Everybody Dies

I finally got around to actually buying Defcon. No, you didn’t misread that link… the website is indeed everybody-dies.com. This game is for two kinds of people: the ones who enjoy strategy games (me), and the ones who like to blow up things (me).

It’s not very straightforward. Defcon is not a game that you try to win. You try to lose less than everybody else playing (up to 6 players online, full AI supported). This will all become clear in a second.

The game takes about 30-40 minutes on the average x5 speed (you have x1, x5, x10, and x20). It progresses through 5 DEFCON levels. There is Defcon 5, where it’s nonviolent chess; this is where the game starts. Everybody places their buildings and fleets and whatnot. At Defcon 4 (6 minutes in), Radars take effect and you can see what they reveal of your enemies’ territory and units. Defcon 3 (12 minutes) really takes off. Nothing more can be added to the world; units and buildings left over are lost now. Naval and air combat is available, and the fun begins. Defcon 2 (20 minutes) is simple: one away from 1. Nothing different from Defcon 3, gameplay-wise, however. And at Defcon 1 (30 minutes into the game), nuclear war is declared. Bombers, submarines, silos, everything. Half of the world is often a white radiation splotch.

Here’s the breakdown of winning: kill everybody else (+1 points per million kills for you, -2/mil for them), defend your homeland (-2/mil for you, +1/mil for them). In the final Tutorial mission, you play a quick 1v1… I ended up winning 100+ to 6, even though the AI knocked me down to single digits early on. A great game.

Now, the download is very convenient. Just get the “demo” client from the website. Try it, if you want. (Restrictions in a second). If you want to buy it, cool. Just do it from the Introversion store (like I did), or buy it at another place (AAFES has it in some PXs…). Enter the key into your installation… poof. Full game. Yeah, this did spring up keygens. But support Introversion and get their great game! (I also suggest looking into Uplink or Darwinia…)

Here are the restrictions on the unregistered client; there aren’t many. No special modes (Big World, Diplomacy, etc.). Only 1 AI player in a game that you make. You can’t join a game using a mod, or with another demo player already in it. That’s about it. You can still do the tutorials, play with 5 full players, and get a good taste for the game.

Tiddly Winks

I’ve been using Google Notebook for a good while now. But what I don’t like is that Google doesn’t provide an offline version. It’s a great tool, and I would love to have it on my desktop. So I set out to make an offline version from the original (Firefox’s Save As… Web Page (Complete)). But after going through over 1000 lines of Javascript, it occured to me: where’s the notebooks? I did some research and found it it was AJAX based. So that was a no-go.

But I continued Google-ing and reading for a while, until I stumbled on a post about some new technology or other that could make it possible. For Windows. But as I read the comments, somebody brought up something they used and liked better, TiddlyWiki. A bit more searching brought up the link. It was actually rather amazing, to me.

It was an alternate Wiki system. It describes itself as a “non-linear reusable web notebook,” but its much more. Built with pure CSS, HTML, and Javascript, it is all in one HTML file. You can have plugins, stylesheets, random CSS, macros, themes, the works, while still just contained inside of that one file.

There are a lot of different uses for it. Some people use the “flavors” (modified versions distributed with plugins or themes pre-installed) MonkeyGTD and d³ as GTD systems. Others use it as a blog (you can deny non-admin editing), or as a way to present stuff at work (aided by the Presentation distro), and some as a simple notebook.

It’s got all kinds of stuff written for it. All macros and plugins are just combinations of CSS and Javascript and HTML, so anybody can write one. There are some that change it to a more Wikipedia style (combining SingePageModePlugin with BreadcrumbsPlugin, and the right style), some that add calendars, splashscreens, GTD systems, little toys… the system is your playground. It’s very cool, and I highly recommend checking it out.

You can run it anywhere, as long as you use IE or Firefox ( > 1.5). I’ve even got it running on my DSL installation. As for hosting, I know for a fact that GooglePages can run at least 1 copy of it, with plugins and themes. There’s also TiddlySpot, which is just for TiddlyWikis, and offers a bunch of pre-installed flavors to start of with (though Standard is still an option).

iKernel.exe

Windows; you’ve gotta love it. I tried to install a program, and it repeatedly gave me the same error:
The InstallShield Engine (iKernel.exe) could not be launched.
I browsed through at least 10 sites, all telling me the exact same things: Clear my C:\tmp and C:\WINDOWS\Temp directories. Install Internet Explorer (never did end up doing this). Update Windows. And the list just went on and on.
I didn’t believe these sites, because after doing most of the tasks, it still cam up with that same error message. And with a little searching, I found the C:\Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\Engine\6\Intel 32 folder, containing IKernel.exe… and with a simple renaming (changing the case of the “i”), it worked. Yay.

Video, Vista, and Linux (Yeah, I was on a V-Roll)

So here goes…

Yeah, so, Vista is out. Wahoo. Except not. While we were over at Sam’s Club, they were A) Selling Vista, and B) Providing laptops on which you could try them out (while bolted to the table). So the ad campaign managers need to get fired… I mean, come on! “The Wow Starts Now”?! What moron came up with that? Anyway, the prices are way up, with 4 different versions for sale: Home Basic, which just sucks, Home Premium, which is OK but not worth it, Business (and the news-to-me Enterprise edition of it) which is not for the average PC, and then Ultimate, which is wayyyyy overpriced and underpowered.

The Home Basic doesn’t even come with the chillin’ interface, which also slows most computers down. I navigated around for half an hour, trying to find stuff out. And you know what? It sucks. Vista looks good, sounds good, and is good for gaming, but please, if you’re not getting a new computer, don’t buy it. It’s not worth it. Almost everything Vista-compatible is also XP-OK.

Well, I also found an awsome Firefox extension: VideoDownloader. It’s free, so get it here:

It is a little icon in your status bar that you can click to bring up a window listing download links for Flash videos on the page. That means Google, Youtube, everything can be downloaded. You click the link and (eventually) get the chance to download “get_video”. You just rename it to whatever.flv and save it! Now, it’s a pain having to stream the video through VLC Player or something like that, so how about we convert it a lot? This is on Linux, so Windows users will have to just read the Help section of VideoDownloader or Google it. Anyway… make sure you have ffmpeg installed (Debian/*buntu users: apt-get install ffmpeg will do it for you :) ) and then type this into flv2mpg, a file with no extension (use KATE or vim or emacs):

#!/bin/bash
if [ "${2}" == "" ]; then
let $2="$1"
fi

ffmpeg -i "${1}.flv" -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500  -s 320x240 "${2}.mpg"

And then use chmod +x to make it executable. Here’s how to use it. Just call it with ./flv2mpg or something, and include 1-2 filenames (without any extensions). The first is the FLV file, the second is the resulting MPG file. If you want them to be the same, just include 1 name it it will do that for you. Like I said, this downloads any Flash movie in FLV form. No games, but yes to others. Windows users will have to use a converter.