Just found a terrific resource for (largely biographical) historical information: “Spartacus Educational”. This seems to be part of SchoolNet, an educational resource run by EasyNet. I’ve only had a brief snuffle around on Schoolnet, but it looks to be an enormous collection of links and sub-sites by and for teachers and pupils. There are some great links here…lots of stuff I can see coming in handy when Alex gets a bit older.
Design for chunks
This is hilarious–a site dedicated to alternative designs for airline in-flight vomit bags: designforchunks.com (Via Webword)
Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City
I haven’t got all the way through GTAIII yet, but already Vice City is looking enormously appealing. And apparently the rest of the British game-buying public thinks so, too: 300,000 units shifted in Britain alone when it was released last weekend. Amazing.
David Weinberger has some interesting things to say about the game, and the morally dubious world it allows you to enter:
“Why is it that I find the computer game BlackHawk Down reprehensible but I’m ok with Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3)? In BlackHawk Down, you’re a righteous American soldier fighting local warlords who are starving their own people. In GTA3, you’re a hoodlum who succeeds by randomly killing innocent pedestrians and taking their money. Also, you hijack cars, kill policemen, and blow stuff up. Why do I have my moral polarity reversed when it comes to these two games?”
Opera 7: it’s here
The Opera 7 beta has arrived. And it’s glorious.
I’ve only just downloaded it, but it’s already clear to me that this is a fantastic step forward for the Opera browser. Check this out:
- You can save and re-open sessions (sets of open windows), just as I had been hoping.
- Multiple user accounts are supported. (Older versions of Opera could be tweaked to allow different users to have their own preferences/settings/favourites, but it was a bit of a hack.)
- <link> tag site navigation is supported by means of a slick extra toolbar. Not many sites use these <link> tags yet, but Mozilla and Opera both support them, and I’m pretty sure they’ll be in Internet Explorer 7, too. It’s a great usability and accessibility feature. Within 2-3 years, I reckon that <link> tag site navigation will be ubiquitous across the web. (Note to self: must implement this on Sunpig now!)
- New mail client program, called “M2”. I haven’t played with this yet, but it looks intriguing. It tries to go beyond a standard email program, and allow you to treat your mail as a freeform database kind of thing.
Also, the browser has been given a fresh new look, with rounded tabs and sexy transition effects on the menu buttons. All in all, it just looks utterly fabulous. I’ll try and do a more extensive review once I’ve had a chance to work with it some more.
Patterns in Personal Web Sites
Here’s a very nice, concise series of articles on patterns in personal web sites. If you’re thinking about starting a weblog, or already have one and want to improve it, this would be a good place to start reading.
Computer upgrade
I used to upgrade my PC based on the following simple formula: when CPUs of twice the speed of my current processor drop below £100, it’s time to move up.
Right now, though, I’m running on an AMD Duron 800Mhz from over two years ago, and Athlon XP 1600 processors are currently going for less than 50 quid. The main reason I haven’t upgraded yet is that I now do most of my games playing on my PS2 rather than on my PC. (And one of the joys of a console is that you don’t have to upgrade it to the latest hardware to run the latest games adequately.)
But I think I’m getting to the point where I’d like to upgrade my PC. The last game I played on it (Warcraft III) was noticeably sluggish when there were a lot of characters on screen, and when I’m running Virtual Machines, they aren’t as snappy as I’d like them to be. And if I plan to be running a Linux VM sort-of permanently, I’d quite like it to be snappy.
Unfortunately, my current motherboard (an Abit KT7) won’t take an Athlon XP. So I’ll have to upgrade the mobo. Also, it looks like all of the Athlon XP mobos only take DDR RAM, so my 512MB of PC133 isn’t going to be any use, either. My wireless LAN card sits in an adapter in the ISA slot on my current motherboard, but ISA slots seem to be extinct now, so I’ll have to get a PCI adapter instead. At least my Radeon video card will still be okay in an AGP slot.
All in all, I think I can put together a nice little upgrade package (Athlon XP1600+, or maybe higher, plus motherboard, plus 512Mb DDR RAM, plus PCI adapter card) for about £250. Also, I can probably recoup some of that cost by selling the old parts on Ebay. (We’ve played the game of keeping spare PC parts around to build new computers from them…but we have all the computers we reasonably need already.)
I think this is going to be a project for the new year, though. I need some time to get myself back up to speed on motherboard technology. I’m not looking for top of the line hardware, but I’d like to make sure that I’m not going to be buying a lemon.