Category Archives: Internet

The Guild?

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So I’ve not watched many of these yet but it certainly looks interesting.  From their about page,

The Guild is a independent sitcom webisode about a group of online gamers. It is written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer. Episodes vary from 3-6 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.

Main page is over here, and the reason I found them is this video which is well worth watching (if you’re a gamer) (the msn site sucks, I know hard to believe, but if you wait long enough the right video will load and play in that tiny little window on the right).

Oh, and I found that link over here at Geek’s Dream Girl.

Google alerts, rss, google reader = recipe for awesome

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Leigh recently blogged about Google Alerts.  I’d seen Google Alerts when they first came out, and I’d tried a few different alerts but the e-mails bugged me.  I spend a lot of time dealing with e-mail already, and getting random mails from Google wasn’t that interesting to me.

But, when Leigh blogged I thought I’d check them out again – and I found you can set the alerts to be read as an RSS feed.  This is awesome, if you use Google Reader the feeds show up automagically in your list of feeds, and every time the search finds something it creates a new entry.

I’m really used to using Google Reader now, and I find it really convenient to just pop in, read a few posts from a few feeds and pop out again, knowing anything I don’t read will still be there later.  Combining that with Google Alerts basically let’s you create your own RSS feeds for any topic you like, if you can narrow the searches down enough (which is the main issue).

Just thought I’d mention it, since I know a few of you use Google Reader (I’m sure it works fine in other feed readers too, but Google Reader just makes it even easier).

Just upgraded

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Just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.7 which was released today and wanted to make sure everything was working.  It’s going to take me a little while to get used to the new admin layout, but I’ve played with the beta’s and release candidates and I know for a fact that some things are a hell of a lot easier.

Then I read today that you can move the different boxes around on the admin pages and get to a very nice wide posting area and that made me very happy.

I’ve noticed that the category pages on the site no longer show custom headers after a Mandigo upgrade, hopefully that’ll get resolved soon, but until then, enjoy the default red mandigo logo on the category pages.

WordPress & Grete

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I really can’t praise WordPress enough.  It’s such a simple install (point it at your mysql server, and it’s done) and although out of the box it looks pretty ugly (in my view), there are so many quality free templates that it can look however you want in about 20 minutes.  Of course, it takes more time to use some plugins and decide on a layout in general, but really it’s so easy to use everyone who wants an web presence but doesn’t want to spend much time should use it.  It’s mainly a blog, but the pages feature means you can certain include a lot of ‘non-blog’ content easily as well.

Anyway, the point of this post, Grete has moved her blog from blogger to WordPress over at her old URL (http://www.darkstorm.co.uk/grete) and she’s slowly moving the content over from her old personal website at that URL, so it’ll be more than a blog in the end (she assures us!)  She’s using the Mandigo theme as well, so I put together a few random headers for her site, she’s not seen them all yet so they may not all stay and at least one of them doesn’t work very well in my view, so I’ll probably get rid of it later.  But I liked them all anyway 😉

Cool game

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Spotted this link over at Critical Hits, and they’re right, you really should check out this cool game.  It’s like a puzzle game with a stream of ‘stuff’ you have to re-direct to fill up meters, but as you do so they play sound and as the levels get more complex so does the music.

You need your speakers on, really, it’s cool.  Play’s fullscreen, so probably not something you can get away with at work.

Google searches

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As anyone who reads this blog already knows, I’m addicted to web stats.  I’m fascinated by how people find the blog on the web.  Here’s a selection of my favourite searches used to find the site over the last few days.

On Google,

  • SHOULD YOU EAT MEAT AND POTATO TOGETHER (link) (my favourite)
  • can tooth extraction result in another tooth moving down into space (link)
  • LEGO perception (link)
  • tesco superstore halloween stock (link)
  • cracking a rib when coughing (link)

Theme header images and meta blog entries

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I’ve added another header image to the site which I’m quite pleased with (matrix-themed), and I forgot to post when I added the two based on recent photographs I took.  I think the one with the leaf looks amazing even if I say so myself.  Rather than making you hit refresh over and over to see the images (and for those of you on feed readers who don’t see them anyway), I’m linking them here.

This is the original image I did.

This one’s based on the sunset photo’s I took recently.

This one’s a close up of a leaf on our apple tree.

And one based on the Matrix falling letters motif.

I must say, I really am still very impressed with the Mandigo WordPress theme, and the ability to include random header images is only one small part of that.  The last update added a feature I wanted as well, since the entire header image is now clickable as a link back to the main page.

You’ll notice the images above are taller than the ones you see on the site, because I check the option to show a smaller section of the image.  I like the images, but I also like seeing some blog text on the page without having to scroll down!

Online tabletop roleplaying – maybe not yet

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Since I’m essentially too lazy / too busy / too scared to try this myself, I was (as I said here) interested in how this article over at the Chatty DM site progressed.  Well, he’s posted the first update on his online roleplaying report, and it sort of agrees with what I’d feared, what I’d briefly experienced and what I’d heard elsewhere.  You should go read the excellent article on the Chatty DM site clearly, but here’s a salient comment,

I think my feeling mirrors the others. When I did the rounds of the players I knew most, we all had the same thing to say. We all agreed that while a virtual tabletop RPG sure beats not playing at all… it remains a weak replacement for the real thing. At least, if our experiment is an indication of how such games are played… and my gut feeling tells me that they are.

Shared storytelling & roleplaying are such physical activities ((physical in the sense that your presence and facial / body language are key to having a shared experience)) that it’s hard to see how things will get much better without a) seriously good video conferencing that supports multiple people or b) seriously good shared VR interfaces.

For the first option, I’m imagining the ability to accept multiple incoming video feeds at once, and to place those images on your screen in such a way that you can see them all at once.  Maybe some composite image ability so you can paste the video into a chair around a fake gaming table on the screen.  I have no idea of the bandwidth or processor requirements to deal with that but I suspect we’re not quite there yet.

The second option is more immersive, with everyone wearing VR headsets and seeing the images from everyone elses video cameras in the same virtual space somehow, again, even more processing power required and plenty of bandwidth.

At the rate things are progressing, how long will it be before we’re there? 24 months? 4 years? 10 years?