Gemini Rue

There was an article on Kotaku a couple of days ago about a new point and click adventure game called Gemini Rue. It looks interesting and there's a demo available. I might give it a shot.

The boy who stole Half-Life 2

Eurogamer has an article about Axel Gembe, who stole the Half-Life 2 sourcecode back in 2003:
The boy who stole Half-Life 2
Can't believe that was over 7 years ago already.

Recent games

I found a guy on Craigslist who was/is selling new (sealed) PS3 games for 35 bucks a piece. Must have fallen from a truck, no doubt, but who cares?! Got Gran Turismo 5 and Need for speed - Hot Pursuit from him.
Then, a couple of days later, a guy was selling Mass Effect 2 for 40 $ (new & sealed).
I had planned to get all those games eventually, but wanted to wait until prices had dropped. Little did I know that I'd be able to get them shortly after their launch at those fantastic prices. Craigslist rules for these kinds of things.

After a long, long time, I finally FINISHED a couple of games: Heavy Rain and Bionic Commando: Rearmed. I only saw one ending of Heavy Rain, I'll get back to it later to try and see some of the other endings. It's definitely more of an interactive movie rather than a traditional game. But taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it. BCR was great fun and since I finished it just a couple of days after its sequel came out on PSN, I bought BCR2 right away.

I played Dead Nation a lot in January and am loving it. I eventually got stuck at the cemetary (if you've played the game you probably know which spot I'm talking about) and died over and over again. Lost my motivation for now, I'll get back to it at some point, when I feel like it.
I'd like to try it in co-op mode too, but I have no one to play it with. (Tried it with my friend in Dakar, but it's too laggy)

I dug Demon's Souls out from the shelf and played it for a couple of hours, having only played the tutorial many months ago). The game is incredible. It's old-school, hard as fuck, addicting and beautiful. And I haven't even finished world 1-1! Its successor, Dark Souls, is already in the making.

The making of EVE Online

PCGamer has an article about "The making of EVE Online", an interesting read.

Dead Nation Metagame

Dead Nation Metagame - Your country needs you!
Article on the EU Playstation blog about the world-zombie-kill-championship that's built in to Dead Nation, a recent game for the PS3.
I plan to get it as soon as I get back to the US.

Ruby programming for beginners

Found this article on Lifehacker about Hackety Hack, a Ruby programming/learning tool for beginners.

In the comments of this article, someone mentioned Why the lucky stiff, the person behind Hackety Hack, and pointed to this article that tells a bit of background information on him.

R.I.P. delicious.com

Yahoo decided to shut down delicious.com soon, so to be on the safe side, I was looking for a way to export all my bookmarks. Here's a how-to.

Google Beatbox

Google now offers beatboxing as a new service!
(click on link and then on "Listen")

Four Lions

Four Lions: Chris Morris' Jiha-ha-had movie

rsync & backups

I've been using this backup-method for a while now and it works well for me.
After upgrading OSX to Snow Leopard, though, rsync would start to do its thing and then it would get stuck at
/var/vm/sleepimage
for no apparent reason.
After looking around a bit, I read that the version of rsync that OSX brings with it is fairly old and a newer version might behave better. Using this tutorial, I installed/compiled rsync 3.0.7 and it solved the problem.

Some articles on the same topic that are interesting as well:
http://www.lartmaker.nl/rsync/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2143497&tstart=1
http://www.lbackup.org/developer/overview
http://help.bombich.com/faqs/troubleshooting/what-makes-a-volume-bootable

DJ Kitty

3D Holo Street Fighter art on the iPad

found on Kotaku.

Japan time-lapse video

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Cats

Cat parkour:

(found here)

Downward facing kitteh:

(found here)

Omusoba recipe

This Omusoba recipe looks really yummy.

DIY PC build

Kotaku has a nice article about building your own PC vs. buying it pre-built.

YouTube Movies

YouTube now has a "Movies" section where they stream full-length movies (with commercials) for free. (well, most are free, for some others they ask for a fee)

How to add an Avatar-videolog-like overlay to a movie-clip

Watching the movie Avatar, I was wondering whether it was possible to add an overlay similar to the one visible in the movie during Jake's videologs to home-made movies using simple tools like iMovie 09. I wouldn't want to shell out the money for pro-tools like Final Cut or Adobe After Effects.
I figured I wouldn't get the full realtime-time-display and blinking "REC"-tag, but a static picture should be possible.

I found a PNG-file somebody created and posted here which looks exactly like the one from Avatar. (He also created an After Effects file for those who have that software, which displays the dynamic effects)
(in case the link ever dies, here are mirrors of the PNG and AE file)

Now, how to overlay the PNG into a movie? I tried iMovie and while it is possible to insert a picture into a movie-clip, overlay doesn't seem to be an option. The image is just statically displayed wherever it's pasted in.

I found another solution here, which suggests using Quicktime Pro. That worked perfectly.

Here are the steps that worked for me:

- I exported my movie-clip from iMovie 09 by going to Share - Export Movie - and I chose the HD option (which creates a 1280x720 video)
- I opened the exported video in Quicktime (Pro)
- In Quicktime, go to File - Open and open the PNG file
- In the open PNG file, go to Edit - Select All and then Edit - Copy
- Back to the movie-file, go to Edit - Add to Selection & Scale
- Now, in my case, my movie was 1280x720 but my PNG file was 1920x1080
- Go to Window - Show movie properties
- There are now 2 video tracks in the list. Video Track 2 should be the PNG picture.
- I selected Video Track 2 and changed the Scaled Size to 1280x720. This brought the size of the video back down to what I wanted it to be
- In the dropdown-menu Transparency, I selected Straight Alpha Blend and set it down to 0%.

Controller Art

Mads Peitersen's Deviantart page (found on Kotaku)

Machinarium on sale

Nuff said.