…can be found at the Animated Knots site. It sounds silly, I know, but this is actually useful to someone like me who barely knows anything beyond the square knot. It has tons of animated examples of different knots, and the interface allows you to step through the process one frame at a time.
[via Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools]
Now this is cool. Computer Gaming World has offered up its first 100 issues for free to download. This is a great bit of nostalgia for me as CGW was for years one of my favorite magazines, back in the days before the internet especially. It’s refreshing to see a company treat their intellectual property this way and is in sharp contrast to most publisher’s treatment of their material.
Yesterday’s lackluster NFL games (3 of the 3 games broadcast in my area were complete blowouts – only the first half of the colts game was interesting) led to some free time for me, so I played Company of Heroes and beat the last two levels. My opinion remains the same – this is one of the best games I played in 2006. The simple fact that I finished it speaks to that, since I play tons of games yet finish very few. Anyone interested in WWII strategy gaming is well advised to consider picking it up. gogamer.com is running a ~$30 sale on it periodically so if you watch their site or sign up for their email notifications chances are good you can pick it up on the cheap. I liked it so much I bought the developer’s previous games, the Warhammer 40k series. They produced 3 expansion packs for that series so there’s a great chance we will see expansions to Company of Heroes as well. Here’s hoping – I can’t wait for more.
A complete surprise – Anno 1701, a city builder, is fantastic, at least based on the demo. It’s the third or fourth in a series. I played the original one years ago and thought it was just ok. On the one hand, it had lots of depth to it, but on the other it was pretty dry and the graphics were uninspiring. This sequel seems to have addressed all that – superb graphics, great depth but this time more easily understood, and a very well executed user interface. Check out the demo if the genre interests you – you can get the demo from gamershell.com. Mind that it’s PC only. The demo is deep enough to give you a real taste of the game (it times out after 90 minutes) and has some great tutorials. I liked it so much that when the demo timed out I was so bummed that I jumped over to gogamer.com and preordered it.
Saturday my dog Soolin and I were out hiking on farmland. I was tossing the ball to her. She came back with the ball and I noted it was fairly bloody, so I called her back and to my shock she was covered in blood down her entire front. I grabbed her and started checking her and realized when I got to her mouth that she was bleeding profusely from a deep cut to her tongue – so deep that it was gushing and she ended up covering me in blood. I was 1/3 of a mile from my house, roughly, and I panicked – how does one apply pressure to a dog’s tongue? Meanwhile, she seemed fine with it and just wanted me to throw the ball some more. I started back towards the house at a jog, constantly having to call at her to follow me since she knew we were headed back towards home and did not want to go. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do once I got back to the house, but I figured I would think of something on the way.
Fortunately by the time we got back to the house the bleeding had slowed and was no longer gushing. I washed her mouth out and cleaned off her coat with the hose and made her lie down and after a half hour or so things seemed to settle. Talk about a scare though, for maybe 10-15 minutes I was under the impression she might be bleeding to death. The wound did re-open several times over the weekend, but only mild bleeding occurred and it has not re-opened since Sunday morning over breakfast so I think she’s in the clear now.
This one’s from my youth. My cousin was a sleepwalker when he was young. When he was about 10, my aunt and uncle were at the neighbors playing cards. They had left the kids home in bed. They were literally about 20 feet away at the next door neighbors house. They had forgotten to put up the sheet of plywood they used to keep my cousin from wandering too far when he sleep walked, however, and when they came home my aunt checked the bedroom and he was not in his bed. Panic ensued and they ran through the house looking for him. They found my cousin in the kitchen, the fruit bin of the fridge pulled out, his rear perched on it, making poopy.
!!!
The doctor had told my aunt not to shock my cousin or violently awaken him if they found him sleepwalking, so they let him conclude his business then shepherded him upstairs and back into his bed. my poor uncle got stuck cleaning up the mess.
This was one of those ‘you can’t let him know you know this story!’ stories when I was a kid, so I never got to tease my poor cousin about the incident, but I laugh every time I think of it.
Check out Aptana, a new eclipse-based (and thus cross platform) web development tool. This is pretty slick stuff and the first thing to challenge Jedit as my web editor of choice. Mind you, this is a full-featured IDE so it’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely worth a look for those managing lab or corporate disk images, or for folks who are looking to take their html skills up a notch and move to professional tools. If you’re already a Dreamweaver user and a bit skeptical, it’s my observation that this is actually less complicated to use than Dreamweaver, and losing the GUI and learning what’s going on with your code is to your professional benefit anyway.
The site also has some great screencasts that walk you through how to use the tool, really these are a model for how to deploy effective screencasts and the developers are deserve praise for their approach. Aptana’s also available as a plugin for those of you who are already using Eclipse or another eclipse-based tool distribution.
Just a heads up – as with previous years, Toys R Us is having it’s buy 2, get 1 free game sale. This year it’s happening between October 22nd and October 28th. If you’re a gamer or if you need to buy christmas presents for friends or family, this is a great way to save ~$50. This year they’re including games for handheld systems in the offer. I’m not sure what I’ll be getting but there are a number of PS2 and Nintendo DS games that are on my list. I’ll post back after I make my decisions.
Check out Fage yogurt, which unlike most domestic US yogurts is not chock full of sweeteners and corn syrup for texture. It’s got an awesome, rich texture, is fat free and low carb. Mix it with some sugar free jello for a dessert, or eat it plain as a snack. Great stuff, the only downside is it’s a little spendy.
The news of this is all over the net of course. I’m only mentioning it here because the numbers are astounding. In 19 months, a team of what was ultimately 56 people managed to create 1.6 billion in value in a company. Zero to 1.6 freaking billion, or roughly $28 million a person, in less than 2 years. One hopes numbers like this will wake up the content companies who are obsessively focused on locking their content away behind DRM – the market values open and free trading of content to a basically unimaginable extent.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 