The Hitchhiker\’s Guide to the Galaxy coming from Hothead

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

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A New HitchHiker\’s Guide to the Galaxy computer game, is coming out from HotHead Games.

I say, a new game, since there already has been at least one Hitchhiker\’s game in the past.  From the Fabled realms of Infocomm came a game about this gentlemen named Arthur Dent…

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As Douglas Adams, said:

There was a time when computer games didn\’t have graphics. Or at least they couldn\’t have graphics and sound at the same time. They certainly couldn\’t have graphics, sound and enough content to keep even a human being amused for more than a few minutes. So they had text. This was radical – a computer game you could control by typing in commands. The game would then respond to your commands with a breathtakingly prescient understanding of your intent. Or not. Usually not – the early text parsers (circa 1977) weren\’t that bright. But, as long as you limited yourself to what the game understood and the game designers wrote creatively enough to misunderstand you in a humorous and entertaining fashion, it all worked. It therefore stands to reason that any game which combined a really good programmer with a really good writer was likely to do well. So when Steve Meretzky of Infocom got together with Douglas Adams to create a game based around the Hitchhiker\’s Guide to the Galaxy, the result was never going to be less than interesting and more than likely insane. So it proved – the Hitchhiker\’s Guide adventure game was one of the best-selling games of its era, selling some 350,000 copies. In 1984.

And the re-release via Flash from the BBC:
Click here for the BBC4 site, with the Hitchhiker\’s Guide to the Galaxy Flash Version.

IO9 explores the world of the Terminator, without Arnold.

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Due to some recent indiscretions, Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to pull the plug on his resurrected acting career. Which everybody\’s assuming means no Terminator 5. But wait — there are plenty of great ways to make a Terminator without Arnie.
Here\’s our list of great Terminator storylines that you could make without the Governator.
Read it here… How to Make a Terminator Film Without Arnold – io9.

Remember, domino\’s go up, and come down…

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Here\’s to the attempt…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com?v=GPjddqhB7f8]
From the description:

This would have been the biggest 3D domino pyramid on YouTube and very probably in the world (not a Guinness record though, they don\’t have such a category yet), with a bottom layer of 27×27 and 13,482, but there seems to be some kind of Egyptian curse on domino pyramids. I didn\’t even make a mistake here, it toppled all by itself when it was more than 96% completed, with just 439 dominoes missing 🙁
So 13,043 were standing when it toppled, which makes this my new personal domino record, beating the old one by almost 4,500 pieces! It\’s the first time I have toppled more than 10,000 dominoes, and more than the 11,111 that made the first world record in 1974.

Engadget reviews the Dell XPS 15z

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

For about $200 less, you can get a fast machine, but with a cheap case and little battery life.

We\’d mentioned that Dell\’s previous attempts at premium systems failed price, power and battery life tests. With the XPS 15z, well… two out of three ain\’t bad. Despite the fact that the NVIDIA Optimus GPU turns off when not fully taxed (powering the laptop\’s display with integrated Intel HD 3000 Graphics instead), we weren\’t able to get much more than three and a half hours of regular use out of our review unit. Turning to our standard battery drain test (where we loop a standard-definition video with the screen at roughly 65 percent brightness, and with WiFi on), we saw much the same thing — 3 hours, 41 minutes of use from the sealed 8-cell, 2.6Ah battery. It occurred to us that perhaps Optimus wasn\’t actually switching off the discrete GPU at the most appropriate intervals, and sure enough, we were able to eke out a little more runtime by completely disabling it, but you\’re still looking at 4 hours, 26 minutes of use. That\’s not bad, all things considered, but it\’s a good sight worse than the 8 hours of life that Dell\’s advertising here, and if the company wants to make a dent in the MacBook Pro\’s armor, it\’ll have to do better than that.

Read the full review at Dell XPS 15z — Engadget.

Gremlins!

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Darn those gremlins.
I have activated CloudFlare for this website, and I missed a DNS setting for the S3 cache for the server.
I believe everything should be working fine now..  But I hate the fact that, presumably due to caching, everything was looking fine until late tonight…