Almost a week ago, Ars came through with another gem: a Flash-based game called 3D Logic by Alex Matveev made the rounds on the forum this weekend. The game is simple; the object is to connect pairs of like-colored squares. Red to red, orange to orange, etc. You may not cross colors over each other, and you can only traverse the dark gray squares, not the black ones.

The game is fun and easy to play. There are 30 levels. Be warned: there is no saving, and navigating away from the game or closing your browser will lose all of your progress.

Give it a shot, it’s free and there’s no login/registration requirement.

Happy belated birthday to A Sleepy Panda! This explains why you were going out with your sister and unable to play JSOC on Tuesday ;).

No, that’s not a tongue twister (on purpose, anyway), that’s the name of the long underwear I wear underneath my leather riding pants. I bought a pair of these from Sierra Trading Outpost in an attempt to keep cooler during the summer temperatures, and also to act as a barrier between myself and my leather pants. If you sweat for too long in riding leather, it takes on a very undesirable odor.

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Well, not really, but close — I’m spending a small part of my amended tax return on Evil Hat Productions’ Don’t Rest Your Head. Don’t Rest Your Head is a pen and paper roleplaying game about what happens when insomnia is stretched to the edge of insanity, and then some. Characters have crossed over into a land of nightmares, and they will now live and die by one maxim: Don’t fall asleep. Don’t rest your head.

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I’ve been living with two softmodded Xboxes for a month and a half now. One of the first things I needed to solve was how to connect the downstairs Xbox to the network. I didn’t feel like running cable through the walls, or outside of the house. I had a spare wireless access point lying around, and had hoped that I could use a crossover cable to connect the downstairs Xbox to my upstairs wireless network.

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Sometimes the most simple things bring us a lot of enjoyment. I bought the Brother Home & Hobby PT-65 label printer on a whim at Office Max for $20. I remembered the old-school clamp-style ribbon maker my sisters had; you know, the one with the big ass dial on the top with letters, numbers, and symbols? You’d crank the wheel around, D R F A U L K N, one letter at a time, only to realize that you left out the “e” in DrFaulken and would have to start all over again. Ah, good times. Anyway, I bought this little guy, thinking I’d just label one or two things and then toss it into my office filing cabinet, never to be used again.

I unleashed a labelling maelstrom unlike any our home had ever seen. Not that we see a lot of labelling maelstroms in Virginia, but you know.
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Lady Jaye and I had the great fortune to attend the Richmond Times Dispatch 100 Indy race at the Richmond International Raceway Saturday evening. We’re not big racing fans (I used to watch the World Rally Cup years ago on television), but Lady Jaye waited on the Marlboro-Team Penske team last week and scored some free tickets. Our seats were outstanding — about thirty rows up, directly on the starting line.
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Before I started my session with my trainer Yoda today, he talked about a Japanese training method called the “20×20.” No, this does not involve giant tentacles or robot monkeys. It involves doing 20 sets of the same exercise 20 times. You rest for 20 seconds between sets. The idea is to put your muscles into extreme fatigue. This results in an accelerated metabolic rate, and a natural production of human growth hormone. Yoda went on to tell me that the best exercise for the 20×20 were squats, since they use a ton of muscle fiber in the legs, ass, and core.

Yoda smiled at me and said, “but we can do that another day.” To which I smiled back, “why not do it today?” He made sure I was serious, and the next thing I knew I was doing 400 squats in the Freemotion machine.

“You’re going to be doing a lot of counting today,” I told him, as we started off the first set at 140 pounds. We peeled the weight down to 120, 100, 80 (one set at each weight). I did 9 sets at 60 and then rest at 40 pounds. 25,200 pounds in total. That’s hardly any weight at all per rep, but trust me, it was brutal. I was winded, sore, and completely soaked in sweat by my 400th squat. I thought we were done, but then we did a round of standing leg curls and then a round of seated calf raises. Then I high-step ran around for two laps in the yoga room, and kicked-my-ass ran for three laps. And then we did abs.

I was completely exhausted by the end of the session, but it was nice knowing that I impressed my trainer. As we moved around the gym, he called out “this guy just did 400 squats!” to other clients and trainers. One of my favorite things about Yoda — and this is why I dubbed him such — is that he’s always making me do crazy exercises that other people don’t do. I’m sure that if there was a way to levitate rocks or raise an X-Wing out of swamp, Yoda would have me do it.

I know a fair amount of my Gibberish readers play the boardgame Settlers of Catan. For those of you who don’t, Settlers is a three to four player game (up to six with the expansion) and the object is to build towns on a random board made up of landscape tiles. Each tile produces a key resource needed to build roads, settlements, cities, etc.

From the Wikipedia:

The players in the game represent the eponymous Settlers, establishing a colony on the previously uninhabited Island of Catan. The island itself is laid out randomly at the beginning of each game from hexagonal tiles (“hexes”) representing five types of resources: ore, grain, wool, lumber and brick.

As players establish towns and cities on the island, each settlement receives resources for its adjacent hexes. The resources, represented by resource cards, can be used to build more roads, towns, cities, or to obtain chance cards that can be used at any time. Various achievements, such as building a town or establishing the longest road, grant each player one or more victory points. The winner is the first player to accumulate ten victory points.

Players are allowed to trade among each other the resources they have produced, and to trade “off the island” for a hefty price. It is difficult for any one player to produce all the resources necessary for progress, so astute trading is the strategic heart of the game. Player interaction is further complicated by the presence of a robber, which is used to steal from other players and hinder their production of resources. There is no combat. Apart from moving the robber, refusing to trade, and cutting off building routes, there is no way to harm other players.

It’s a great game, but one of the major drawbacks is that you have to have at least three people together in order to play. That is, until we discovered Jsettlers, a free, Java-based Settlers of Catan game originally written as an artificial intelligence project. Stilts runs his own server, and I’ve written a quick acclimation guide to ease the transition into Jsettlers for those familiar only with the boardgame. Quite a few of us play JSOC together, and as is typical with my a-type personality readers, we got to talking about another tournament.

The first tourney had limited success, I think in part to the difficulty of coordinating schedules between players.

Anyway, let’s try this again. It has been suggested that we all chip in $5 for an entry fee, with the cash going to the winner/top x. Or perhaps a non-cash prize of some kind. Who’s in for a JSOC tournament?

The RSS 2.0 was formalized in 2002, and is an XML format designed to summaries of Web content and accompanying metadata. The most common use of RSS feeds today are for article or blog summaries. An example of an RSS metadata item would be the URL for the full text of the article/summary.

If you follow lots of Web sites like I do, RSS is a godsend. I used to repeatedly visit the same Web sites each day, hoping that something new had been posted. RSS readers (also called aggregators) do this for you, by automatically updating each site’s latest feed at predetermined intervals. Instead of compulsively checking my favorite sites, I now compulsively check my RSS bookmarks folder to see if any new items have made the feed ;) This capability is particularly useful for news sites like Ars Technica (shit, do I go a day without linking out to them?), which carries feeds for their main news items as well as their volunteer journal.ars section.

Going RSS-feed only has a few drawbacks. The biggest one is relying solely on RSS feeds side-steps the entire “home page” experience. Despite being part of a world wide web, most Web sites are designed so that visitors funnel to the home page first and then go on to individual stories or subsections. I asked my friend Fish Sprout where her Flickr gallery was the other day — only to be told it’s prominently displayed on her home page. I’d subscribed to her blog’s RSS feed from day one, and had never gone back to the home page.

Easy access in Firefox
One of the my favorite advantages Firefox has over Internet Explorer 6.x is the ability to process RSS feeds (also called LiveBookmarks in Firefox) by default. A few of my friends aren’t sure what an RSS feed is, or how to set up an RSS feed in Firefox. I have added a new page to DrFaulken’s Tome of Useless Knowledge, describing how to set up RSS feeds for Firefox versions 1.50 and higher.

If you’re not using Firefox, unfortunately I can’t be of much help to you. I don’t have the need for a standalone RSS aggregator.