MaisonBisson

shadowzack knows his games a lot better than I do. Even though he says it’s “crap”, I’m enjoying playing Bond 007: Quantum of Solace on my Wii. I only play about one game a year, so I’m not ashamed to go looking for a bit of help in shadowzack’s walkthroughs:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15 (Last)

A walkthrough can be better than a cheat, which is good because I didn’t find any.

Richard Moore’s Pac-Txt is even more brilliant than his Paper Pong (which, ironically, you can play online).

Here’s a transcript of my best Pac-Txt game to date:

Pac-Txt!
--------
You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

> go east
Huh?!

> look
You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction. There is a glowing dot hovering near you. 

> eat
You have eaten the glowing dot!

> go forward
Huh?!

> forward
You have moved.

> look
You are at an intersection. You may go forward, backward or right and there are glowing dots forward and right. There is a glowing dot hovering near you. 

> eat
You have eaten another glowing dot!

> check score
Huh?!

Patrick McGoohan, creator of The Prisoner, has died.

lbjay uses both the Tabulator and Semantic Radar Firefox plugins to do magic with RDF in his browser.

Perian: “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture

The LGPL–licensed QuickTime plugin installs easily on Mac OS X 10.5 and does what it promises. FLV videos (such as those you’d sneakily download from YouTube) open just like any other QuickTime vid, and you can easily export them to other types.

Way back in 2002 Dave Winer made a bet:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.

It’s important to remember that in 2002 people still wrote “weblogs” in quotes, as though they weren’t sure how to use the word. Winer won his bet in 2007. Anybody want to make a bet about 2014?

You might not have cared to know the recommended trucking practices for pigs or other livestock, but Colorado State University professor Temple Grandin is happy to explain all of that and more. She’s got videos too.

Perhaps you know somebody who made a new year’s resolution to improve the way they truck their livestock?

This news story from 2006 alerted me to a war I didn’t know anybody was fighting: the liberation of Karen State from Myanmar. The KNLA (Karen National Liberation Army) and KNU (Karen National Union) have been fighting for independence since the British left Burma (Myanmar) in 1948. What do you get a 51-year old rebel movement for its birthday? Here are their demands:

• For us, surrender is out of the question.
• We shall retain our arms.
• The recognition of the Karen State must be complete.
• We shall decide our own political destiny.

duckett‘s Wired But Disconnected on ccMixter is actually ironic: the whole song is the result of an online collaboration.

Listen

Tankmen is funny, no doubt, but I wonder what it means when we’re deeply embroiled in two of the longest running armed conflicts of US history that we find it so easy to make comedy about war.

YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

lcsh.info is gone, but there’s a lot to learn from this paper. I wish I’d seen that earlier.