I haven't been thinking much lately.
Our Enemy Is SVN
19th of March
Our enemy is not each other, [...] we all want to do cool Python projects, [...] but this is our enemy. [SVN] is 100 times worse.
Scott Chacon on Hg vs Git. I agree that Mercurial and Git should forget their differences in order to convert Subversion users. (For some reason, I still use Subversion on occasion. I really need to change that.)
Strelok’s Blog
17th of March
If you like blogs about gamers, games and the annoyance of Hammer (Valve’s mapping program for TF2), you’ll love Strelok’s blog. He does swear a bit though, in case you don’t like that sort of crap.
TV Tuners
15th of March
I have to say, I have definitely not had much luck with TV tuners so far. The first tuner I bought was internal, and thus, didn’t work once I woke my computer from sleep. For some reason it also started making my computer fail to boot.
My newer tuner is a USB tuner, yet it still appears to have the same problem, in that it doesn’t work after sleeping.
The advantage, however, is that I can just unplug it from one USB port, and straight into another. I ♥ hotplugging.
14th of March
I’ve enabled IntenseDebate comments on here now, because it took half a second to set up. Let’s see how they go.
Why Steam Beats Pirating, Hands Down
14th of March
Valve’s Steam is by far my favourite method of digital distribution for gaming. It is simply so easy to use and it’s getting better too, with the new UI beta being a massive improvement on the previous version of Steam.
Why is Steam so good? In case you’re not familiar with Steam, let me run you through the process of buying and playing a game:
- Browse to the game on the Steam store
- Click “Buy”
- Enter payment details
- Wait for the download to complete
- Play.
That’s it. No complicated installation to go through; no waiting while the game downloads the latest updates; nothing. Compare this to buying a game physically, where you have to install the game (usually swapping discs halfway through), download the latest updates, make sure PunkBuster1 (or similar) is up to date and usually insert the disc every time you want to play a game.
Even compared to pirating games, it’s so much easier. Torrents are usually slow because of the amount of other users downloading at the same time (seeds:peers ratio is usually low), while Steam’s content servers have always been exceeding fast for me (2Mb/s compared to 40kb/s for a comparable torrent). Additionally, simply finding a torrent is usually 10 minutes of searching itself.
Steam’s ease of use shows. Of the past 10 games I’ve played (excluding free ones), 9 of them I bought from Steam, and the other was Modern Warfare 2, which uses Steam.2
Steam is an absolute win for gamers everywhere. The ease of buying, downloading and playing is fantastic. I’m not aware of any other distribution method for games that is as easy to use.
Copenhagen Suborbitals
2nd of March
These guys are making a rocket with the intent to launch a person into suborbital space. They’ve already developed several rockets, and have run tests on them which show them working well.
Oh, and they also built their own submarine.
1st of March
I hate doing work for free. It’s fine if it’s a project I’m interested in, but when I do the work and then people complain, it annoys me. Sure, it may not be perfect, and I’m up for modifying it, but telling me (not asking) to redo it is unacceptable.
PC World: Apple Tablet Won’t Mean Business
20th of January
I remember the old days, when PC World writers would wait until after Apple announced something new to declare that it was a toy.
John Gruber on PC World: Apple Tablet Won’t Mean Business.
Hilarious.
Numbat, a Tiny CMS
31st of December
Introducing Numbat, a tiny CMS, my project for the last week and a bit. Numbat is based around using URLs as unique identifers. It’s intentionally very lightweight, and can be used to make almost anything. I’m currently powering my projects site off it, and it’s working wonderfully.