Category Archives: Internet

Online tabletop roleplaying

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As a kid or someone in my early 20’s I had loads of spare time for roleplaying.  Anyone in their 30’s knows that kind of time just goes away.  Even playing a lot of online games it’s different, because you can still do stuff around the house, sort things out, and play games because you don’t have to be out or fully focussed for 5 hours at a time.

I tried messing with various tools to run some virtual tabletop D&D a while back and it sort of half worked, and I’m hopeful the tools can only get better.

So I’m watching this thread with interest over at the Chatty DM site.

I’ve already used the tablet I bought Grete to do some maps and although it’s different to doing them with pen and paper, it’s far easier than trying to use a mouse.

Oblong Industries and their ‘g-speak’ environment

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One of the founders of Oblong Industries served as a consultant on the movie Minority Report, and the computing interface you see in that movie was developed based on work he did at MIT.  Now his company have made it a reality.  Really.  Check this video,

I’m sure that the data and the input method is strongly tied together but in a few years this is going to be truly amazing.  Of course, we’ve been seeing this kind of thing in fiction and movies for quite a while (Johnny Mnemonic springs to mind), but if we finally have real world applications then that’s quite exciting.

I would dearly love to have a go at one of these, although I’ve got no idea what I’d do (probably write a blog post, I guess not the most efficient method).

Hmm, Google SearchWiki, cool or chaos?

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Wiki’s are cool if everyone buys in and collaborates in a compatible manner.  Google is adding collaborative ‘editing’ of search results with SearchWiki.  It looks like the changes are specific to your own Google account, but you can also see what other people have added if you like.  You can add notes and promote or remote search results (using little icons next to each search result).  The little video says it won’t directly affect how others see searches or even how you see searches if you’re not logged in.

You can add websites you expected the search to return, but didn’t – which seems like it might be an interesting addition.

Is basic searching dead?  Is this really a Wiki (since it only truly affects your search results when you’re logged in) or just an attempt to hijack a currently popular terms?  Who knows.   But the little icons have appeared on my Google searches, and I plan to have a play and see how effect it is.

Maybe it’ll turn the entire Google search engine into the biggest set of bookmarks I ever had?  I guess at the back end, Google is collecting which results are removed and which are increased in rank and maybe using that to tune their pagerank algorithm?

I promise, no more Google posts for a few days from me.  Just wanted to let you know in case you don’t normally log in to use Google searches since you won’t see the little icons if you don’t.  It took me a few moments to realise there’s no new search page to go to – this stuff has been added to the main Google search pages.

Update: Thinking about it a bit more, this could be quite exciting.  It’s a bit like Reddit or Digg, but with all the world’s URL’s already submitted.  I guess it depends on whether the promotion or removal of URL’s eventually affects pagerank and if the notes people are adding become useful.

Rare moment? Google actually shuts down a project.

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Google is shutting down Lively.  I only played with it about three times, and it didn’t really provide me with anything I thought would be worth sticking with.  In some ways I think it’s good that Google is prepared to shut down some stuff if it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, nothing worse than leaving a trail of half finished projects in your wake …

… like me 🙂

GMail Themes

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I love GMail, I’m man enough to admit it.  When all around me WebMail providers were doing horrible things and making stuff huge and ugly Google gave us small, quick (at the time), simple, IJustDoMail GMail.

And now they’ve added Awesome Sauce by adding GMail skins.

As usual, Google are rolling this out slowly, so the option may not be there for you yet, I’m going to go with Terminal for a while!  Story originally found on Life Hacker.

Google Insights

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I posted recently about why search means something, and about Google tracking the Flu.  Here’s another site from Google that’ll waste three weeks if you’re not careful, Google Insights.  It lets you see who’s searching for what and how it’s changed over the years.  There was one fascinating search that amazed me.

And that was “apple in the Food and Drink category in the US“, over time you can see people are more interested in Apples during the end of Summer and the start of Autumn, and that it’s the same every year.

In case the link doesn’t work or the info goes away, here’s a screenshot (click to bigginate it).

And Sunday arrived in that usual Sunday arriving style

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In which every paragraph is a segway.

Lovely fresh November morning.  No rain yet although it looks like we might be in for some later.  I’m not sure how it works but during October it’s always too cold to have the patio doors open, where-as in November there’s nothing better than sitting in the computer room with the door open enough for the crisp clean air to sneak in.

Because spending 7 hours at a craft exhibition wasn’t enough, the girls are all going to Hobbycraft in a bit, maybe it’s considered a suitable ‘warm down’ after the full on exhibition.

A friend of mine found a screen callibration bit on a THX DVD and mentioned it to me, so I may spend the time they’re out seeing if I can tune our screen any more.  I’m quite happy with how it looks but there’s always that vague concern that you’ve picked some weird settings and pink skin is looking orange but you never noticed.  Sunday’s just the kind of day for doing lazy LCD screen tuning I think.

John Scalzi wrote up a Quantum of Solace review, which I totally agree with.  Despite the fact that I still don’t really know who John is (I just stalk his blog) I feel at least now I could share a pint of beer with him and have one topic to chat about that we agreed on 🙂  That’s the internet, bringing together people who don’t know each other and fooling them into thinking they do.

Mark wrote a blog update, which I really enjoyed, despite his implication that he shouldn’t write them too often.  How am I supposed to live vicariously through other people if they don’t tell me what they’re doing?

We watched a comedy show on ITV last night, in honour of Prince Charles’ 60th birthday and some of the acts were really funny.  One guy stood out, I’ve seen him before and really enjoyed his stuff.  He’s Omid Djalili and you can check out his web site over here.  He manages to poke fun at a lot of racial issues and particularly racial accents and still stay on the right side of the line (in my view) and is pretty funny.  There’s some videos of him on the site, check them out.

Virtual Geekery – Sun xVM VirtualBox

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Been playing with Sun’s xVM VirtualBox software again for a couple of days.  I find virtual machines fascinating.  Clearly emulators have been around since the dawn of computing, and in fact, the whole concept of writing software is in some ways emulation.  But the complexity of emulating an entire PC, within a PC, just makes me giggle.

In the daylight hours that I’m obliged to work I spend a lot of time dealing with virtualisation as it’s an increasingly popular technology, and I’ve messed around with virtual machines at home, but VirtualBox really is pretty smooth.

And I’m using it to satisfy my other geekery interest – Linux.  Anyone unlucky enough to have read this blog for a few years will know that I used to have much more Linux in the house, handling web, mail and a bunch of other things.  Over time it became clear that I was just doing it for the sake of it and that open source and free Windows software really was enough to get me by.  This was even more true when we bought new PC’s with XP licenses (I’ll leave that statement hanging, so you get the implication).

I’d messed with Linux desktops for quite a while, originally with SUSE and a little Red Hat, but I’d never gotten on very well with the X Windows environment, it was always too painful to me.  So for a long time I stuck to a server implementation of Debian (never got X working on the graphics card that I used in that machine) and stuck to the server side.  Lately however the desktop distributions have come on in leaps and bounds and coupled with Linux versions of Firefox and Open Office, they really do provide a significant amount of functionality that I use day to day at home.

So I stuck Ubuntu on a virtual machine and it runs really well, very impressed.  Despite the fact that it’s a VM it runs pretty quickly, more than useable.  I suspect other than games I could quite easily live with Ubuntu as my main OS and these days WINE is pretty good at supporting most games (if I understand it correctly).  The reason I won’t move fully is that I have a legit version of XP on this machine, it works fine, does everything I need it to do and plays games.  Which is exactly why Linux is still the underdog in the desktop wars and why you find people so upset about the bundling of OS’s with hardware.

The reason I started looking at VirtualBox again was actually nothing to do with Linux, I wanted to see if I could build a little sandbox running XP, in which I could install and run software that I’d downloaded to make sure it worked as expected and didn’t cause any issues, before installing it on the real image.  VirtualBox provides really nice snapshotting which can ‘roll back’ any malicious installs.  I’m really not sure how the XP licensing works though.  Can I run the same licensed version of XP on my machine, and inside a VM on the same machine legitimately?

Spamalike

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Got a sudden influx of spam, all of it one line and on random posts.  Looks like a tracking mechanism, so the bot makes a spam comment, and then looks for the tracking ID.  If it shows up, it knows it’s ‘good to go’ with as much spam as it likes.  Askimet stopped 2 out of the 5 and I manually flagged the other 3 as spam.  We’ll see how it goes.  If I end up marking 50 a day as spam I may need to force registrations on comments, we’ll see.