Recently in Geekitude Category

Well THIS will come as a shock to absolutely no one:

Dear Valued Customer,

For the past several months, we’ve been working hard to combine the best features of Quicken Online and Mint.com into a single online personal finance solution—Mint.com. With the improved Mint.com, you can enjoy the features you love in Quicken Online, plus new benefits such as connecting to over 16,000 financial institutions, including Canadian banks—as well as tracking your investment and retirement accounts. There is also a new Goals feature that takes the tool you enjoyed in Quicken Online to the next level.

As a result of these changes, Quicken Online will no longer be available as of August 29, 2010. Creating a new Mint.com account is easy, but for reasons of security and accuracy, we cannot create one for you. Once you’re signed in, you can add your accounts and see your financial picture in just a few minutes.

Color me shocked. NOT.

It was obvious from the beginning that Intuit was never going to make anything serious out of Quicken.com - they’re far more interested in Quickbooks. When they announced the aquisition of Mint.com, the writing was on the wall.

I recently switched my online accounting over to Mint.com, and I have to admit it’s a helluva good system. Fast, very well designed interface, and good integration with my other finances.

So, there ya have it folks. If you can’t code it, acquire it.

I admit it. I've been a fan of the geoDefense games for quite a while (even during geoDefense's Freak Out period). When Critical Thought Games released geoDefense Swarm, I jumped at it. The new game layout (free form, etc) took a little getting used to, but after a bit, I was hooked.

For those not familiar with it, these are classic "tower defense" games. geoDefense used a fixed track for the 'creeps', while Swarm uses a free form layout. The game play is virtually identical between the versions (Swarm introduces 'thumper' towers, while de-emphasizing 'vortex' towers. Which is sad, cuz I do love me the vortexes).

The games have a strong 'retro' color-vector look to them. That coupled with some smooth, stunning animation makes the play experience pretty exciting. As the towers get more powerful, and more dramatic action is happening, the visuals really ratchet up. The endgame for an endless level is constant nuke-explosions from the missile towers and plasma lasers firing every which way. Kaboom!

Lately I've been rerunning Swarm levels and shooting for higher scores. This involves a huge amount of trial and error at the beginning, particularly on the 'endless' levels (which I adore).

The trick is to get the score multiplier up as high as possible in the first 10 levels. My best is around 900x by level 10. That particularly run resulted in my best score ever in the Crazy 88 level ('hard' 'endless'). The screenshot here shows the very end of that game, which took about 3 hours to play beginning to end. Naturally, toward the end, it was just a matter of watching the game run it's course.

Thanks @nsxdavid for making such an awesome game. Can we have some more endless levels please?

Sounds more grandiose than it is, really.

We're going through a heck of a heat wave here on the east coast. The last 2-3 days have been 90+ degrees with high humidity, and it's showing no signs of really letting up until at least next week.

I don't react well to heat - I mean, I can deal with it during the day while puttering around, but sleeping? Bad things happen when Mr. Geek doesn't get his beauty sleep.

With our super efficient buildings, we really don't need to air condition an entire building just to make it habitable. But I've found that even with proper 'behaviour' (closing windows during the day, opening at night, using fans if necessary), I still need to cool the space down when I sleep.

Here's how I set up my bedroom to use the minimal amount of cooling necessary for me to get a good nights sleep.

A few months ago I built a loft in my bedroom so Zach could have a place to sleep when he was over. I found that on super-hot-humid days (like this week), the upper part of the loft got too stuffy, even with the room AC turned on. I was also uncomfortable 'turning up' the AC just so my upper space could get cool. "The rest of the room is fine, it's just this spot. Hmm."

So last night I moved the room AC under the loft, turned it on LOW, and dangled one of my sheets over the end of the loft. With that loose enclosure, the low-power AC was easily enough to keep the space cool. I flopped on what is normally Zach's bed, and slept like the dead for almost 8 hours.

I'm able to cool that space down in about a half an hour. I can turn off the AC when I leave, so in the end, I run the AC only about 9 hours a day on lower power. Just enough for me to get a good nights sleep.

Works for me!

Well, I said it and said it, and promised I'd do it, now it's really here.

You've heard me chatter on about CONGO, my Event Management System for running conventions, meetings, and the like - well, now you can download and run it yourself.

Details are available on the CONGO home page. If you're a fandom or gaming event, and you're looking for a tried and trued registration system for your con, this is the place to go.

Enjoy!

Well, guess I'll be booking my PTO early. According to Slashdot :

Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."

I remember being completely addicted to StarCraft when it first came out. We recently tried getting it running on Zach's Windows XP setup, but we weren't successful (Starcraft ran on Windows 95... that was 15 years ago. Sheesh!).

I wonder if we could have a release / lan party. Hmmmm :)

First, a disclaimer. I am not an iPhone developer. I am what used to be termed a 'power user' - gamer, tool user, critic, yes - but I don't write iCode. (I do develop, just not on the iphone).

Having gotten that out of the way, I'd like to propose a list of Do's and Don'ts that every iPhone app developer on the planet should adhere to. This is a list from a USERS perspective - things that irk me to no end.

Onward...

• DO : Obey the Mute switch! - How hard can this be? If the mute switch is on, then SHADDUP! There's a REASON it's called a mute switch! I don't know how many games I've powered up that leave me scrambling for the volume-down buttons when the mute switch was IN THE MUTE POSITION.

• DO : Incremental saves - again, primarily on the gaming front. That little device in your hand? it's a TELEPHONE. That means people can call you at any time, and interrupt the application. It doesn't matter if you've spent 3 hours getting Sir Grinsalot to the top of Mount Bigahonkin and you're about to kill the Great Gizbo of Durn - grandma will STILL call you at that point, interrupting the game. Save!

• DO : Provide status that you're doing something. Okay, older platforms are slow, so sometimes it takes time for things to load. Provide some animation or indication that something is going on - a load bar would be best (gives an idea how much longer it'll take), but even a spinner will do.

• DO NOT : assume that just because you're on an iPhone, the easiest device on the planet to use, you don't need to provide directions. Apps are NOT self explanatory, and a link to a web page is not enough. "This button does that, this button does that. Got it? Go forth and enjoy."

• DO NOT : Link out to a web site without informing the user you're about to do so! Nothing is more painful than tapping on a "view the high scores list" and have that exit the damned app to start Safari. That app may have taken you 4 minutes just to get to that screen. Now you have to do it all again.

• DO : Provide a rotation lock. Some of us like to read or do games while going to sleep, which does not necessarily mean I'll be in an upright position. Having the app auto-rotate to what it THINKS is the right orientation is irritating when you have no option to disable this.

I'm sure this list will grow, and I'm open to suggestions as to what to add to it. These are things that have come up in my adventures.

What bits have YOU seen that developers seem to miss?

I've been pretty lax on CONGO lately. Other Life stuff as well as being worn after Arisia has put coding on the back burner.

This week I had a great meeting with the Arisia registration head, and she and I hammered out a schedule of updates for the next release. I have about a month to implement a bunch of new features - most of which have been burbling in my head for a while, but it's time to get them coded and released.

There's been some nice input from other events (some far away, some local) interested in using CONGO, and my path to general release is pretty well established. Having said that, the current code is pretty solid, with documentation, installation instructions, and support available. Want to run it? Let me know, I love testers.

Anyway - code is being checked in and features are slowly getting done. It feels good.