The Dancing Poodle

How good is this? Some guy set up a HL2 environment with a heap of steel doors, tyres, balls, and other stuff, and set it going. It shows how good the physics model in HL2 is. See it here…

This is what 500 hours in MSPaint can do.

My question is, as always, why?

At work I have a desktop PC with 2 monitors, and a laptop sitting up on my desk for emails, etc. Due to lack of deskspace, I don’t have a mouse attached to the laptop, so am stuck with the scratch pad (Yech!). Synergy is a client/server program that runs on multiple OSes (Linux, Windows, Mac) and allows you to use a single mouse / keyboard for multiple computers, as long as they all have their own display device. So now, I can just move my desktop mouse off the screen, and instantly I’m moving the cursor on my laptop! It also means I can use my nice MS keyboard rather than the loaptop keyboard. Cool!

Played Halo 2 over the weekend. First time on an X-box. Needless to say, I got flogged (Thanks Glenn). Anyway, I think I now have to agree witht the guys at Penny Arcade - the X-box controller really is like playing with a Kodiak Bear. Personally, I’m a mouse & keyboard man, but will accept a PS-2 controller when needed. The X-box variant just feels a bit unweildy.

Still, Glenn was kind enough to lend me a connection to his 1.5Mbps ADSL so I could finish grabbing a few Windows updates and the all-important Steam updates. Steam’s a bit scary, though. Data was coming down at about 1Mbps, and it took 4 hours to get everything up to date. Let’s see, 1Mbps is about 25 times the speed of an average 56k dialup connection (say 40kbps sustained, if you’re lucky?), so if I had used dialup to get these updates, it would take 4 x 25 = 100 hours (over 4 days continually connected)!!! Yegads!!! At $1.10/hour (my current dialup cost), maybe ADSL ain’t so expensive after all…

Always wondered how these work…

Just got the parts for my new PC last night, to upgrade my Celeron 300MHz to something a little more respectable! It’s amazing what a 3.2GHz P4, 1Gb RAM and a spanking new ABit MOBO will do for your computing self respect. Many thanks to the team at Jantech for all their help (and great prices)!

Now all I need to do is get rid of the old 56k modem and get broadband…

Found this through SlashDot. Looks like someone has decided to take the Free Software Foundation to court over the apparent price-fixing activities of the GNU General Public License. A PDF of his complaint can be found here.

All I can say to him is, “Good luck, Smeeee-Heeee”…

I need one of these - even though I only live in a single floor house…