Perhaps they hardly ever see the light of day; their only interaction with nature the petting of a cat, whose name is an obscure Star Wars reference and who features in several YouTube offerings. They may not dress according to the latest fashions and may lack the fluency in social interaction that others take for granted. But as far as music goes, geeks are no less than the next man. Read more

I’m in the market for a new laptop and have been trying to find something that fits my preferences. It turns out that finding something that really does is going to be very hard because of a single reason: nearly all laptops currently being produced have a widescreen display. What is up with these widescreens? Read more

Hancock (2008) -

When I initially saw the posters for Hancock, I thought nothing of it. Just another action flick to be ignored. But I let myself be trapped by reviewers who gave it more than the benefit of the doubt and awarded it decent marks. Frankly, I don’t really see why. Read more

The Dark Knight (2008) -

I’ve commented before on the effect of a story being told as a comic before becoming a movie. In the Dark Knight (and starting in Batman Begins (2005)) Christopher Nolan takes Batman in an entirely new direction, if you only take the previous movies as a reference. But if you like the relatively new series of Batman comics, Legends of the Dark Knight, you’ll see that Nolan is merely taking cinematic Batman on the same road as his paper counterpart. Read more

I just added a phpBB3 mod which adds RSS feeds to a phpBB3 forum to the forums on this page. Like most phpBB3 mods, it’s a bit of a chore to install. More so since currently there is no easyMod for phpBB3, so everything has to be done manually. But if you follow the instructions in the install.xml to the letter, everything should be fine. Read more

This last May saw the release of a new edition of the popular pen-and-paper roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. Since version 3.0 was released in 2000 and the more properly fleshed-out 3.5 saw the light in 2003, you might argue it was about time for an update. But where a fairly straight line could be drawn from the earlier versions of the game to the 3.5 edition as created by Wizards of the Coast, this new 4th edition seems to turn its back on a lot of tradition and is taking the game in a new direction. Read more

Marking another checkbox on my list of “pop legends to see before they buy the farm”, I watched Leonard Cohen perform some of his best material at the Westerpark in Amsterdam, yesterday 12 July 2008. The performance was better than expected, with a lot of life, passion and humour still left in this singer/songwriting geezer. Read more

You can love or hate episodic content, but you’ll have to give it this: at least you save a few bucks if you buy something you shouldn’t have. SiN: Emergence as currently available on Steam, packaged with SiN 1 and SiN 1 Multiplayer, falls snugly into that category. Never mind that $5 should be good value for money for any playable FPS created in Valve’s source engine. Read more

Gliffy is a web application that fills the gap in open source office software: a Visio replacement. Sadly, it’s not open, nor is it really free. You can get a free account if you’re not using the documents commercially and even then, you can only have 5 active documents in Gliffy at any one time and they’re all public (that is, for the world to see).

Still, as a web-based application, it is surprisingly full-featured and it’s perfect for getting some diagrams quickly sketched out. Of course, if you’re really serious about your diagrams and want them to translate into code or be validated as correct UML, you will still need something like Microsoft Visio or ArgoUML (which is open and free by the way).

Gliffy supports JPG, PNG and SVG export. This is nice since it allows you to quickly save your work for use on a website, or even import the SVG into Visio or some similar product. If you know of other alternatives to Visio, preferably open or free, feel free to let me know. I’m aware of Dia, but that one just doesn’t do the trick. There’s too much focus on making diagrams that fit the rules and not enough “diagram sketchpad” for me.

The FireShot add-on for Mozilla Firefox allows you to take a screen shot of either the visible area of the web page you’re viewing, or the entire page. It includes an editor to tweak the image after shooting. FireShot allows you to save the image to disk, send it by mail, open it in an external editor or just paste the shot to the clipboard.

The built-in editor is a bit too much in my opinion, weighing down the add-on, but it can be good to have in your Portable Firefox, when you don’t have your favorite image editor handy.