Lavonardo

Something to keep clicking on until the fireworks start embroidering the sky with flash and fire.

• An inspired opinion on Why Vista Security will suck.
• The history of computerized role-playing games starts from the very beginning: the first part covers 1981-83.
• Something to check up on a lazy day: are web-based operating systems viable at all?
• And something for lazy days in the cubicleland (sounds turned off, obviously): best of web games.
• Wired’s annual Vaporware Awards feature both familiar faces and inspired newcomers.
• BBC’s 100 Things We Did Not Know Last Year.

The longest night of the year will be easier with the following:

• An interview with Michael Gentry, author of one of the greatest recent IF games, Anchorhead (a special edition of the game is now in the works, with a demo already out).
• Inside dirt on the effects of the second Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Top Ten of dangerous toys (no, not the band - but actually lethal devices for kids).
• Universal Text Imitator. For the times when lengthy non-sensical, but syntactically correct phrases are called for.
• The worst loser award of 2006 goes to Michael Crichton.
• A collection of heroically geeky animals.

Click. Click. Click.

• Linus sounds off on banning binary-only modules. A decent idea, but fundamentally flawed.
• Wikipedia’s list of featured articles rarely fails, yesterday’s: Monopoly-game’s history.
• Next entry in the long-running series “blogs to follow, or at least check out”: Smart Economy.
• Gingerbread Carcassonne.
• Google launches patent search.
• Regrettheerror collects the assorted mistakes from media all over the world.

Gemischte linke.

• Truthiness is the word of the year, if the Merriam-Webster guys are to be believed.
• Before blogs, there were diaries, and some folks just didn’t know when to stop.
• Clive Thompson’s collision detection seems to be a worthwhile blog to pick up.
• Another fine idea that ought to have been forgotten the next morning once sobriety kicked in: a headcrab hat, straight out of Half-Life.
• Wikipedia provides insight into the etymology of “considered harmful”.
• Compressed history, nominally for writers, but a great source of trivia and facts for everybody.

Random cruft recently scraped off the surfboard.

• Rex at fimoculous has started the traditional collection of end of the year lists, the one on unfamiliar blogs ought to provide amusement.
• Seems that the recent release of Pixar’s Cars is lame everywhere but Australia.
• Another Guardian list, this time on the forty best directors (current ones, that is). I don’t think Lynch and Scorses pack an equivalent amount of substance, and that, if anything, is a decent argument to kick off discussion with film buffs.
• A chocolate cake for the Dr. Who fans among readers.
• The european airlines’ in-flight shopping magazines are thin and filled with boring and unimaginative stuff when compared with the US ones - though this joke can be taken too far.
• Zeitgeistiest poster of the year.

Random articles that made it into my del.icio.us-collection this week.

• A set of logic problems, some familiar, but mostly not.
• In the series of potentially useful tools: firebug, a javascript debugger. For the long-pending google maps mashup.
• A wireless router for free. For a well-defined value of “free”.
• Museum of Bad Art, definitely something for the next trip to Boston.
• A convenient tally of camera popularity as used in flickr.
• A collection of humorous analogies.

I planned on writing something clever about the reversal of roles in a couple of recent cases when random passersby have caught the appointed guardians of society up to no good or even worse.

And failed. Several false starts didn’t help.

So here’s some random linkage instead. For the first time in absolutely ages.

• Lengthy profile of Will Wright in New Yorker. And it doesn’t concentrate on the obvious Sims and Spore, but his 1984 debut Raid on Bungeling Bay gets namechecked as well. Inspired by the article Jason Kottke has put up a good addendum.
• KFC has crafted a giant version of their logo, one that is visible from space.
• Stand up or Die is a finnish portal for stand up comedy.
• Today’s featured article on wikipedia is the much-lauded Stephen Colbert’s verbal assault at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
• Photographic education. Loads of tricks of the trade.
• I failed to observe the no music day today. Didn’t change the phone’s ringtone to something buzzy, and got sideswiped by Eric Satie. In a meeting.
• They’re not up to the level of adbusters, but the finnish anti-advertisements are worth a look.

These crept up unawares.

• Peter Gabriel unleashed the classic Shock the Monkey song to be remixed at will.
• Note to self: Never Embellish a Resume.
• Borat must be clapping his hairy palms: the Kazakhstani central bank misprinted two bills.
• What not to dress up on halloween: a toilet seat.
• Scriptwriting has been the weak spot of Hollywood for ever. Thoughh talent may be prolific, it’s not employed by the studios.

100 feet tall, and breathing fire.

• Tempest in a teacup. A finnish poet has his vanity page put on the to-be-deleted- list in the finnish wikipedia, and the resulting furor is amusing to watch. And the Hitler-card is played immediately.
• Wilhelm Scream, theory and practice.
• This could be a reason enough to try out swedish: Clockwork Orange as re-imagined by the Viirus theatre.
• An updated list of programmatic ways of shooting yourself in the foot.
• Worth1000 rarely fails. This time the topic is “movies, whose title has a single letter mistake”. The results are worthy indeed.

Been a while since the last terse collection of completely unrelated links. Here goes.

• Today’s featured article on Wikipedia is on Lost. Didn’t read, being quite averse for spoilers. Two thirds down the second season. And still pleased.
• Google Reader has undergone a redesign. The new version is a long way ahead of the old in usability.
• Seems that Rockstar Games will follow Valve’s lead into episodic delivery.
• It’s two years until perl can buy beer. The tenth state of the onion speech strays from the topic as have all the previous.
• Well, yes, apart from the distance, locating a library on the moon would make some sense.
• The knitting blogs have been ruling the finnish blogosphere for ages. Haven’t knitted (or is it knut?) since junior high - but these killer Converses could make anyone recant their vows.
• Very decent article on software patents.
• Convenient explanations for some of the NCAA team names (in finnish). Props for mentioning the Utes.

Where n is 9.

• A page on the evolution of speech bubbles in comics.
• independent gaming is all about what the title states. Sadly windows-centric.
• Neatest google maps mash-up in a while: NYC subway mapped onto the streets of the city.
• Never tried out the addiction called World of Warcraft - according to a study, a whopping 40% of its players suffer from acute addiction.
• The firefox crop circle.
• Nintendo DS homebrew portal.
• John Heilemann’s “counter-historical” article: What If 9/11 Never Happened.
• Llamasoft history, from programming a space invaders clone on zx81 to the modern day (most of the tale still not written).
• Amazing kinetic sculptures (and yeah, it is a BMW commercial, but well worth watching).

You have been sentenced.

• Get Lamp is a forthcoming movie about interactive fiction.
• A mean, but pointful strip, showing the lack of clothing on the emperor.
• Yet another worth1000-contest, this one about outdoing Escher.
• nethack on DS.
• Classic video games, re-enacted with common household objects.
• Google re-launched writely.
• A blog that concentrates on roguelike games sounds like an interesting concept (and could be more frequent than an entry every two weeks).
• Important skills for origami-retreats held in the outback: how to open a bottle of beer with just a piece of paper (and yes, you’re so much better off with pretty much any other object).
• Iron Sky, the next movie by the guys who did Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning has a writer: Johanna Sinisalo.

You know the drill.

• Rather clueful article on wikipedia in Atlantic Monthly.
• An an interview with a guy who has edited more than 80000 thousand pages in wikipedia.
• A nifty wallet created with origami (and a convenient update for european paper sizes).
• Admit it: a tsunami hitting a nuclear power station is a scary concept. The folks of hyökyaalto.org wish that the issue should be taken seriously.
• According to Observer, this is the list of fifty albums that changed the world. Not bad, though reggae and soul are rather well-represented, and metal is confined to Black Sabbath’s debut (at least Kill ‘em All and Slowly We Rot ought to be in…)
• In the series of overdue mash-ups: a simplistic flight simulator built on google maps.
• Frets on Fire for those without Guitar Hero.
• Peter Elk is back in blog-land.

First batch of links for august.

• Onion has a great Wikipedia-spoof. Obviously, july 25th was the 750th anniversary of the US independence.
• Stephen Colbert, a Daily Show sidekick, famously graduated to have his own show (with a slight
  right-wing bias). After coining the term “truthiness”, he’s now beginning to use wikiality as a new tool to advance the incoherent agenda.
• Turns out that there are cheaper alternatives to the almighty Photoshop to play around with high dynamic range images. As pointered by pinseri, hdrsoft’s products sure merit taking them out for a spin.
• Panography is something I haven’t tried out yet. Apart from a four-to-six image single direction panoramas with the aid of Canon’s photostich-application. But that’s obviously just a sliver of the cake, as shown in the relevant flickr-group.
• Just discovered: a finnish blog of nothing more than book reviews, and they’re looking for additional authors.
• Ok, ok, so blogging and journalism both intersect AND differ, perhaps these five things no longer need to be repeated. Or perhaps they will. Over and over again.
• The Los Angeles Times is not a newspaper I’ve read, on paper or on the web. But they sure seem to have an interesting series about the state of the oceans ongoing. Props to Matti for the link. Definitely interesting, and the article seems unencumbered by any DRM (unlike the New York Times, sadly).
• The annual O’Reilly-organized Open Source Convention is over in Portland. And, as usual, the presentations can be downloaded right now.

Despite the sunshine, some interesting destinations have accumulated:

• DRM is bad, mmmkay? And it’s always good to know the enemy.
• Wanted to check out whose song Radar Love originally was, and was broadsided by this information blast. Never guessed that it was this popular.
• Ptolus looks like it’ll be the biggest game-related publication ever. And most expensive. Though the idea of having lots and lots of unprinted material available on an attached cd is a very good idea.
• It’s been a week since the world jump day, and at least I’m oblivious to any axial wobble the six hundred million participants have caused.
• Finland’s selection of insects (and related animals) is far narrower than that of the US. And especially that of any big/poisonous enough to be hazardous to health is very small. But a bug-identification site like or would still be good.
• Now this is getting seriously funky and impressively twisted! Doom 1 is playable on a monitor screen in Doom 3.
• Amit Singh’s book on the internals of Apple’s OS X looks very interesting. And the web-only bonus content is an excellent addition - the latest extra chapter is a 140 page history of all the operating systems put out by Apple, since the seventies.
• And hopefully Singh’s book is still valid after the fifth release of OS X (codenamed Leopard). The content’s been kept under wraps solidly, and the best guesses as to what’s going to be in can be found in the keynote bingo for the Worldwide Developer Conference on the first week on august.
• Now this registers high on the nift-o-meter: gotapi.com is an interactive syntax guide for those awkward moments when, say, the attribute names of tag prove elusive.

Some recent arrivals / changes on the blogroll:

• Matti has given up his quest for anonymity.
• Salakuunneltua brings forth the overheard lapses of reason, in finnish.
• Charles Stross has changed from bloxsom to MT - and changed the URL of the blog as well.
• The official Google blog is usually a worthwhile visit.

Things that have alerted the powerful cybernoid lately:

• Stat City is the coolest Threadless design lately (and I sure haven’t bought many t-shirts lately).
• Crash-only software is another interesting article at lwn.net. And I refuse to use work-credentials to read about the ongoing symposium right now.
• CNN interviews the guy who creates the occasional day-specific logos for google.
• Prestige definitely shoots to the top of “should definitely see”-list. Christopher Nolan (with no bad movies on his belt) directing Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and Scarlett Johansson on an interesting premise sure sounds worthwhile.
• Pitwall, a Formula-1 management game. For the inner Jean Todts and Flavio Briatores. It cannot be any more boring than the real thing has been, recently.
• Despite being officially abandoned by Activision, the Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines game keeps getting gamer-provided patches to enhance the original release in many unexpected ways.

Or a mojito, if you’re so inclined.

• William Gibson’s Alien III-script. Which, obviously, wasn’t used.
• An annotated list of non-errors in the english language. Now I finally understand what “splitting an infinitive” really means.
• An interesting article on community sites as games.
• Kyle MacDonald traded up his one red paperclip, and now owns a house. In Saskatchewan, Canada, but a house nonetheless.
• This year’s annual transhumanism-conference will be organized in Helsinki.
• On the very same weekend as Finncon 2006, the biggest finnish speculative fiction-occasion.
• Minutes from the very first Linux file system workshop are available (and now for free at lwn.net).
• A Chinese company claims that it has cracked the Skype protocol.

… here’s the six links.

• Summer’s definitely not the fireworks season in Finland, but tips on photographing nocturnal pyrotechnics are bound to come in useful sooner or later.
• What would happen if some classic photographs would be posted on a review site. The responses are ghost-written, obviously, but the caricatures are cruel indeed.
• Not all the video games have cool names. Gamerevolution has put together a list of the fifty worst ones.
• Carnival of Gamers, again something for a rainy day.
• On the internet, there’s room for everything. Including a photo collection of yawning rabbits. (Which seems to be down due to exceeding bandwidth limits at the moment).
• A decently long interview with Ron Gilbert, the man behind the classic Secret of Monkey Island.

Some things to check out in case the games get boring.

• Zork over IP, which goes to show that no matter what the platform, a Z-machine implementation will soon be ported to it.
• Moleskine has expanded its product range to city guidebooks.
• The deepest hole ever drilled into the crust of Gaia.
• This must be the biggest page on the web, after all it covers the deep sky in some 8.1 nonillion pixels. Something to scroll through in a long-winded and badly ventilated meeting.
• A draft of a history of interactive fiction.
• Future of pinball is a forthcoming document of Williams’ Pinball 2000 project. A project that was supposed to bring the game into the 21st century, but was instead untimely shut down.