Hanford Lemoore recently wrote about the low sales figures for the indie game Gish. in which the player controls a gelatinous blob of tar, navigating subterranean coridors and traps, dealing with monsters, etc. They actually have a Linux version (as well as Windows and MacOS X versions) and a free demo; the full game [...]

BBC World Service aired a news item concerning the Pope’s visit to Brazil, and mentioned that he rode in the “popemobile,” though the word is not used in the written news story on their web site.  Wikipedia confirms that it is a portmanteau, though it is said to be an informal name.

lcdtest wasn’t working properly with German keyboard layouts.  It was using keysyms from SDL key events, and those only indicate what the unshifted key legend is.  The fix was to enable the optional SDL key event Unicode mapping, and switch on that rather than the keysym.  However, some keys such as escape and the cursor [...]

There’s an old computing maxim that one should “always mount a scratch monkey”. The most commonly found explanation is that of the Jargon File (and thus the New Hacker’s Dictionary), and while the story is amusing, it is also fairly inaccurate. Recently on a mailing list, a person who was actually involved explained [...]

The Number class in Java is completely useless.  It doesn’t provide arithmetic or comparison, which should be defined on all numbers.
I’m writing a generic class, and what I need is something similar to the Smalltalk Magnitude class.  I don’t want to know the details of the class provided by the user, but I want to [...]

I just received this death threat by email. I can’t imagine that anyone would actually be willing to spend $650K to kill me. I’m guessing that it’s an attempt at extortion; otherwise there would be no point to let a victim know that a contract has been taken out on him. [...]

The AACS-LA claims to own the hexadecimal number 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 (decimal 13256278887989457651018865901401704640), and is threatening those who post it online, even though they also claim that the distribution of the number is not a problem for the viability of the AACS system.  If it’s not a problem, why do they need to threaten people who [...]

Wally Schirra flew on the Mercury 8, Gemini 6A, and Apollo 7 missions.

At the entrance to Fry’s checkout line, they had a display stand of “MyGourmet Tuna” snacks, described as a “Meal To Go,” “Low Carb Wild Caught.” They contain a small can of tuna salad with various added spices, six crackers, a small plastic spoon/spreader, and a napkin, and were priced at $1.99. I [...]

Brutal Soft Toys (h/t GMSV)