Interstellar Marines – Wow!
I came across this game the other day while I was perusing a random website someone in the #projectreality channel on Quakenet linked the channel to, and I was immediately impressed. The first thing that caught my eye was what was in the ‘publisher’ field. “It’s AAA Indie baby!” I thought it was some kind of sarcastic comment written by the auther of the article. After visiting the Interstellar Marines website though, it turns out that they really are an independent game development company, that does not have a publisher.
After reading through all the information that the development team has posted so far, this game sounds very interesting! Especially since it appears that they have done their homework for the most part.
Currently the plan is for them to create the game and release it on PC, and then work on 360/PS3 versions.
Check it out, and show your support for this awesome-project!
Filed Under Miscellaneous, UncategorizedNot keeping up
Wow. I haven’t been on here for quite awhile, and I apologize for that. I kind of completely forgot. Got caught up in other things, many of them not even that important anyways.
I will finish my browser reviews in the coming weeks and months.
What actually reminded me to come is I needed to amend my Google Chrome review slightly. So there will be some changes to that. Check it out.
Filed Under MiscellaneousWeb Browsers: Part 4: Apple Safari 4
Generally Windows ports of Apple products take up a lot of system resources, are slow, crash often, and do not even work right. Without even using the Apple versions of these products, this much can be discerned.
From what I have noticed Safari is exactly what it advertises to be. A web browser, with an RSS reader. This is both good and bad. On the one hand this means that the developers can focus on making that one thing work very very well. On the down side, this means that you don’t have a very nice all-in-one program for handling practically anything the web could throw at you.
The new safari has some really nice features, and has very good integration with Windows 7, which is surprising considering that when Windows Vista came out Apple refused to support it for as long as they could.
The Look
I have never been a particular fan of Safari. I tried Safari 3 for Windows a few years ago and hated the way it looked. While not a major improvement, a few minor tweaks altered the look enough that it is now very visually appealing. The grayish-silver style Safari uses is very easy on the eyes, it does not strain them like Black on White does. Everything is right where you expect it to the preferences are very easy to find.
I particularly enjoyed the download manager that Safari has. Alternating colors of off-white and sky-blue separate each individual download from one another. The status bar used is very visually appealing. It is solid blue with white “pulses” streaming down it at regular intervals. It looks pretty.
The “Top Sites,” what is shown when you open a new tab, also looks very good. It is similar to Opera’s Quick Dial, and Google Chrome’s Favourite Sites, and many addons for FireFox including quick dial, and fast dial. It discovers what your most frequently visited sites are and places them on a large grid of the sites that you visit the most. After first instillation there are many popular sites as placeholders. You can edit this at any time, removing sites, pinning the ones you want to keep on the page, and adding sites that you want displayed.
Speed and Resource Usage
Safari is much faster than it used to be on Windows. Loading web pages almost immediately (assuming you have a fast connection). It no longer balks at flash, or javascript, nor really any of the things that it used to have trouble with. The problem however, is that it is currently using 184MiB of RAM, and 2-7% of my CPU. While they seem to have fixed the speed problem, it seems to be using more memory than ever. (Comparatively FireFox is only using 80MiB of RAM, but nearly 15% of my CPU).
Security
I never really tried to access in shady sites in Safari. I am not confident in it’s security. Unfortunately there do not seem to be in customizeable Javascript controls, decent adblock, or any other serious security measures. I’m sure the developers have coded in security measures of some sort (though they don’t really need to for it’s intended operating system), but I am not confident in that fact.
Other
Safari is much more open in it’s interpretation of Code than Opera is. This means that your website does not have to strictly conform to the .html standards for Safari to properly display it. As far as I could tell, Safari nearly fully supports CSS and Javascript, and pretty much everything else the web can throw at it.
While not only interpreting html in it’s strict format is nice for the end user, it promotes laziness in web-developers, as does FireFox, which is a little annoying, but at least it displays nearly everything well.
Up Next: Mozilla Firefox (with and without addons)
Filed Under ReviewsWeb Browsers: Part 3: Opera 10
As stated in Browsers: Part 1: Opera 9; I have been testing Opera 10 for the last few weeks.
As with Opera 9, I like it. They have vastly upgraded the interface, and now it is much more pretty. However, they seem to have taken something from Microsoft’s books, making it look very pretty but totally non-functional. It is rather difficult to find many things which I found so easily in Opera 9.
As far as features go, from what I could tell everything that was in Opera 9 is still present. Quickdial is still there, and that was always a welcome feature. I didn’t really get a chance to mess around with the e-mail system in Opera 10, mostly because I didn’t want to screw up my IMAP synchronization. Nor did I get a chance to play with the IRC, Bittorrent, or many other features, but I expect they are much the same as they were in Opera 9, not the best, but at least functional.
The visual aspect of Opera 10, as I previously mentioned, is fantastic. At the top of the screen for tabs, you can pull the section down, and the tabs become a small preview of the page inside of that tab. It isn’t big enough to actually read anything, but at the very least it gives you an idea of what is inside of that tab. Alternitively you can also hover over the tab and it also gives you a preview. Something I discovered quite by accident is that when you have the permanent tab-preview open, if you hover on it, another preview is shown just below your mouse, as it would as if it was another tab. Redundancies of this type are rather annoying.
As with Opera 9, Opera 10 still suffers formatting certain webpages, a problem I have never run into in Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox.
Overall Opera 10 is a decent webbrowser. It isn’t lightning fast, but it does it’s many jobs well.
Up next: Apple Safari 4.
Filed Under ReviewsWeb Browsers: Part 2: Google Chrome
Google Chrome came out about… a year ago now I believe, in a beta stage. Now it has been released on Windows (XP+ officially, it may work on older systems) as a fully stable browser, which is somewhat true.
I have used Google Chrome off and on ever since then. It has always been relatively stable, though I have had some problems. It seems to be fully compatible with every website that I have gone to, no problems with CSS or Javascript, or flash, or anything that I have encountered.
The visual style is, to me, appealing. It is minimalistic. Everything just makes sense. I love the way that every tab almost looks seems like its own window. Being able to pull the tabs out of the current window, to create a new one, is very seamless. Reordering the tabs is visually appealing as well, to me the visual aspect was definitely thought through.
Unfortunately Google has not officially opened up Firefox-esque addons as was promised. They are available in the “developer” version of the browser (appending -dev into the executable path in a shortcut). I definitely miss my AdBlock+ and NoScript extensions, as well as a few others that are more just personal preference than a practically globally used addon.
One of the biggest things that Google advertised as, pretty much, the main selling point of Chrome, was that each individual tab had it’s own process in Chrome’s own Task Manager. This is excellent, if it worked. I have done a few tests on it, both intentional and unintentional. When browsing with several tabs open I happened upon a website that crashed Chrome. I attempted to access the Chrome Task Manager to no avail, and had to restart the browser completely. This happened each time I ran into a crash-causing website.
Overall I have to rate Google Chrome very high. It is extremely user-friendly, visually appealing, fast, and stable.
The minuses are that it doesn’t have any add-on customization; the ToS was a little weird at first, but they quickly changed that; and also the “each tab has it’s own separate process” draw doesn’t work as intended.
EDIT:
I finally ran into a browser tab actually killing itself and not the entire browser. That was really nice, because I had some kind-of important stuff open!
Also, the browser is now working in Linux! I am using the latest version of Arch Linux using KDE 4.3. I installed Google Chrome through the Arch Users Repository. There are a couple of problems with it, firstly that I have to run it as a super user to be able change any settings. This of course makes it hard to download anything, since anything I do download will be owned by my root account, and I won’t be able to edit it, open it for anything, BUT! At least Google Chrome is out for Linux, and that’s all that matters to me right now.
Filed Under ReviewsWeb Browsers Part 1: Opera 9
Over the next month or so I will be posting some personal reviews of the most popular browsers: Opera 9, Opera 10, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, KDE Konqueror.
I like Opera. I really do.
About 4 or 5 months ago I was an adamant user of Opera 9. I was pretty excited for Opera 10, though not completely thrilled; I thought the whole facial gestures thing was, well to be frank, retarded. Mouse gestures are bad enough, why would I want to make faces at the computer screen??
So back on topic, I used Opera 9 for, oh lets say six months (that sounds right to me). I like it a lot. It was really nice to have my mail, my RSS feeds, and my web-browser all in one application. Opera link is also pretty cool, you can sync bookmarks, and notes, but not e-mails (I guess that is what IMAP is for, right?). That is really frustrating. I like IMAP, but I want to see the exact same thing in each browser, that wasn’t going to happen. Oh well, it’s still an awesome browser.
I will mention the apps were really bad in Opera 9.
Opera has always been slower than FireFox. That’s just the way it is. It really isn’t too noticeable, until you use it constantly, and you really notice it gets sluggish, especially when loading images, or long pages.
Ultimately that is what made me switch away from Opera 9 back to Firefox. I just love the Fox.
Currently I am trying out Opera 10. After a few weeks usage I will report back on how that works.
Filed Under Miscellaneous, ReviewsKilo-Tango
Kilo-Tango is pretty much fully operational. The gaming section (http://gaming.kilo-tango.net/) is moving along nicely, and is nearly all set up.
I am very pleased with the results of the community so far, I would prefer to have more people, but it’s only been about a month.
Filed Under MiscellaneousSurprisingly Interesting
I began working on my presentation for my English Composition II class yesterday (when I have to present today, yeah pretty hardcore procrastination). I expected the article I chose to be very dull and boring, as I didn’t know the author and most of the other recent ones have been pretty dull. I am surprised.
The passage “Encounter on the Tundra” by Barry Lopez is actually very good. It really got me thinking about different things that he mentioned. One question he posed that I really liked, and am still pondering, is do animals have intentions like humans do? What about courage?
In my presentation I have to ask two discussion questions. This will definitely be one of them. I am interested in what my class has to say about it, especially because many of them seem to be the philosophical type.
I would like to pose this same question to you, my readers (though there is only like, one of you right now), what do YOU think. DO animals have intentions, intentions like humans do? Do they have courage?
Filed Under MiscellaneousKleptomaniacs piss me off
Yes they do. Today in my Computer Technology class I getting ready to leave class. Most everybody had already stood up and walked towards the door, but there was a few stragglers (myself included). During this prepare to leave exercise, I had to stand up and go put away a “Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows XP” book. During this time I left a pencil on the table where I was sitting. I was gone for less than 30 seconds.
I return, and my pencil is gone. After briefly looking around my work area, I came to the conclusion that someone picked it up. Now, this wasn’t a particularly nice pencil or anything, just your normal run-of-the-mill mechanical pencil. Why would someone steal it?
I come now to the conclusion of kleptomania. My school is full of kleptomaniacs, in fact probably most high schools are. People that just HAVE to take things.
What is the point? I mean, it is not like these people NEED these things. They just want them. But why do they want them? They have their own pencils and pens, and some of the ones that take iPods and cell phones, have their own of those too! There is absolutely NO purpose in taking other people’s belongings. Other than, this is the only thing I can come up with, a minor adrenaline rush.
What drives these kleptomaniacs?
Although kleptomaniac is the wrong term for them, because most of them don’t feel a compulsory need to steal EVERYTHING they see, rather they do it just because they don’t have that thing.
So I modify my question to be: What drives these people to steal things that they see, and want, but don’t necessarily need?
Filed Under Miscellaneous#Kilo-Tango
The #kilo-tango website has been launched!
http://www.kilo-tango.net/
The forums are up, though still under construction, but registrations are open and you can begin posting.
Filed Under News