I made another puzzle solver. This time its for hacking terminals in the game Fallout 3. Simply type out the possible words and it will help you solve the puzzle with the fewest possible tries.

Fallout 3 Optimal Hack Tool

Recently I came across a good deal for two Intel 80gb SSDs. However, they are first generation Intel SSDs, with no TRIM (discard) support, but that's OK because the plan was to use them in a cheap motherboard RAID 0. Motherboard raid configurations do not support passing through the TRIM command to the devices. This means that paying a premium for TRIM would be a waste of money anyway.

Having trouble getting audio working on your HDMI monitor? Using a DVI converter cable and an audio jack?

Some monitors will not output sound from the RCA or other audio source if the video is coming in with a HDMI/DVI conversion going on. If you are using a HDMI to DVI converter cable, you may have noticed that DVI can not carry audio.

I was playing, in Linux, with the filesystem on my Coby MPC652 and apparently I accidentally overwrote the firmware, which seems to be on the same flash memory as the memory for the mp3s.

Does anyone in the linux world have one of these things? If so, I'll leave an open invitation for you to send me the first megabyte of the raw /dev/sdX file.

Recently Activision / Infinity Ward have announced that there will be no dedicated servers (which means no mods or clan servers) for Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2.

There is a growing community of PC gamers who are encouraging a boycott of the latest Call of Duty game for PC. Below are just a few screenshots from the in game browser of Activision's latest CoD game, Call of Duty: World at War.

A rough calculation shows that about 3-5 % of all the CoDWaW servers have the word boycott in their server name. Undoubtedly, more are encouraging boycott by other means.

 

I must admit Windows 7 runs beautifully on my EeePC 900A netbook. Without doing any real performance benchmarks, I can at least say it *feels* much faster than linux. (The only other OS I've used on it.)

I started with a somewhat low powered netbook, the EeePC 900A linux edition. This EeePC came with a mere 4gb SSD disk drive and 1 gb ram. Microsoft gave me a promotional copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, so I figured I would get it to work on this EeePC and report how I got it to work.

Braid will single handedly change the way you think about puzzle games. To me at least, they are rarely very interesting and usually devoid of any plot or meaning. Braid is a puzzle game with both an interesting plot and profound meaning.

Amazingly this game was written by a single author, Jonathan Blow. Blow credits David Lynch, which is understandable since the entire story is an allegory for something more sinister. If you can figure out a David Lynch movie then you will probably love this game.

This is a Panic Button. I got it for $7.50.

What happens when I push it?

I recently acquired Blood and Magic, an old game from 1996. It is somewhat unique as a real time strategy; the resource gathering system is different from all other RTS's known to me. 

This game is a treat and is fun for throwing away a few hours. DOS Box plays the game quite well and it works with multiplayer too. If anyone wants to play a 1v1 (thats the only multiplayer mode supported), contact me.

Patch!
I hunted down the 1.01 patch, the patch file is mirrored here. 

Writing a simple GUI for the Block Puzzle Solver turned out to be semi painful. I'll go over the problems encountered while writing the puzzle solver with GWT. GWT converts Sun's Java into browser compatible Javascript. For details of what motivated me to do this, see the writeup on the Dorito's The Quest puzzles.