If you owned a personal computer in the 80s and played computer games, you probably played at least one Infocom text-based adventure game like Zork or (my personal favorite) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Known as interactive fiction, or IF, these games used the most powerful computers on the planet for their processing engines …
Continue reading ‘Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7’ »
For the past few years I’ve been trying my best to keep Galleon’s weather app running, but it appears the end-of-life for it has arrived.
One of the first apps I put on my iPhone 3GS was Stanza, to replace iSilo from my Treo for reading e-books. At that time, Amazon had just acquired Lexcycle and I remember wondering they would end up combining the Kindle and Stanza apps. Well, now we know the answer: nope. A recent update to …
I learned my lesson last time and decided to hold off a few days before upgrading to the new release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot. That was a smart decision since the upgrade took just under two hours this time instead of over eight. I did have one (self-induced) snag during the ‘do-release-upgrade’ step. I …
This week at the Build Conference, Microsoft released a freely downloadable developer preview of Windows 8 (you can download the ISOs here). If you’re an avid reader of this blog (and which of the five of you aren’t? ;-)) you know I like to jump on new technology early so of course I downloaded the …
Today, just six short months since announcing a slew of new WebOS devices, hp announced they are discontinuing the entire WebOS line. The successor to PalmOS and its related devices like the Pre just never took off and the TouchPad was pretty much dead-on-arrival, crushed by the iPad only 49 days after its release. It’s …
Continue reading ‘WebOS is dead … long live, er — uh, nevermind’ »
Last summer, my mini-tech project was installing some wireless internet cameras inside and outside the house so I could keep tabs on things while I was away. For the past year I’d just been using the built-in features of each of the cameras (motion detection, e-mail alerts, etc.) which was hit-or-miss since each manufacturer offered …
April is almost over, which means it’s time for another Ubuntu release! Today Canonical released Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. As I am wont to do (with Maverick, Lucid, Karmic, Intrepid, etc.) I upgraded my server right away. The entire process took about 7 hours start to finish, but most of that was waiting for the …
It’s been almost three years since I last fixed the local radar image in Galleon’s Weather application. Earlier this week TCF user ajayabb pointed out that just like last time, the image was showing N/A again. I tracked down the bug to a change in weather.com’s HTML page and was able to make a simple …
Continue reading ‘Another Galleon (local radar) weather fix’ »
Yesterday, hp announced a slew of new devices running WebOS (which they acquired last year). One thing was missing from their press event though … Palm. hp’s new devices are branded the hp TouchPad, the hp Pre 3, and the hp Veer Yes, sadly, the Palm brand is now dead, almost two years after the …