Just wanted to show everybody where I’m at in Blender proficiency. I’m still an infant, but it’s a powerful graphics tool if you have the time/patience to learn to use it. Unfortunately, most of the tutorials seem to be by non-native English speakers and can be a bit confusing. Essentially, the attempt I made (below) is one of the hardest things to model - the human face. Blender has some interesting features whereby vector wire frames can be created, sub-divided, and modified to get the general shape of whatever you’re trying to model. Then, a function called “SubSurf” creates a rounded, organic looking, 3D surface model within the wire frame thereby taking on the frame’s basic shape. Ah well, it’s going to be a bit of a learning curve!

While I’m on the subject of robots, I had better mention this little guy.

He drives around his environment until he finds something to drum on, then he drums on it. Like a little robot version of me. Excellent.

Seriously though, this thing is awesome, it has a sampler on board that it uses to record the sound it makes while tapping on things, then he plays it back and drums along on top of it. Amazing.

Found him over at letsmakerobots.com.

Here is some info from the project page:

What it does? Basically:

• Navigate around, collect some data, avoid obstacles, until it finds something “worth playing on” (a single isolated object or a wide flat surface that it can find an angle onto)
• Snakes into place
• Plays some beats on what it have found, and samples this, checking it has a “good sound”
• Based on data collected in the area, and sample just made, then compose a little rhythm, and plays this along with the sample

Why? Well.. I was sitting thinking what I should do for my next robot, what it should do.. Listening to music.. making a rythm with some robot-parts.. Thought; “Hey, I will make a robot that drives around and plays on stuff”

Wicked.

Here is a much longer video showing him navigating around the creator’s home. It wasn’t until I saw this one that I realized he had a kick drum (that floor tapping thing).

Here’s a quick rundown of the specs:

Cost to build:
$120
Time to build:
20 hours

* Actuators / output devices: 6 geared motors in total, 2 speakers, sound sampler
* Control method: autonomous (very)
* CPU: Picaxe 28
* Operating system: Picaxe basic
* Power source: 4 AA batteries
* Programming language: Picaxe basic
* Sensors / input devices: SRF05, microphone
* Target environment: where ever there is something to play on

I was stumbling around trying to find more info on how it generates the music for a while. Like are they premade beats and that, or is it just making that shit up as it goes? Turns out he programmed the robot to know the basics of rhythm and that, what makes a good beat, timing, etc, but it’s basically just making that shit up.

The beats are - however - semi-pre-made. Just as the navigation is semi-pre-thought; you decide that it should not just drive into a wall (unless it is for playing it), but you do not decide weather it should turn left or right when facing the wall. That descission is up to how things are looking to the left / right, and where we just came from, and where we are trying to get, and what we are doing now as well (are we reversing, for instance).

Same way with the beats; There are rules to what is “good behaviour”, what makes a good beat. There are “examples”, and there are setup to make everything play in sync. There is input; how does it sound when sampling, and there is such things as speed, shuffle and combinations, that are put together based upon inputs made when we got to this particular place to drum.

So.. basically and in reality it is just completely random.. But I know “in my heart” that it is not; there are reasons - But I cannot predict what it will play.

I love this thing!

Holy shit, have you guys seen this yet?

Panelists sit and discuss whether robots have too much control in our lives, some concerns about the automated police force, and comments made by President Executron in his latest speech.

“That’s what the cavity search robot said this morning at the office”

OMFG, lol

Hello… (tap, tap) is this fuckin’ thing on?!? This is my first official post, and I call it, the IPod Touch = SEXXX!!! Okay, let’s cut the shit and get right into it. This badboy is available, in case you didn’t know, in 8G, 16G, and recently released 32G models. Each one packs a 400MHz processor. Mine’s an 8G, and no, I don’t feel like any less of a man for it. Either way, the space isn’t nearly the coolest thing this IPod has going for it. I’m sure you’re all aware that the Touch has a touch screen interface, and that it’s actually multi-touch sensitive, and if you didn’t know that, well… believe it. ‘Cause it does… so there. Anyways, it’s also got this ass-rawkin’ motion sensor thingy in it called an accelerometer. Interesting side note - before I learned the word “accelerometer” it pleased me to refer to this wondrous device as a “gravitron”, and guess what folks, it pleases me still. So, that’s a little bit about what it’s got. Now let’s talk about what it does.

Naturally, it plays music, and video and all that other basic shit. And it’s packin’ tidy little clock and calendar apps out of the box, just the way you’d expect. But one of its coolest features, (also works out of the box) is the safari web browser that allows you do view really real web pages (including secure sites, like for my online banking!) over a wireless internet connection. Now as for zooming in and out to view said web pages at a comfortable size, all you need to do is pinch open or pinch closed with your fingertips on the screen. Ooooooooooooooooooooh… Now you can also tip the whole unit from its assumed upright position to the right or the left, and the gravitron will rotate the entire screen to suit the change. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… Sexy isn’t it? Well… take a second to adjust the crotch of your pants and read on. The touch screen is so unbelievably comfortable to use. You turn it on, you try it out, and you’re good at it. It’s just that beautiful. You may notice there’s also an icon right on the home screen for YouTube… (adjust…) and yes, that’s lots of fun too.

Now… my favorite part about the Touch, by far, is the option to “jailbreak” it, and install and try whole worlds of toys, tweaks, tools, games, upgrades, patches, runtimes, wallpapers, themes, and other mind blowing 3^rd party apps on it. First… a quick how to. I’ve jail broken my IPod Touch twice so far. The first time, I did it the incredibly hard way. The second time, the incredibly easy way. Both times, I got identical results. So… I shall tell you the easy way… ‘cause you’ll like it better. Trust me. K, first step is making sure your IPods’ firmware is 1.1.1. If you didn’t purchase your IPod right when they first came out, it probably won’t be. Check under Settings > General > About to find out. If it turns out that you need 1.1.1, use this to get it. http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite….a_Restore.ipsw Save the firmware file to your desktop. Then open iTunes and plug in your pod. Select the pod on the left, and HOLD SHIFT while you click the “Update” button. ITunes will now allow you to select the firmware file to be installed on your iPod touch. Pick the file from your desktop and open it up. There. Welcome to firmware 1.1.1. Now, for the tricky part. The part that’s much easier than the multi step, hour long process my first attempt involved. Open your Safari browser, and go to jailbreakme.com… there… that’s it. Wait the IPod is done doing its shit, and you’re there.

Now that you have the installer icon on your home screen, you can open it up and start adding source sites. Once you add some source addresses, you can use the installer app to scroll through a huge list of categories of packages that are available for you to install. In other words, the more sources you’re able to find, the more unique shit you can get. I’ve got something like 93 sources and there are more out there to be found, I’m sure. And yeah, my installer application now takes like 10 mins to load up all the sources, but there’s a lot of cool shit to be found within. For days I’ve considered typing up a list of the categories and all the packages they contain, but seriously people, it’s a list at least 10,000 items long… and let’s face it… I just don’t have that kind of dedication. But, I’ll gladly tell you about some of the interesting shit that I’ve seen so far. Where shall we start?

Games… gotta love ‘em. And after jailbreakage, this thing’s really packin’. It’s got a Nes emulator. I installed and tried it out for awhile, and it was pretty sweet. ROMs can be acquired in different packs through the installer, or added to your iPod in windows explorer once you’ve plugged it into your computer. The NES emulator actually builds the NES controller on the touch screen, which can be a tad difficult if the touch is being held upright. Flip sideways and the screen and controller will reposition. Oua-la. Much better. I’ve seen other emulators available in the installer, including a PSX emu, and I believe a SNES one as well, although I can’t say I’ve tried either of them just yet. Yeah, yeah, perhaps not entirely practical when you really wanna beat a PSX game… but it sure is candy to watch the touch do it. It’s got a ton of other cool games like chess and stuff. And hey, remember that game you might have played when you were a kid. The one where you have to roll the marble through the wooden labyrinth? Well it’s got that shit too. It also runs crayon physics, which makes for some pretty amazing gaming. P.S. If you don’t know what crayon physics is all about you can check out this YouTube flick. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgRWT0QH-sU Prepare to be fuckin’ amazed.

There are also various sound/music based apps that can be fun to mess with. I’ve got a beat box style drum machine with the ability to change drum kits and programmable patterns that loop at a selectable tempo. I’ve also installed and enjoyed using the guitar tuner app, tunewiki (which displays lyrics for songs in your playlist in real time while the track plays), a variety of different internet radio apps from some of the bigger broadcasting names in online radio, a piano app that’s more for fun than actually composing on, and so on, just to name a few.

Other impressive apps include eBook readers, (with thousands of downloadable eBook packages in the installer that include everything from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, to Harry Potter, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and even older classics like Frankenstein, and collections by Poe), WeDict, a dictionary style app that allows you to customize your quick reference library. (I’ve added a Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus, Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, English Etymology dictionary, a large jargon file dictionary, and an irregular English dictionary, so when I search any word in WeDict, I get the results for that word from each.) I didn’t bother with language dictionaries, but with options to and from English to Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian, I’m sure other people will. There’s even a PDF viewer app. How friggin’ cool is that? Add to that the flashcard packages for languages and the Greek alphabet that are all part of the iStudy setup, and it’s all pretty sweet.

The skins, and themes, and wallpapers and shit are just too numerous for me to even bother to begin to tell you about. They’re like sand in the desert people. The best I can tell you is, try ‘em out.

There’s also a small group of apps that focus on the online IPod Touch community, like wallpaper, which will share your wallpaper to be viewed by any other touches using the program at that moment, while you are able to view theirs. These of course from the good people at iApp-a-day, who’ve made some other very interesting apps as well.

There’s also a lot of other shit that’s a little bit beyond me, to be honest, but it all sounds very cool. Apache web server apps, BitchX IRC clients, DNS command line tools, Ruby web proxy server, ebay watchers, BSD subsystems for linux command line utilities, Pure FTP servers, Open source implementation of LLDP, Wi-Fi stumblers, VNC clients, GNU Wget, AFPd servers, Wi-Fi access point loggers, and a whole lot of other shit that I’m just not sure about yet. But if I find out anything cool about any of these apps, I’ll post something just to let you know what’s worth it.

I should also mention that I’m starting to see a lot of upgrades, patches and plug-ins for the safari browser. I’ve recently installed one that lets you download files in safari. (It tells you what path you’ll find your downloads in once you plug into a computer again.) Apparently there’s another one for OTA downloading and Installation of PXL packages from websites. Cool beans.

Anyways, these are some of the things that I think make owning an IPod Touch a lot of fun. It’s got the internet, it’s got the YouTube, it’s got the apps. There are even magic tricks out there for it. So pick one up and check it out. IPod Touch fuckin’ rules!!! PSP owners… dismissed.

Okay, so you’ve downloaded Ubuntu or some other variety of linux - commonly referred to as flavours, builds, or  distributions - and want to install some program you found on SourceForge (a huge internet repository of open source software by nerdy people with a lot of programming talent - sometimes - and obviously a lot of spare time). Now installation can be a problem if your built-in package manager (the module that pops up when you click the add/remove button in your “start” menu) doesn’t handle that particular application. More complications can arise if they haven’t provided you with something called the binary version. Binaries are just packages of source code that have been compiled and are ready to install out-of-box. In this post I’ll go over installing a binary package and then next time move onto the source code installations.
If you’ve been given the binary version of some piece of software then you can install it on your Ubuntu system by navigating to the folder you downloaded it into and running one of a few different kinds of commands that either actually installs the software into your system or runs the software from the folder you downloaded it into. Briefly, the way to do this is as follows;

1. open a terminal window then type

cd /directory_string/name_of_downloaded_file

Where cd is a command that stands simply for ‘change directory’ to whatever you type after the ‘/’. The highest level of directory (or most basic if that makes more sense) is just called ‘File System’ by default which is like a Windows ‘C’ Drive. Most of your activity, if you’re a basic Ubuntu user, will occur in folders within the /usr/ folder. It is important here to understand that directory_string should be something like this;

/usr/local/share/

…etc if that’s where the program you’re installing is located. Moreover,  it is important to ensure you type the name of the program exactly as it appears in the file system. Sometimes your downloads will be in your user folder, in which case it will look something like this;

/home/your_user_name/Desktop/

…etc if you downloaded it somewhere in a folder on your current Desktop. The best way for a windows ex-patriot to find the string is to click the ’start’ button on your desktop. Then, open the ‘places’ folder and navigate as you would using Windows Explorer to the place where you downloaded the files. At the top of the file explorer module will be a series of buttons that begin with the first folder you entered from (e.g. usr) and will end on the right with the current folder you are in. It’s a handy way for you to navigate around since you can click any of those buttons and be transported back to that particular folder. So, for navigating within the Terminal window you just have to place ‘/’ between each of the those folder names beginning with a ‘/’ before the first folder and not necessarily ending with a ‘/’ unless you’re also going to identify something within the last folder (like a program or file you want to manipulate). A handy location string short-cut is ‘~’ which, when placed before the first ‘/’ in your string, indicates the current user directory. So, if you wanted you could replace the following long folder path;

/home/your_user_name/Desktop/

with the following short cut;

~/Desktop/

Now that you’ve navigated to the folder with your download in it, you can take a look inside the package with or without ‘extracting’ it first. The command dir at the Terminal window prompt will show you the files in the folder you are currently in. Notice that you’ll know what folder you’ve navigated to because the location is given before the prompt in the Terminal window. You can also just use the GUI (Graphical User Interface) or Windows like file system explorer (Windows Explorer) like you did to find the file path in the first place. Inside the package will be a bunch of folders and files that you really don’t need to know anything about at this point except that there will also be a document (Word Pad looking opened with a Text Editor) called README.doc or possibly Install.doc that will contain specific instructions on installing that binary including additional ‘libraries’ that your system might need. I’ll deal with libraries next time as well. So, follow the instructions for installing provided and you’re probably good to go. The README file will likely also contain instructions for ‘extracting’ or ‘unzipping’ the compressed package. You can do this in a few different ways and the Ubuntu Linux distribution contains a number of pieces of software for this purpose. The most commonly used is tar. The end of the file name of the package your trying to install likely looks like this;

somepackageidownloaded-4.5.3.2.1.tar.gz

the important part to understand right now it the tar.gz. That file extension means that the package is compressed using tar and can, therefore, be uncompressed/unzipped/extracted using the same. the file system GUI approach will determine all of this automatically if you right click and select extract to here from the context sensitive menu. On the other hand, you can extract the files from the Terminal prompt - as long as you’re in the folder that contains the package- by using the following;

untar -xvf somepackageidownloaded-4.5.3.2.1.tar.gz

Be sure to read through all of the manual pages for any command you haven’t used before to ensure that the options you select for that command (also called flags) are doing what you want them to. The flags can be in any order and follow the ‘-’ but generally come before whatever file you want the command to alter. Then you can look in the file again for files with extensions like .pyc and .sh. The .pyc file likely won’t run, but it’s program code created with a language called Python. The .sh is the key since that’s like the Windows .exe files. Try simply entering the file name with the .sh extension in the terminal window and see if it runs. If that doesn’t work have another look at the INSTALL and README documents. If all of that fails you can also use file system explorer if you’re more comfortable using the GUI. Look for a little diamond shaped icon with some gears in it with your filesystem explorer. Try double clicking it. If that runs the program then it can be run from the Terminal prompt as well, all ‘out-of-box‘, right from the folder you downloaded the package into by entering the file name of whichever gear icon file actually worked into the terminal prompt.

So, with any luck that will save someone some damn time when trying to install programs. There’s more to it and more ways to install things which I’ll get into next time.

It’s been around for a while, but I’m only now beginning to learn about it in any detail. I actually remember learning Q-Basic and C++ (with allonby at school actually) and vaguely recall the transition to OOP. Personally, I really hope the next significant change in programming is called Post-Object Oriented Programming.

For anyone that’s just starting out and having a bit of trouble wrapping the ‘ol noodle around OOP, my advice is to simply accept it! Well, the idea of OOP, I mean. Objects are anything that can be called by a program and even the program itself. A vector of numbers (just a list of numbers, but programming guides prefer the term ‘vector’) is an object as is the 1000 lines of some function you just typed out. I’ll have more to say as I learn more about it and have basic questions that take me a bloody donkey’s age to find the answers to. Then, I’ll post the Q and A. Hopefully, it’ll save someone out there some amount of time to get the info from someone who is a recent convert to compu-geekdom. Convert or Die!

Note to the music industry: This is how you release music on the internet and still survive as an artist

Trent Reznor has just announced the release of Ghosts I-IV, an instrumental project that was recorded over the course of 10 weeks last year. This alone is nothing amazing (well, depending on your opinion of Nine Inch Nails’ instrumental tracks) but the fact this is available immediately and the variety of release formats is. Nine Inch Nails fans have 5 different options for this release:

1. Free download of first nine tracks in high quality mp3 format. Gives unsure fans a taste of what this release is all about.

2. $5 download of entire album (36 tracks!!!) in a variety of formats (including Apple Lossless which is FLAC for itunes. Will only work with some ipods.)

3. $10 double cd-set with immediate digital download of album. This is perfect for the cash strapped fan (for example, me) who still wants physical cd’s from one of his/her favourite bands. Also, $10 for 2 cd’s is a really good fucking price.

Fanboy break: Trent Reznor is a fucking god

4. $75 package with double cd release, a dvd with multi-track files for remixing goodness, a blu-ray disc with high-def sounds and video. The video is a slide show of artwork inspired by the music. Finally, a 48 art book inspired by the album. If you have more money and a blu-ray player this is gold. The blu-ray disc experience with this will be amazing and I can’t wait to find someone who will get this (or lower the definition so I can download it). The art book also looks beautiful.

5. $300 package with everything from the $75 package plus vinyls and two art prints. Obviously Trent understands his rabid fanbase and these will be soldout in less then a day.

My love for Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor runs very deep and this release re-enforces and deepens this love. Trent has put the time and effort into creating options that will suit every fan. And making this is all better is that it is released under the Creative Commons License. Translation: this release can be shared and there will be no repercussions. The album is copyrighted by Nine Inch Nails but considering Trent’s feelings towards major labels, something tells me the RIAA won’t be coming after you for sharing this album. So to summarize, Trent Reznor has set the new standard for releasing an album. Smaller, independent artists will not be able to do this but larger acts that still announce albums 4 months before the cd comes out and sell DRM soaked mp3’s are way behind. Innovation isn’t impossible and for that matter, Trent has done most of the thinking for you. Bye major labels, your business plan from 20 years ago is fucked and you have no one to blame but yourself.

(Review of album coming soon…)

Free open source games that I actually want to play are few and far between. Then there is Wesnoth.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.

Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host against whom none can stand! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition.

The art is wonderful and the game play and story are captivating. Available on more operating systems than you can probably name, hours of free entertainment to be had from the the multiple campaigns that are available.

So of course I tried to get it running on my Eee PC.

Initially I had terrible problems with the resolution, font size, sprite size, tiles, all of it seemed messed up. I was trying to compile the stable branch.

I tried the development branch and ended up with a whole other set of issues.

My entire adventure can be seen in this thread over at the wesnoth forums.

Turns out not all the fixes for smaller screens were back ported to the stable branch, and the dev branch’s image resize script was broken, so nothing was actually getting resize when compiled with –tinygui.

They released a new version the next day and it works just fine now.

Still a bit tiny, but very much worth it.

So yeah, if you’re looking for a great game to play on your Eee, go for Wesnoth. You’ll have to compile from source however, just grab the dev brach and ./configure –enable-tinygui.

UPDATE:

I suppose in my haste to finish this post, I neglected to mention the build dependencies.

Prior to compiling you’ll need to make sure you have the required development libraries installed. First off, you’ll need to add the debian repositories to your sources.list file. Don’t let that scare you off, I wrote a friendly tutorial for that type of thing here. We need to add a source repository in addition to the ones mentioned in that post. Once we have access to some source packages, getting the appropriate development libraries installed should be a piece of cake. So, following the same procedure, add the following line to your sources.list.

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

Next, open up a console (ctrl+alt+t) and type in:

sudo apt-get build-dep wesnoth

That will pull down all the stuff required to build wesnoth. There are a few more things we need to install to get the development branch of the code working on the EeePC however. One of these they decided not to mention on the wesnoth pages, which was quite a pisser when I was trying to get this working, and that is the imagemagick package, which is used when compiling with –tinygui to resize the images.

Some of the stuff in the following line may not be needed for it to compile, and I don’t have a machine to test it on right now. The first part (python-dev) you may be able to omit and have yourself some space on your EeePC. Same thing goes for libboost.

Try this:

sudo apt-get install libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

And then give it a try. If you get errors give this one a try:

sudo apt-get install python-dev libboost-iostreams1.33.1 libboost-iostreams-dev imagemagick

Then do your ./configure, make, make install.

I hope that helps, if anyone experiences problems with that please let me know in the comments.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I am a whore for Valve. A total whore. And I love it.

When I got my Macbook Pro when they first came out, the only regret I had was that I wouldn’t be able to play Half Life 2, or any of the episodes, on it.

Well, the orange box finally hit and I caved. First attempt was using parallels. Disaster. 2nd attempt was bootcamp, and while it did work perfectly I actually had to boot out of my beautiful OSX and use fucking Windows to play it. I needed a windows install, and software license for it, and i had to tie up all that fucking space just to touch the greatness of Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. And that was OK, because i’m a whore for Valve.

But then the day came where I needed that hard drive space back (OMG BattleStar Galactica!!!), and i decided to wipe my Mac clean of bootcamp and windows, and I could whore no more.

And for a time, all was quite.

Then came CrossOver Mac, and I could be a whore again.

…

CrossOver Mac is essentially Wine++. Wine was initially meant to run windows apps under linux. Apple switched to intel and OSx is basically BSD underneath. Perfect. I tried Darwine, a Wine implementation for OSx, but it just didn’t have the speed. CrossOver is where it is at.

This thing just works. They have install scripts setup for lots of popular applications, Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 among them, which lead me to believe they are also whores. Excellent.

The only “downside” is that CrossOver is not free. But it is worth the $50 they want for it, because it delivers exactly what they say it does. (to keep up a trend) Go buy it. Now. They have a free trail (one i’m still using, I’ll be buying it when it’s up) that you can test out to make sure it works for you, which it will.

So you download CrossOver Mac, install it, select the app you want to install from the list(Steam), pop the Orange box CD in, or just let it auto download the steam installer. Once steam is installed you can get everything else installed and running as you normally would. The only thing is, Steam itself is slow as hell to load. I’m not sure why, but it takes /forever/ to load up. Once it’s up and running however it’s business as usual. HL2, Portal, TF2, all run flawlessly. At native speeds. With no windows install. No license key. No eating up the rest of my hard drive.

So, I’m a whore again. Singing Still Alive while sipping pretentiousness from my Aperture Laboratories coffee mug and cursing the wretched Combine.

The cake is a lie.

Taking cues from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and movies like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and SwordFish, Uplink from Introversion Software is an amazing “hacker sim” that brings to life the campy hollywood concept of hacking we often see on the big screen.

…

Your trace tracker is beeping like crazy as you’re bouncing your signal all over the planet to avoid being caught as you hack away at a corporate firewall, intent on destroying a database as outlined in a contract from a shady employer. Sweat beads on your forehead as a storm of packets fly by. Bypass the firewall, wipe the database, remember to delete the logs! BEEP BEEP BEEP! Time is running out! Hurry, the trace almost has you pinned down! Hurry it’s-

…

Anyway, I love this game.

One of the great things about Introversion software, is that they simultaneously release all their games on all 3 major OSs. We’ve got Windows, Mac, and Linux, right out of the gates. Pretty damn nice for “The last of the bedroom programmers”. Uplink costs $20, but you can also get it in a 3 pack containing the other amazing games these guys make, Darwinia and Defcon, for $40. Go buy em. Now.

So, what we’re interested in here is the Linux release, and how perfectly it runs on my EeePC. I’ve also tried the other 2 mentioned above, but since the Eee has no graphics card, they aren’t any sort of usable.

Basically you’ll want to unzip the linux version to a location of your choosing, download the latest patch and install it. Then you may need the code card, depending on where you got the game. At this point it should be ready to run, and it should run flawlessly.

One of the things I really dig about this game is that there is out of game content that you need to “hack” to get access to, the game extends beyond the executable. Just as an example, you need to decrypt a series of images using a hex editor so you can get more info from them and move onto the next challenge. There was additional content to be hacked on the bonus CD which you can’t really get anymore, but has been made available here. Also there is a developers CD available containing the source for Uplink, which has led to all kinds of user made mods and expansions for the game.

Uplink does it all just right, and with a tag line of “Trust is a weakness”, it really brings the paranoid campy fake hacking of the movies to life.