screen of any of the macs on the network, which would pop up on the target mac in a box that looked very much like the standard mac crash/error dialog box. So, say you’re sitting there typing one day and suddenly this error pops up:

Keystroke Frequency error: 1094
Keyboard input exceeding buffer tolerance. Reduce keystroke frequency.

or:

Mouse accelerometer malfunction: 0xAE EEE3
Mouse controller maximum input velocity exceeded. Reduce excessive speed of mouse movement.

or:

CDROM tray lubrication deficiency: EEE3
Lubrication sensors indicate primary cdrom bay controller issue. To confirm this error please execute an open/close cycle on the primary CDROM drive 10 times. If error message persists, see technical support.

Revenge for dumb tech support help requests is a dish best served cold but with an opportunity for laughter was my theory. Call me into your office for the 3rd time because the solitaire game you were playing instead of working crashed your laptop again? OK, I’m going to the well for the third time with some ridiculous error message sent your way that’ll have you in my office trying to explain why you think your keyboard (on a laptop) needs replacing, or asking me for CDROM grease, or whatever. I had dozens of these.

So yeah, I was pretty much the BOFH in some ways but there was an undercurrent of humor to it and I still laugh to think of these to this day.

Friday two-fer – Flash based particle simulator

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Here’s another friday fun link. This is a simple yet captivating flash-based particle simulator. Use the radio buttons at the bottom to pick materials and elements to ‘paint’ onto the canvas and watch how they interact – drop some seeds, for example, then some water, watch things grow, try and overwhelm it with an avalanche of sand, or lay down a small fire and pit it against a water fountain. There are tons of cool little interactions and rube goldberg inspired setups you can sketch out with this.

Flash based riff on Robotron

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It’s not exactly a Robotron clone, but Luminara is a fun, fast paced 8-way shooter that uses the core Robotron gameplay mechanic in a stylized setting, and it’s a perfect friday fun link. It’s not a perfect game though – it’s too easy to lose track of the aiming icon in all the activity on screen, and after several games I’m starting to think that staying in the center is a better tactic than moving around. Also, the laser made me laugh when I first got it, but as a gameplay element I think it’s pretty lame. Still, for a lunchtime diversion it’s worth a look.

[via]

Examining open source and copyright from a different angle

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I muse periodically on open source and copyright issues and I happened across a great non-software example of how letting things fall out of copyright is generally good for folks. Star Frontiers is a sci fi themed pen and paper roll playing game that reached the height of its popularity in the 80’s when Star Wars hype was at its peak. It was originally published by TSR, the folks who introduced Dungeons and Dragons to the world. TSR dropped the game from its product lineup in the mid-late 80’s, and eventually it became freely and legally available for download. A small fanbase have been keeping the product alive ever since. Recently one of those fans took it upon himself to do some major updates, ironing out issues with the rules, fleshing out areas that had been unfinished or vague, working on the aesthetics of the downloadable rulebook, and launching a ‘dungeon‘ like fanzine to accompany all this work. This has caused a bit of a renaissance of interest in the game, bringing a moribund product back into the limelight at places like rpg.net and exposing a new generation of gamers to a solid, fun game that had become unavailable due to the economics of publishing.

If this game was kept in copyright it would be dead now, sought after only for nostalgic reasons by collectors and played by no one. Instead it’s a living, breathing product with a fanbase and new content to keep it going into the future. This whole conception of reuse remix burn doesn’t just apply to music or digital media is the point I’m trying to make here – it’s equally applicable to dead trees and other kinds of intellectual property. And lest you think this is an edge case I’ll observe that things I’ve linked to in the past like Librivox (fan created audiobooks of rights free material), source code releases to game engines like Quake 3 (and the various fan projects these spawn) and other things I don’t think I’ve mentioned (the Marvel Super hero role playing game, the downloads, and the fan plans to revamp it) also illustrate the issue.

This is not about anarchy and fighting against rights owners opportunity to profit – this is about recognizing that it’s a complex issue and there is value to all of us on both sides of it, and our challenge is to find the right balance between protecting the interests of rights owners and the interests of everyone in a vibrant, flexible, imaginative marketplace of ideas. In my opinion we’re failing miserably at this at present.

Things that are awesome – walking slowly through a flower petal snowstorm

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I love spring. Yesterday it was a bit windy out. There are several flowering trees in my yard including a large apple tree, a pear tree, and a really large tree that has small white flowers. I pulled into the driveway and hopped off my bike just as the wind picked up and I was engulfed in a flower petal snowstorm. It made me laugh out loud, and I paced back in forth in it grinning and laughing. It went on for a good sustained bit and then came back periodically yesterday as I played with Soolin after work. Spring rules, that is all 🙂

Egoboo gets a sequel

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This week’s friday fun link is to Soulfu, the new game from the guy who brought the world Egoboo so long ago. Egoboo was a sort of ‘roguelike meets gauntlet’ action adventure game that never really found a wide audience but that showed a lot of promise. Soulfu is still a work in progress – the networking is not yet included and because everything is randomly generated it feels a bit disjointed, but there’s fun to be had in a mindless kind of way, and the art style is great. Check it out if you’re on windows and looking to try something lightweight and fun. Windows only, sorry to say.

If you’re on mac or linux or you’re just curious, Egoboo is still being maintained and can be fun to mess about with, too, using the link above will bring you to the portal where you can download it for your platform.

Want Joost?

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Joost is a new approach to streaming video to computers from the folks who designed Skype. Skype was a business model revolution, a direct challenge to the telcos and long distance companies and the pay per minute cost of voice communications, and Joost has similar aims. It’s p2p powered streaming television that in effect works like a video on demand service. It also cleverly forces you to watch the advertising since you can’t quickly switch channels like you can on your television when the ads start. This is counterbalanced by the fact that you’re watching on your computer, so you can turn the volume down and your attention to something besides the ads while they play. They’re also promising to implement community building tools layered on top of the content, things like chat and so on, which will also help distract you from the ads. The first of these features have just started rolling out.

All in all it’s pretty slick, and they’ve been signing a lot of content deals with different providers. It’s main downside right now is that there’s not very much worth watching on it – it’s sort of a greatest hits of all the obscure cable channels you never watch in your 250 channel lineup right now, but lots more is coming.

If you want an invite let me know and tell me which email address to send it to, they’ve opened the floodgates and are starting to let many users in. Joost works on macs or pcs and is free for the download.