Podio

Go to Podio Books. Seriously. And Get Mur's Work. She is great. And her daughter loves Dora, like my baby does. How can you really go wrong?

Flikr

Put up the flickr flash badge. Much cuteness inside that account. Now back to the technicals.

Tali and Tropa

For those gamers out there, how roman dice worked:


Tali and Tropa

Edit:

Sheep ankle bones, 4 sides, and various rules wackiness to follow. And apparently quite the part of culture. I guess the next thing that I should do is research how we all got to the six sided dice as something semi-standard.

Burning Empires

So yeah, this wasn't as easy as I had thought itwas going to be to find:

Burning Empires


I can't wait till I get my hands on this bad boy. The wikipedia entry on Burning Wheel alone made me go "Huh? I don't get it. Grief for elves?" My interest is totally piqued.

Sons of Kryos and random musings at 5 in the morning

I have no idea how I could have missed that GenCon 2006 and GenCon 2006 Indy where one and the same. Moving on, I've been thinking of going out and buying copies of Burning Empire and Burning Wheel. From the Sons of Kryos (link) I've got the impression that Burning Wheel is really fun and interesting to play in. This and Riddle of Steel are the three games on my most immediate "to get" list. My only hope is that, since these *might* be low print runs that there are still copies available.

I do have to say this, the more that I listen to more of the podcasts out there for roleplaying, the more I wonder about my own personal style. I do enjoy a good game of hack and slash, and I love the feeling of progress on a character that is levelling up. Now with that said, I haven't quite hit that spot where stories completely take over and the levelling is more of a chore or a pleasant side bonus. I do love it when there is back story to a place, but a lot of the more psychological twists and turns haven't still grabbed me. Maybe it's presentation, if there is a GM/DM/ST/whatever that could present it into a more digestible form, I'd finally "get it". Or maybe just reading Burning Wheel could lead to enlightenment.

Seriously, go listen to Sons of Kryos. They will blow your mind away, especially the episodes where they talk about tinkering with the systems you play in. The mention of tying hit points into a part of the community alone bogggled me for 10 minutes. I then thought, why not tie levels into how large of an area that you effect. I'm still working out this mechanic, because the litmus test of telling another gamer how this would work required more than 1 minute. Now the Morale Dice Pool from ... oh man 30? ... is a great idea. Also detailed in one of the podcasts.

Well, hm, the mental gastank has run empty. Be back later.

Blog This! is gone?

So, I've been looking at some of the set up for beta blogger and tried to BlogThis!. Now that I've gone to beta, apparently this isn't going to happen with my old bookmarklet and I a) can't revert back b) can't hack around the bookmarklet to get it to work.

Much sadness in the House of L.

GenCon Indy 2006

GenCon Indy 2006 pictures taken by someone (I think Mick) and posted to the Harping Monkey.

All I have to say is wow. I can see now, that the journey of the Misfit and the Journey of the Hero are sometimes one and the same as these people I think anyone could feel comfortable around. I.e. these are normal folks that just happen to have a love for a game or set of games. Too bad there were no pics of the Sons of Kryos, granted I am listening backwards so maybe they didn't even go.

It's like Fruitcake, but without that pesky fruit

Seriously Good: Bourbon Cake


mmmm sounds yummy, and lay you flat on your back if seasoned properly.

File::Find::Rule::Extending - the mini-guide to extending File::Find::Rule - search.cpan.org

A mini tutorial on how to alter file::find items. I really like the example that they give for spitting back random files. Imagine tying it into an xmms call so that you could get a random playback and then be able to save the playlist from inside xmms.

Or showing random pictures or whatever. Neat stuff.

File::Find::Rule - Alternative interface to File::Find - search.cpan.org

CPAN doc listing how to use this fine module to sidestep some of the restrictions in another fine cpan module. I swear perl has some neat modules out there.

sharm - Real-time open source activity stats

Follow your programmers and revision code management systems like they were baseball players. I mention this one because of the Tomboy relation....

I'm kind of liking it...

Edgy Beta CD's

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta

And here you can find the cd images in case you are cursed to not have a dvd burner

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta

Just out today. C'mon, surf the bleeding edge. What's the worst that can happen?

Python 2.5 Release

Python 2.5 Release: "This is a final release, and should be suitable for production use." Some people have said it's neat and new and works well for their applications. Some of the numpy items have supposedly broke but that very well could be a) numpy b) the person compiling it c) the platform we were trying it on.

Best of VIM Tips

Go to the Best of VIM Tips, gVIM's Key Features. Then wonder why you are using any other editor. Then again, i am using emacs for my email and for editing code and washing my dog.

The main thing is that I use both all the time, and can't imagine why some people want to holy war over these editors. Of course, bike sheds do tend to obscure vision.

Geek Pit: Using Emacs to Edit Blog Posts

Geek pit has this article that I'm really needing to read in full. The overall gist is that you can edit the posts you make in emacs without too much fuss.

Oh and there is a comment on how to post articles to blogger via emacs as well. Truely a very nice editor. I guess the next questions is: Is there something like this for VIM?

Vim 7.0

Oh did I mention that my stable Gentoo recently went to the 7.0 version of vim?

So, it's time to start waxing poetic about random editor. Well maybe later.

Second Life

Oh yeah, if you like to create coded content, you might want to check out Second Life. Tons of neat places to explore and a lot of content generated by users.

Remember that since it's all a labor of love there are going to be edges and rough spots to some folks. But what makes it's so cool is that it is the modern "folk art".

Hrm

So, I have the ability to upload images to this blog. Or so I think. When I go to add a 2.9 MB bitmap it just sits and sits and sits trying upload it. It's quite odd, especially since I then get the dreaded "This Script has stopped responding" error in firefox (gentoo linux, latest stable).

Guess I'll try another browser and os and see if that works just fine or not.

New Glarus Brewing Company

New Glarus Brewing Company is one of the best breweries around. I really enjoy their 'Spotted Cow' and really wish that it made it all the way out to Montana.

Very tasty and I highly recommend it. And honestly, I really think it is something that all beer drinkers can love.

Get Ready

The BETA of the new blogger is coming. detailed in the prior link, it sounds like something will be a bigger improvement over the current software. Which is quite Exciting.

:Buddhistic StatuesHKe1

Very Neat looking statues with a high resolution ability. They also have commons symbols in svg and png formats. All very good stuff, and very handy when you are importing media content into your life.

Vim love

Now I am not a hardcore Vim fan. In fact I tend to use whatever editor I can get my hands on at the moment (which tends to be vim as vi or emacs). But this review, Linux.com | First look at Vim 7 makes me definitely think that sometimes it's going to be something that I really really want to have installed.

Imagine, you are editing a configuration file on your server and restarting services when all of a sudden you realize that you have put in the wrong options for the past two minutes. With this you can go :earlier 2m and get back to where you were. . . .

That's sweet.

Virtualization Product

This Beta program is something that all OSX intel folks should get in on. It looks like very fast XP and linux on mactels and right now since it's in beta, they are giving it to you to use to give them feedback. Make it the best product you can, and it's only 40$ when it goes to the next version.

Back from the vacation

And man this site fold-your-shirt.com would have been really handy to have. And it really works. Very cool.

Podcasters

So, have you ever wrote a podcast asking something and never got back a reply? What are the reasons you think? I always lean towards the time or mass of emails but there are a few that I've written into and gotten an immediate response and others that I get no response ever. Odd. Comments?

inkling

An idea market, inkling (link) is something that at the very least is an interesting thought experiment.

I really like the quote about "none of us is as smart as all of us". I only wish that there was a kanji picture for a logo or wallpaper that I could put on my desktop. Very cool quote.

Oh and the idea of inkling is to let groups of people predict things, such as language popularity, the idea being that a group of people can better pick out trends than just one pundit. And if you select something correctly, you get inklings, or 'idea cash' that show that you're in tune with the zeitgeist.....

CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection

CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection (link) is self-contained lisp code that provide various functions. Including the ability to parse xml with xml.lisp. Very interesting.

Oh and the net.list includes such interesting functions as resolve-host-ipaddr ipaddr-to-dotted dotted-to-ipaddr.

Sweetness. Granted I didn't see something like UDPServer but, meh, I think it might be something trivial to write.

On further musings, maybe it's time to revist that atom blogger mode in emacs-lisp. Something about Title: and then the URL: entry point that's just bugging me. That should be simple, but maybe there is something in the code that I'm not reading correctly.

Lisp v Python

On the Relationship Between Python and Lisp: compare the two. Well this is written from a python standpoint. So there is some bias. But then again, there are some salient points in the writing. Now language wars are always something of a "I can think in X, so it's cool" stripe but then again, what works for you, is the right one for you. I guess it's all a matter of tools.

And the thing is that I found this while looking for cl-xml. cl-xml *was* something that allowed a person to parse and query xml. But it was on a mac.com webpage and apparently the person that had it stopped paying mac. So it's gone. Much sadness.

DistroWatch.com: Link to get FreeBSD handbook free

Distrwatch has a link to get the FreeBSD handbook.(link)

The author has released the book under the creative commons license. I really really hope it helps to extend the BSD scene in ways that some people can't expect.

Practical Common Lisp

Practical Common Lisp: the book.

Yay, step 1 is done.

Is Lisp Ready to Become popular?

Google Groups : comp.lang.lisp: "Is Lisp ready to become popular?"

For me there are a few things that I need for any language to become my tinker language. A good reference that's online and offline. An editor, and a windows binary and a linux binary. Oh and if it's really going to get my attention it needs a schtick. Most of the time it is something like, well, an RSS library made by some other developer. It doesn't have to be part of the language proper, just something that I can go "Hey, you know I could cook up a distributed file pushing system with these three modules".

Oh and how fast can I "Hello World" something together. You know what I'm talking about, the ability to take some STDIN read it all in, parse and manipulate and spit the changed form back out.

reddit: Night of the Living Python

Reddit isn't lisp anymore. Richard Cook had mentioned this in a comment today, and well, here's the blog entry.

Much sadness, but then again, each project's language is a choice or medium of expression and sometimes it's just easier to express things for people in other languages. Granted as Paul Graham had said it was lisp, it was all I went with. Actually I'm kind of suprised that if he's involved in it that he went to the python side, as I always got the idea he was *hardcore* lisp.

Thanks for letting us know about that Richard.

Blogger: Atom API Documentation

Blogger: Atom API Documentation

Too bad this atom-blog.el doesn't work for me. Guess some debug output in the background with the curl calls it's supposedly making might help me track down and debug what's wrong, but, you know, I'm not really going to keep beating my head into the wall for something like this that keeps refusing to work. Just plain silly.

Emacs

Blogger Developers Network: Blogger + Emacs = Crazy Delicious: "Blogger + Emacs = Crazy Delicious"

Well supposedly this will work. Granted the defaults require xml-mode, which my cygwin doesn't have. And I'm not overly sure why. And then there is the issue of getting it to log in correctly. And it doesn't seem to work under xemacs, for some reason. Blech.

15 minutes of hack time down the tubes. I hate that.

Hi

Hotlink: Planet Lisp

Bill Clementson's Blog: Who is this guy?: "In the beginning, there was Planet Lisp, and life was good."

Definitely a link to something that I want to look at later. It's got various feeds and information about all sorts of things lisp-y and things that I want to learn.

Bill Clementson's Blog

Bill Clementson's Blog talks about all sorts of things lisp. And he uses Emacs. Which hey, isn't that bad, despite what some people have said. I'll be using it more to do the blog posts once I get a module to do blogger from xemacs on cygwin.... :)

Remote File Editing

Bill Clementson's Blog article Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs mentions "TRAMP (the remote file editing package that most people use with Emacs for accessing remote files)".

Now wouldn't this be nice for editing web pages remotely, so you can insure that you have an emacs environ that you don't have to always be tweaking on each new machine?

I'm thinking of doing something like this on the local machine, but as it is windows, it'll be a bit more trick. Granted the Make the Machine a Ubuntu box is very much still in the queue of things I'm going to do soon.

TRAMP and editing remote files

Bill Clementson's Blog: Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs (link) mentioned that "TRAMP (the remote file editing package that most people use with Emacs for accessing remote files)". I am definitely thinking this would be a handy feature and something that would really make things easier for those one shot web page edits.
Granted this machine is windows that I'm posting on, so it'd be emacs for windows, but that Make my machine Ubuntu project is still very much in the queue.

shitinabox.net - FAQ

shitinabox.net - FAQ: "Exactly, we care nothing of your revenge..we just want your money in exchange for helping you achieve it"

Bill Clementson's Blog: The Most Important Idea in Computer Science

Bill Clementson's Blog: The Most Important Idea in Computer Science: "Lisp is the most important idea in computer science."

Remember that. And be afraid. Well, not afraid. Think about this. Lisp is it's own compiler. It's a pimp language that scares people with ()'s. And it can do darn near anything and a lot of the libraries to do it are already out there. And shoot, Reddit is written in it. And that's sweet.

Super Hero Vault

Ignore the fact they were growing weed (link). It's the fact that they had this interesting set up at their home that let them almost be like super heroes. Except that they were selling drugs. That's not cool. But damn, imagine the kind of secrets other people have under their house....

Spanish language

So was browsing the Creative Commons Deed link and saw a reference to Castellano. Now the one thing that I have to confess to is that I'm a language fiend. It's partly cause I'm a cryptography fiend and also an anthropology geek. Nothing is more exciting than uncovering information held in a different form, I guess. Anyways I see a reference to Castellano, and I well click on it, never having heard of this term. Turns out it that it's a formal version of Spanish. I now refer you to the excellent Wikipedia article Names given to the Spanish language.

Tekumel :: The World of the Petal Throne

Tekumel :: The World of the Petal Throne Give in. Go look at it. Serious mind warping goodness and a rich world that isn't based on the European stories that a lot of the rpg's are based on.

IE no greek gods. Oh there are gods, but they are aztec-y. Yeah that prhase makes me cringe, but it's the best way to describe it. And imagine a world where no one really knows that they used to be super-high-tech world but the remnants are there. It's post holocaust, without those pesky 'day after' syndrome.

Tags

What I need to do is figure out how to make tags for this for not only Technorati, but also for people that want to get only those "articles" that pertain to the items of interest. Plus then I can make some posts "personal" and people could skip them or read my wacky views.

Writely - The Web Word Processor

Writely - The Web Word Processor(link) sounds like something really neat. I am wondering if it uses RubyOnRails to do it's thing. In any event, I'm definitely thinking things like this are great for podcast shownotes or resumes and cover letters.

I mean imagine people being able to add to the show notes of a podcast with things like ratings for games, further explanations on tech hints and then it *might* be downloadable by the audience. I have to go check that last point.

Guardians Of Order

Guardians Of Order(link) makers of such great things as "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" and publishers of "Tekumel".

Go look up Tekumel. I dare you. I have my copy, which I bought at Portland's greatest bookstore (well in my opinion), Powell's. Oh, and any city that has a technical bookstore with tons of books and another store with tons of rpg's and others is just awesome. Although, seriously Powell's, why is some of the anime in the children's section?

Tri-Stat DX

"Min/Maxing and munchkinism are not problems with the game, they are problems with the player"

This is part of the *Role-Playing Game Manifesto* in the Tri-Stat DX system. And I have to say that manifesto, regardless on how cool the system is, is something that people need to read and remember. Basically the manifesto reminds people that, well it's a game and a game isn't fun if it's filled with bad cheese.

Oh and where do you get the tri-stat DX system? You can get it here. I've heard of a couple of groups dropping the system that was mentioned in a game world (like FUDGE) and using this system. Now is that because it was they knew it better or it made the world more interesting, I don't know. But it at least means that the system worked for someone.

Podcast Alley

At Podcast Alley (link) they list all sorts of podcasts. First thought, do they use Ruby or Ruby on rails? Second thought, why aren't some of my fave podcasts higher on their ranks? :)

Anyways, it's a really nice site, and really nice to find various podcasts and see where your's is in the ranks.

Go there. Go there now.

Podcast Geeking

So I love listening to podcasts (link). I have several favourites and I'll be posting some of them and their pages in the near future. All of them are great to listen to and chock full of information that I really appreciate.

I have to say that a lot of the time that the podcasts that I tend to continue to listen to are ones that do the following:

• Have good audio
  
• Have Emotionally Stable people
  
• Admit that they aren't the be-all end-all to their topic
  

The last one is a major reason that I keep up with a particular podcast. Otherwise I think that they are being selfish over their title and think that only they can do the job well and the rest of us suck. Thankfully, most of the podcasters out there still haven't fallen into that trap.

Small Batch Craft-Roasted Coffee from Sweet Maria's!

Small Batch Craft-Roasted Coffee from Sweet Maria's and how to subscribe to their service. I got this from CoffeeGeek who's site is the best darned resource for coffee in general. Granted a how to make ristretto link isn't easy to find (for me).

Xandros

So I'm sitting here blogging and I was noticing that when I did a search for Ubuntu that under the google sponsored links there was a Ubuntu vs Xandros link. I clicked on it and was sent to the Xandros web site.

Ok, maybe I'm dumb but they are both debian distros. And Xandros is pay only. Now if that is wrong and there is a live-cd for me to play with I'm all for trying it out. The only thing I hate about some of the distros for linux out there right now is that they are pay-for only (more or less). I mean what's the point of leaving one paid-for operating system to go to another. Now don't get my wrong, a lot of the distros like suse xandros or redhat are great for those people that want tech support or at the very least someone to blame when something breaks.

But that's not me. I use things like BSD's and other Unix systems cause I want control of my experience, I want it cheap, and I want neat new tech that is sometimes really niche. If anyone has a better overview of Xandros I'd love to hear it.

Ruminations on Linux

So, something I've been thinking of doing is installing ubuntu on my computer on the alternate hard drive partition. I've already done so on the laptop, and well I rarely now go into the windows paritions. The only things that I don't know will work in Ubuntu (I can hazard guesses but eh)

*iTunes music, specifically the aac's on the drive, if they even exist
*the podcasts on the ntfs partitions
*network set up might be slightly painful if this network card isn't recognized

All kind of slight reasons to not use Linux. I could do things like set up a webserver on the box and let people know the site or set up jabber servers and other messaging elements. Those are serious draws. And I know the sound will work, since this is an AC97 sound card. Hm.... Guess I could always slot a live-cd and see what shows up and what doesn't. The choices abound. Oh and would X work on this ati radeon 9800....

Mutt with Gmail

This blog article talks about how to use mutt with gmail. Very handy to have. My would someone use mutt when they could go over to the gmail web interface? Well sometimes you aren't at a web browser, or with me, I want to be able to customize various aspects of the reply that I don't have in the web client.

For example, mutt lets you do things like have multiple identities when you are replying to things, sometimes you can have mulitple signatures and some other features.

And heck, I really like mutt.

NetBSD's CGD

Tasty crypto information follows. One of my favourite things mentioned: n-stage crypto keys. So you could have some wacky things like a network key, a disk based key, a password, and another key on a crypto partition that only opens up at certain times.

Keey your stuff secret if you want, but the really nice thing is that you could do this on a laptop and have it so that if the laptop is stolen, all that critical credit card information and pictures of your spouse aren't usable by *anyone*. Also, would kind of eliminate what happened on the National Lampoon's European Vacation, with the video camera..... hint hint.

'aztec calendar' T-Shirt

Here is an example of the zazzle.com shirts and also something that I was looking at getting sometime in the near future.

Can't know this calendar. Now if only I could find Tekumel items.

Zazzle.com

If you want to make super pimp tshirts, one at a time, you should zip over toZazzle.com. It has things like Scooby Doo shirts and lets you really customize your shirts, with things like color, style and logo on a per shirt basis.

Very handy.

Blogger Buzz

Blogger Buzz is something that I think is part marketing and part feature announcement. With that said they had the latest "Blog This!" bookmarklet linked, and it was changed over on Jan 3rd. Wacky.

Cheese

So it appears that a lot of my prior posts went to a pic blog.

Hard
Core
Cheese

Anyways, I've deleted those posts and am going to check and see if there is a new bookmarklet that will go to the right blog.

Code of Unaris

Amazon.com: Code of Unaris: Chat Roleplaying: Books

Yeah, this is wacky. I've seen a copy and the overarching ideas are very very cool. Imagine a game session where you hack what the GM just said so that the event is less threatening or neater than s/he had imagined.

Buffalo Yarn

Here is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Yarn from the American Bison. Apparently, there is even a patent on how to get and make it. Donein 1991. So this isn't something that your grandmother knit with. Or shoot even your mother.

Supposedly it's quite soft....