AdThwart – AdThwart is an ad blocker that ports parts of Adblock Plus from Firefox to Chrome. It’s still early in its development so it still doesn’t compare to Adblock Plus, but so far this seems to be the ad-blocking system with the most potential on Chrome.

Bit.ly Shorten Url – If you use Twitter much, you’re probably familiar with URL shorteners like bit.ly. This extension puts a button in your address bar that shortens the current page’s URL with bit.ly. Simple and effective.

Chromed Bird – A simple Twitter client that sits in the toolbar. It updates you with new tweets and allows you to tweet without going to the Twitter website.

ChromeMilk – A great client for Remember the Milk, the online to-do list software, that sits in the toolbar.

One Number – Addicted to Google? This extension keeps you up to date on GMail, Google Wave, Google Reader and Google Voice.

XMarks for Chrome – Chrome does incorporate Google Bookmarks, but I find XMarks gives much more control on what is synced and where, plus it works on more browsers. Just like XMarks’ extension on other browsers, this one syncs your bookmarks online for free and lets you choose which bookmarks are which computers.

youTagger and YouTube HTML5-ifier – Don’t like Flash, but like YouTube? No problem! These extensions replace the YouTube Flash Player with YouTube’s new HTML5-based player. The HTML5 player improves performance of YouTube videos and makes them less likely to crash the browser. I’m currently listing both extensions because each has an issue that could bug you. youTagger works everywhere but loads the low quality version of the video. YouTube HTML5-ifier loads the highest quality version of the video, but only works when directly on a YouTube video page, not on embedded YouTube videos or on YouTube User Channels.

Hopefully, proper high-granularity content blocking will be implemented soon so that real equivalents to Adblock Plus and NoScript on Firefox become possible.

A few of the things coming in the next week or so:

• Google Chrome Extensions Recommendations
• Real updates to my eBay page and new auctions
• Zork Guides website update and discussion on that topic
• Discussion on some of the recent computing-related topics I’ve been tweeting about

More topics to be featured here long-term:

• Android discussion (and maybe even an app I develop!)
• Google discussion (Chrome browser, Chome OS, Google Wave, etc)
• Operating Systems (recent releases, current trends)
• My 2010 Projects: Cleaning/Fixing my Xbox 360, Building a kitchen pc, a new desktop pc, other cool household projects, MAME cabinet (maybe)

It’s exciting to be working on the website again. I’ve had the web design itch for a while now and though this isn’t real web design (it’s manipulating Wordpress and it’s themes/plugins to do my bidding), I may do some real web design again at some point in 2010. It’s a new decade after all!

Edit (12/11/09): Also, FYI: I’m cleaning up some of the old posts including the ones that are merely links to outdated eBay auctions, or posts that are no longer or any relevance.

One promising lead is that ScummVM has a work-in-progress port of the MADE engine, so Return to Zork can be played. It’s currently only available in their daily SVN builds, but once the engine is more stable, I’ll write up a guide for it. Because of the consistency of ScummVM cross-platform and the ease of use of the software, this guide will be appropriate for Windows XP/Vista, Linux and OS X without much difference between each version. A second development is the continued growth of Wine. Recently a patch was created that addresses one of the big bugs that get in the way of playing Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor on Linux and OS X. That patch isn’t in the main wine codebase yet, but once it is, I’ll revisit writing a guide for Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor on Linux. Mac OS X continues to be a problem because I can’t test on that system, but I have researched a few options that may allow for the games to be played on OS X and placed those links in the table of configurations on the website.

Lastly, I want to bring up a real piece of news in the Zork universe, probably the first real piece of news in a decade. Activision announced Wednesday that they’re working on a new Zork game called Legends of Zork. It will be a multiplayer adventure played through a web browser and will target iPhone so it will likely be JavaScript-based. More info can be found at Gamasutra and Forumopolis.

And happy new year to everyone!

I also upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, upgraded some old plugins, and installed some new ones. The main new thing you will notice are social links below each post. If you like what you’ve read, you can submit the article to one of the social media websites listed. I currently have buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Pownce and Reddit. If you would like another website added, let me know. The plugin I use has a ton more options, but I only added the most common social media sites.

The guides are currently at http://www.kevinbecker.net/zorkguides and will soon be hosted on http://www.thezorklibrary.com as well. The project is a work in progress and needs help on the configurations I can’t test myself, mainly Mac OS X and Vista. Help with writing the guides and testing them, as well as comments and questions would be greatly appreciated!

When I first heard about the Wii, I thought that it would be a flop. Honestly, I thought that it was possible that Nintendo would go the way of Sega after Nintendo’s poor Gamecube sales if the next console was a financial failure. I certainly didn’t want to see Mario and Link in games of the poor quality of recent Sonic games, but then a funny thing happened. As we all know, the Wii is a hit, but it is a hit despite that it has all the things that gamers typically don’t want and doesn’t have all the things that gamers typically do want from the newest consoles. First, it has a gimmicky controller and multiple games that have their own attachments for the controller, plus the nunchuck and the classic controller. Historically, add-ons and special controllers don’t sell well. (See: Sega 32X, Nintendo Power Glove, Steel Battalion). Second, it has a completely new user interface. Nintendo tried new interfaces before with the Virtual Boy and it was one of the biggest disasters in Nintendo’s history. Third, the Wii isn’t capable of high definition picture resolutions, which was one of the big things gamers were excited about with this generation of consoles. Fourth, it has extremely poor online service for multiplayer with the abysmal friend code system that is so far behind Xbox Live or even the Playstation Network. All of these things made the Wii seem like a terrible idea to the typical hardcore gamer. The only things going for it are its lower price and the typical Nintendo franchises. These things held the GameCube afloat, but just barely. Even with all that, the Wii sold and isn’t stopping anytime soon. Beyond that, the Wii isn’t selling to hardcore gamers, at least not as much as previous consoles.

The Wii sets itself apart by selling to the people historically least likely to play video games… people over 40, women, and every other non-gamer demographic out there, including my parents. Not that it sold really poorly with gamers, it being a Nintendo console after all, but the percentage of hardcore gamers buying the Wii is probably less than any console ever. Let’s look at why this has happened. There are a few obvious reasons: the low price, the familiar Nintendo franchises and the hype of the console that no one can seem to find in stores. Beyond that, I think there’s two broad reasons in addition to those: the controler and the games, and both these reasons show interesting trends in gaming.

The Wii remote is the first motion sensitive video game controller to go mainstream. It’s the console controller with the fewest buttons since the original Nintendo Entertainment System’s controller from 1985 (counting the buttons on only the Wii remote, not any add-ons). One of the problems many people who are traditionally “non-gamers” have with games are the controls. The controllers and their buttons are not intuitive to them. They probably weren’t for me either, but I don’t remember back that far. Video game controllers have been second nature to my hands for more than 15 years, so I grew up with simpler controllers, simpler games and grew into today’s gaming control complexities. In addition to difficulties with the physical controller, navigating a 3D world is difficult for the uninitiated. The Wii gets around both these issues with its unique motion controls. Not only are there fewer buttons to learn, the act of controlling on screen movement is as simple as moving your hand. Rather than forcing your brain to translate your wishes to the control scheme of the buttons, your brain simply uses your already well developed muscle functions to control events on screen naturally, so the games are much easier to get into in terms of interaction.

More intuitive control is an important step in getting more people playing games, but makes little difference if you’re pushing games like Ikaruga (a scrolling space shooter that is masochistically difficult to master), .Hack (a single player, offline, japanese-style role playing game [JRPG] episodic series where you play as a video gamer who plays a virtual reality massively multiplayer online roleplaying game [MMORPG] where some players are unable to log out to get back to the real world; you play in that online roleplaying game’s interface as if you are in the virtual reality world with others, despite it being a single player game… yes it’s that abstract and convoluted, really!), or Deus Ex (a cyber-punk hybrid of first person shooter and role playing games with a deep, complex story with an equally deep and complex system of character customization). I could go on and on listing games that are either very difficult to play and master, very difficult wrap your head around or just plain weird. Those aren’t the type of games that bring in casual gamers. Games like Wii Sports, Wii Play, Rayman Raving Rabids, Warioware and now Wii Fit give non-gamers accessible experiences that can be played for small amounts of time without the mental and physical investment of a more hardcore game. The Wii succeeds because it primarily provides these types of games.

The combination of these two factors results in the fact that the Wii gives experiences that are genuinely fun. More importantly, it is fun in a way that is obvious to most people, by being physical and being social. It’s great at a party. That said, it’s not fun in the way a speed run in a mario game, a low level challenge in an roleplaying game, or a gold star, full combo performace in Rock Band recorded for YouTube are to a hardcore gamer, but that’s Nintendo’s point. They’re catering to those who pay the bills now, and that’s not necessarily the hardcore gamer anymore.

The real question is what effect this is having on the gaming industry. Obviously, hardcore games are becoming more of a niche than ever, especially on the Wii and there’s lots of evidence of it. A game like the previously mentioned Ikaruga will never see retail release again, as Ikaruga and many like it are relegated to being downloadable games because those hardcore enough to play it will be hardcore enough to buy games on services like Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and the Playstation Network Store. Another example would be Rayman, which was previously a platformer series that was transformed (or some may say perverted) into a casual assortment of mini-games like Warioware. Games which were once extremely difficult like the Ninja Gaiden series now have newer sequels released with a significantly easier level of difficulty as the default. There are exceptions to this trend, like No More Heroes for the Wii, and games that stradle line between both hardcore and casual gaming, like Rock Band, but it’s obvious that casual games are taking a bigger and bigger piece of the gaming pie.

A full critical discussion of the intricacies of the new balance between hardcore and casual games being forged today is a topic for another article though. That said, I’m not the only one thinking about the issue. IGN recently tauted 2008 as year of the “Death of Hardcore Games”. I’m not so convinced about them being dead, or if the proliferation of casual gaming is such a bad thing, but that’s a topic I’ll discuss more in the future. This is certainly an interesting time for games!

Like a pivotal event in computing history, the demo of the first GUI by Doug Engelbart in 1968 …



…and a retrospective of the origins of the little operating system that could by Linus Torvalds in 2001.

I find this very interesting. Learning different programming paradigms (like procedural, object-oriented, functional, structured, logic and so on) is a good thing for programmers to do. I see this as a good thing that Microsoft is encouraging functional programming. My favorite lesser-known programming language is Scheme, another functional programming language.

One of the problems with less popular programming lanaguages (the popular ones are usually only procedural, structural or object-oriented languages) is that there are few libraries to support them so its hard to actually do something useful. Microsoft linking F# to .Net will be benefitial to the Windows world by bringing the power of .Net (and Mono, in a way) to functional programming. I have a feeling that Microsoft Live Labs has something to do with this and did it so they can do cool projects that take advantage of functional programming paradigms.

This news just shows yet again how unpredictable Microsoft is because of its size. Some parts of it are making blunder after blunder while others keep doing tons of amazing things like this.

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Ubuntu 7.10 Post-Install Guide v1.1

Do This First — Enable All Software Repositories:
1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager).
2. Go to Settings->Repositories.
3. Check all boxes under “Downloadable from the Internet” in the “Ubuntu Software” tab and under “Ubuntu Updates” in the “Updates” tabs, then press Close.

4. Press Reload button to reload the repository cache.

Recommended Software Packages to Install, In No Particular Order:
ubuntu-restricted-extras — A collection of common “non-free” software, like flash, mp3, dvd playback, java, rar, microsoft fonts and lots of codecs.
gnome-themes-extra — More themes for gnome
nvidia-glx-new — The latest, greatest nvidia driver for the 8000 series of cards. Ubuntu may prompt you to add this during the install, which takes care of this for you.
amarok — An excellent music-library-based music player similar to iTunes (except that it doesn’t suck like iTunes).
audacious — A simple winamp-style music player.
jokosher — An excellent audio editor.
ardour-i686 — An excellent audio editor, optimized for i686.
armagetronad — Tron light cycles in 3D!
vlc — A simple and effective video player just like the windows version.
mplayer-nogui — A GUI-less video player. uses the keyboard for controls. very 1337.
warsow — You already know what this is!
kate — The text editor of choice (though GNOME’s text editor “gedit” is of comparable quality these days)
k3b — A CD/DVD burner similar to Nero that’s better than the one installed by default.
emacs — Just kidding! I’d never recommend that!
katapult — A keystroke application launcher, similar to Launchy on Windows or Quicksilver on OS X. Add it to the startup items by going to “System->Preferences->Startup Items” and adding the command “katapult” after installing it.
deluge — Excellent bittorrent client, comparable to uTorrent on windows

Notes:
1. I’ve never used jokosher or ardour, but they’re supposed to be the best out there for creating/mixing audio on Linux. Ardour is the more powerful and complex of the two. Give them a try for making your music. Check out http://ardour.org and http://jokosher.org for help using them.
2. If these packages prompt you that dependencies need to be installed, just ok it.

Compiz Fusion in 5 Easy Steps:
1. First you need the nvidia driver installed, as recommended above. So install nvidia-glx-new and reboot. As mentioned above, Ubuntu may prompt you to add this during the install, which takes care of this step for you.
2. Some of compiz will already be installed, so just install compizconfig-settings-manager and emerald from Synaptic Package Manager (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager)
3. Go to the Appearance Settings (System->Preferences->Appearance) and go to the Desktop Effects tab to enable compiz.
4. Run the Compizconfig Settings Manager to configure compiz.
5. Enjoy!

Common Things to Explore and Tweak:

Desktop Theme Options — found in System->Preferences->Appearance
Display Options — found in “System->Administration->Screens and Graphics” (only needed if it didn’t autodetect the right resolution/refresh rate)
Firefox extension browser and install wizard — in Firefox, go to Tools->Add-Ons, go to the Extensions tab and click on the “Install Ubuntu Add-ons” link on the bottom right.

Install some programs — either via the “Applications->Add/Remove Programs” fancy user-friendly interface or the “System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager” powerful list interface.
Changing default program for a file type — right click on file, go to Properties, go to the “Open With” tab in the window that pops up and select the program.

Installing a printer — Just plug it in! That’s all!

More Information:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org — Excellent user forums
http://www.ubuntuguide.org — A huge how-to for everything.
http://screencasts.ubuntu.com — Screencasts that give how-to’s for various linux tasks.

Edit: On second thought, I do own some plaid pajama pants.

After I was done playing, I decided to do a Google search and see if anyone noticed the Vera comment. Apparently someone had. Then I found a second. But this second one mentions more. What? That UNSC Sergeant Reynolds is… Nathan Fillion?! Brilliant! I don’t remember noticing his voice, but there was a Sergeant Reynolds mentioned several times during the “Tsavo Highway” and “The Storm” missions, specifically in the Battle of Voi section. I had to investigate more. It turns out that not only did that “Here’s Vera!” sound like Jayne, it was actually Adam Baldwin. Alan Tudyk (Wash) is somewhere in the game too, but I’ve yet to recognize him. Someone on livejournal actually took a screenshot of the voice acting screen in the credits that shows the former Serenity crew members.

As if I needed more reasons to love Halo 3!

Since I’m rambling, it’s obvious that I love the game even though I’ve played very little so far. But that’s not the main point of the post. As you can see by the title, I have way too many great games to play. But I can’t complain. It’s better than not enough great games to play. Currently, I’m still working on completing Guitar Hero 2 and Bioshock. Plus there’s a few arcade games I need to complete, like Band of Bugs, Catan, Carcassonne and Bomberman Live. Now I have Halo 3 as well. Then there’s Guitar Hero 3, Half Life: Orange Box and Puzzle Quest coming in October followed by Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect in November. Plus, IGN claims that Beautiful Katamari is coming in October and Army of Two in November, though those aren’t likely to make it out by then. Of those, I think I’m looking forward to Mass Effect most. And now I read some really good reviews of Eternal Sonata. I love those good ol’ traditional turn-based japanese-style RPGs and Eternal Sonata certainly looks like a good one. I haven’t had a good one since Xenosaga in 2003 (no, the Kingdom Hearts series doesn’t count, it’s neither a traditional RPG nor turn-based).

I love fall because it’s the best season for video games. Winter is pretty good too because that’s the time I catch up on my game playing.

The article is about Apple adding a cryptographic block to their new iPods to prevent them from syncing with anything but iTunes. While I understand that they probably want to make it harder for competing online music services to get their music onto the iPod. They’re trying to look out for the iPod/iTunes brand but they somehow completely missed the point. Part of the iPod’s continued success is that it is now so ubiquitous, everything is compatible with it. By doing this, they not only made it so fringe users like me are less likely to buy it because we run a flavor of Linux or BSD or Solaris or whatever and use programs like Amarok or GtkPod to transfer our songs, but it makes a large portion of people who use OS X and Windows less likely to buy it too. There are currently many many alternative solutions for syncing music on Windows like Anapod Explorer and Media Monkey. I’m confident that there’s numerous solutions on OS X too. iTunes really isn’t that good of a program. Those alternative solutions make an iPod a viable choice even for those people who don’t like iTunes, of which there are many. Once Apple makes it absolutely necessary that you use iTunes with their device, a lot of people won’t be happy.

Personally, I switched back to Creative players with my last mp3 player purchase this April and bought a Zen Vision: M 60GB, after owning an iPod Color that finally died after a good 2-3 years of heavy usage and even surviving my car accident. That said, an iPod was always a viable option that I considered. After seeing the new iPod Touch, I even had been thinking that my next mp3 player may be a 3rd generation iPod Touch 2-3 years from now, once the capacity of a flash memory based drive gets up to where hard drive based players are today (60GB+). If Apple continues to cripple their products like they are, an iPod won’t even be something I consider. Sure, there will be hacks to make it work, especially for Linux, but sometimes it’s not worth the hassle and I certainly wouldn’t want to support these types of practices by buying such a product.

With this issue and recently reading about the cable fiasco surrounding the new generation of iPods, maybe PC World is right in suggesting the Apple is becoming the new Microsoft.

Fortunately, that no longer matters. With a little trickery of QEMU, the kvm paravirtualization drivers in the latest linux kernel (2.6.20 as of this writing), and a little program called rdesktop, linux can do the same. The Ubuntu Wiki details setting up Windows XP in QEMU (for the creation of the virtual machine) and then setting up rdesktop (for the creation of our very own “coherence mode”). It must be noted that these walkthroughs on the Ubuntu Wiki are designed for Ubuntu 7.04 only, because it is the first version to include kernel 2.6.20 and its paravirtualization support.

I can’t say yet how well it works, but I plan to set this up once my projects are over next week and I’m “studying” for exams. I’ll report back on how it went.