A true geek can’t help themselves. Every time — every time — the garage door is closing, you’ve got to duck out under it as per Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark; for some reason I keep remembering it’s his hat he retrieves, not his whip.
But malfunctioning technology kills my inner child. Every time the collision detector fires off (which it does fairly often, even when it hasn’t collided with anything) and the garage door opens again – beeping – a little part of me dies.
totem-video-thumbnailer at fault?
Close Nautilus, the file-system browser that you’ve got open on the directory where the files are being downloaded. It file is constantly getting pinged as having been updated, and so it’s getting thumbnailed over and over again, to no end.
Note your download speeds may improve after this fix.
This is great.
(via Tony and Shell)
PS. Note the references to Commodore, Atari, Ocean, Psycnosis, and possibly others!
To celebrate Pacman’s 30th anniversary, Google’s banner today is not only Pac-man-based, it’s a playable game if you wait for a few seconds.
And yes, if you clear the first two boards, you get the traditional cut-scene.
Is that totally awesome or what?
Am I correct in thinking it’s not actually written in Flash, but in some clever HTML-type thingy?
Update: Yes. CNet reports: ccording to Germick, the company worked with Pac-Man’s publisher, Namco Bandai, to make the project as realistic as possible. Yet the Google team, with the inspirational lead of Marcin Wichary, a Google senior user experience designer, built their version of the game from the ground up using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Update 4pm: If you click Insert Coin twice, you get a two-player game (W/A/S/Z controls Ms Pac-Man). And there is one minor bug I’ve noticed — sometimes when chasing ghosts after eating a power pill, you can pass right through them.
Update 9:30pm: Google Pac-Man: The FAQ + Kill Screen Winners — contains more details on how it was written, where to find it when it’s gone from the main Google page, and a picture of the”kill” screen.
Update Monday: It’s gone from Google’s home page now, but is still online here: www.google.com/pacman
Towel Day is an annual celebration on the 25th of May, as a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001). On that day, fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his honour.
See Towel day on Wikipedia.
Note to the Internet:
The Transmission bittorrent client supports the magnet bittorrent protocol, but only after Transmission has run once. On it’s initial run it registers itself as the provider of the magnet: protocol. If you haven’t started Transmission (at least, a version after 1.80) and restarted (say) FireFox, the magnet: protocol won’t seem to work.
You need to use the age-old solution of closing everything and starting it back up again.
This is not documented anywhere, but if you search hard enough through the closed bug reports for Transmission you might figure it out eventually.
Photo caption — “Make: Canon Model: Canon EOS-1D Mark III Date/Time: 2009:11:30 10:57:33 Source: Herald Sun”
Source: Herald Sun
Facebook has new simplified privacy options.
Including one for About Me, which it claims “refers to the About Me description in your profile”.
“About Me”? I don’t remember that.
So I went looking in my profile. It was nowhere to be found. I thought maybe somewhere on the Info tab. Nup, couldn’t see it.
Eventually with some clues from someone on Twitter pointing me to it, I discovered it’s invisible unless you’ve set it to say something. Very helpful.
So to find it, it’s under: Profile / Info tab / Personal Information, then if you can’t see About Me, click the Edit button for Personal Information. Only then will it appear.
And just to confuse things, the “Write something about yourself” box underneath your photo in your Profile is different.
So here’s the thing. The other day I was looking at Facebook, at the Wall of a friend of mine, Jason.
And for a few minutes there, Facebook decided I was logged-on as Jason.
Except I wasn’t. I didn’t have any permissions to look at his private stuff, nor change things, but every time I clicked on the Profile button it showed me his Wall, not mine.
When I clicked Home, it thought I was me again. Clicking back to Profile, Jason again. I just couldn’t get to my own Profile.
In the bottom-right it said I had a bunch of notifications. But it wouldn’t let me see them; they must have been his.
Then I clicked logoff, and became me again.
I had a look at a couple of other friends’ Walls, it didn’t do it. But back on Jason’s, it got stuck again. I let him know, of course.
Makes me glad it didn’t just assume I was him and let me do and see anything he could. All I ever saw (apart from the number of notifications he had) was stuff I could see anyway as his friend.
All very odd.
If you’ve ever wondered how election results make their way from the ballot boxes onto the screen on the ABC, Antony Green’s written a fascinating post about how it how it all works, and how the technology involved has changed over the years from paper slips to XML feeds.
BBC: Classic video game Elite turns 25
Elite co-developer David Braben takes the BBC’s Daniel Emery on a flight in the BBC Micro computer game.
The space fantasy involved trading in slaves, narcotics and minerals as you flew around a fictional universe.
Pirate and police ships threatened to disrupt your journey or kill you.
I never got to the rank of Elite, but I did make it to Deadly.