Xatal

One thing I’ve been loving lately about my college is that we have wireless Internet at most places on campus. This has shown to be intensely useful, whether for casually browsing Facebook while in class or as a tool to study somewhere other than my room.

Back home, we only use wireless Internet, and I’ve grown very fond of moving my laptop from room to room, rather than limiting me to one desk in the house. Using wireless Internet is great.

However, I’ve found that there are some trade-offs when I choose wireless over Ethernet:

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Crouching in Left 4 Dead is surprising essential. While crouching, you aim better, allowing you to pick off zombies at a distance better than you otherwise would be able to. When large amounts of zombies are coming, crouching allows you to hit them quicker and avoid getting hit yourself.

One thing that really irked me about crouching was that you couldn’t set the key to toggle crouch — you had to hold it to crouch down. If you’re going to be crouching just a few seconds, that’s not a big deal, but crouching for a long time happens as well, and being able to tap a key to enter/exit crouch would be pretty handy.

Luckily, much like making Zoey and Louis scream in Left 4 Dead, setting crouch to toggle on a key is as simple as a quick console command. Here’s how to do it: Keep reading »

The famous Control level is playable in multiplayer now

For fans of the classic N64 first-person shooter GoldenEye, a modern version of it has been released!

If you have any games using Valve’s “Source” engine, then you can play GoldenEye Source, a modern version of it.

For the main page of the game, check here. You can see more screenshots and other info about the game there.

The online play is pretty fun, although a bit frustrating. I’m used to games with crosshairs in the middle of the screen, so trying to aim without any crosshairs can be a bit tough. However, it’s easy enough to hold a button to aim your gun.

A lot of the original GoldenEye maps aren’t meant for that many people, but they hold up pretty well. The game plans to feature all of the original one-player levels as maps. The online play is definitely more fast-paced than the N64 counterpart, and with the added advantage that you don’t have to worry about screenwatchers.

Seeing as the game is basically free — provided you have a Source game — it’s definitely worth at least trying out. I doubt it will ever catch on as the next big thing,  but it’s great for the nostalgia.

After a long 3 weeks of classes, work, and just about everything in between, I’m taking advantage of the three-day weekend to go back home. It’s quite the trek back — about 6 hours, using a combination of bus, train, and car, and it will set me back a cool $30, but it’ll definitely be worth it.

I hope everybody has a good weekend, and enjoy your Valentine’s Day! Use it to be grateful for the ones you love. There might not be a post on Monday, depending on how my schedule goes, but there definitely should be one on Wednesday.

So I decided to add both the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugin to Xatal. Here’s a brief explanation of what each does and how to use it:

KeywordLuv

When you enter in your name in the box as you type a comment, write your name in the following form:

<your name>@<keywords for your blog>. This will output links as “<your name> from <keywords for your blog>”, where the keywords become a hyperlink.

So, if I were to input “Paul@Xatal”, the output would be “Paul from Xatal wrote:”

The advantage here is the keywords will be directly tied to your URL, helping you out in the search engines. But at the same time, you can still use your name and have an identity besides just your website’s name.

CommentLuv

For CommentLuv, it helps if you’ve made an account at the CommentLuv website. That way, when it detects your most recent post, it will be most up-to-date. Otherwise, the post it lists may not be your most recent one.

You can alternatively choose other recent posts. Choose whichever post you want to highlight.

And that’s it! I hope you like both plugins and I hope that they can give back to your site. I’ll post a sample comment showing how both work.

Normally, I’m all about metal music. I love the heavy parts, I love the massive variety in the genre, and I love the lyrical themes.

I’ve explored metal pretty thoroughly, and it’s been a long time since I found a new metal band that I could really get into. I’ve been moving onto other genres of music lately, mainly post-rock and reggae.

The album cover for Open Container by The Expendables

One reggae band that caught my eye and completely blew me away was The Expendables. The Expendables combine a lot of heavier elements in their songs with reggae elements, creating a really soothing blend of styles. The reggae side is of course very smooth and laid-back, whereas the heavier elements create a lot of variety and keep the music very memorable. The Expendables even hail from Santa Cruz, so the local aspect makes them even more appealing.

It’s always great to discover a new band that rocks,  and lately I’ve been listening to The Expendables quite a bit. If you’re interested in hearing a bit from them, you ought to check out their MySpace. I personally would recommend the song “Let Loose”, though they’re all really good.

For a while, I searched high and low to find a good FireFox extension for handling RSS. What I ideally wanted was something that could queue up unread items and inform me via the status bar and a notification pop-up. I have an extension for my Gmail account that does this, and a matching one for RSS would have been perfect.

Everything I found seemed to have a little bit more or less than what I wanted — I just couldn’t find something that seemed to work right.

A sample Google Reader interface

So after searching thoroughly, I realized that the best solution came from the same company that seems to do most everything right — yes, I’m talking about Google.

Google Reader can combine all of your RSS subscriptions in a nice, easy-to-read interface, and the FireFox extension Google Reader Watcher can display your unread items in the  status bar, popping up notifications upon new posts. The addon is pretty simple but very customizable, giving you a good amount of control over how your feeds are handled.

Google Reader Watcher and Gmail Notifier side by side in the status bar

Finally, all my woes are solved! I can now keep much better track of what I have (or haven’t) read, and now I can be updated when new posts are made.

Before I was occasionally missing out on posts by blogs I like to read, and I was getting pretty frustrated finding ones that I’d missed.

This may be helpful to a few of you who might be looking for a good way to integrate RSS into your browser. If you use any other method, please tell me!

Yesterday i was reading Derek Semmler’s post about comments on blog posts, and I noticed he mentioned two plugins: CommentLuv and KeywordLuv.

CommentLuv I’ve heard of before — basically, when someone posts a comment, CommentLuv will find the most recent post they’ve made on their blog and display the title as a link back to the site. In theory, other readers will read the title and click if it sounds interesting.

KeywordLuv I’m new to, but from what I’ve read, it works like this: When you post a comment, in the name field you fill it in as such: <yourname>@<keywords for your blog>. Then, when your comment is displayed, it’s displayed with your name from your blog, where your blog is a hyperlink and your name is just text. This way, your links are linked with keywords (which helps with search), but it lacks the spam feel of just using keywords as your name.

Since I do believe in giving back to commentators, I’m considering installing one (or maybe both) of these plugins. Personally, I don’t care much for CommentLuv, but if you guys like that I’m definitely willing to install it.

So, as with any other decision, I prefer a democratic approach:

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