Category: Techie

Anything of particular interest to the techie crowd.

The technology behind the game

First, apologies for 2 days without updates.  There was nothing worth updating for on Friday, and I just had no time for updates on Saturday.  I’m still trying to catch up with my geek readings in the world.  So expect plenty of updates tomorrow.

That said, here’s a cool article at Engadget about some of the technology that makes the Super bowl work.

Telecom bigwig makes moronic statement

Really hard to explain all the potential problems with his desired outcome.  Thus spoke AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre on the concept of charging content providers for running their content over “the telecoms’ pipes:”

That ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn’t get on [the network] and expect a free ride.

Ummmm, aren’t we, the customers of the telecom companies, already paying for the pipes?  This is a bad idea, and if you agree, you should visit Common Cause and help in their fight against this.

[tags]Telecom, Greed[/tags]

Smart fridge magnets make poetry

From Engadget. Here is a set of refridgerator magnets made up of a 16 character LCD display. The magnets can recognize what other parts of speech are nearby and adjust themselves to make poetry without user interaction. And if you don’t like what comes up, you can shake a magnet to change its word.

As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using.

Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.

[tags]Poetry, magnets, Cool[/tags]

Joel on great design

Joel is another favorite of mine.  Like Paul Graham, almost anything he writes I find interesting.  His specialty is design.  Or at least, most of his writing that I read is about design.  If you do interface design, Joel’s latest column should be of interest to you.  I don’t do interface design because I stink at it.  Thanks to Joel, though, I can at least recognize bad design, and sometimes even make suggestions to improve things.

Here’s a great part of his column:

Here’s why I’m afraid to turn off my cell phone: because I can’t always seem to muster the brain cells necessary to turn it back on.

It has two buttons on it, a happy green button and a scary red button. They have funny icons on them that don’t mean very much to me.

You might think that the green button turns it on. Green means go, right?

Wrong.

[tags]Joel, Software, design[/tags]

Indie games of the year.

According to GameTunnel, here are the independent developer games of the year.  Some of these I know, and love.  Some I haven’t ever seen, but plan on checking out.  The soccer game (#10 on the list) looks really cool.  Sorta Sim-Fifa.  And Darwinia made the list.  It’s a cool little game, too.  Check all of the listed games out.