Bannanaz

Bannanaz, eh? Long. Smooth. Tasty. Yellow. Could be something else, except if it's yellow, you might need to see a doctor... Yet I digress. Banana's are actually my most favourite fruit. They're so yellow and have a nice texture. That, and their immense power as a phallic symbol. That's pretty full of win.

Right. So what can we do with bananas? Well, you could eat them. That would be boring though, wouldn't it? Instead, you could make a smoothie. Loads of ice cream, loads of banana, little milk, blend it up and you're done. Tasty. but still boring. So here are five other things you can do with a banana!

1. Wear it:
   One obvious way comes to mind... but you could probably also sew banana skins together to make a nice raincoat. Or a shirt. Or something.
2. Sex toy:
   *cough*
3. Start a banana-rights group:
   Collect together all the bananas you can find, theft possible if necessary*, take some photographs of their terrible conditions (one of them tightly packed together should be enough to bring a tear to the eye of even the most devout opposition) and make a lot of money giving interviews about said terrible conditions on TV.
4. Make a Pottasium bomb:
   Bananas are high in Pottasium. Pottasium is reactive. Put two and two together and you have a plentiful supply of explosive foodstuffs! Can be used in conjunction with idea 3 - take people hostage and blow them up with the very things they opress!
5. Start a multinational corporation:
   Use bananas as empoyees! I'm sure their average IQ is greater than that of your average American...
   

Mmm... Chocolate chips...

I was stumbling around the internet today, and I happened to come across this article, giving a little experiment to show the speed of light. I must remember to do that experiment myself some time. Exclusively for the scientific value, I swear. Nothing to do with having to eat the chocolate afterwards...

Oh yeah, and this is interesting too.

I call shotgun!

A firm observer of the rules of shotgun, I attempted to call shotgun on a short road trip. A lift home to be precise. However, I was thwarted by someone saying something to the effect of:

"You can't call shotgun! I can't see the car!"

At this point, I was, obviously, disheartened at the fact that I had lost my right to shotgun. Furthermore, I decided to take a good look at the rules, and discovered a passage that shows that I had shotgun rights after all:

The Line-Of-Sight Rule
In the situation of the deed being a hike or other extensive outdoor activity, you may not call Shotgun until the automobile is within your sight. This rule needs only to be used when the passengers are outside for a long time and have traveled long distances from the car, as with a day of snow skiing.

I'd have to say this is quite obviously stating that, as the "deed", specifically an exam, has been done inside, the line-of-sight rule doesn't apply. 'Nuff said.

Jack codes in Delphi!

Jack Bauer, in his infinite wisdom, seems to have learnt some rather impressive coding skills. As commented on here, Jack definitely seems to be a pretty good user of Delphi. Hell, he was able to use a part-written media player he wrote to tell that an EMP was going to go off. Damn. I'm impressed.
What's next? Dieing and coming back to life? Oh wait.

Do a barrel roll!

Was googling around and happened to find a blog entry that intrigued me. Guy doing a barrel roll while pouring ice tea. Works under the laws of physics, but is still pretty damned impressive:

Gaming in Linux

Wow, seems I'm doing an entry that actually has a point. How rare.

Anyway. Gaming in linux. Although generally not people's preferred gaming platform, Linux is anything but incapable. Generally, there are two ways to go. You can either go for native Linux games - Darwinia is a personal favourite of mine, running on Windows, Linux or Mac OSX - or running Windows games via some sort of emulator*, my personal choice being Wine, or a variant like Cedega. There are, of course, some steps common to getting games working either way, specifically getting drivers for your graphics card working properly. I won't bother explaining about my experiences with this. If you can't use google well enough to find some help, I'm not sure if you're ready to use Linux...

* Wine isn't actually an emulator, more of a compatibility layer. Emulator's easier to explain.

Native linux games? There's a few out there. As I said, Darwinia's my personal favourite, and there are also a couple of other games from the same guys, Uplink, which is available now, and Defcon, which is awesome and coming soon. There's also a couple of the more "mainstream" games, like Quake 3 Arena, Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2k3 which have been ported onto linux. Generally, these are pretty easy to install, but if all else fails, you can always google for a howto... There's usually one around for any problem you'll have. Check linuX-gamers for that.

That said, good native linux games are still pretty sparse, at least compared to Windows ones. That's where Wine comes into play. Once again, I'd best point you to linuX-gamers or WineHQ, as I don't feel like going into detail over setup details. Cutting a long story short, Wine lets you run a lot of windows software under Linux. Often badly. And with setup issues. But still, it's better than nothing. And if you're willing to shell out a little, head over and have a look at TransGaming's Cedega program. Designed specifically for gaming, they've got a reasonable list of games that run quite well, Half Life 2, Civilization IV and Guild Wars to name a few. So, um, I guess that's about all I've got to say on the subject. Now go. Install linux and, most importantly, play.

Oh yeah, personal note, another exam over. And another one tomorrow. Bah.

New Stuff.

 Whether or not anyone's been paying attention, I've been bitching about computing needing something new for quite a while. Well, as I discovered while surfing today, there are a few things you can do. (Just a note for windows users, you're stuck without stuff like this. Serves you right.)
Recently, I moved onto Ubuntu as my operating system. Some linux enthusiasts may disagree, but it's nicely organised, and simplifies a lot of the hard stuff. As default, it's not installed, but I learnt about a very nice music playing app called amaroK. Organises everything very well. That was step one.
Step two. Compiz. What's compiz? Compiz makes your computer look the way it always should've done. Alpha blended title bars, rotating cube desktop, stretchy windows. So many things have been thrown into this window manager. On top of that, it runs pretty smoothly two. Hell, it's usable on the heap I call a PC, so who shouldn't be able to run it?
Other than that, only other thing worth meantioning would be Wine. It lets you run windows software under linux. Sometimes. 'Nuff said.
On a final note, it be the exam period now. Got an exam tomorrow. Damn. Well, goodnight.