Offmessage

This one is a kind of breakout-type game, Bubble Ball. Bouncy bouncy…

Nice to see that a report commissioned by the US army has recommended that Open Source software is good for the US military. Apparently it promotes diversity. Now there’s a surprise…

Hmm.. Today Alcatel announced that their research has discovered that the UK is disaffected with the Internet and that broadband providers should focus on family services to harness the “decision making power of women” and the “pester power” of children.

Not surprisingly the e-Envoy says that this is bollocks.

Personally I’ve been having a similar argument with some others in the industry - I love my broadband, but I’m a techie. I imagine that the home gateway will be the real solution to all of this - a black box that talks to your ADSL, your PVR, your games console, your MP3 enabled stereo and possibly your fridge (no seriously, look at that fridge link!). Until then it will only be people like me who can be bothered/aren’t scared to set up routers and wireless hubs and unallocated networks and so on and so on who are really going to make the most of it. My opinion, mind.

Steve Bowbrick of another.com tackles it another way, and I agree with him too. Broadband is always on, but has few unique applications and is currently hard to use. When we can make the most of the good points and make the bad points go away, then we’ll have broadband Britain.

Oh how I love George Bush. I really do love him. Here are some quotes that really truly show us how great a man he is.

I used to be into a lot of bands in the 80s, and was an avid vinyl collector. I watched 24 hour party people last night (pretty good, but more of a documentary than a movie - look out for our favourite Dave Gorman as John the Postman) and was reminded of a) Factory Records (rather obviously) and b) Joy Division.

One of the things that I noticed about my Joy Division 12 inch singles (and most of my Sisters of Mercy ones as well) is that they have some variation of this is another porky prime cut scratched into the run out groove.

Turns out this is more than just a goth/punk thing. Records from the Beatles to Elvis Costello with all manner of artists in between also have this message scratched into them. It is in fact the work of one George Peckham, an engineer at the Abbey Road studios (oddly whose web site I run) who went on to form his own company and master more records for more artists than you could care to imagine. One more mystery explained by the power of google! Anyway, where’s my copy of Substance? It’s time I listened to the poet of urban decay…

• Simon Says - remember that game from when you were a kid, you know the one with the flashing lights?
• It’s gripped, it’s sorted, let’s offroad!
• New diver game at orisinal
• 5k version of Wolfenstien (keys are l-left, j-right, k-forward, m-back and space-fire)
• Very odd Daytona racing game
• Graaagh, graaagh! What about me brains?

That’ll do…

Ah well. This site was very useful in giving me the info that I needed to install Linux on my laptop, but the risk to a huge amount of work on the machine and the time it would take to restore should I cock it up caused me to bail. I’ll try again when I feel stronger. As a bonus I’ve finally got XML and XSLT running in PHP on Apache for Windows, so maybe the need for Linux is not so great…

…trying to install RedHat 7.3 on an IBM ThinkPad R30. I’ll let you know how it goes…

He. Did you see the episode of Banzai! where they were squirrel fishing? These blokes actually have. Nice. There’s loads of links on Google if you search for squirrel fishing. They even have a directory category for squirrel humour. Marvellous.

This guy has put together a site dedicated to old computer magazines from the 80s. Marvellous. I’d forgotten how much I liked CRASH! Reminds me of the hours I spent playing Star Quake.

Bloody hell… Do you remember Star Quake? You can download it here (you’ll need an emulator)… Or you can play it online!. Either way you might well need a map as well.