http://iphi.net/index.php/iphi/index/ iphi needs a plan en iphi@iphi.net Copyright 2012 2012-01-11T01:30:35+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/bookmarked-01-11-2012 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/bookmarked-01-11-2012#When:01:30:35Z               ContactCopy    Copy contact information efficiently Select contact information such as name, address, phone number and email address in any application. With just a keystroke you can copy all data to your contact database.                                        Driftmoon Alpha 7! - Instant Kingdom    We nearly completed all of the new areas last August. But when testing the whole game through back then, we discovered some areas of the game-play and the content, that we wanted to tune a bit further to make them just right. It was a relatively large and time-consuming task, but now that we’ve spent the last two weeks playing and replaying, we’re really happy we decided to do it. Why? Simply because we ourselves have now had so much fun with our own beta-testing play-throughs. And if we’ve really enjoyed adventuring in Driftmoon ourselves (even though we know beforehand pretty much everything that’ll happen), we have high hopes that you will too                                        Home | GTB    Gratuitous Tank Battles is coming to the PC and Mac, developed by Positech Games, makers of Democracy, Kudos and of course Gratuitous Space Battles. Gratuitous Tank Battles is an RTS/Tower Defense hybrid with online elements and customisable units. The player can take the role of the defender or the attacker in a series of top-down explodey battles. A built-in map editor will allow easy sharing of custom maps and defensive challenges with other GTB players in a similar fashion to GSB’s challenge system.                                        Botanicula – Amanita Design    Botanicula is point’n'click exploration game created by Jára Plachý and Amanita Design. It’s about a bunch of five friends - little tree creatures who set out for a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites. The original soundtrack and sound effects are created by Czech alternative band DVA. Release of Botanicula is planned for early 2012.                                        Headline Generator ThoughtOffice Brainstorming Software                                    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. bookmarked, 2012-01-11T01:30:35+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/gifted-ebook-you-have-absolutely-no-excuse-not-to-read-the-warriors-apprent http://iphi.net/index.php/site/gifted-ebook-you-have-absolutely-no-excuse-not-to-read-the-warriors-apprent#When:19:15:05Z The Baen Free Library offers one of my favorite reads ever!I enjoy the adventure of Miles (and his parents before him) so much I actually own 2 copies of “Young Miles” so I can lend one and not be without. There are very few books that I have ever done that with. It is Trickster Space Opera and you don’t need to be a SF reader to have fun with it. Available in more formats than is sensible, too. No excuse! reading, 2012-01-09T19:15:05+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/as-i-am-doing-with-books-so-i-shall-do-with-games http://iphi.net/index.php/site/as-i-am-doing-with-books-so-i-shall-do-with-games#When:23:32:20Z It was one of my “themes” last year to buy less and use what I have. Whereas it worked OK with books (I certainly bought less except for grabbing tons of free ebooks) it didnt work at all with games. I bought a couple new titles, bought several “preorder to support” indie titles, and raided too many old games when on sale on any digital platform. Games I hadn’t bought when they first came out as I was either too busy, or didnt have the computer for it. And even though 2012 have an absolute plethora of games coming, I still want to play some of these games I missed, because I am curious, because I enjoy all sorts of gameplay that I won’t necessarily find in new games, and in some cases because I feel I ought to have played them. So, just like I have the Mount TBR challenge, here’s the (totally unofficiall) Dusty Mousemat, challenge (yeah, I know, won’t win any awards for that name, but “dusty mouse” sounds evil to anyone who ever had a mechanical mouse and “dusty joystick” could be misinterpreted) The rule I make up for this is simple: - play an old game you never finished or never played. 1 per month at least. - old means it came out before 2010, ideally before 2006. It can be a game you have owned a while or it can be an old game bought “new” this year in a bargain bin or digital distribution - it should be a game you wish you’d played at the time, or think you ought to have played since people keep mentioning it - give it a chance, play it at least a couple evenings Here’s a random selection of games I might revisit this year - if I arrange it right I could revisit (or discover) 4 a month! The first game at the moment is Port Royale 2 - simply because I started on Pirates of the Black Cove and encountered a bug, and hadn’t quite sated my nautical wish yet. I have mostly played the commercial sim part of the game, I fail many of the missions due to not figuring it out, and whereas I can handle some sea battles, the battles against towns just defeat me (even in the tutorial). Still, there’s a lot to figure out and I shall at least master the commerce a bit more, before I get myself annihilated trying to take over a town and quit I could continue on a nautical theme for quite a while as I have Pirates of the Caribbean, Tortuga 1/2, East India Company, Ship Simulator and Sail Simulator, Sub Command, Silent Hunter IV, Tradewinds, Patrician (2 and 3), Naval Warfare (that’s actually a shooter). Don’t ask… I’ll probably switch to an RPG or action game before I go through all these, though.   games, Use what you have, 2012-01-08T23:32:20+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/in-which-i-make-yet-another-post-about-books http://iphi.net/index.php/site/in-which-i-make-yet-another-post-about-books#When:22:27:12Z It’s starting to be a bit of a single topic this week - guess I have phases. In a recent post I mentioned deciding to take the Mount TBR challenge to read some of the books I have owned a while and not yet read (or meant to re-read but never got around to). I figure this won’t happen unless I make a list of the first few books to get publicly started. So these are the first five, chosen in part as they were in boxes here upstairs and therefore reachable. The Robber Bride The Derwish House We The Drowned - not sure I can forgive what he did to that dog, strangely enough Good Behaviour an attempt to restart and finish The Lacuna and for when I have to travel I have many ebooks I have had a long time We’ll see if making even this tiny bit public will keep me on track. 25 books from the old pile should be easy journal, reading, Use what you have, 2012-01-08T22:27:12+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/bookmarked-01-08-2012 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/bookmarked-01-08-2012#When:01:30:47Z               AKW Books. Quality new eBooks at low prices                                                Wizard’s Tower Press — a science fiction and fantasy publisher    Welcome to Wizard’s Tower Press, a science fiction and fantasy publisher. We concentrate mainly on making out-of-print works available once more as e-books, and helping other small presses exploit the e-book market. We will also publish a small number of limited-print-run anthologies with a view to encouraging diversity in the science fiction and fantasy field. Finally we publish Salon Futura magazine, an online non-fiction magazine devoted to discussion of science fiction and fantasy literature.       tags:              science fiction        publisher        fantasy                                        Rebellionstore.com | eBooks in New Worlds of Fantastic Fiction                                                1889 Books – Make Your Brain Happy    1889 Labs is an independent publisher dedicated to producing the best strange fiction conceivable by the human brain. Catering to a specific demographic of men and women between the ages of 3 and 97, we print everything from kids books to serious stories for adults. Our goal is to bring you on an amazing adventure onscreen and off. We hope you’ll take us up on the offer.                                        Dancing Fools Press    Welcome to DFP! We’re dedicated to bringing well-written, character-focused stories to readers with a hunger for the good stuff and an understanding that quality fiction isn’t found only on the shelves in a chain bookstore. We offer an alternative path to publication for authors who want to have more control over their work and are ready to thrive in a professional and supportive environment.                                        OR Books    Welcome to OR Books A great, exciting project! —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing OR Books is a new type of publishing company. It embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business. More                                        Closed Circle Book Store » Closed Circle                                                Steven Lyle Jordan - Novels                                                Stoney Compton, Author - What I write . . .                                                The Big Idea: Courtney Schafer – Whatever          tags:              book                            Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. bookmarked, 2012-01-08T01:30:47+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/in-which-i-get-an-ereader http://iphi.net/index.php/site/in-which-i-get-an-ereader#When:19:43:33Z On picking open products, buying by feature not by brand or popularity, self limitation, avoiding DRM, and how it made me discover so many great books.I spent 2010 travelling so much for work and spending a week (or more) at a time away, that I couldn’t carry enough books along. I tried watching TV but frankly I prefer a good book to much that is on TV. I tried buying books when there and bringing them back, but this is wasteful - I didn’t have the time to go to a proper bookshop and airport selection is full of disposable clones… and it is not as if I need more random books! Simultaneously I became aware how many books I already own and how many my technical books quickly became outdated clutter. Even when you are a keen reader with a big house (and planning some special bookshelves, but that is another blog post), it only makes only sense to own books you will either re-read in the future or lend to friends. So I decided I’d been keeping the book-and-gadgetaholic inside me at bay for long enough, it was now more than reasonable for me to get an ebook reader. That way I could have hundreds of unread ebooks too My rules for book versus ebook Books versus ebooks is mostly resolving the conflict between storage and longevity. Paper lasts forever and can be shared. Ebooks take no space. * Is it a technical reference book? ebook. They are too big and bulky as books and become obsolete too fast * Do I already know I will lend it or reread it? book * Do I already know I will read it once? library borrow, or ebook * Is it an impulse or curiosity buy? ebook * Is it available only with DRM? book or library borrow I wanted a device using standard formats to be sure that in 10 years I still can read them in some way. I wanted to add any book in any format wherever I found it, through copying the file, not have to jump through hoops. I don’t particularly need an on-book shop (which seems to be important to reviewers, strangely) or a dictionary or some of the other bells and whistles. It couldn’t be the Kindle. I’m not anti Amazon, by far, I buy many books from them for convenience and if they offered ebooks in open formats I possibly would buy from them some of the time - and if they made the Kindle more open I could have been tempted, its a lovely device - but the Kindle’s geography lock and the closed format are too worrying for me. I want to be able to buy french ebooks too, if I so feel. And if I am honest I think it dangerous if too much is on Amazon only when it comes to ebooks - a monopoly on ebooks would be bad for authors, publishers and readers. So I won’t help it happen, even if it deprives me of many books. I was not content to lock myself out of the Amazon ebook store and format by not getting a Kindle (I know there’s ways to convert files but I can’t be bothered and I don’t want to increase the monopoly anyways). No sir! I am also locking myself out of most of the other big stores as I refuse to buy DRM files. DRM is simply a way to cripple the content to make it less yours and less reliable - I cannot trust that any DRM scheme will remain unlockable in 10 years time - after all I own a few games which I can no longer play as the “unlocking” server is long gone, or the deal between the publisher and the distributor has been severed in the last 10 years. Not to forget limited activations (i.e. you can only copy it to your next phone or ereader so many times, 5 most commonly!). I don’t want this to happen to books, which I am much more likely to want to revisit in 10 years than games. DRM does not respect the user, and as a consequence I reject it. My reader So I did my research and settled for an Iriver Cover Story, and a year on I am still very pleased with it. The screen is not as contrasty as it should be (only 8 levels not 16 like newer ones - one thing I do regret about it) but it is small and solid, has a touch screen, notes, supports many formats including for work documents, has an extension card port, wifi, email, and even supports audio. Battery life is long, recharged via USB. And it is, all in all, quite open. And it doesn’t look half bad So how did I manage? I think the whole no kindle, no DRM could have gotten rather drab and frustrating, but I already knew of Baen and that and Gutenberg could keep me going for years, so I wasnt worried. In the end it turned out to be a blessing, because I had to dig a bit and indulge in risk taking and curiosity, and found many books and authors I would not have read otherwise. And that only happened because I put these limits on myself. I got the largest number of my books from Baen and Angry Robot - one because I knew they did open ebooks by design since the nineties (including a mountain of free ones to kickstart any reading) and I could finally now reward them. The other I found via a review and the first random books were so good I kept buying (and now subscribe). I also got subscriptions or issues of quite a few hard-to-find-in-europe magazines. Are there many publishers and books I would get and try but cannot, because they are only on Amazon/Apple, or only available with DRM? Sure! But I found others instead, more interesting than what I would have bought on Amazon. PS: Here are the places where I have bought good books in the past year. I will list the books with 1 line comments in a separate post, this is long enough Directly from publishers: * Baen webscriptions and the Baen Free Library. Now found at http://www.baenebooks.com Also have books from Nightshade Books from the Baen store * Angry Robot - got so many good books from them I now subscribe to their entire output! * Apex Books http://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/ebooks * Almost all computer and science/reference books publishers sell their own without DRM, I bought from dozens. * wizard tower (genre) http://www.wizardstowerbooks.com/ also has some magazines and other publishers books * rebellion http://www.rebellionstore.com/ * 1889 labs http://1889.ca/books/ * OR books (non fiction) http://www.orbooks.com/ * Ps publishing is starting to have ebooks and eshorts http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/ebooks-31-c.asp Small ebook stores: * Fictionwise http://www.fictionwise.com journal, reading, 2012-01-07T19:43:33+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/warlock-preview http://iphi.net/index.php/site/warlock-preview#When:15:09:46Z “*There are a LOT of Warlock options to start with and you can customize their starting abilities. *The races are odd. You have “Humans”, “Undead” and “Monsters” as options. A fantasy game without Elves as a race option? What’s wrong with these people? Anyway the “Monsters” are stuff like Ratmen and Orcs. I do wish there more than just three though. *Undead have access to Flying Rats, which at first I thought was weird but they are in fact “undead hybrid flying serpent rats” which is the coolest thing ever. They also act as scouts and can shoot at stuff from 2 hexes away. *Units auto retreat if they take a lot of damage, which is great. “ games, preview, 2012-01-07T15:09:46+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/retrospective-the-witcher http://iphi.net/index.php/site/retrospective-the-witcher#When:14:51:04Z “The Witcher’s legacy to me is that it encouraged me to play an actual role, rather than flesh out a cipher with a range of canned goods and evils. It illustrated that game developers needn’t rely on reward or punishment to make us care about the choices we make: provide compelling narrative, not shiny trinkets, as the preeminent consequence of our decisions and that will be enough. We’ll even forgive you the sex cards.” games, editorial, 2012-01-07T14:51:04+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/yearly-confession-software-i-bought-2011 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/yearly-confession-software-i-bought-2011#When:12:52:55Z This is all I bought in 2011 - not counting games… in case someone wants to ask Webuilder - needed a web editor again for occasional use and my web designers had made me buy it for them (at a previous job) so went for this JRiver Media Center (upgrade) Paragon Rescue Kit (upgrade) BitDefender Goalscape ECMerge Ashampoo® Burning Studio 10 ConceptDraw OFFICE 2 (upgrade) Postbox Driver Cleaner.NET (for the purpose of installing an ATI driver on an older laptop using one of these laptop cards ATI refuses to install new drivers on) Paragon Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional (upgrade) Genie Timeline O&O Defrag 14.5 Pro (upgrade) Rainlendar2 Pro SmartDraw 2012 (upgrade) ACDSEE Pro 4 then 5 (upgrade) Linkman Pro DisplayFusion Pro TwistedBrush Pro Studio / Curvy 3D / Genetica / Dj D Artagnan / Project Dogwaffle 4 / Archipelis Designer 2 / Texture anarchy / AnyFX / DAP (all DC’s fault) PDF Annotator (update) CrossOver Linux Professional (renewed) Object Desktop Renewal (renewed, but might be the last time) TaxCalc 2011 Recovered my license of Spherical Timesheet Tracker (never found suitable alternative!) Wireless IRC (phone) Gravity (phone) Syncplicity (not renewed) Expression Engine 2 (web) Lifejournal Paid Web Services/memberships: Spideroak (renewed) Fastmail (renewed) Hiveminder (renewed) FreeAgent Newsblur computers, Use what you have, 2012-01-07T12:52:55+00:00 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/bookmarked-01-07-2012 http://iphi.net/index.php/site/bookmarked-01-07-2012#When:01:30:04Z               fosdem.org    If you’ll be at FOSDEM, come and hear how OSI is changing: http://t.co/93rLAi1I       tags:              twitter                                        Climate scientist disowned by Newt Gingrich speaks out over book spat | Environment | guardian.co.uk    Last two paragraphs of this link from @stevesilberman are the most disturbing. http://t.co/634BY4MH FoIA requests as antiscience weapon.       tags:              twitter                                        I Won a Major Award! - Skepchick    You guys! I Won a Major Award! http://t.co/AGfNihgH       tags:              twitter                                        Campaigning inspiration for WoodWatchers, from WoodWatchers by the Woodland Trust    Quick and easy planning update - what is happening in England? #WoodWatch #nppf - http://t.co/Xzw3vCJF       tags:              WoodWatch        nppf        twitter                                        New Movies For January, And Where In London To See Them | Londonist    This month’s new movies…paired up with the most apt London cinemas to see them in http://t.co/96FrvaFN       tags:              twitter                                        As Kodak Fades, Workers Remember Their Moment - WSJ.com    At Kodak, Workers Remember Their Moment http://t.co/tEwXoc2I       tags:              twitter                                        The Ultimate Productivity Blog    I shall now be following the useful advice of the Ultimate Productivity Blog: http://t.co/F9XJJFWQ via @fatbusinessman       tags:              twitter                            Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. bookmarked, 2012-01-07T01:30:04+00:00