Today Google launched Lively, a browser-based Second Life clone where users create avatars and rooms and can chat with complete strangers. It did not run very well on my gaming PC, and that does not bode well for it in my opinion. It is neat for about five minutes, but gets boring pretty quick. Unless you are into Second Life and/or chatting with random people with a 3D avatar that looks nothing like you, you will probably feel the same way. This could potentially give Second Life some competition, but at this point it is little more than a chat room. I’ll give it another go when users can actually create their own content.

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After getting addicted to DiRT for the Xbox 360, I started making a top-down, rally game in flash. Assuming I have the time, I’d like have a ton of tracks and cars as well as online racing/tournaments. It is very unpolished at this point and only has 1 track and 1 car… but here it is after a few hours.

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If you are looking for a high definition video camera to mess around with, the Aiptek A-HD 720P High Definition Camcorder is your answer. I was looking for an inexpensive camera to make some videos for YouTube and this does a great job. Anything comparable is much more expensive.

• 1280 x 720 H.264 Video @ 30fps
• Connect to TV/VCR/DVD player to record video, pictures and audio
• Charge with USB or AC Adapter without removing battery
• 5MP CMOS sensor with still images up to 8MP
• 2x digital zoom with fixed focus

I made my first video which shows my X-Arcade stick w/ Amiga port in action. Unfortunately, the original HD video is too large to upload. It has been compressed multiple times and the aspect ratio has been changed by YouTube.

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You may have noticed that it has been a while since my last post. For the last few months I have been putting the finishing touches on a social networking script I wrote. If you are into reading and writing poetry and stories, making friends online, having a public journal, and getting achievements (awesome) for doing it, check out the new members section at Lovingyou.com. If you are not into any of that, you can check out my profile at any rate.

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Synaesthete is an interesting mix of genres. It is part shooter and part rhythm. Imagine playing Geometry Wars but instead of pointing where you want to shoot, you have to press buttons to match the rhythm much like Dance Dance Revolution. If you are interested in trying it out, it can be downloaded for free here. Synaesthete is a finalist for the Independant Games Festival so be sure to vote for it if you like it.

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I added an Atari/Amiga/Commodore joystick port to my Xbox 360 X-Arcade stick today… Why you ask? Sensible World of Soccer of course! Although I never played the older versions, I have become very addicted to the recent Xbox Live Arcade release. The guys at sensiblesoccer.de seem to prefer an Amiga joystick over any other type of control method so I decided I would give it a shot. Since the Xbox 360 controller can be used on the PC, I figured this project would also be good for emulation.

The gamepad I used is a wired Xbox 360 MicroCon Game Pad Pro. I had to use a relay (TF2E-4.5v-1-H50  ATF20620) on the left and right buttons because they don’t share a common ground. If you decide to do this and just want a joystick port on the controller and not the X-Arcade stick, you should use an opto-isolator instead of a relay as they are smaller.

On my controller, pins 3 and 4 go to the following relays which connect to the left and right d-pad buttons. Other controllers may be set up differently. Any button that does not share a common ground needs a relay or an opto-isolator.

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During Amazon’s Black Friday sale, I stumbled across what I thought was the most pointless product ever… the Pistol Mouse FPS. It is basically a mouse that is shaped like a pistol. You are supposed to use it in first-person shooters to add an extra level of realism. It was $2.99 with free shipping at the time so I bought it just to mess with or use in a future project.

This thing is surprisingly heavy duty. I expected a flimsy little plastic gun that would barely fit in my hand. It looks and feels realistic enough. Hopefully no police officers are around to shoot me when I’m playing video games. Now for the good stuff…

I used Half-Life 2 to test it out on and it actually worked a lot better than I expected. There are only two problems with it. The big problem is that you have to slide the gun forward and backward to aim up and down. This sounds horrible I know, but it’s not that bad. The left and right aiming is perfect. The other problem, while almost impossible to implement, is a lack of rumble. This is getting extremely picky since most PC games don’t support a rumble feature, and I have yet to see a mouse that has a rumble feature.

Overall, the quality is great. I am not sure if I will use this as my main FPS mouse yet, but I will definitely try it on a number of games. If you love shooters, you should check it out. It is no longer being made, so if you want one you better get it soon.

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Marvel Comics has launched a subscription service that allows you to read Marvel Comics online. They already have many comics inlcuding the first run of the original X-Men, issues 1-100 of Amazing Spider-Man, and issues 1-100 of Fantastic Four. The supscription costs $9.99 per month or $59.88 annually ($4.99/mo). Considering it would cost you a fortune to collect all these comics, it is a great deal.

For more information, visit Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited.

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A NooberoUno Folding@home team has been created and anyone can now join. You will need to have downloaded the Folding@home software or own a Playstation 3 in order to participate. Once you have it up and running, just enter 91933 as the team number. If you have no idea what Folding@home is then read the following:

“What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.”

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Having recently acquired a PS3, I decided to install Linux on it. If you are only interested in playing games, specifically newer games that require a graphics accelerator, then don’t bother. If you are looking for something that has the potential to be the next XBMC, can run many emulators, and has a ton of built in apps including Thunderbird (e-mail) and Open Office (MS Office equivelant) then this is something you need to do. Unfortunately for us, Sony only allows other operating systems to use a fraction of the processing power the PS3 has to offer. This means that linux can run a tad slow but is still able to run the majority of apps I was interested in.

Read on for instructions…

(more…)

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