It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Culture & Entertainment

  • Free Video

    To encode your video in a free codec (ie not proprietary), use Theora from Xiph.org. This codec is still in ALPHA stage (as in, not even beta!) so don’t use it for mission critical stuff just yet. However, xine and mplayer already play the codec. If you try to convert an avi to theora (using…

  • Mid-Feb Snow Haiku

    Winter’s Returning: Snow falls gingerly downward. Will you stay long, snow?

  • A great song

    “Dance, Dance, Christa Paffgen” She’s got the time says she got time on her side Running the rule Commanding the late boys eyes She runs around, knows all the streets by name So mysterious, shadows meet James Dean She’s intoxicating, soon your favorite drink Your black dress in disarray Only dance floor prayers can save…

  • Superbowl Sunday

    Football just gets in the way of the commercials I want to watch. So what did I do to kill time in between? I hacked Python, of course! I found a bit of humor in this, don’t know if you will if you haven’t taken CS classes. >>> li [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ‘example’,…

  • Eric-Chin III of the Chinese’s Reign Ends

    The computer kept declaring war on me and finally I got sick of being on the defensive. To speed things up, I declared war on EVERYONE! It still took a few turns! This time I’m playing as my original civ, the Japanese. Let’s see if I can lead the Japanese to victory at Warlord setting.

  • On to Warlord!

    Finished my German game in civ4 and now onto warlord. I’ve never been this high up in civ before. Hopefully they don’t crush me!

  • New Civ4 Game Started

    I’ll post my file from my last game soon. Just started a new civ4 game with 2 new elements. First of all, I’m playing pangea so boats are irrelevant. Second, I’m playing Germans which have some differences from previous civs I’ve played (Japanese and Chinese). One primary difference is that the German special unit comes…

  • Playing Civ4 on the New Computer

    At first, Civ4 seemed not to play much better on this computer with twice the stats of my old machine. Yeah, the game didn’t take 15 minutes to load, but it wasn’t as close to instantaneous as I’d hoped. But then I slowly began to see the places where Civ4 was much better on this…

  • Big Brother wears Mickey Mouse Ears?

    Went to Disney a few days ago with my family and found out that Disney is not quite the innocent little park it once was. I never quite felt the same about the park after 11 Sept 2001 when they began checking bags, but this time it was even more invasive. In order to enter…

  • Quickies

    1) In this post, wget had created a directory structure, foiling my plans to do the md5sum check automatically. The correct way to do what I wanted to do was use the option -nd for no directories. If I had typed wget -nd address it would have just saved to my current directory and the…

  • Reasons you shouldn’t use Linux

    My wife asked me a poignant question a couple of weeks ago, “If Linux is SOOO awesome, why don’t you stop using Windows?” I told her that I couldn’t play civ4. “I thought you said it was ready for use and equal to Windows,” she continued. And I realized, there are probably some others who…

  • MMORG and Real Economies Clash

    As I was driving home last week, I heard something interesting on NPR. I knew that people had been selling their MMORG characters on Ebay. They would spend a few sleepless nights getting their character up to a really high level and then sell the character on Ebay to the highest bidder. I’ve heard stories…

  • FF VIII

    Started playing Final Fantasy 8 once I finished up 7. I’ve played for about 3 hours and have already found the obligatory Wedge, Biggs, and Cid. In case you’ve never played the Final Fantasy Series, ever since 4 (I think – but definitely 6) there have always been some characters named Biggs, Wedge, and Cid.…

  • Snow Haiku 2

    Work begins later; Thank you white snow for falling. But why the ice too?

  • Civ4 Computers Fighting

    I was surprised that, by only raising the level of difficulty by one, the computer opponents in civ4 began to fight each other. In this instance, it was to my advantage because Washington of the Americans attacked Peter of the Russians, who I was planning to attack anyway. I think I will play my fourth…