Category: lounge

Duke it out with “David MeShow”

I would hardly call myself a rock fan, yet from time to time, I need my “shot” simply to bring some balance, I guess. 😉 But who does not love that Megadeth aka Duke Nukem theme song?
So once more I was listening to it through Youtube when I stumbled upon this “best guitar improvisation ever” thing. 13M hits, mm.. 🙂
Check this out. Gotta love this guy 😉

I read in the description of some other vid he uses EZDrummer for his drums but I’ve seen him doing some neat stuff with the keyboard too.

Digicorder getting TiVo like features?!

When you live in Belgium, being ripped off for broadband internet and telephony is your inevitable fate. It’s like there is some conspiracy to keep Belgian people away from the information highway. However, it seems after decade(s) of suppression, there is a little light at the end of the tunnel. 🙂 This month brings interesting news, especially if you’re a Telenet customer.

First of all, my data limit gets doubled next month and even tripled in July. Second, they finally got rid of the silly mail box size (50MB), although the silly web space without php/mysql stays. 😉

Third, and that’s why I started this post actually, is the possibility to program your digicorder (digital PVR) from wherever you are using a website (Dutch announcement)! I’ve always wanted that. 🙂 I won’t go into details why the digicorder still sucks big time (and once more, Java and “slow” seem to go together, painful coincidence? ;)), still, I welcome any improvement. 🙂 Way to go Telenet!

Dual action. Literally.

If you own a dual action gamepad, i.e. one with 2 sticks, Gunroar is a game you MUST try out. If you don’t own that, you might wanna try it out anyway as there are also game modes that are well playable without a gamepad.

To me, Gunroar is a typical old-skool action “shooter” game implemented using modern techniques (others may also want to call it a geometry wars clone). In other words: success. 🙂 The wireframe and polygon style rendering is refreshing, the action is fast, the music and sound effects perfectly fit the bill, did I mention fast action? 🙂 It really blows your senses. 🙂

What really puts this game apart, is it superb dual action gameplay. The game sports several game modes:

  • Normal mode: one stick to navigate. If you start to shoot, the navigation stick becomes a strafing stick. Also “torpedos” available.
  • Twin stick mode: real dual action 🙂 Use one stick to navigate, the other to aim/shoot.
  • Double play: if you thought twin stick was the fastest action your brain can process, try double play. You have to control two gunboats simultaneously! The combined position of the 2 gunboats determines the shooting direction. Your brain might protest in the beginning, but try it and you will enjoy. 🙂
  • mouse mode: use arrows for navigation and pointer to aim and fire. Don’t think this mode would be inferior because of the focus on gamepads in the other modes!

But the best part is: all this action seems so hyperkinetic and stressing, but once you get the hold of it, it all feels quite natural and works even relaxing 😉 Also, each game mode has its own distinct gameplay. It’s amazing what you can do with so little. 🙂

A few factoids to close. Gunboat is:

  • written by some Japanese guy Kenta Cho.
  • written in D
  • uses SDL
  • uses the ant build system
  • is not open source :/

Europe’s most sexy vegetarian

is Belgian! Even West-Flemish, of course. 😉 An award presented by PETA.

Just a few days ago, I went to an info evening about the environmental impact of meat production (they showed the documentary “meat the truth”) and guess what, they invited Fiona Dewaele to give a short testimony of how she became a vegetarian. The final outcome of the contest wasn’t known yet, but I really granted her the victory as she seemed a nice girl. I guess it was a small effort for her to join the info evening since she still studies literature and philosophy here at the university.

Now afterwards, it’s funny to see all the “media/model” glamour pictures spread over the internet but still recognize the “real girl” behind the pictures. I could post one from the pictures from the event, but I’m not sure whether she’d like that. 🙂 (although she probably wouldn’t mind) Anyway, here are some “media pics” instead. 😉


Fiona Fiona Fiona

Congratulations, Fiona!

Fine-tuning Urban Terror configuration on linux

This has actually been too long ago, but I’ll to reproduce accurately. 🙂

First of all, why would you need to configure your urban terror install on linux? Can’t you just extract & play like on windows? Yeah, you could. Except when:

  1. You’re using a recent libcurl (which is used for downloading new maps through HTTP).
  2. You’re using an azerty keyboard (or a keyboard map which contains keys that are unknown to ioq3).

Which is quite a lot of people, at least, in Europe. 😉
Continue reading Fine-tuning Urban Terror configuration on linux

Adobe doesn’t like Opera?

I was idly surfing the Adobe knowledge base (yeah, one of my secret hobbies is memorizing KB’s ;)), when I encountered to my surprise the following instructions for uninstalling Adobe Bridge:

Remove remaining folders and files for Adobe Bridge

Back up any personal files you want to save from the following directories, and then remove the listed folders and files:

All versions

Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Adobe\Bridge
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Adobe\Updater\Data\bridge1.aum
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Adobe\Updater\Data\bridge1_meta.txt
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Opera
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \My Documents\Updater\bridge1
Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Updater\Certs\bridge.cer
Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Adobe Bridge
Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Bridge
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Launch\bridge\1.0
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts\bridge.jsx
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts\bridgecenter.jsx
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts\ols.jsx

They cunningly snuck in an instruction to remove all Opera application data! Can you believe this? 🙂 how evil 😉

New record

In my studio I reached a new record for lowest temperature. I have a min-max thermometer, so it’s easy to know 🙂
Last night when I arrived, it was 6.5 °C. After 6 hours of electrical heating, it became 12 °C. yay. Today, I won’t reach it. I tried playing an FPS, but my aim is totally frozen. 🙂

My last record was about 9-10 years ago on my student room, where the wind was blowing over the floor due to bad insulation. I was in the highest room and since there always came air in the heating circuit (central heating) I was lucky to have water at all in my radiator. And in the event it reached my room, it had already cooled down since the heating pipes weren’t insulated. I somehow still managed to get 12 °C anyway although I think I added another electrical heating device to achieve a temperature this high 😉 I remember playing Half life with my gloves and hat on. Now I only need a hat, probably because there is no wind anymore.

The Crippled World of Modern Gaming

Citation on how the author experienced the end of Fallout 3:

The final quests consists of following a massive MechWarrior-esque robot who basically does all the killing and fighting for you. All you have to do is stay behind him and collect the loot of the dead Enclave soldiers – loot you’re not going to need anyway, but hey, in an RPG, grabbing loot is a reflex. You then shoot a few Enclave baddies in a building, flick a switch, and the game ends. It was so easy I kept on telling myself this was just an intro to a massive battle.

When I realised I had actually finished the game, I was all ready to grab some chips, and make me a nice pot of tea, but before I even got up off the couch, the ending sequence was already over. Five pictures slid by, with the voice over telling a three-sentence story, and that was it. The end. That’s your reward for 140 hours of gaming and 64 Euros. A sepia slideshow.

Usually, I’m not that much of a fan of Thom Holwerda’s somewhat provoking/sensational writing style, but this piece really is an entertaining read 🙂
Read the full story on OSNews