Right from the start, Reiner Kniza’s “Knights of Charlemagne” is in my good graces. It does something that all apps in the App Store should do: it doesn’t mute my music on start. I have an iPod Touch and an iPod is primarily, above all else, a music player. If it’s on, chances are it’s playing music. Any app that mutes it without my consent makes too many suppositions about its place and role on the device it’s on. “Knights of Charlemagne” isn’t so presumptuous.
Much like “Poison,” the game is mechanically simple. There are ten estates, 5 uncoloured ones numbered 1 to 5 and five unnumbered representing five colours, in the middle of the playing field that two players vie for. Each player is dealt eight knight tokens, each one representing a colour and a number. Every turn, the active player has to place one of his knight tokens on a matching estate (either colour or number.) A new knight is then drawn and the game continues until the last one has been placed.
At the end, players score one point for every estate in which they have a presence, no matter how many the opponent has there too. The real scoring benefits come from every estate in which you have more knights than your opponent. Each coloured estate is worth five points and each numbered estate is worth its value. Additionally, the first player to control two estates, counting up, gets a crown worth five points. It’s an important game balancer that makes ignoring the least valuable estates a perilous choice.
It’s always dangerous because the AI is competent enough to punish you. The easiest difficulty, squire, which acts as a tutorial, is a pushover, but the other two, knight and king, locked until you beat the preceding level, provide a heady challenge. It’s not much, but the limited progression towards beating the king level adds to the replayability of Knights of Charlemagne. Although equally portable, in the best of ways, as Poison, Knights feels more rewarding because of this design. When you don’t have human opponents to play against, or even physical cards, these little additions are essential to keep a game engaging.
Best of all, the level of strategic thought and planning that Knights of Charlemagne requires is engrossing enough to be fun but simple enough to never be frustrating during brain addled morning commutes on the train. For $2, it’s a great little strategy game to have in your pocket.
Those that only see this weblog through an RSS reader might not have noticed that I’ve made a few tweaks around here. The second column of links, imported from delicious, has been moved to the bottom of the page. Since there’s only the one core column now, I’ve merged the wordmark, which sat above the second column, with the header image and centered everything. I haven’t changed a single thing in the main body since I was happy with the readability, so that column retains its width and font size. It has more breathing room now.
In the footer, I’ve elaborated on my details and added an extra area of “recommended” links. It is, as they call it, a “blogroll.” I wanted to have something a little more permanent than my delicious bookmarks to point out some sites I’ve enjoyed recently. Those links will change, but not too frequently. All are highly, well, recommended but for entirely distinct and diverse reasons. It is an eclectic bunch.
Anyway, the main reason for these changes is that the single column allows for this:
Brighton sunset
Images float outside of the main column so the extra room allows for some extra large photos. I’m using the camera more often than I’m writing paragraphs, so I figured that I’d let the site reflect that.
The good thing about Flash becoming such a ubiquitous audio player online is that it has, essentially, killed off proprietary formats like ASX and Realmedia. Nearly every browser has Flash installed so it makes it easy for site operators to allow mp3 playback without having to worry about what players the user has installed or what the default download options are or whatever. You put up a simple Flash audio player and it works without any of the overhead that might scare away less computer savvy users. Additionally, Flash’s extensibility allows site operators to create players with the features and appearance that they want. They can’t do that with third party players unless they’re of the size of Microsoft or Apple.
Of course, these content providers want to have their cake and eat it too. They desire the ubiquity of flash and mp3 but they also want to restrict and contain the music, so that it’s not easily downloadable (Flash loads mp3s through the browser and if it can load them, the browser and the user can grab them too. Quite easily.) This has resulted in some overly complex mechanisms using tokens and sessions and other sorts of obfuscations, as seen in the above image. None of which work. These measures do nothing but add inconvenient speed bumps akin to the annoying “spaceball.gif” image overlays on Flickr and the old-school “do not right click” javascript popups. None of which ever worked.
Lately I’ve noticed a new trend, as seen in the imeem Player. Certain sites are now encoding all their audio as .flv, Flash Video, format. There’s no video, of course, since the format is being used as a wrapper for the mp3 audio. I understand why they do it. Their logic is that flv files can’t be as easily and freely distributed as mp3 files can (a lot of people wouldn’t know how to play an .flv file), but come on. Stop trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. There’s already a perfectly fine file format for playing back audio: mp3. Wrapping it up in some camouflage won’t work because it can easily be unwrapped.
Here’s a word of advice: if I can listen to your file in my browser it’s because it was already downloaded and it’s on my hard drive. This is how browsers work. Stop trying to put ineffectual roadblocks around this. If you are going to share it then share it. You’ll get more sales and promotion out of it. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and it’s hopefully working for Flashbulb. “Soundtrack To A Vacant Life” is a pretty solid album. Buy it.
There. I’ve gone live with a WordPress install. It’s been live for a couple of minutes and I’m already sick of WordPress. I don’t know why even bothered. This port of the site has left me screaming at the screen more often than XBox Live’s Street Figher 2‘s arcade mode. With that, I say Fuck you WordPress. You certainly are easy to install, but doing anything with the themes is so obtuse and rediculous I might as well just code the whole damned thing in PHP myself.
Some things are probably still a bit off. The old feeds are now dead and need to be redirected. Comments probably don’t even work. I don’t know. I’m on vacation and I don’t want to deal with this now.
WordPress is a pain in the ass to skin. More so than any of the other weblog tools that I’ve used. The seperation of content from design in the templates — the default ones — doesn’t feel up to snuff. I find myself mixing the WordPress PHP variables with other various PHP statements and conditionals right in the middle of the HTML, which reminds me more of clumsily pieced together scripts than, you know, top-tier web applications.
All I want is for my html to remain exactly the same as it is now. Why is this so hard to do? (A rhetorical question since comments are dead until the transition is complete. I was tired of getting a hundred comments about ringtones and penis enlargers and poker. PROTIP: ban the entire .info top level domain to vastly improve your spam denialability!)
When online web services don’t play nice together, doves cry.
Right now they’re bawling their eyes out over the glitchiness between Bloglines and del.icio.us. I don’t know how it all began (and it began weeks ago) — perhaps an overly eager spider got itself throttled — but the end result is that most user feeds from del.icio.us don’t work very well anymore. Luckily, that’s what my inbox is for. However, in trying to fix and/or workaround the problem, I turned to yet another third party web app: feedburner.
In the process, I’ve ended up with a single, amalgamated feed that mixes this weblog, my del.icio.us feed, and even my flickr photos. It is here. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while; preferably rolling my own system but there’s no accounting for the combination of laziness and feedburner’s ease of use. I’ve railed about the decentralization of personal information and content on the web before, so this amalgamation is useful to me. Of course, the catch is that those various third party feeds are now being combined by yet another third party application, so it doesn’t solve the problem that my content is dependent on their services. For now, though, it’s a good stopgap. Useful too.
So if you’re so inclined, point the ole’ news reader to http://feeds.feedburner.com/n0wak. If you do then you might see further evidence as to why Guitar Hero, despite its many frustrations, was my game of 2005. I still play it a lot and my pinkie still hurts a lot. It is possibly the game of decade.
My hipfour digit blogger id (it’s been a long time since I used their service) confirms that this is my sixth anniversary of doing this. I’m a grizzled veteran.
After all these years, the weblog became a natural extension of the self. There isn’t any thought to it, there’s no pressure or desire to impress or attract traffic and no stress about posting habits. It just is.
I’ve seen a lot of change in these six years. I’ve seen it go from “web logs” to “weblogs” to “blogs”, from a small niche geek group to mainstream “credibility”, from an innocent distraction to a spam magnet. There’s been a lot of self-indulgence in that time, a lot of it archived across various computers on the internet (unfortunately), but we learn.
I couldn’t care less if weblogs change the world. It doesn’t matter if they bring about the downfall of the “old media” (hah). What matters is that after all this time, I’ve greatly improved my writing (looking at my initial posts is cringe worthy) and my “style” (there was a lame no capitals period in there somewhere) and I’ve met some cool people because of it. That made it worthwhile and as I probably say every year, here’s to more weblog perpetuity.
And if others have enjoyed anything I have ever written or if anyone was pleased by something I have linked to or got something, anything, out of this nonsense, then thank you.
There was some sort of game today. Something to do with a breast. I don’t know, I wasn’t following it. I was watching Shall We Dance on TVO instead. How’s that for counter-programming? Quirky film.
Anyway, I have updated my RSS feeds to be more complete and valid, using these MT templates. I’m not sure if I like the idea of a full content feed, as that defeats the purpose of syndication, but I’ll try to see how it fits into places. Like my new bloglines account (my public view) for one, which will give me a means to check a vast number of feeds from a centralized web-based location. Even at times when I shouldn’t be browsing them. *cough*work. (Yeah, I could use my own feed reader, but I want to ease server load as much as possible).
This got me thinking. With bloglines, and del.icio.us, and all those syndication oriented sites (localfeeds), and the geourls, and all the various user accounts at dozens of varied places and forums, I’m finding it hard to keep track of my own content. Everything is too decentralized, and with so much information flowing to and fro it all becomes a little too unwieldy. What I need is some sort of hub for all this external content. Hmmm…
Five pages of stills from the new Ghost in the Shell movie, Innocence. There’s a trailer, too. I didn’t even know they were making a follow-up, so it’s news to me. The art looks pretty good, but hell if I know what it’s about.
I’m trying to figure out a way to integrate my delicious feed into the main weblog here, but: 1) I’m not good with perl, so modifying Movable Type might be problematic; 2) Out of consistency, I never bothered to upgrade MT’s database to MySQL — further adding to the complexity. So if something fucks up around here in the next few days, blame that tinkering.
What ever happened to the RSS Reader that I said I’d make?
It is alive and already proving itself quite useful! The preliminary version is up at dev.the-inbetween.com/Feeds. That was the first look I was going for, but after some tweaking I’m starting to favour the alternate look. It’s more compact and efficient, and with some more compacting it might make a good Firebird sidebar. The floating descriptions are powered by kryogenix’s nice titles script. It’s dhtmlicious!
There’s still some bugs, some features still need to be added, and a lot of optimization is required, but the early results are positive and I’m hoping that will be my motivation to get it completed.
As for the name: Mimir. I like the etymology of it, but I’m undecided as to whether the actual word is good. Something about saying “mee’-mir” doesn’t sit right. It’s a smidge too “tinny.” A “woody” word would be more apt.
It took nearly a week to fine-tune and finalize, but the new style — along with some relatively minor fixes in the underlying XHTML — is done and live. Quite clearly, it is not my typical fare as it has colour (and not just colour, but pinkish colour.) Yes, I have decided to opt in on pink, shunning aside all those years of dark-gray on light-gray with touches of grayish-blue. I am comfortable enough in my masculinity to use pink.
There are a few minor browser inconsistencies with Internet Explorer 5.5 and up (strangely, 5.0 works fine ?) and I no longer have access to a Mac so I can’t test it there, but if you are using a Mozilla-based browser, you should be fine; you should also be commended. Go Mozilla!
If you absolutely hate it, then hit the “Config” link and set it back to the old “Gamer Classic” style.
On the surface, the site changes are minor. Underneath, the mark-up is drastically improved: I’ve removed a lot of superfluous html; improved semantic structure; cleaned up the style sheet; started using header tags properly; removed all instances of the img tag (except when actually displaying inline images — no more dividing lines and such); and, added a number of links to enable the Mozilla site navigation bar. It’s a useful feature. If you are viewing individual entries, you can navigate through them all using the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons. Amongst other things.
Also, in Mozilla, you can change the stylesheet by going to View -> Use Style. The alternate ‘biggie’ style is there for testing purposes only, but I’ll clean it up for use later. A javascript style switcher is on the way too.
There is a slight issue with Mozilla, though. It seems to cache the randomized header image on load, even if the image forcefully sends “no cache” headers. I’ve tried a few things, and will have to look into it a bit more first, but I’m pretty sure that it’s a bug on Mozilla’s side, not mine. Looks like I might be reporting my first bug. How exciting. Or not.
Over the next week, updates will be completely dependent on my ability to find internet access in Los Angeles. Hopefully, I’ll have some nice E3exclusives — or, at the very least, a bunch of blurry, non-descript photos of some half-finished video games. Exciting!!
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
