STG's

I've just finished the latest book in the Jon and Lobo series - Overthrowing Heaven, by Mark L. Van Name. Less than a week ago I read the first book in the series, One Jump Ahead, and read the second book last month, so they are both fresh in my mind, and the latest is my favorite. I particularly liked the explanations about the nature of Lobo - which is Jon's sentient PCAV (predator class assault vehicle) - which always was smarter than other AIs, but for no apparent reason, till this book (to be fair, the existence of a difference in its nature was well hinted on the other books) One thing I noted on this book is that Van Name isn't afraid to have an unhappy ending - which is uncommon on oh so many books, no matter how forced the story gets as a result - and on a personal level for Jon Moore, he seems to insist on it. The base story is, as usual, a mission that only Jon can take, and this time it's personal - for Lobo. Overall, quite entertaining.

An interesting answer to question I've thought about before - How to make Windows load the Desktop before you log-in? If you have a lot of programs that start up automatically, that can save you a lot of time.

This is a pretty cool looking attempt to make cookies that can't easily be erased, by spreading the data across multiple storage options. Particularly unexpected is the PNG based cookie...

I've just finished One Jump Ahead - by Mark L. Van Name, which is the first book of a series. I've already reviewed the sequel  , about a month ago. This book is more of the same. It explains how he gets his ship (a little phony sounding, though), he goes on missions (that either involve being a great guy or survival), uses a thrill-seeker thing for one of the missions, and uses the nanotech in not very impressive ways. There is a bit of funny, silly dialogs with machines, just like the sequel. Overall, it's quite entertaining. And as chance goes, just as I finished I erased it from my cell phone and the next book I picked (out of 80), based on the name alone, was the sequel to Slanted Jack...

I was just trying to boot a GParted ISO volume into VmWare, and it's next to impossible...  The delay between the Post and Windows starting is just too fast - and if you happen to get it by pressing Esc several times quickly, you might get out of the boot menu with another Esc press. Thankfully, there is a simple solution. Just edit the VMX file and add this line: bios.bootDelay = "5000" (this gives you 5 seconds) Unfortunately, GParted failed, and now my partition is (somehow) the right size, but Windows won't recognize the extra space. Argh! PS: (A few very angry minutes later) Resized the partition using vmware-vdiskmanager again for a little more space, ran GParted and this time it worked. Not completely - for whatever reason the mouse mapping was very messed up, but it was still usable with the keyboard.

A cool conceptual interfaces video from Tat - which apparently is a much bigger deal than I could have imagined. Almost nothing here is conceptually new. The stretchable screens were featured in Earth: Final Conflict, back in 97. Transparent touchscreens have been all over the place (although I can't remember the flipping windows trick). Sharing news is quite commonplace. Sending apps between devices has been done a lot on CSI:Miami. You could buy a mirror TV years ago (although not with a wave-based interface). Nevetheless, the video still looks pretty cool, and is worth watching.

I've left two of the games with a weekend discount on Steam downloading yesterday. The first was Booster Troopers, which I didn't like and already reviewed. The other is Altitude. Altitude, by Nimbly Games, is a nice little side view plane game. It reminds me of Sopwith, which I played a lot back in the early 90s. Like Sopwith, you use little planes to shoot each other. Altitude, however, has a bunch of different modes - simple/team deathmatch, an Air ball game, a mode where you bomb your enemies' base, and others. It also has different plane types, from the nimble to bombers. These planes can be customized with different boosters, too. Stalling is a big part of the game. And it happens not only from flying up, but also from shooting some of the weapons, and bumping into deployable traps. On the actual game, you have to earn planes and boosters by gaining experience (on the demo everything is available right away). Overall, I found it great fun for the price (o...

This is a very quick review, since I only bothered to play the game for a few minutes. Booster Trooper is a side-view (plataformer) shooter. It reminds me of Soldat, but I liked Soldat a whole lot more, while I really hated this one. Maybe the tempo of the game is too fast, or maybe it's because I'm older and slower :-) . The graphics and music are nice, but the gameplay didn't work for me.