Viva la Revolución, Agent Calavera!

r3dux | April 14, 2009

I loved Grim Fandango when it came out in 1998, and to this day still have my original copy of Tim Schafer & Co. at LucasArt’s love letter to noir. It’s simply one of the finest adventure games I’ve ever played (if you don’t know what all the fuss is about, check out this link) – and what do I see on Offworld this morning? Why Grim Fandango figurines of Manny and Glottis!! Woo-hoo! WANT! Really WANT!

Glottis and Manny figurines - Grim Fandango FTW!

Glottis and Manny figurines - Grim Fandango FTW!

They’re not mass produced, and just one-offs by talented media fella Iain Reekie (go to sculpture from the flash blob), but wow… 10 years too late and I’m still going Coo….

Awesome is timeless.

P.S. Grim Fandango quotes! “My scythe… I like to keep it next to where my heart used to be.” - Ahh, happy memories =D

P.P.S  To run Grim Fandango on modern hardware (multicore CPUs, high-end graphics etc), you will more than likely need to run it through a side-project of the ScummVM people called ResidualVM.

Comments
No Comments »
Categories
Gaming
Tags
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

The Gaming Revolution Will Be Televised

r3dux |

Preferably on a massive 1080p LCD with 200Hz refresh =D

gamingrevolution

T-Shirt available here. Props to my better half for pointing it out to me… :)

Comments
No Comments »
Categories
Consumer Whore, Gaming
Tags
,
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

Hot, Cross

r3dux | April 13, 2009

I caught a Digg link the other day w/ 10 skills a developer will need in the next 5 years, and realised that I’m not quite up to par. So, I’m thinking that if I learn a bunch of Python and Perl, and work on the OpenGL a bit more I’ll be in better shape. Also I need to learn some SDL. I was originally thinking of using FMod, but it’s Windows only (or not?), so I’m not as keen on learning to use the API as I once might have been, considering I boot exclusively into Linux these days and do any windows work through a copy of XP thrown through VirtualBox… which runs on Linux and Mac, and even has 32 and 64 bit clients.

I’ll prolly still go with SDL, since it covers joystick input etc and I need to know that stuff for classes – I’m teaching gamers, they want to write games. They don’t know shit about coding, but they want to write games, so I think SDL and OpenGL with serve them well rather than going with the DirectX abortion and proprietary bullshit…

Got a couple of games this week – Devil May Cry 4, Bully/Canis Canem Edit (Latin for “Dog eat dog”, btw)  and picked up Guitar Hero World Tour, which is a bit of alright, tho only have one guitar for it atm. And only two arms and 8 fingers. Sometimes with Guitar Hero, more would be useful.

Still working my way through Resident Evil 5 with the Shetboy, still breathing. Feelin’ a bit odd with the world and not looking forward to going back to work, but there’s the second week of holidays still to go, with only maybe 30 hours of work to get through, oh, plus the marking of assignments, so maybe 40 hours… Dang.

Not to worry. Keep breathing.

Word of the day: Mensch

Comments
No Comments »
Categories
Life
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

How To: Stop DiggBar From Stealing Your Content

r3dux | April 6, 2009

Update: Good news, everyone! DiggBar is now dead.

Digg released DiggBar last week, and it’s an odd and unwanted bit of code… What DiggBar does is much like a URL shortener, like TinyURL, and it allows you to look at digg comments on sites and digg or bury content from a little toolbar at the top of the site – and this is all well and good, but what DiggBar is also doing, is stealing your traffic – and for this it can die.

Let me explain: In a normal TinyURL link, TinyURL sets the page forward from its smaller URL as a 301 Permanent Redirect, this means that in search weightings, the 301′d page gets counted as the page source, while the TinyURL link was just a way of getting to that page. Any occurrence of the TinyURL URL that points to a site, gets counted as the site URL, not a TinyURL URL – with me? With DiggBar, digg grabs your content and puts it in a frame with some buttons for digg/bury etc and hides the original content URL as a digg one – to show this, just view the DiggBar version of a site by prefixing digg onto something by going: http://digg.com/some-web-address-here i.e. http://digg.com/r3dux.org

However, you’ll notice that if you try it with r3dux.org, I kill the DiggBar frame – and here’s how you do it:

Somewhere on you site, such as in a header inside the <head> </head> tags (so that it’s loaded on each page), put the following javascript code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.onload = function() {
if (top.location != location) {
top.location.href = document.location.href ;
}
}
// -->
</script>

Job done, no more DiggBar ripping off your site hits.

Further reading can be found here: http://www.1918.com/how-digg-is-screwing-you-with-diggbar/

Update: Digg has relented and will be making changes to the effect of: i.) All anonymous users, those not logged into Digg.com, will now be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect – no toolbar, no frames., and ii.) Registered Digg users that have not opted out will continue to see the DiggBar, but they will only see the bar when logged in, and opting out will be made much easier.. And not a moment too soon…

Update 2: Updated above iFrame killing code on 1st Oct 2009 – works again to kill Diggbar. Grrr. Bad Diggbar. Stay dead.

Comments
No Comments »
Categories
How-To
Tags
, , ,
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

Ripening Rainbow Peppers

r3dux | April 4, 2009

The peppers on my Thai Rainbow Chili plant are maturing, and all the chillies are changing colour (from green through purple to red) and getting hotter and hotter – yummers! =D

ripeningrainbowpeppers

Capsaicin FTW!

Comments
No Comments »
Categories
Imagery
Tags
,
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

« Previous Entries Next Entries »