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.

So there I am in the middle of doing prep for the extravagant valentines meal I’m about to cook when I realize I don’t have any “mood” music to go with that candle lit dinner. A quick google and i come accross SomaFM, a commercial free internet radio station with a variety of channels to choose from. They are supported entirely by the people, so donations and subscriptions are appreciated. $50 gets you a subscription and a great t-shirt. Go support them. Now.

They have all kinds of music to choose from, here is a taste:

• Groove Salad - A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves.
• Secret Agent - The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life. For Spies and PIs too!
• Drone Zone - Served best chilled, safe with most medications. Atmospheric textures with minimal beats
• indie pop rocks - New and favorite classic indie pop tracks.
• Illinois Street Lounge - Classic bachelor pad, playful exotica and vintage music of tomorrow.
• cliqhop idm - Blips’n'beeps backed mostly w/beats. Intelligent Dance Music.
• Boot Liquor - Americana roots music with a bit of attitude. For Cowhands, Cowpokes and Cowtippers.
• Doomed - Dark and scary industrial-inspired music for tortured souls.

Thats most, but not all of the excellent stations these guys are serving up.

I chose Groove Salad to go with diner.

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.

Note: This is a rant and is meant in no way, shape or form to end any discussions about anything. These rants are meant to start discussion and (hopefully) open some minds to new ideas. Also, these rants are written by fairly seasoned pompous asshole who will not respond to comments or questions. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people? During my failed attempt to get Super Tuesday results while avoiding over the top and needlessly in depth news channel analysis, I overhead several pundits addressing the issue that John McCain isn’t really a conservative. Furthermore, some of these people called him a liberal. This unfathomably ignorant discussion was spurred by some conservative talk show hosts and critics saying that they would rather see Hilary Clinton in the White House then John McCain. I have a short response for these people and a longer one; Shorter Response: You are idiots and you’re wrong.

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A public demo of Renoise is now available for Linux. I love this tracker, especially for beat slicing madness, and I’m very excited to see a Linux release. It’s something like 50 euros to buy the full version.

Now, hopefully I can get it running on my Eee, and not run into the kind of issues I had with window size while working with wesnoth.

I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

UPDATE: So, as it turns out it the minimum window size for renoise is 990 x 700, which presents a slight problem on my 800×480 Eee PC…

So aside from being rather cramped on my tiny new toy, we are still looking at a fully functional tracker for Linux. We’re talking ALSA and JACK support for MIDI and sound routing excellence, aswell as support for both LADSPA plugins and native Linux VSTs(link to renoise forum listing currently functional ones, also check out jucetice). So, overall I suggest you pick this thing up and go play around with it since you can finally enjoy it’s /massive greatness/ under Linux. Actually if you’ve never used it you should give it a try no matter what OS you’ve got running, you may come to love it’s unique approche to music making, especially if you’re a techie and a musician.

Aside from Linux, there’s been a variety of additions and and bug fixes in the 1.9.1 release, including a great “Draw Mode” in the sample editor that you can use to quickly edit out pops and clicks in your samples (or however you want to change them), as well as the ability to create new samples on the fly by drawing thier waveforms.

There are a few bugs lingering in the Linux version, but it mostly seems to be with multichannel sound cards and ALSA. Also there are a few things I’d like to see added, namely DSSI support for native Linux synths, better integration with the Jack transport, and the ability to load mp3s. Then again this is just a beta.

Overall I give this a rating of awesome sauce or, if you perfer, sawesome.

This thing is crazy.

It’s basically a huge interactive kinetic sculpture. It moves and ripples and generally acts very un-wall like. I’d very much like to see this in person one day. Here is an except from the site:

This project was developed for a competition for an interactive art-work for the foyer of The Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre. The piece is a facetted metallic surface that has potential to deform physically in response to electronic stimuli from the environment (movement, sound, light,etc). Driven by a bed of 896 pneumatic pistons, the dynamic ‘terrains’ are generated as real-time calculations.

The piece marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic (interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal architecture.

Mmmm… 896 pneumatic pistons

Here is a very low quality movie of it in action.

…Wow.

So I’ve just now found out that they’ve commercialized this thing and you can buy them (or rent maybe?) at this site. The fact that Coke and the McDonalds are using these things has somehow cheapened this whole experience for me. No, really. I’m more cynical and bitter now than I was when I began to write this post. Especially since the mass production of this thing has somehow resulted in a movie of it in action that is of no better quality. At least this one is on youtube.

Note: This is a rant and is meant in no way, shape or form to end any discussions about anything. These rants are meant to start discussion and (hopefully) open some minds to new ideas. Also, these rants are written by fairly seasoned pompous asshole who will not respond to comments or questions. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

You know what is really refreshing? When the manager of one of the world’s biggest rock bands makes a speech about how internet service providers (ISP’s) should cut off service to customers that get caught sharing music. This is so very refreshing for a few reasons.

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I just love this shit. Weird creations that blend organic and technological themes. Christopher Conte at www.microbotic.org creates just this kinda stuff. Ranging from Geiger-esque biomechanical work, to intricate mechanical (yet unfortunately static) insects. Wired has an article about this guys work if you want some more info on the peices. Insect Lab Studio also has more of this type of thing, but it’s all of the “clockwork insect” variety. I espcially like this spider and this beetle.

Also, this post prompted me to add an “Art” catagory to the site, so expect to see posts about interesting art and sculpture, especially peices that have a technological aspect to them or ones that simply appeal to the dirty little cyberpunk in me.

Contributors: diana, tiffany and allonby

Here are some short descriptions of the sex habits of some current and former presidents and presidential candidates:

Hilary Clinton - definitely a dominatrix but one that never actually gets to the sex but just keeps whipping you, also has teeth in her vagina

Bill Clinton - likes getting dominated but probably hasn’t gotten Hilary to get sex since the whole Monica Lewinski thing

John Edwards - tries really hard but fails much like his presidential bids

Barack Obama - has sex like british people do on family guy

Condoleezza Rice - hasn’t had sex since the mid 70’s, vagina currently filled with dust, any attempt to have sex with her would result in deadly sandstorm

Colin Powell - complete freak in bed but nobody wants to see that

Bob Dole - says his name with each pelvic thrust and refers to himself in the third person during dirty talk (Bob Dole is gonna cum all over your face!!). After orgasming while shouting his own name he either falls asleep muttering his name or goes to the bathroom, but firsts stops by a full length mirror to check himself out while running his hand through his air and saying “Bob Dole….Sex Machine”

Here is my summary of the presidential candidates, enjoy:

Obama - my personal pick for president, actually has a chance to change things and if not, can at least make speeches that don’t put me to sleep

Clinton - not sure why some people hate her so much, would probably be a very typical democratic president, would also be funny to see how pissed off Fox News would get if she won

Edwards - the white guy in the democratic race, no real chance of winning, don’t mind him but doesn’t really offer anything new

Guilaini - complete and utter asswipe, hope he dies a horrible death, fearmonger

McCain - acts like he isn’t a normal republican and he wasn’t…..8 years ago, since then he has bended to the will of Bush and has proved he is just like the rest

Romney - same old neo-con republican except a mormon so kind of creepy

Huckabee - chuck norris is an idiot and so is this evangelical asshole