On writing about "Girls in Games"

"Girls in Games" is such a popular topic simply because there are much less girls who are obsessive about gaming than boys. Surely, you'd have read special features in magazines or online articles looking at the less common girls who are in games or are into gaming. Anyway, a UK journo called Richard Cobbett has written an interesting piece on writing about "girls in games".

At some point in your writing career, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll think it’s a good idea to write one of these articles. If you’re a guy, that is. By and large, female writers have better things to do with their time than obsess over their gender while playing a game, and tend to be into gaming because they like - how can I put this? Oh, yes, playing games, rather than out of a burning need to practice amateur sociology.

But never mind that. Here’s your ten-step path to success.

Swarm the dot com

This is a must-have if you like to see what other people are browsing. Using this Firefox extension called Swarm, you can watch what the sites you're browsing and also display what other folks are viewing too. The site describes this app this way:

Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller.

Website traffic is symbolized with thin lines. Each time you see a line appear, it means someone has moved from one site to the other. You can gauge how many people are swarming around based on the number of lines.

LEGO Flash drive

You can already declare your love for LEGO by carrying your bunch of keys on a LEGO keychain. If you're a geek, why not also carry a USB drive that's made from LEGO bricks? On the MAKE blog, you can find links on folks who came up with some nifty home-made LEGO flash drive. There are also links on how you can make your own.

The musical Roomba

The Roomba is the famous robot vaccum cleaner. HOwever, it's also a hacker's fave tool. Now, hackers have turned the Roomba into a musical instrument, albeit a crude one. With the software called RoombaMidi running, you can make your Roomba move and light up according to preset Midi instructions. There's also a demo video of the Roomba grooving to Super Mario Brothers on the site. Neato.

Cataloging books in MacOS X

If you like to catalog the books that you have on your bookshelf, and you're looking for a free app to help you do that on your Mac, then check out Books. This is a freeware that will help you catalogue your books collection. Now, if it adds in scanning of the ISBN code using the iSight, then it will be the perfect app.

HFT: Quick-and-easy HTTP file server

If you're looking for something that lets you share files over the Net, you can try out HFS. It stands for HTTP File Server and it is free and open source. With it, you can do file sharing and use it as a webserver. It allows customisation and has features like HTML template, bandwidth control and even a dynamic DNS updater. Pretty nifty for something that's free.

Free, public domain images

With copyright a concern, using pictures in your presentation can be a problem. That\'s why you can use this site to help you get some pictures that you can use. There are plenty of public domain images here and, unless otherwise noted, you can use them for free. Granted that the pictures are mostly taken from old books and may not be that modern, it can still be a pretty good source to include images in your presentation or any project that you may be working on.

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yWriter: Word Processor for Authors

If you are planning to write that great novel that's in your head, you'll need some writers tool. Word is a good processor but it may not help you to organise your thoughts, writing fragments, etc. In comes this software called yWriter. It's suppose to be a word processor that's specifically a story writing software. Here's what the developer of this tool has to say:

I'm a programmer and a novelist, and yWriter is the result of 3 or 4 years of development. I really struggled over my first novel because I wrote whole slabs of text into a great big word processor file and tried to make sense of the whole thing at once. I then tried saving each chapter to individual files with great long descriptive filenames, but moving scenes around was a nuisance and I couldn't get an overview of the whole thing (or easily search for one word amongst 32 files) In the end I realised a dedicated program was the way to go, and yWriter is the result. It may look simple, but as the author of three books written with this tool I can guarantee it has everything needed to get a first draft together.

Best of all, yWriter is free.

Yes, check out that last bit, it's free. Too bad it's only for Windows.

Celebrating the unboxing of new gadgets

Sometimes, the best thing about buying a new gadget is not just knowing that you have a new toy to play with, but knowing that you can unpack a brand new toy. The act of unpacking, or unboxing, is certainly a joy if you're one who love to open packages and smell the fresh scent of brand new tech toys. Now, you can enjoy the act even if you're short of cash to buy new gadgets. On Unboxing.com, you can find picts of folks opening up their new gadgets. It's porn for the tech geeks, I tell ya!

The Top 25 X-Men

The new X-Men movie will soon hit the big screen. Outside of the movies, there are actually hundreds of mutants that have graced the covers of the comics. IGN has sorted through the many mutants who appeared in the past 40 plus years and come up with the top 25 X-Men. Cool.

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Turn Your Mac Into A Jedi Weapon

Your Mac laptop is your trusty computer. If you install this software called MacSaber, it'll also turn your machine into a Jedi weapon. Using the motion sensor on your machine, it will sense the movement and make authentic lightsaber sound effects. Essential for Mac-loving Padawans.

How-to Backup Your Original XBox360 Games

Now that the instructions for modifying the XBox360 firmware is out in the wild, those with the courage to actually do that will want to start making backups of their 360 games in case anything happens to them. This link will bring you to a guide that is written to help you make backups of your original xbox360 games. Why make backups? Well, there's the problem of scratches and othe malfuctions that may happen.

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Cork'd: A site for wine aficionados

Cork's is a website where users can freely catalog, rate and review wines. It's like a online database for wine that you can use. The site is still new so it may take some time for the database to expand and include more variety of wine. Anyway, it's free and all you need to do is sign up to use the service.

Installing a Dualboot Homebrew Firmware Mod on the Xbox360

If you're prepared to tinker with the Xbox360, then this tutorial on XBox-Scene will tell you how to get two fireware chips on the console so that you can switch between the original DVD firmware and the special firmware for the TS-H943 DVD drive. Note: This may not be legal depending on how you view it so proceed with caution.

singapore: a free php-driven image gallery

What is Singapore? Yes, it's the sunny island republic near the tip of the Malayan Peninsular. But singapore, on the other hand, is an open source image gallery. According to the website, it's an

...open source, multilingual, template-driven image gallery web application... quite a mouthful! It is written in PHP and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

What makes singapore different from the hundreds of other similar scripts is that it was originaly conceived for displaying photographic art in an aesthetically pleasing fashion using a clean, uncluttered interface. Now, though, its powerful templating system allows you to display your images in pretty much any way that takes your fancy.

Well, it's quite amusing to find that someone actually names their product after Singapore.
Link

Free version of Avid video editing software

Those who have worked in pro-video editing environment will know that Avid is widely used in the video editing world. However, Avid may be too expensive for home users. It is therefore a good thing that Avid has a free version for those who just want a simple way to edit their video. This software called Avid Free DV can be downloaded from the Avid site and versions are available for Mac OS and Windows.

Tools for Getting Things Done

The Getting Things Done, or GTD, system seems to be quite popular with the tech set. It's therefore no suprise that there are plenty of software or online tools to help organise your life with the GTD system. This webpage has a list of GTD tools that your can try out and start getting your life in order.
Link

Documentary on piracy available for download

Is downloading films and music piracy? It all depends. To explore this issue, here's a 2-hour documentary that discusses music & movie piracy. It covers issues like DRM, the DMCA, why people pirate, and what everyone thinks of it. It features interviews with industry execs, copyright lawyers, pirates, consumers, artists, the government, and everyone that's ever said anything about piracy in Canada. Best of all, it's available free for the download. You may need to use the torrent file to get the film due to the massive demand for the file.

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Creative Commons tunes on Jamendo

If you're looking for legal music to fill your MP3 player, head down to Jamendo. It has plenty of Creative Commons licensed music for your to grab by direct download or via BitTorrent. So in your search for new music, you might just want to check out more than 1,000 albums that they have. You can also write your own reviews, and participate in community forum discussions. Nice.
Link

Bloodspell: A machinima fantasy film

Think machinima, ie. films made with a game rendering engine, and you'll think of short films. Of course, Scotland's Strange Company is going beyond the short film with its feature-length fantasy-adventure machinima film. Offered under the Creative Commons license, this film is released in various episodes and is suppose to be quite good. Spell-binding indeed!

New Google tools are all about search

On the official Google Blog, the folks in everyone's fave search company annouced 4 new Google products all based around search. They are Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, Google Trends and Google Notebook. Of the four items, probably the most fun is Google Trends where you can compare 2 or more search terms and look at the search trend over the years. With it, now you can know if "good" or "evil" has grown or decline in popularity over the years.

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ted: The torrent episode downloader

If you want an automatic way to grab specific shows using a RSS feed, you can check out this free application called ted. It will save you time to track new episodes of your fave shows from torrent sites.

3tunes - Time shifting Pandora

If you've used Pandora, you'd know that it's a pretty cool service that suggests and plays you tunes from a genre or artist that you like. So what if you've heard something from the Pandora stream that you like? Well, now you can save it for your later listening pleasure with an app called 3tunes. It's free and is in early alpha, but what it does is cool, allowing you to grab music with the track info and save them. Nice.

Keeping tabs of E3 with torrents

Can't be there for the biggest gaming event of the year? Don't worry. There's a Bittorrent tracker site that's called Titanium Torrents and it is is dedicated to video game media. You can get the latest E3 videos here. The videos for the last year's Nintendo and Microsoft press conference are there now and hopefully, it'll be updated with more trailers and stuff from this year's E3.

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Satisfaction of a Boss

"Boss battle". Tell that to a gamer and he'll certainly be able to tell you a memorable incident during a boss fight where the experience is so intense that it becomes part of his own gaming myth. On Wired News, there's an article that looks at the attraction of bosses in games. Essential read for gamers before you go taking on another boss in your next game.

It's like bosses are the SATs of the game world: "It's a culmination," Byron notes. "It's not asking you to suddenly learn new skills. It's asking you to remember everything you've learned." You're aiming for that "aha" moment when, desperate for some way to topple the boss, you suddenly hit upon a clever new way to apply your powers -- and the insurmountable becomes manageable.

That's one of the best feelings ever -- and it's also one we rarely get in everyday life. The enemies we face in our contemporary world are so much more ambiguous and internal, and half the time it's ourselves. We try to find a meaningful job, to hack through a bad relationship, to blunder through the red tape of money and taxes. Even our modern literature of struggle has been blunted. The Greeks and Romans imagined their lives through metaphors of heroes facing down arcane monsters; we read The Corrections or Indecision or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

City Guides for iPod

Your iPod can do more than be a musical companion when you're traveling. When you install CityGuides, you get info about the location that you're visiting right there on your handy music player. There are 300 cities for you to choose from so before you get on your plane, you can load up this useful and free app.
Link

Star Wars + Lord of the Rings = Star Lords

What happens when you put Star Wars and Lord of the Rings together, and then mix it up in a pot filled with disco goodness? Well, you get the video Star Lords. This is a video mash-up of the two epic movies into a 6-minute plus clip. The music track "Its Just Begun" by Jimmy Castor Bunch is then thrown into the mix and you have the characters from the films are seen to boogie. Fun to watch.
Link

Watch 70 TV stations on the Net

This site called Channelchooser has put together a page which has a collection of 70 channels that you can watch from your browser. Some of the channels include Game Network, Horror Channel, Comedy Channel, Sci-Fi Channel, Lifestyle Network, and even 8 Adult channels. Are they illegal? Well, it's up for debate.

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Top Azureus Plugins Revealed

The Azureus bittorrent client is a feature rich application. If not for the fact that it can be a resource hog, I would spend more time using this client. However, if you have plenty of processing power to spare, then using Azureus may not be such a bad thing, since it allows plugins that can enhance your BT experience.

Zeropaid.com has an article that is useful for those want wants to venture into the plugins territory. It features some of the best plugins available for Azureus include one that will give you a 3D representation of your downloads. Nifty.
Link

Amusing screenshot of Green Card application on CNA

When browsing on the Channelnewsasia.com website, I stumble across something quite amusing and I've captured a screenshot of what I saw.

On a page where the General Election news is reported, there is a banner ad on top of the screen that belongs to a Green Card Lottery Application site. The story is about Singapore not needing full-time MPs. So since we don't need full-time MPs, one can chose to get a US Green Card instead?

Seriously, I know it's just a coincidence, but it is just amusing and doesn't seem appropriate.

FIFA World Cup info on your iPod

Here's another use for your iPod. If you're a footy fan and an iPod user, and you are eagerly waiting for this year's World Cup, then head to Coolgorilla.com to grab this World Cup 2006 Guide. The guide contains useful stuff like the full schedule, info on teams and players, stadium details, and plenty more. In the words of the folks at Coolgorilla,

This game will transform your iPod into an interactive football encyclopedia. It unleashes the power of your iPod by using a clever system of menus so that all the information you want is only a few clicks away. Astound your friends with your knowledge of the beautiful game.

Beautiful indeed.
Link

Fold - another web-based desktop

Add another AJAX-based webpages to your list. This one called Fold is a portal or start page that claims to be a "desktop in a browser". It looks pretty cool as you can put "containers" with News feed, HTML, notes, and even Flash content on this "desktop". It's in beta now but it sure looks promising.

Ponyfish RSS Feed Builder

Have you ever wanted to track a blog but then finds that it does not have a RSS feed? Ponyfish is a tool that'll help you with this problem. It's a free web-based tool that lets you create a RSS feed from almost web page. The concept is simple and it'll help you to get your blog cravings even though the site does not have RSS.

Smarter way of formatting

Many folks are moving to open source office suites because they don't want to pay for MS Office. While that is a good thing, the problem arises when it comes to compatibility between the documents created in the two software.

On the linked site, there's an article titled "Smart formatting for better compatibility between OpenOffice.org and MS Office", on how you can better format your documents so that when you move them around, the formatting doesn't change too drastically. There're plenty of tips on how you should format documents and they are sure handy even if you don't switch your office suites.

Wiki for song lyrics

There seems to be a Wiki for everything these days. Of course, only useful wikis will attract attention and this wiki for song lyrics will certainly be useful for many music lovers. Great if you want an ad-free environment to look for the words to your fave tunes.

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Rallies at Hougang compared

The Singapore General Election is in full swing. One of the most exciting things during elections is the rallies. What is interesting is that the media does not seem to fully or accurately show the number of people who are present at those rallies. I found these two photos on two different blogs. Click on the links to see the photo.

Photo One

This is taken from sgrally.blogspot.com and is suppose to be a rally by the PAP. The field is suppose to be muddy as the rally was held after a rain.

Photo Two

This one is from Yawningbread.org. It's a rally by the Workers' Party.

Compare the two pictures and you can tell the difference in the size of the crowd. Draw your own conclusion.

Blogging with Xbox360

Want to start a blog but you're too lazy to stop playing the Xbox360 to actually start one? Here's the solution for you. On the 360voice.com page, you can give your 360 a voice. Just enter your Gamertag and it'll generate a blog from your gamerfeed that details what you've been doing on Xbox live. Pretty cool.