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.”
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.
I have been meaning to try this out for a while and finally got around to it. It is extremely easy to set everything up and works just like the video shows.
After getting my first Wii replaced, I turned it on for a few minutes to see that it was working properly and it was. I hadn’t turned it on until today when I decided to start Super Paper Mario. After about 30 minutes of playing, the Wii shut down. There was no power getting to the Wii at all. After unplugging it and plugging it back in, I turned it on and it seemed to work again. After five seconds of investigation, I narrowed the problem down to overheating due to the fan not working. Time to send it back to Nintendo.
From what I gather this does not seem to be a common problem.
Having recently upgraded my video card to a DirectX 10 card, I decided to give the Unreal Tournament 3 demo a try. Running the game with the max settings, it looks (and plays) a lot like UT2 to me. Hopefully the final release will look much better.
The Orange Box is Valve’s new compilation of five great games including: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress. If you have not played Half-Life 2 then that alone is a reason to own it. If you have played Half-Life 2 and/or Episode 1 already (most have), consider them a bonus. Portal and Team Fortress together are worth the price of The Orange Box.
Team Fortress is a multiplayer first person shooter where each character type plays a very unique role. For instance, an engineer can build turrets to defend an area while a spy can disguise themselves as a player on the other team in order to sneak past their defenses. It took me a while to learn the basics, but is turning out to be a very solid multiplayer shooter.
Portal is a first person puzzle game where you are given a gun that shoots portals too help you get through the levels. While the story mode may only be a few (extremely entertaining) hours long, there are many more things to do once you complete it. Unless you are a genius, this game should last between 10-1,000 hours depending on how smart you are.
The Orange Box is currently available for the PC and Xbox 360. It will be available for the PS3. To find out more about any of these games, check out The Orange Box site.
Nintendo is now including jackets with all Wii remotes and offering 4 free jackets per system. All you need to do is go here and enter the serial number on your console.
Electronic Arts is offering the original Command & Conquer as a free download. If you are interested, you will need to download and burn the cd images.
“In order to give back to the fans for over 12 years of devotion we are putting together a 12th Anniversary celebration during the month of September. However, as any Command & Conquer fan knows, the true party starts today, August 31st, which marks 12 years since the original Command & Conquer launched way back in 1995.”
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…
