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.

Bookmark to:

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.”

Bookmark to:

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…)

Bookmark to:

If you’re a fan of Tron the movie or Tron the arcade game, you are going to love GLTron. It’s a 3D version of the “Light Cycles” game from the Tron arcade game. There are a ton of settings that let you change speed, difficulty, and the theme among other things. It looks great and is very addictive. As of now there is no online or LAN play, but there is four-player local multiplayer.

GLTron is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Click here to download it.

 

Bookmark to: