Very useful: Language filter for Firefox

You’ve heard it before: It’s sometimes difficult to be a Christian in today’s media-rich world. The Internet can be a pretty good gateway to stuff you’d rather not see. Profanity, for instance…

I found this solution a while back, and it works nicely.

When did THIS happen?!?!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

DVD playing has been pretty troublesome in Linux (patent problems and such), and I had largely ignored the problem until recently since I usually watch DVDs on… well… a DVD player. Still, it would be very nice to be able to watch movies on Linux, would it not?

Enter, PowerDVD from… Canonical! Yes, the people making Ubuntu are now selling DVD (and other codec) support as well. You can also buy codecs straight from Fluendo, in case you’re not using Ubuntu.

I don’t know if I missed the news or what… this caught me off-guard when I was trying to open a movie in Firefox and there was a little “buy commercial codecs” link in the software finder. Pretty cool news, eh?

OpenPandora – what’s up?

A while back I mentioned an open-source gaming console called the Pandora. I’m sure people don’t come to my blog for Pandora news, but I thought I’d mention it again just anyone didn’t fall in love with it the first time around.

We are still waiting for real, actual pictures of the assembled prototype. They’d be here already, but apparently a manufacturer made a slight mistake and sent pieces to the wrong person. I’m hoping for pictures by Christmas, but we’ll see how things go.

Around every cloud there is a silver lining, they say… Some problems with credit card orders forced the Pandora team to refund a number of orders and ask people to reorder – mine was one of the ones refunded. They “apologized” for this problem by upgrading the 256 mb of ram to 512 and adding a 256 mb of onboard NAND memory for the OS. As a hopeful developer, this is awesome news!

Ubuntu announced that they’re going to support the ARM architecture in the future, so that should work on the Pandora with little troble. Adobe is also porting Flash. I’d also heard rumors about one of my favorite games being ported to the Pandora, but hadn’t had anything “real” until recently.

They’re hoping to have all the orders to buyers by the end of January – I can’t wait!

(p.s. The picture in this post was modeled and rendered by yours truly. More stuff to come soon, I hope)

8-Bit Christmas music!

Like 8-bit music? Well, lucky you!

• 8 Bit Peoples – Look at the second album on this page. (thanks to Blendenzo for the heads up)
• 8 Bit Jesus
• 8 Bit Weapon – Scroll down to “Holiday Songs!”

All three of these links have donation links or opportunities to buy cool stuff from them. Please consider saying “thanks!” for the early Christmas present they’re giving us!

Are you kidding me?

The other day I  finally bit the bullet and started learning C++ (I’d worked through a couple C books before). It’s going pretty well, but finding a good IDE has been… interesting.

I started out with Geany, and I like it. It’s simple and works nicely for the basic programming that I’m doing. I don’t know how things are going to go once I try Irrlicht, which is my goal at the moment.

Today I installed another IDE, Netbeans, just because I’d heard a couple people say it was good in forums. Installation went okay from Ubuntu’s Synaptic, but when I started it up and complied with the instructions from their “update” popup, I decided immediately that this wasn’t for me. I’ve complained about long EULAs before, but 137 pages?

Are you kidding me?

Does anyone have any advice on a good Ubuntu IDE? KDevelop, maybe?

I don’t like blogging.

Okay, so this post was originally called something else, and was about something else entirely. That was until I realized that I just didn’t want to post it – didn’t want to keep writing the way bloggers I admire do. Well thought out articles with thought-provoking insight and witty titles just seem to be beyond me.

I’d like to think that I could become a part of “that crowd” and write really cool stuff, but whenever I’ve started a post educating the world about what I think, I come to a grim conclusion: The things I want to say can be said in 10 words, not 10 paragraphs.

So with that, I say adieu to the style of blogging I’ve aspired to since the creation of clean3d.wordpress.com! Farewell to cohesive narrative and witty remarks! (as if they were there in the first place) I’m going to try something different.

Rather than have this become a dead blog – something that brings a high level of grief to my soul – I’d like to experiment with some different things. Maybe post some artwork that I’ve been doing, type those 10-word posts I’ve been neglecting for so long. I’d also like to get a few more Blender tutorials created (not just because that’s the most popular post on here – honest!).

With that, I’ll wrap up this post – the first I’ve completed in what must be a dozen tries. See ya!

Has anyone else noticed this?

I wish I was less of a DRM troll – I really do. Even with awesome games like Mirror’s Edge coming out, a lot of the time all I think is “Hey, neat game. Too bad it’d going to be locked down by oppressive copy-protection”

Occasionally I manage to see through that, though, and it’s always educational. I’ve read quite a bit about players creating their own goals within a game, but this deserves a special achievement.

It reminds me of the hundreds of hours I must have spent with another game that allowed me to create things.

Seems that when it’s made easy enough, we’ve all got a vision and a story to tell. Games seem to enable that creativity, whether it be Spore, modding levels and character models, or even Garry’s Mod – the Little Big Planet connection should be obvious…

I’ve only scratched the surface with these examples – I’d like to go on and make leaps of insight and thoughtful remarks like my favourite game-bloggers would, but I overcook my food-for-thought when I attempt gourmet. (I also make terrible metaphors)

Until next time…

I say… What a coincidence!

When I created my post on Linux gaming yesterday, I had no idea that today – and only today – Codeweavers would be giving away Crossover completely free!

Time to enjoy some Windows games…

So you want Linux games?

Me too! After using Linux for a number of years, I’ve gotten to the point where I know that there are quite a few good-quality games available, but I have a hard time convincing Windows and Mac users of that.

So, I decided to create a post highlighting what are, in my opinion, the top Linux games around. Little did I know what I was getting myself into!

Stylized shading in Blender GE

Blender 2.48 includes some very fancy features – among them, GLSL shading and editing in realtime.

Here’s a shader I created to imitate a comic-book like effect. Feel free to edit it and use it in your projects!