Primary link: www.cubed3.com
It seems like Picross 3D for the Nintendo DS finally got a release date for Europe. According to Cubed3 the game will land on February 5th. It's basically the same idea as with any other picross game, but this time you're more or less working on a cube and removing parts of it to reveal an object. ... And it will feature weekly downloads for even more picross madness :D
I so need another puzzle game ;-)
2009 was quite an eventful year for me so, I guess, it is worth taking a look back. Finally got my diploma degree, found a new job, a new apartment, at least some travelling ... Sadly, I haven't written about most of that stuff here on my blog but thanks to TweetScan I could also play a little data-mining on my tweets.
Read more about "This was 2009" ...Today, Django 1.2 alpha1 was released and it comes with a ton of new features compared to the 1.1 branch. You can read up about them in the release notes but I want to take a quick look at probably my favorite addition: The new messaging framework. Why this and not the support for multiple databases? Well, I see myself using messaging in many more places than multiple databases ;-)
Read more about "Django 1.2a1 has a message for you" ...Normally, if you want to check out a new magazine, you just go to the next news stand and get it. But what if you learn of one that is not officially available in your country? The rise of social media and content delivery methods like Podcasts also changed the playground a bit on how to advertise content coming from the "old media".
Read more about "Demos for Magazines" ...It's funny: For the better part of the last 2 years I've been avoiding all the hype about netbooks, but now, in the week of Steve Jobs perhaps changing the game once again, I kind of want one ... and if it's just for coding while watching TV on my couch or in a café. So, I've been looking around a bit and at first was nearly ready to just order a Dell Mini 10v because of all those stories about how easy it is to get Ubuntu running on it. Not to mention that it's currently on sale on Dell's website. But a two year old CPU and a pain-in-the-butt method of upgrading the RAM? I don't really mind messing around with some hardware for upgrading it it, but if there is something even better, easier to customize and ... newer, I'm all for it :-)
Late last night, in some kind of semi-comatose state, I noticed a new EeePC on the website of a local retailer. The 1005P is available right now (at E-Tec) for less than 280EUR, which is really nice for an Atom N450 powered netbook. I, obviously, can't really compare that to other netbooks, but the specs look really nice :-)
What's holding me back right now is twofold: First I naturally wait for what will get announced in Cupertino, but second and more important: I've so far read enough success and failure reports by people trying to install Ubuntu on it to wait a little bit and see what's really going on. There are stories like this one where the user can't get crucial elements like the keyboard to run and then there are more than just a few reports that state that nearly everything is working properly out of the box. The most problematic part seems to be the wifi adapter. Weird... I thought the graphic chip might cause more trouble, but so far most people seem to fight with network driver issues. I guess, I realy should wait a few more days ;-)
Steve Jobs did it again and announced a device, many people think will change the world. Well, I for one am still wondering what kind of use I might have for it. A few years ago while still working at University projects I had the chance to play around a little bit with a tablet PC running Windows XP and it was barely usable for what I wanted to do with it. Granted, Apple has done some miracles with the iPhone user interface, but what would I want to have mostly the same in 9.7" device without any real benefit?
Read more about "Apple's iPad: Still looking for a use-case" ...Alle Jahr wieder hat auch dieser Februar ein Barcamp in Klagenfurt gesehen. Es war wieder an der Universität Klagenfurt, es kamen wieder jede Menge Leute aus unterschiedlichsten Beweggründen und Branchen ... und war wieder großartig :D (Disclaimer: Ich war ein kleiner Teil des Orgateams, also muss ich es als großartig bezeichnen, selbst wenn es das absolut war ;-))
Read more about "Barcamp Klagenfurt 2010: Recap" ...Primary link: gowalla.com
It's been quite a while in the making but Gowalla today finally made an API for their geo-location service publicly available :-) Compared to what Foursquare has to offer, this one is rather limited because it's read-only. But this is IMO actually a good thing since then it's not that simple to easily cheat the system from the outside. On the other hand, the documentation mentions POST-requests often enough to suggest that check-in support or some other operation that requires write-access is planned for the future.
Another absent feature is OAuth support, which isn't really an issue right now, since you barely need to do authenticated requests anyway, right now. I guess, we will see it when the time comes for write-access. Applications, on the other side, require an application key in order to access any of the provided data.
Given that the API is read-only for the time being, there are some obvious limitations of what you can do with it. Nevertheless, this would have been more than enough to add some more information onto the Twitterwall for the recent Barcamp Klagenfurt 2010 and I'm pretty sure, many people will create some useful and some just plain funny tools with it :-)
Seems like Ubuntu is finally about to dump the primarily brown theme it has been using for the last ... well, since its first release. On the equally new brand page you can find a screenshot for each variant of the theme (dark and bright) as well as the new logo. Personally, I think the new look is really nice, judging from the screenshots I saw (Putting it on my netbook would kind of defeat the purpose of that devices ;-)). It appears to me far more mature and slightly more "professional" than the previous "Human" theme.
What I don't like, or at least haven't come around liking, is the new window-button order (the buttons you see in the upper left corner of each window in these screenshots): For me, the action I use the most on any given window is the "close" action. And this is just easiest to reach when positioned in one of the outer corners. Perhaps has a patent on having the close button in the top right corner and it being red ... who knows.
If you want to know more without installing it, Ars Technica has some nice hands-on article.
Now I just have to find some not-used notebook with an Intel chip that I could put this onto :-/
[via arstechnica.com]
Wow, I just realized that this year is probably the one most packed with conferences ever for me. To be honest, I also count barcamps since the best conferences are for me those where I (1) get to drink some beers with awesome people, (2) learn about new techniques and technologies and (3) get ideas for new projects. So barcamps definitely qualify ;-)
Read more about "The Year of the Conferences" ...
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