software

Chris Knight's avatar

Mike Dobson – AKA Robotic Solutions – is known far and wide for his genius at cooking up contraptions with LEGO bricks and the LEGO Mindstorms robotics packages. Dobson has now applied his mad skillz toward his latest creation: the CubeStormer.

This thing looks scary. Sorta intimidating like the Voight-Kampff machine from Blade Runner. But set your faces to stunned y’all: the CubeStormer can solve any Rubik’s cube puzzle on its own in twelve seconds or less, and sometimes even in less than five seconds!

Check it out…

Read more about the CubeStormer here....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Clive Thompson at Wired has written an exhaustively-researched article that should give every software developer and game publisher pause: the twelve-year development cycle that plagued Duke Nukem Forever before the plug was finally pulled on the project this past spring. The tale Thompson relates is one rife with technical obsession, corporate money and motion-captured strippers (for realz, folks). If you want the lowdown on the biggest gaming fiasco since Ion Storm and perhaps of all time, here it is!...

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Chris Knight's avatar

A little over a year ago I posted the how-to tutorial on putting video content from a DVD onto an iPod. The workhorse program that I found perfect for my needs was HandBrake. When it came time to convert Lost Season 4 for my iPod classic (‘cuz I like having all the Lost episodes hanging on my belt… along with my own movies, the Star Wars saga, etc.) I found that HandBrake had upgraded to version 0.9.3.

So if you haven’t checked it out yet, I heartily recommend giving HandBrake a looksee, because it has become significantly more powerful since the last time I used it en masse. HandBrake 0.9.3 introduces universal video input: it can now convert practically any format of video into MPEG-4, including DivX AVI files (very nice for putting those bootlegged Doctor Who episodes on an iPod or iPhone or any other ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

About a month ago I heard about GOG.com. The site – its URL is an acronym for “Good Old Games” – is dedicated to promoting classic computer games from years gone by. So with a lot of folks raving about how good Fallout 3 is since it came out last month and because I never played the original, I purchased Fallout (shown at left) from GOG.com for $5.99 earlier this week. For that amount came not only the game as a 500 megabyte download, but also the manual and a lot of other Fallout-related goodies (like the soundtrack).

And after the last few days of traipsing around the blasted wasteland of Fallout, I now forsee giving GOG.com plenty more of my coin in the future. In addition to Fallout and Fallout 2 (also for six bucks) the site’s catalogue features Descent and its ...

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