Apparently the comments system was broken by the new theme I activated last week. I’m been using the current theme Inbw for a while now, and while I still like its clean, straightforward look, I understand that it doesn’t render well at all at screen widths of less than 1280 pixels. On really wide screens, it stretches out the site so much that it can be hard to read.
So I’ve been looking for a clean, simple theme with a fixed-width and settled on Light. But I had no idea that activating it would disable comments so I’ve reactivated the old theme for now. Looks like I still have a great deal of work cut out for me if I’m to figure out how to get it working right.
EDIT: Well, it looks like I’ve been able to fix it, though I’m still not sure what the problem was. All I did was redownload the theme, going to the site of the theme’s maker, instead of WordPress, and install that version.
Hey, look at what the postman brought me! As you might guess, I finally have a gaming rig of my own again. It’s a fairly modest Dell XPS 420 with the following key specifications:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
3 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
500 GB SATA Hard Drive
This is nowhere near the current cutting edge of course, but with just a 20-inch LCD monitor to drive, it should be more than enough to meet my gaming needs for a while. The included speakers and subwoofer aren’t anything special, but they constitute probably the best sound system I’ve ever owned.
I tend not to write gushy posts about the latest tech toys because I don’t care for devices looking sleek or fashionable. To me, function matters a lot more than form. However, I’m writing about this latest interface device from OCZ because it’s cool enough to make for an exception. It’s called the Neural Impulse Actuator and it’s a headband that can “hear” your thoughts and allow you to use it to interface with a computer, replacing the traditional mouse and keyboard.
Devices like this aren’t exactly news at this point, but this is the first time that I’ve heard of something like this outside of an experimental setting with specially designed software. OCZ’s device has already been demoed at a computer show to play a commercial FPS game, Unreal Tournament, and apparently will soon be in normal production with an estimated retail price of US$300.00. The makers also claim that since the device bypasses the muscles, response time for gamers will be much better. Essentially, instead of your thoughts going to your fingers and from there to the computer, they’ll pretty much go directly from your brain to the computer.
We’ll have to wait a while yet to see how much of this is true and how sophisticated an input device it proves to be. It seems to me that an important factor will be the communications bandwidth that it allows between your brain and the computer. If the bandwidth is large enough, it would cause a revolution in games design since it would allow games with many more options and controls to be designed than would normally be possible given the physical control limits of traditional interfaces.
What you’re seeing there is a project by the Tampere University of Technology in Finland to create the world’s biggest game display by using the windows of an apartment building as pixels. Here they’re implementing a version of Tetris specifically written for the project, though I must admit that the player playing it isn’t much good.
Pretty amazing project though and it would totally rock to see it implemented on a larger scale on skyscrapers.
[The above image is taken from Sager’s official website.]
I noticed this ludicrously powerful notebook computer in the news today. It has a quad-core CPU, dual 8700M-GT video cards in SLI mode and triple 200GB hard drives. It’s so powerful in fact, that instead of having a battery, it claims to have a built-in UPS instead. And since it weighs 11.5 pounds without including its power brick, can you really call this thing a laptop?
I’m an tech enthusiast myself, but this item serves as a perfect illustration of my puzzlement at how some people go completely crazy in an overboard way over the latest and greatest gadgets. I play a lot of computer games so naturally I need a gaming computer, but from my observations there are people who will happily pay ridiculous amounts of money just to be able to own powerful computers that they don’t really take full advantage of. Similarly, I can appreciate the utility of devices like mobile phones, PDAs and even ebook readers but I’m certainly not the kind of person who buys them just for the sake of buying them.
