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951

General Software Discussion / Firefox begins its mass rollout of ads on new tab tiles

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 11:50 PM »

Okay, Firefox just stabbed themselves in the foot with a fork again. (Less dangerous than shooting it! And if you keep stabbing it enough, it raises the bottom line! ... Uh... by treating the (slightly smarter than IE) userbase as ... idiots?!)

Now they have decided, after testing in the test channels, to roll out ad tiles in Firefox.

Fine, there's plenty of ads everywhere else, and we go through the big discussion of adblock vs whitelisting a very few sites.

But ads in the browser proper?! That just feels wrong on so many levels! That's just smelling like giving the FF mod editions a lead in the race. The first few Slashdot comments are up, and so far they're "restrained". (I used the new Firefox Forget button, and I now forget ... didn't Firefox lose their big Google revenue stream contract? So, did they hit a cash crunch that the CFO decided to fix with ads in the browser?) But more importantly, I'd half expect the other Big Companies to do this, but Mozilla?! They were (once?) "the cool kids". So how can they not know that some corners of their base won't be so ... restrained?!

So for y'all on Palemoon, I so hope they use this to further promote themselves.

Iceweasel came up, which is also a good option at least for Linux. Is there a Windows version of Iceweasel? I ignored long running performance problems because the rule is "assume incompetence before malice" ... but now they just added malice! That's enough to make me boycot them, and just use the derivative mod editions out there. So, besides a guess at iceweasel for Win, P-M I have, is there a third such mod edition out there so I can go back to my 3-copy set usage style I just started working on today?

952

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 09:34 PM »

Per sort categories, do you know if it pulls the same games in the same order?

-TaoPhoenix (November 10, 2014, 02:58 PM)

I believe so, but I haven't done anything to absolutely verify that to be the case.

-Deozaan (November 10, 2014, 06:48 PM)

Well, it's unclear this early, but LD has already flipped their rotator (it might be automated) because the new ones on page 1 are nothing I recognize. On the itch.io under All Games / Most Rated, there's a black circle logo called Close your eyes. So if that stays there, we have our answer. The small nuisance is that there's no "page #", more of a Tumblr Super-Scroll, but then that's something I can use one of my third copies of FF to do and park it on a less used virtual desktop splitter tab and then slowly drift through it bit by bit.

953

General Software Discussion / Firefox Developer Edition

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 04:36 PM »

Anyone had a chance to use this "for real" yet?

I just got a copy just to see what it's like, though I'm massively unqualified to use the actual tools!

However, it DOES change the UI - Aurora is gone!


It's back to some kind of one of the older square layouts, and yes, all the menus are back on top where they belong - none of this "let's hide everything under one button" junk!

I did have to put back in Classic Theme Restorer to fix some minor prefs of mine.
- Menu, Nav Toolbar, Tabs, in that order.
- I like the full quad of back, forward, stop, and reload buttons in that order on the left side. (Their original reload button is jammed way on the right of the address bar and I can't easily get rid of it, so I might have two reload buttons now. Who cares, that's nothing.)
- View/Toolbars/Customize is stripped pretty badly in the native version of most new Firefoxes, so CTR adds back a bunch of stuff you might have used. That's where I got those other buttons from - they weren't there to begin with in Customize.
- At some point a "Forget" button showed up in Customize, and I think it's from CTR, which should be interesting to try. For ex, when I get done with a LD marathon and I have 8 browser windows and 9 tabs each, my particular comp seems to make a big deal out of closing tabs ... it lags pretty badly for obscure reasons. So sometimes I go to Win Task Mgr, and just nuke the process... but on the days I was viewing 25 Youtube clips, sometimes the browser tries to "remember it all" and load them all back in at once. So "Forget" could be neat just to nuke all that stuff away, and then go back to more Ludum games er... real work!

- The usual tiny tweaks such as colors and spacing that CTR is known for.

So I always like to have "multi clones" of Firefox, it's actually a different process, so when I've got 25 Youtube clips open and Flash crashes, and I want to restart, at least I won't lose other open things such as email.

Edit:
Now that I have a "third" clone of FF, I might even make it Email-Only, whereupon it leaves me two clones to "do rec things with", and then email can be sitting on another tab in my virtual desktop splitter, and still be open even if I close the other two. I'll think about that.

Edit:
Looks like the Forget button was a new feature only just rolled out in "reg FF 33", but Dev Edition seems to be 35.0a2 from the Aurora channel.

954

Living Room / Re: Stephen Fry's eloquent response to Grammar Nazis

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 03:14 PM »

Ow!

I do get tiny internal cringes when I see store signs with "basic" grammar errors with the apostrophes and stuff. But maybe it's a good lesson to end the even momentary better-than-you attitude upon seeing them, and just move on to the actual point of the day's activity.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 02:58 PM »

I prefer to browse the entries through this portal:

http://ludumdare.itch.io/

-Deozaan (October 28, 2014, 03:13 PM)

This is interesting:
Per sort categories, do you know if it pulls the same games in the same order?

One discouraging thing about the LD site is that I'm pretty sure at x intervals, when you do "preview", it pulls different games for the "first page" etc on different days. So I was getting tired, but I'd bet a sandwich that after having gone through 16 of 106 pages, what's on today's page 1 is not the same page 1 I looked at yesterday! So it's tricky to mark your progress and be methodical!

And yes, the changeable icons make some difference. I'll have to find a way somehow to merge using both pages.

956

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 02:44 PM »

Here's a non-LD game I'd like to see your opinion on. It's definitely Phoenix-Easy.

http://blocsilent.it.../dance-to-the-finish

-Deozaan (November 10, 2014, 12:50 PM)

(Edit 3 - I messed up this post. Tagged to look at, etc. See below.)

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Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 05:05 AM »

Okay, this post is for games that look pretty good, but are too hard for me!

So there's a couple reasons why a game could get here for being too hard. One is that something like the art is amazing but the overall game just makes you die too fast. Another is the info management is simply too complex for me to snap-grasp since I'm surveying pretty fast on look and feel. But I know some of you geniuses out there want stuff that's more challenging than half the reviews I post, so look here.

Fusebox
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=26650
Managing connections in an emotion-energy power plant between some 50 planets and 10 fuse types each with a metal profile.
Hard: Info Complexity

Generation Ship
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=29081
Another info management game of some kind, this time on a spaceship. The art is incredible looking!

958

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 04:45 AM »

Monster Dude's World.

Another Phoenix Easy one, because I beat it in about a minute. You really have to blunder badly to die!

http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=14804
http://gamejolt.com/...-s-world-ld30/32978/

This is another one all about the art, and "stay simple and finish, rather than get complicated and run out of time".

959

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 04:26 AM »

Dance Party
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=22452
http://storage.wertl...Dare/LD30/index.html

A truly silly one!
It says Chrome but I squeezed it to work in FF.

The art is so silly here, it's the point. It's a bit like HyperboleAndAHalf.


Rated Phoenix Med-Easy because you can get going a little after a couple tries to figure out the controls. But it does pick up, and starts getting harder after about the 2 min point.

960

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 03:47 AM »

This is a funny little one, but kinda another one you only play once.

Many Ninjas
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=20543
http://bushidoburrit...m/games/many_ninjas/

It's basically a resource building game, where you try to attract and train the most ninjas to your camp as possible.

It's Phoenix Easy because there's no lose condition. Then again, you only play it once because there's no win condition either. I decided that ___ e120 was enough to declare a "neo win".

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Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 12:43 AM »

Apparently LD's version of Flappy Bird

http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=35835
http://www.kongregat...ckoo1337/flappy-geek

962

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 10, 2014, 12:30 AM »

Attack of the super ninja nazies from another dimension - juakob - 48 Hour Compo Entry
https://dl.dropboxus...8008/LD30/index.html
http://ludumdare.com...preview&uid=8488

A funny little spoof of old Nintendo fighting games.
Punch the health bag to get hp back.

Beat up the Nazis just to get them out of the way (they spawn), then beat up the machine to win.

Tip: It's got the "Brokken flaw" of World Heroes 2 - your kicks are about 5 times stronger than your punches, and I didn't even need to jump. Just a little experience from some of those old fighting games helps you navigate the space - placement of the screen elements.

With that it is Phoenix Easy on the first level, though each time you win it seemed to spawn Nazis a little faster, though that's not clear.

963

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 11:13 PM »

Planet Hop
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=27844
http://gamejolt.com/...de/planet-hop/33061/

Planets circle each other, and you control a little red ball.

Press any key to hop back and forth. The key is you have to get the hang of the speed it takes before the planet gets to where it needs to be for you to hop. Like Nasa missions for five year olds!

Difficulty:
Phoenix Medium.
If your hand-eye is good and you have a knack for the spatial timing, you'll do well. But if you don't, one missed connection hop and you lose. It's not my forte so I ended my tests after a best score of 8 in some 50 games.

964

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 11:00 PM »

Okay, a couple of these are for you guys who like minimal info!

Other Side - Raphy - Jam Entry
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=24241
http://gamejolt.com/...re/other-side/33241/

Single tip:
Travel to the right for about 30 seconds to find the stones, then wait for night. Then figure it out ... in 30 seconds once you get the concept!

965

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 08:59 PM »

Okay, while hanging out in the chat room, it became another LD day!

First up:
Anima et Corpus
http://ludumdare.com...review&uid=30283
http://www.amateurla...com/games/ld30/play/

You are disembodied, having entered a tragic zombie-esque state, and you need to re-unite your physical and spirit states in the "scroll room". It's pretty simple per se - you need to move your body half and your ghost half into the room with the scroll, sometimes they need to touch or merge.

It's neat that the body half walks (spacebar jumps), and the spirit half floats with a delay like the ship in asteroids.

Using the "e" key, you toggle between your body state and your ghost state.

It really is Phoenix Easy, which I always find pleasant! But here's just a couple of tips just to help prevent minor frustrations to really get you going.

- There's no time limit, so for example on levels 3 and 6, take your time. If you trap yourself and get an impossible position, just reload the page. It's really generous letting you pick levels.

- As I write this "live" while I am playing, it goes really slowly introducing you to world elements, so you don't have to madly try to solve five things at once.

- The Body form has sorta "flying samurai" physics, and everything is pretty generous - I don't see much of the "pixel accuracy" that tends to sometimes push games into one of the hard categories. (Though Level 10 seems to have a little.)

Here's the start of Level 10:

966

Living Room / Re: Ripple - When the Good comes back

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 07:14 PM »

Stephen: This lady worked hard for the money...what she did next will astound you!

-Josh (November 08, 2014, 09:05 PM)

When I clicked on this I expected to see:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=MX7MbG6MiQs

-Innuendo (November 09, 2014, 03:49 PM)

Darn. RIP Donna Summer!

And yay for our tech age under the cynicism - that's a pretty good video. I never really tracked each line of the lyrics before, but that video does a good job explaining the song. And Donna Summer was just a really solid singer!

967

Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 07:06 PM »

^^ I'm beginning to get the impression that actually the Mac mini is just a piece of junk - a technological dead-end - and that it was that sort of a piece of junk before it came off the production line. It's possibly even the sort of junk that used to be called "a white elephant":
...
The thing seems to have been cynically turned out with all the old tricks for throw-away product obsolescence - including, for example, well-sealed units (difficult to maintain), lock-in, and little or no forwards or backwards design compatibility. ...
 
I say this after researching across the Internet for "uses for an old ...", where most commenters seemed hard-pressed to think of a use for the thing ...

iFix Old Macs
You know the ones I mean: those Power Macs, PowerBooks, iMacs, iBooks, Mac minis, etc. based on the PowerPC processor that Apple sold a few years ago. Sadly, support for them is dwindling, but the software is still out there that would enable their continued use.
...

- which absurd statement rather begs the question "...all it needs" for what? For making it "look like a new one"? Why? It's already obsolete. A Spinning Jenny was "a fine old machine" too.

-IainB (November 09, 2014, 03:53 PM)

The comparison with the White Elephant is interesting. I will try to separate out a couple things.

A. A lot of the "hatred for things Apple" is that the entire *company* likes to make varying shades of elephants (and put them in your room! Take that, triple joke!)

So I'm not sure if specifically the mini was designed to be quite so aggressive to users as that Sultan from the Wiki snip. I think that the mini is the result of some sales meeting where they drew a chart of specs on a board, some decently high but rather expensive, then said "and we need one with a lower price point. So let's hack it down here, here, here, and here". But I believe there are varying sweet-ish spots in tech, so they hacked it down below one of them, and then when time marches on, (see my post in Deozaan's thread on his game), then later you struggle to find uses for it.

The only non-insulting use for much older tech I've ever seen is people who put it separately monitoring some low level project they have, and just park it there, solely to "efficiently" free up their main computer from having to deal with even that minor processing load.

I've got two aging laptops, with one truly ancient, facing the same problem, except I don't do the right kind of projects to need them for stuff like that. (My third laptop is still aging too, but it's done "emergency backup" duty when something is wrong with my main comp.)

968

Living Room / Re: Any fans of the TV Sci-Fi show "A Town Called Eureka"?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 12:20 PM »

Eureka was an awesome show at the beginning, but it took a turn for the worse when they started ignoring their own world-building. Remember in the first season it was established that Eureka was a top-secret government project and its entrance was hidden from the world so that strangers couldn't pop in unannounced?

Fast forward a few seasons and you start seeing story-lines centered around strangers popping into town unannounced.   Even without the contract dispute I really don't see it having lasted much longer. The writers were running out of ideas and didn't know what to do with the characters.

Warehouse 13 was a very enjoyable show. The quality between episodes wasn't always high, but it was nearly always entertaining. It ended right where it needed to. The characters had run their course, but I see a lot of untapped potential with the premise of the show. Maybe in a couple years there will be a Warehouse 14 with an entirely new cast.

-Innuendo (November 09, 2014, 09:36 AM)

I thought in Warehouse 13 It wasn't so much the characters running their course, as after the brilliant 2nd Season they got stuck trying to follow the double act of Egyptian-Awesome and Helena Wells stealing the show! So season 3 was a little tricky. But then when one writer hands you a broken script the others have to now deal with it. So once the Astrolabe entered the picture, with the power to *reset the entire world*, "only" at the cost that it just makes the user crazy, they created an Elephant in the Room. So the whole Dark Artie season 4 faltered.

C. C. H. Pounder / Mrs. Frederic mastered her "one-act" of stern glares, but I'm betting the actress began to grow tired of the role because she tended to have useful tips, but didn't "do much" to "save the warehouse". And then the last season had too few episodes for what I thought was a really promising premise.

If I recall the show correctly, Paracelsus was among the smartest of all the caretakers. To me, he showed the true danger of the warehouse: each artifact is nasty all by itself. But when you start playing Magic, the Artifacts Gathering and smashing them together, TRULY astounding things are possible!

Some can be really good, if used responsibly. All of Season 4 was about Artie's desperate attempt to undo the total warehouse destruction.

I'm borrowing a bit of chess concepts here.  Let's call Artie a "Master" of the warehouse. He's pretty good. But his solution was the Astrolabe that only worked for 24 hours, and left him insane.

Paracelsus smashed three artifacts together, and created a *full time machine* with *apparently no downsides*.  

So that should have scared the beejees out of Mrs. Frederic, because Paracelsus was a "Grandmaster" who just happened to be a psycho.

Plus, using the mid season break, the Season 5 opener had some of the best set design ever in the show.

969

Living Room / Re: BIG NEWS: Scientists have now managed to link the minds of three pairs of people

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 11:57 AM »

wat! 

-Deozaan (November 07, 2014, 02:42 PM)

Yeah, I saw it in somewhere about the history of the dev of Star Trek.

970

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Pledge: Untitled Game

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 09, 2014, 11:47 AM »

(see attachment in previous post)

I'm glad I spent the time doing this. Now that it looks nicer it also seems a lot more fun to play, even though virtually nothing has changed gameplay wise.

So thanks for motivating me to polish it up!

-Deozaan (November 09, 2014, 01:41 AM)

Thanks for the credit! And the art is def improving! I'd suggest one more round of art for some of the reasons below, and fairly soon I think you'll hit "stair landing #1". Maybe not a "sweet spot" ... just not sour apples!

I think I have a bit of insight on this. It's a bit tricky to know what to tackle first, but I bet there's some kind of well known psychology principle here, though I don't know what any official name for it would be. Put colloquially, it goes something like this:

Some of us at certain ages were children of certain ages and abilities just at the ages these consoles were developing. So there was a bit of an innocence with consoles like the Atari 2600 because at a rapid pace in the early 80's, if we allow ourselves the small joke to anthropomorphize, the Atari 2600 was just reaching its last legs valiantly struggling to still entertain one last "half generation" of children by about 1983 with the brutal limits of 1977 hardware design decisions. 4k games, 128 byte racing the beam, and more. But as just an "averagely bright" child of nine, I was content to play the (now known as very bad!) port of Pac-man until I think at one point the machine overheated. And Yar's Revenge, and a few other games.

But as I grew as a child, even I vaguely began to realize that time was marching on, and the by-necessity square-block graphics in most games ... just wasn't really how games should look. And now, "still retro", take your pick of the Commodore 64, 1st gen Nintendo system, or Sega Genesis, and the game playability jumps by leaps and bounds, and def in many ways because of better art.

So when you're designing your game, I'm betting subconsciously you "see the future" with better art evolving, but now you have to "work to see past the current state". But with a fairly small chunk of time starting with something at least a little pretty to look at, then when you go back and add game elements (and fix bugs), even if it's still only in day four of development, let's say you get at least one section working, and then you can just spend an hour of testing watching nice pretty 5-color flaming buildings! Then come the 5 color explosions. And moving the plane around. Etc.

971

Living Room / Re: Ripple - A touching and awesome movie

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 08, 2014, 05:12 PM »

They deleted the credits in that embedded version!

972

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.9.1 - Oct 10, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 08, 2014, 12:11 AM »

The delay is still there ... about 3 sec.

973

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Pledge: Untitled Game

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 07, 2014, 09:45 PM »

Hehe Deo see my Fake Nany post in the basement ... smash your game into one of those "what IS this??!" apps! Then you don't have to pick and choose for Nany ... do a few of them! Sure, release them separately for the official compo, but then make a joke version where they're all smashed together!
:D

974

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.9.1 - Oct 10, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 07, 2014, 09:42 PM »

Hmm. It's not so clear, but I did (re?) disable delay capture which might have been clicked on, (though it says 400ms, that's not what it felt like), and Stay in memory longer is def on.

So it seems a little better, and I'll try that for a while.

975

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 07, 2014, 10:57 AM »

I'm starting a Fake Nany board in the Basement. Real Nany is too honorable for such dumb things. But Mouser has found the second most ear-worm-y acronym ever, just behind Slashdot's IaNAL.

It's just for low level silly/dumb jokes about apps in general.