Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Pondering the Imponderable -- 2:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Quake 4 Linux demo ran on my box (Athlon XP 1800+, 512M RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra). I had all of the settings quite low. I'll try to mess with it some more. It hung up my box with a ton of disk thrashing in the opening cutscene. I assume that's a swap problem. The jury's still out on whether it's worth getting the way it looks.

The Master comments: The initial cutscene did some stuttering on my machine as well (Athlon 64 +2500, 1gb RAM, Geforce FX 5600 Ultra) but I assume that's just throughput limiting on the video card. The game itself plays very well except for a couple of places where the special-effects type stuff bog down the video card. Not sure how much the demo is going to bring those issues out.

Thunderbird Modern Pinball Theme -- 2:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sweet! The Modern Pinball theme for Thunderbird (Mozilla's stand-alone email client and a cousin to Firefox) is complete! It looks sharp and doesn't take up a lot of screen real estate. Currently, there's only a version for 1.0.7. The author says that he will release a 1.5-compatible version once Thunderbird 1.5 final is released.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Firefox 1.5 Released -- 11:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Mozilla team has released Firefox 1.5. The changes are numerous from the 1.0x series. You can check out the release notes here. I'm going to make sure that my favorite extensions/themes are fully supported and then make the switch.

Quake 4 Demo Released -- 5:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

This time for sure! id has released a demo for Quake 4. You can get it from your favorite local mirror, id's FTP site (currently being hammered into oblivion), or id's BitTorrent tracker. The demo weighs in at just over 320M, so you might want to make yourself a sandwich. I'm going to download this bad-boy to see if I can actually play it on my box and, if so, if I want to add it to my list for old St. Nick. Thanks Linux Games.

KDE 3.5 Released -- 4:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The latest and greatest version of my favorite desktop, KDE. You can take a visual tour of the changes and download a copy of your very own. I'm snagging the contributed Slackware 10.2 packages as I type this. Please be kind and use a mirror site.

NFL Week #12 Final -- 4:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Whew! What a weekend! My Lions can Steve Mariucci, but inexplicably keep Matt Millen around. My fantasy team, the Fightin' Wombats, held on to win 87-86 and improve my record to 10-1-1. We're playing the second-place team that is 10-2 next weekend for the top seed in the playoffs. To top it all off, I managed to pull back into a tie year-to-date with Eeyore. Let the record show, I was nevertheless pulling for the Packers (mainly because I have no great love for the Eagles). I was 13-3 while she was 12-4. Year-to-date we are both 115-61 (.653).

Paul Steed, Dave Taylor Interviews -- 1:52 pm CST, Update by The Master

Gamasutra has "Playing Catch-up" interviews online with Paul Steed and Dave Taylor, both former id software employees and interesting people. Paul is now working for Atari, and Dave is freelancing. I've been wondering where these two had gone. Good to see they're doing well.

No Old News

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