P.C. Shannon

I’m pretty paranoid about privacy—I don’t like to use the discount keycards thingies that some grocery stores offer because I don’t want them to be able to track my purchases that easily. This is apparently a feature of my INTJ personality type.

The latest version of Google Desktop has a feature called “Search Across Computers” that stores copies of all your files on Google’s servers. You can read eWeek’s coverage or the original announcement from the EFF (incendiarily titled “Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation”).

My paranoia instills in me a real love for the EFF. They’re suing AT&T for the corporation’s alleged complicity in the domestic spying brouhaha. To advertise the case, they’ve morphed the telecom giant’s “spinning earth” logo into the Deathstar. Love it!

I’m a sucker for Star Wars videogames, so I recently downloaded the demo for Empire at War, which is a real-time strategy (RTS) game set in the Star Wars universe. Last night, I played through the tutorial and the demo. It’s a pretty awesome game, but like I said, I’m a sucker for Star Wars games, so maybe you should take that with a grain of salt.

Empire at War goes beyond the basic harvest-build-conquer model of traditional RTS games. In fact, the resource management aspect of the game has a lot more in common with the classic galactic conquest game Master of Orion than with defining RTS games like Dune 2 or Command and Conquer. There are no resources to harvest in EaW. Instead you earn credits from each planet you control at the end of each galactic day. You can spend the credits on building installations on the planets you control, constructing warships, or recruiting soldiers. This is, for me, one of the most exciting aspects of the game, since I find harvesting to be the most annoying aspect of RTS games.

In the demo, I started off with control of Hoth and was ordered to liberate two neighboring systems from imperial control. First I constructed a large space fleet and attacked a well-defended asteroid system. The space battle was a lot of fun. The space units seem to have a rock-paper-scissors balance system: the capital ships are strong against fighters but vulnerable to bombers, the fighters are strong against bombers and other fighters but easily taken out by ships, and the bombers can make quick work of the capital ships but are easy prey for fighters. When attacking capital ships and space stations, it’s possible to target individual systems, such as the shield generator or a turbo laser battery, in order to weaken your opponent before going in for the kill.

Following the space battle, I amassed ground forces in an attempt to liberate Tatooine. This part of the game was much more frustrating as the control and view system is less intuitive than in the space battle. Also, not all of my forces were immediately available. Instead, I had to take control of reinforcement points, each of which allowed me to bring in a handful of units from my army. It seems like this part of the game could use a little work, but I strongly suspect that the demo I played was from the finalized game.

Empire at War will be released on February 15^th. Check out Gamespot for a full, professional review.

In the interest of keeping my desktop relatively clean, here is a bunch of crap I’ve been collecting.

General Interest

PC Magazine’s Secrets of Selling on eBay.

Lifehacker has some real tips for saving time.

The future of TV is online.

Dear Reader is a book club via e-mail.

“How to Do What You Love“, another good essay from Paul Graham.

Click to donate at the Hunger site and their brethren.

Someone found pictures of a family that may have owned a liquor store and put them online. The site also has other, uh, unusal collections of photographs and whatnot.

Apparently Belgian children’s TV is filled with singing flatulent pigs.

Bloggity

Cliptip has a new music video every day. I’d love this if they weren’t in Quicktime, which I hate.

The Incredible Hulk has a blog. Who knew? Who knew he was so funny?

A different crazy hardware hack every day at hack-a-day.

Science-y Things

Fascinating article from The New York Times on “mirror neurons”. This explains why I love to watch soccer so much.

Scientific American’s report on preparing the for pandemic.

Budding scientists (like me) might be interested in the Internation Society for Computational Biology Student Council or the World Academy of Young Scientists.

Geek Stuff

Memory Alpha is a very thorough Star Trek wiki.

Nerdy Shirts.

Tired of Pedro? Get the Vote for Cthulhu t-shirt instead.

Internet radio goodness.

What is the Internet for? The Internet is for porn. It’s a muppet-esque music video featuring creatures from some video game. They’re singing and dancing—so this is worksafe, unless the word “porn” gets you in trouble. In that case, it’s too late.

Learn all about atomic rockets.

Rudy Rucker’s latest book looks pretty cool.

I loved the old X-Com computer game. It’s apparently still available, with a fix to get it to work on modern computers.

Super-Nerdy Items

Can’t wait for Windows Vista to slow down your computer with lots of useless visual flourishes? Want to Mac-ify your desktop? You need Konfabulator (aka Yahoo Widgets).

Try social bookmarking with del.icio.us or Outfoxed.

CNet has tips on speeding up boot time.

Subclipse is a plug-in for Eclipse to interface with a Subversion repository. I use it in my various programming projects.

Here’s an article on Subversion for CVS users.

I’ve completed the transition to the new blog, meaning I’ve imported all the old entries, comments, and categories. Everything is now more or less like it was. The only catch is that if you were registered on the old blog, that info has not been brought over, so you will need to register again before you can comment. But you’ll do it because you love me.

I still need to customize the look and layout, but other than the cosmetic stuff, everything is done.

I’m in the process of migrating from my old blog to this new one. I’m doing this mainly because the software that the old one used is no longer supported. I’ve imported all the posts from the old blog, but not comments or users yet. So bear with me while I make this transition.