Category: Useless knowledge

Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.

Remote air hockey

(via Engadget)
Sometimes, you need to play air hockey, and just can’t get anyone around you to play.  When that happens, you really need to make yourself a remote air hockey table and play it up with someone clear across the country.

airhockey-distance.jpg

Videoconferencing is designed for coworkers who have met in person and want to work together remotely. It falls short, however, in introducing people, and does not account for the complex interaction patterns humans engage in when they meet for the first time. Airhockey Over a Distance aims to introduce people over a distance by utilizing the social power of a quick, casual game that can be played in the social spaces like canteens of distributed enterprises.

Airhockey Over a Distance is played like a conventional airhockey game. However, the table is split in half and the two ends are connected via a network. The players can see and hear each other at all times. They shoot a real puck back and forth, trying to score a goal. Once the puck passes the midway-line, its location is detected, and a corresponding physical puck is shot out at the other table.

[tags]Air Hockey, Remote gaming[/tags]

Worth1000 beta games photochop

If you are a gamer with a sense of humor, you really need to check out the latest Worth1000 Beta Busts photochopping contest.  I’m still working my way through all the entries, but this contest looks to have the highest ratio of good to meh submissions I’ve seen yet on the site.  Such entries and Mario Kombat, Final Fantasy XXX (a must see cover), Ratchet and Frank (Zappa’s got your back), Super Mario Bloodlust, and more.  There are pages and pages of entries, and most are worth seeing.

The beta version is the test version of the video game….the way it was intended by the video game designers before the big studio calls for changes.

The rules of this game are thus:
You are to take a still, box or ad from a video game and edit it so as to represent a version of the game that never made it to the consumer. It might be helpful to briefly discuss the original game in your author’s comments for people who never heard of it. As always, quality is a must. We will remove poor entries no matter how much we like you. You’ll have 48 hours for this contest, so make your submissions count.

And here are a couple of the entries.  Check out the full contest to see the other great games.

chlamydia-clip.jpg

w1000-halo-kitty.jpg

[tags]Worth1000, Beta Busts, Photochopping, Photochops[/tags]

Sony warns of greater gaming division losses

The writeup at ArsTechnica has all the gory details.  Sony has announced that the cost of some components for the PlayStation 3 have gone up.  After a US$231 loss for the division last quarter, Sony is warning of a greater loss than originally expected around the PlayStation 3 launch.

According to Merrill Lynch Japan, such a move could result in a second-year loss for Sony of US$730 million, and another loss of US$457 million in its third year. This would be in stark contrast to the PS2, which was profitable in its second year, to the tune of US$757 million.

. . .

So if the game console business is getting so expensive, why do companies like Sony and Microsoft continue to chase it? Each company is looking at the long term benefits of having the dominant game console market share, and each company has additional reasons to promote its own console. Sony, on one hand, is clearly anxious to push the Blu-ray format in order to create a market for the high-definition movie standard they are promoting. Microsoft, on the other hand, likes the idea of the Xbox serving as an entertainment hub that links seamlessly to computers running the Media Center Edition of Windows.

Then there’s Nintendo, who have consistently turned a profit with their gaming hardware and never seemed to jump on the bandwagon of losing money selling high-powered units below cost in order to make it back with game sales and third-party license fees.

The rest of this year and early next will be interesting in the console business, I suppose.  I want Sony to do well with the PlayStation 3, but more and more it sounds like a troubled console, or at least a troubled launch.

[tags]Sony, PlayStation 3[/tags]

City of Heroes lore

This one is completely, totally, and unashamedly for City of Heroes players only. If you don’t play City of Heroes, please go to the next post, as this will mean nothing to you.

Now, for the three of you that get to this section, if you want to know more of the lore of City of Heroes, hit this forum thread for all kinds of details and wondrous information.

  • Nowaki:
    Did you know that the last contact you get in the Outbreak tutorial, Coyote is a tribute to the first member of the City of Heroes pre-beta community.His forum handle was Kiyotee, his real name was Matt Bragg. He was an active contributing member of the pre-beta community for 2 years, one of the nicest guys around, but died tragically around the time the game was released.

    The tutorial character Coyote, bear’s Matt’s name and character’s identity.

  • IanTheM1:
    I’m guessing Kings Row was left without a trainer for a while because…Back in Beta, Galaxy City didn’t exist!

    That’s right, back in Beta you went straight to Atlas after being forced to do the tutorial. Kings Row appropriately had retired police officer Michael Knight AKA Back Alley Brawler serving as the trainer of Kings Row.

    Since Beta had become so crowded, there was a call for a second starting zone, thus Galaxy City was born, and Brawler moved there.

    Since Galaxy didn’t exist at the time, Kings Row connected to Perez Park! You can still see the spot where the old gate was. It’s in the northeast part of High Park. You can’t miss the lookout posts and the fenced in section.

  • Bad_Luck:
    Break-frees were originally Disciplines, which didn’t negate holds, they only added defense against them. For a while you could trade in bounty in SC and get them instead of break-frees.Unyielding used to root you to one spot.

There’s around 50 pages of posts there now. Some of the information is getting off the CoH lore/backstory and into the CoH history and what-used-to-be, but it’s still interesting to folks that play the game, I think.

[tags]City of Heroes lore[/tags]

Which is better

In an effort to determine the best thing ever, the creator of webcomic xkcd has started the site BestThing.info.  The format is pretty simple – you are asked which is better and given two buttons with choices on them.  Click one to vote which is better.  As an example, here are a few of the choices I’ve had:

Which is better?

  • Clavicles or The top of a thong above low rise jeans
  • Secret compartments or Sexing up a hot girl
  • When stupid people shut up or Getting extra nuggets at Chick-Fil-A

I went ahead and crossed out the wrong answers there for you, too, so you know how to vote if you get the same choices (which you won’t).

If you don’t like the things you see, you can also add your own things to go into the voting pool.  I passed on this, but I’m sure some folks out there will have some good ideas to add.

[tags]Which is better?, BestThing.info[/tags]

Server move recovery status

I am close to having all the images back in place.  While going back and restoring images to old posts, I’ve cleaned up some old errors in posts, some dating back to February.  So if you are visiting via a feedreader (Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or any other), you may see a lot of old posts showing up again because of edits.  Please bear with me over the next few days as I recover from this downtime and server move.

By the way, I finally received a response from my previous webhost’s 24×7 support staff, 44 hours after I filed a support ticket for my unreachable web site.  The answer was I had some sleeping SQL processes that were taking up an unusually high percentage of available CPU time, or something like that.  Since the only abnormal thing I had done that day was a complete database dump via php_myadmin, I have to assume something in the database dump caused the problem.  I really have no idea what it was, though – maybe someone out there brighter than I am can tell me?

So, with a large portion of the cleanup from the move behind me, we’ll celebrate with a picture of a rabbit with a pancake on its headrabbit_pancake.jpg.  Thanks for stopping by.  Now I have to start my work to gain visitors again – after hitting 200+ unique visits a day for the past couple of weeks, after the crash I’m down to under 100 unique visits today, and only 16 yesterday.  Hopefully some of that is DNS propagation, but I fear some of it is lost regular visitors.  Now that I’m mostly recovered, though, I’ll work on getting more articles up and start trying to get visitors again.  Hugs all around.

Top 10 obscure sports

(via Neatorama)
I’ll admit, I actually knew of some of these. But I’m into oddities, as you might have picked up on from reading this site. That said, check out YesButNoButYes.com’s top 10 list of obscure sports.

10) cabertossing.jpgWorld Highland games

These are the festivals held in Scotland that celebrate Celtic culture. Events like the Sheaf toss where you throw a bundle of straw, the stone put where you throw a rock, and the caber toss where you throw a tree. I think landscaping was evented here. Just a guess, but I think sometime in the 70’s human growth hormone was thrown into the mix, and the World Strongest Man competition was invented. The tree thing isn’t too suggestive, is it? Reminds me of my summers at camp thumping eagle.(Hi Mr. Oglethorpe)

. . .

4) rockpaper.jpgRock Paper Scissors League

This is a sport started on a dare…right? The U. S. Association of Rock Paper Scissors. That’s right, I said U.S. Association…damn proud. And of course, the lovely girls of the RPS. What do you think? Which network’s gonna snatch this one up? Spike? GSN? Oxygen? You know if it’s big, Oprah’s gonna get a taste…stay tuned.

 You might even find the number 1 “sport” rather peculiar – I know I did.  I also have to admit being intrigued by their Top 10 Violent Movie Deaths article, so you might want to check that out while you are there.

[tags]YesButNoButYes, Obscure sports[/tags]