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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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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The newest version of Google Earth now has a built in flight simulator. This was kind of a no-brainer for them to throw this in since the hard part (creating a 3D version of earth) was already done. I have always enjoyed flight sims but since there is no point to them, I never purchased them.  Now I can enjoy flying over my girlfriend’s house and crashing into pyramids for the low price of nothing. The controls are pretty basic so it is not a flight “simulation” in the true sense, but who wants to learn how to fly a real plane anyway? Okay, many people would. That’s not the point. The point is, it’s free and it’s pretty fun. If only they would add multiplayer dog fighting, you could shoot down your neighbors and watch them crash into their own house. Awesome!

Anyway, try it out. I suggest using a gamepad; I hated the mouse and keyboard controls. I have a feeling this will turn into a full-fledged flight sim over time and will probably be the best one available. Hopefully it stays free…

Here are the full instructions

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Scratch is a visual programming language meant to help kids learn the basics of programming. If I had had this as a kid, I wouldn’t have left the house. I remember having to copy pages of BASIC code just to get a circle on the screen, let alone a picture I drew.

After about 20 minutes of messing around, I made a pretty bad… thing, called Zombie Kill. I wouldn’t call it a game since you can’t lose. If you don’t shoot the zombie, he just goes right past you. It has horrible graphics, no sound, and no point. It is, however, infinitely better than anything I made as a young kid.

What you can do with Scratch is limited, but it has way more functionality than I expected. I’m sure that with each new release, it will have a lot more to offer. Don’t expect this to replace real programming languages. Scratch is great for kids, those new to programming, and anyone who likes to waste time. It is free and is availble for Windows and Mac operating systems.

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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.

 

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