Random Monday

A project by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of MIT Media Labs with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation and the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a educational interactive content creation tool aimed primarily at kids to create their animations, stories and games in a very easy to learn scripting language. Just think [...]

Since I’ve been using several of Nir Sofer’s (NirSoft) applications quite regularly both at work and at home, I hope that some of his utilities I list below will prove as useful to you as they are for me. I recommend NirSoft’s applications for several reasons: Portable - copy and run directly from USB flashdrives as they [...]

Been encountering some intermittent lockups with my home computer for the past few months. Scanned for viruses and malware with zero infection results until I realized that the source of the problems might be from the hardware instead when the casing became unusually hot to the touch. While I’m an absolute idiot when it comes to [...]

An oldie but goodie link(s) from the random Gnomes’ random lair (but not as confusingly random as The Download Munkey, heh) featuring some really classic gaming magazines for various platforms. I haven’t got much interest in consoles and early computers since the first computer I got was a 486 clone long after stuff like the [...]

A recently released mini-novel based on Crafty Games’ Spycraft : World on Fire CCG campaign setting made free for your reading enjoyment. (you do need to register for a free DriveThruRPG account before downloading) © Crafty Games If you enjoy reading espionage thrillers of shady underground organizations and ambiguous superspies, hackers and mercenaries whose actions keep you [...]

Here’s another edutainment game to ease that irritating, nagging feeling of being totally unproductive at the computer - Alpha Assault, mentioned by Jay Is Games in one of April’s Friday Link Dumps. In Likwid Game Studio’s Alpha Assault, your task is to spell out words with three or more letters from letters randomly arranged in a [...]

Here’s another edutainment game to ease that irritating, nagging feeling of being totally unproductive at the computer - Alpha Assault, mentioned by Jay Is Games in one of April’s Friday Link Dumps. In Likwid Game Studio’s Alpha Assault, your task is to spell out words with three or more letters from letters randomly arranged in a [...]

First seen on the Papercraft Paradise, these cool road roller (aka steamroller) scale models are official downloadable papercraft from Sakai Heavy Industries and represent a selection of their many road roller models. The detailed parts for each vehicle are printed clearly in a very high quality PDF - there’s no blurry or jagged lines in [...]

Just chanced upon this page (legal, of course) where Konami is offering a selection of the BGM tunes for the Wangan Midnight : Maximum Tune 2 racing game for free download. All tracks are euro-trance which essentially sounds like stuff produced during the early days of trance music before its heyday during 1998 to 2000. While [...]

Alex Vdovichenko, developer of TequilaCat Bookreader (TCBR) kindly sent me an email a few weeks back with instructions on reading rotated text with TCBR. You’ll need to create a new JAR file for your mobile phone (see previous post) with the following additions. Add Windows Font - only Windows fonts can be rotated Click on Font Direction button [...]

This one’s specially for Mr Hardian A.C.E 3 (or Another Century’s Episode 3 : The Final if you prefer) is a PS2 game by FROM Software, better known for their Armored Core series. What’s interesting about this game is the sheer quantity of user-controllable mecha as documented in the Wikipedia article for A.C.E 3 - [...]

A new series of articles on some edutainment games that I have recently found from various sources so that we all can feel less guility when we’re supposed to be working on things that are more productive First up is TypeRacer, discovered on Ian Timothy’s blog via the Ping.sg RSS feed. More games coming [...]

Finally found time to read this free issue of Brick Journal #9 - a must-read for anyone remotely interested in Lego. While I haven’t been actively playing with Lego for close to fifteen years, occassionally I get the sudden inspiration to create something simple like this birthday present © thoo2.net The Lego blog The Brothers [...]

Foxit Reader has been my PDF viewer of choice since version 1.2 - I still remember keeping multiple builds of versions 1.2 and 1.3 of Foxit Reader as some builds could miraclously open PDFs that would crash other builds upon loading. Thankfully, the current version 2.2 of Foxit Reader is much more robust in [...]

A beautiful orchestral theme from the Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon composed by Nobuo Uematsu who also scored the music for the Final Fantasy series. © Microsoft Game Studios If the character design of the boy Shu bears more than a passing resemblance to Dragonball Z’s Gohan, it’s because both characters were essentially conceived by the same [...]

Just found this very useful Google Gadget Translate My Page to automatically translate English websites into any of the 13 available languages. Installing this widget on a non-English site usually gives you only one option to translate it into English, but it’s still better than nothing. Now you can attract a larger international audience to [...]

Recently installed the J2ME text file reader, TequilaCat Book Reader, on my mobile phone to kill time during my daily commutes to work. Highly recommended for avid readers except if you’re driving of course Download TequilaCat Book Reader from Alexey Vdovichenko (aka TequilaCat)’s website, which is essentially a Windows application to create the necessary [...]

Despite the fact that attempting to load more than five MySpace pages simulatenously is often enough to make my trusty Opera browser gag and sputter, I still find myself browsing to the MySpace pages of electronic music artists simply because it’s still usually the first place to listen to the latest unsigned releases (e.g drum [...]

For those that still confuse Euro-house with proper techno, this post is really not for you Check out this 1:40 min video clip edited from video footage taken during Japanese DJ Takuya Kashiwada’s two hour set at the Under Water Bar Praha (Niigata) on 03 Nov 2007. I think it perfectly sums up the [...]

What do you get when you combine turntables, accordions, pianos and an assortment of drums together ? Instead of the expected cacophony from the distinctively different sound of each instrument, the end result actually comes off as an infectiously toe-tapping, head-bopping soundtrack - I simply love the cheery carnival sounding clockordian and the machinegun [...]

I saw a Before You Know It (BKYI) ad from Google Adsense not too long ago on my previous Blogspot site about learning Korean with free software and so went to the BYKI website to look for the advertised free download. And, no this isn’t a sponsored or affliated post Click this! Click this! Just kidding Transparent Language offers lite versions of its Before You Know It langauge learning software. There are wordlists for a total of 63 languages as well as additional user-submitted wordlists in BYKI ListCentral Beta up for free download. Languages range from common ones like French and Chinese to less frequently seen languages like Tuvan. (spoken in Russia, China and Mongolia) Each language download comprises an small downloader application which will then download 15 to 20 MB of data comprising of the actual application installer as well as the wordlists for that langauge. It does not download the actual application installer (around 12 MB) if you have already installed BYKI

Drivey by Mark Pursey is a cool application perfect for use as a screensaver or as a relaxation tool. The graphics in Drivey reminds me of those driving simulation toys I played as a kid back in the 80s. Watching the landscape go by really relaxes me The screenshots below don’t really do Drivey justice so download and give Drivey a test drive. Default setting Going home Before sunrise Tunnel vision My favourite setting Some useful keys for playing around with Drivey. Check out the other keys by pressing F1. F3 - Toggle dashboardEsc - Quit1 - Change environment to very sparse road2 - Change environment to tunnel3 - Change environment to city4 - Change environment to industrialH - Change coloursK - Toggle colour cyclingC - Toggle between 0,8,16 and 24 carsCtrl - Speed upShift - Slow down Download Drivey 0.15 (298k). MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:Russ Schwenkler’s Vexel Car Art & Photorealistic 3D Car RendersBMW Art Cars Nissan 2009 GT-R Wallpapers Forza Motorsport 2 Wallp

Been busy fixing www.downloadmunkey.net and thoo2.net last week. Somehow I exceeded Photobucket’s 25GB bandwidth limit last month, resulting in most images on my previous site to randomly disappear for the last few days. As a result, I switched to a Wordpress site at Dreamhost.com. You can get your own at 22.40 USD/~33SGD for 1 domain registration + hosting for 1 year with promocode DOWNLOADMUNKEY While fiddling with the Wordpress configuration, I downloaded quite a few plugins and I’ve compiled a list of useful ones that I’m using. I believe that Akismet should be compulsory for any Wordpress site and so doesn’t count in this list Subscribe To Comments - IMHO the most important plugin to install. Allowing readers to subscribe to your comments makes it much easier to follow conversations. To place the “Subscribe to comments via email” checkbox above the Submit button, check out Derek Punsalan’s post at 5ThirtyOne. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Fo

While there are many ways to learn your A.B.Cs, this must be one of the more unconventional and possibly the bloodiest method of learning the English alphabet.Clearly inspired by Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, Emperor of ancient Rome and allegedly an insane tyrant. His supposedly depraved character was the subject of the shocking 1979 film and now in this (literally) bloody Flash game from adult swim.Over in Viva Caligula, you control the mad tyrant himself as he cooks up some half-baked excuse that his fellow Romans have rebelled against his rule and then goes on a massacre of both defenseless civilians and heavily armed legionnaires alike, simply because he can.Armed initially with a lowly dagger, Caligula sets forth to collect 25 other weapons hidden in 7 different districts split into 97 zones (yes, I counted). The name of each weapon starts with a different letter of the alphabet which means that this cunningly-disguised educational tool actuall

While there are many ways to learn your A.B.Cs, this must be one of the more unconventional and possibly the bloodiest method of learning the English alphabet. Clearly inspired by Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, Emperor of ancient Rome and allegedly an insane tyrant. His supposedly depraved character was the subject of the shocking 1979 film and now in this (literally) bloody Flash game from adult swim. Over in Viva Caligula, you control the mad tyrant himself as he cooks up some half-baked excuse that his fellow Romans have rebelled against his rule and then goes on a massacre of both defenseless civilians and heavily armed legionnaires alike, simply because he can. Armed initially with a lowly dagger, Caligula sets forth to collect 25 other weapons hidden in 7 different districts split into 97 zones (yes, I counted). The name of each weapon starts with a different letter of the alphabet which means that this cunningly-disguised educational tool act

While there are many ways to learn your A.B.Cs, this must be one of the more unconventional and possibly the bloodiest method of learning the English alphabet. Clearly inspired by Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, Emperor of ancient Rome and allegedly an insane tyrant. His supposedly depraved character was the subject of the shocking 1979 film and now in this (literally) bloody Flash game from adult swim. Over in Viva Caligula, you control the mad tyrant himself as he cooks up some half-baked excuse that his fellow Romans have rebelled against his rule and then goes on a massacre of both defenseless civilians and heavily armed legionnaires alike, simply because he can. Armed initially with a lowly dagger, Caligula sets forth to collect 25 other weapons hidden in 7 different districts split into 97 zones (yes, I counted). The name of each weapon starts with a different letter of the alphabet which means that this cunningly-disguised educational tool act

A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests :DShe asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here's the steps if you're interested in doing the same for your site.Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we'll use ICOs here.Create a 16x16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor.Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon.After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon. Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn't allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you'll end up displaying Google Pages's favicon instead :DNow you'll need to login to Blogger and edit the Blogger XHT

A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests She asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here’s the steps if you’re interested in doing the same for your site. Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we’ll use ICOs here. Create a 16×16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor. Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon. After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon. Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn’t allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you’ll end up displaying Google Pages’s favicon instead Now you’ll n

Australian-based electronic music site Resident Advisor offers high quality recordings of exclusive mixes as free weekly podcasts. (registration is required). There are currently 76 podcasts in total with this week's mix by Michael Fakesch from the now defunct Funkstörung. Each podcast is a mix by producers from the house/techhouse/minimal genres ranging from the more established producers like Joris Voorn (RA.062) and Adam Beyer (RA.030) to names I haven't heard of, like Panoramabar resident Prosumer (RA.070) who did an excellent deep house mix last month.The older mixes were usually one hour long but recent mixes by producers like Prins Thomas (RA.074) spanned 2 hours 15 minutes(!) and Chloé (RA.073), Sven Weisemann (RA.075) both did ninety minute mixes.Excellent stuff if you're into more slower paced mixes of house and minimal techno that's all the rage in the electronic scene now. I find these mixes either too bleepy or too ambient for me so I'm sifting through the differ

Sandboxie, as its name implies, acts as a sandbox or virtual container in which your Windows application can be run without it writing directly to your registry or hard disk, thereby minimizing the risk of virus or malware infection. Developed by Ronen Tzur, Sandboxie is shareware but has no time limitation.The usual uses of Sandboxie are to surf the .NET or check your email in a sandbox for added security since any malware and trojans encountered will be trapped inside the sandbox. For me, I mainly use it to run trial applications and games that I download from the .NET, not so much for security purposes but more to minimize the chance of improperly written installers cluttering up the computer.© Ronen TzurWithout Sandboxie© Ronen TzurWith SandboxieFrom the above diagram, you can see that when your application is run under Sandboxie, all files and registry data which is usually written straight to the hard disk are redirected to a temporary storage area (sandbox). The data i

Tired of grinding just to see your character level up in a RPG? Why not try ProgressQuest instead?Everything essential for a best-selling RPG game are available in ProgressQuest : from killing foes, looting and selling of items, completing quests, upgrading of equipment and the all-important levelling-up. Just generate your character, roll virtual dice for the initial stats and you're ready to go. Fortunately, all the boring and time-wasting activities like killing, looting, bartering and completing pointless quests have been abstracted out so you will only need to sit back and watch your character charging into the killling fields to hack up foes, haul the loot back to the marketplace, upgrade his/her stuff and repeats the damn cycle over and over again.So what's the point of ProgressQuest? Frankly, I don't know either although it's quite addictive watching your character grow in power from an absolute wimp into a powerhouse with insane stats.Click here for my stats!I just run it

© Axis RecordsRecently found a three min excerpt of the video footage recorded from the Exhibitionist Mix (Feb 2004) by American DJ Jeff Mills aka The Wizard on three turntables. Tracks played in this video:Jeff Mills - AX-009F (Segment 3)Jeff Mills - Condor To MallorcaOliver Ho - Organic Synthetic© Axis RecordsThe full video for the Exhibitionist Mix, along with 3 other mixes on the Exhibitionist DVD can be bought from Jeff Mills's Axis Records online shop for 22 USD + 10 USD shipping (for Asia). After watching this short clip, I really feel like getting this DVD :) The footage for three of the four mixes can be viewed from three angles - front, top and side as well as slowed down or zoomed :)There's also a audio CD edition of the Exhibitionist Mix with 45 tracks as opposed to 32 tracks on the DVD available for 16 USD from the Axis Records store. I downloaded a copy of this video for offline viewing with the excellent donationware SDP Downloader which handles downloading o

Read this on the Friends of EML blog next week and have been playing with this nifty little Flash application for the whole of last week :)Orange Mixer allows you to arrange preloaded samples into tracks (max 16 samples per mix) and then apply effects to each individual track like fading and panning (switch to Advanced mode, add points and drag - a bit like drawing and tweaking Bezier curves in drawing applications). Each mix can consist of up to 20 bars which means a song can be up to close to 7 minutes for hip-hop or close to 4 minutes for drum n' bass.The included audio samples comprise drum, bass, percussion, music (piano, guitar), sfx, some really hair-raising vocals as well of some of the Chemical Brothers' bleepy electro stuff. Electro (above) and drum n' bass (below) mixesHere's my 1 minute long efforts :) - dnb and electro - hack jobs done in a few minutes which shows how easy it is to create your own stuff from the included samples even for a amateur like me :) Try my 30

Games Day Chicago 2007 must have (possibly) gone down in history as having the greatest number of Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine Primarchs on display.© Chris BorerThe first Primarch entry is of Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children by Chris Borer, who won the gold for Warhammer 40,000 Single Miniature.His entry is followed by a whopping six(!) honorable mentions featuring the Primarchs from various Space Marine Legions, which adds up to close to 40% of the 18 known Primarchs.© Nathan ComanseFerrus Manus of the Iron Hands by Nathan Comanse. My favourite among all the Primarch entries featured at Games Day Chicago 2007.© Tom SchadleLion El' Jonson of the Dark Angels by Tom Schadle.© Angela ImrieRogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists by Angela Imrie.© Joe OrtezaJaghatai Khan of the White Scars by Joe Orteza.© James CraigAlpharius of the Alpha Legion by James Craig.© Shawn WeltePerturabo of the Iron Warriors by Shawn Welte.BTW, the recently released Horus Heresy :

I present two different takes on the tower defense genre today. Not the freshest games though but still as detrimental to productivity as other tower defense games :) Onslaught 2The first game is Onslaught 2 by Gaby Vanhegan (see jayisgames review). In this variation of the Tower Defense theme, there are only four types of turrets - fast firing machine guns (blue), linked lasers (green), rocket launchers (red) and tazer beams (yellow).© Gaby VanheganTurrets can be upgraded in terms of damage, range and rate of fire separately. What's more, if you upgrade the damage of turrets to the max, it will also perform combos with nearby turrets with maxed out damage.To see which towers are in range for combos, press C to toggle the combo display - when you attempt to build or select a turret, turrets eligible for combos will be highlighted in yellow. The first turret to fire at the enemy triggers the combo so you may need to upgrade the ranges of some of the turret to activate the desired

Spotted a couple of freebies from Games Workshop from the past few weeks.Codex : Blood AngelsFirst up is the Codex : Blood Angels originally published in White Dwarf 329 & 330 (June-July 2007). Found out about this from Tabletop Gaming News since I didn't notice the little link over at Games Workshop US.© Games WorkshopThis 28 page official Codex for the Blood Angels replaces the previous Codex : Blood Angels which I believe was published in 1998.There's three pages of background information with the rest of pages comprising rules and army lists for Warhammer 40,000 games. No painting information or miniatures showcase in this Codex though.The artwork is also pretty much reused from Codex : Space Marines and the previous Codex: Blood Angels. At least the PDF is in quite high-resolution so you can enjoy photos of some nicely painted miniatures :)Download from Games Workshop US.Black Library WallpapersThe wallpapers section at the Black Library have been updated again with latest

A bunch of cute super-deformed avatars of the Warhammer 40,000 races from the Relic Forums done by forum member Dr Badman. Just remembered them when I visited the official Dawn of War - Adeptus Modificatus forums looking for the excellent DoWXP mod (currently version 4.02) by Riker2800.On to the avatars ... I like the Khorne Bezerker the most ;) Only the 18 featuring Warhammer 40,000 characters out of the 25 available are shown below.                        © Dr BadmanFrom left to right, top to bottom:Vindicare Assassin, Chaos Space Marine (Emperor's Children), Necron Warrior, Eldar Guardian, Tyranid Gaunt, Ork Grot, Imperial Guardsman, Chaos Horror, Grey Knight, Kroot, Ork Mega Armoured Nobz, Space Marine (Blood Ravens), Necron Warrior, Ork Nobz, Ork Slugga Boyz, Tau Firewarrior, Space Marine Terminator (Ultramarines) and Khorne Bezerker.The original avatars ar

Below are 5 of my favourites from the award winners for Baltimore's Golden Demon Awards 2007 on 23 June 2007.Winner of BOTH the Slayer Sword and Warhammer 40,000 Single Miniature - Natalya Melnik's Dark Angels Company Master. Natalya also won awards in the Warhammer 40,000 Squad and Warhammer Single Miniature and The Lord of The Rings Group or Large categories.© Natalya MelnikSteve Fields's Offal, Lord of Plagues, was awarded Gold for Staff Large Model category. A very unique looking Great Unclean One with Greek provocator-style gladiator armour.© Steve FieldsAndrew Wylie's Centaur Artillery Tractor named Forgeworld's Best of Show, is very impressive with the rusted, about-to-fall-to-bits look.© Andrew WylieScott Bowser's Harlequins is also a favourite because I love the new Harlequins miniatures especially the Solitaire and Shadowseer ones.©Scott BowserBeastlord and Retinue by Bennett Blalock-Doane, Gold winner of the Warhammer Regiment Category, is one of th

Saw this video clip of the original 1986 The Transformers : The Movie re-dubbed with the lines from the more recent 300 movie at The Meditation Chamber which reminded me of this 300-related post by gnome as well as the Ladybird Transformers books which I used to have (a long long time ago that is).This is Madness!No, this ... is ... Transformaaaa!!!I've found a site where Derik Smith provides nice scans of these mini Transformers books written by John Grant with illustrations provided by different artists. Each was 40 to 50 pages in hardcover. I used to own Transformers : The Movie and Megatron's Fight for Power although I have absolutely where they are at the moment :(  Images scanned by Derik SmithOther books available:Autobots' Lightning StrikeAutobot HostageAutobots Fight BackLaserbeak's FuryGalvatron's Air AttackAutobots Strike OilDecepticon HideoutDeceptions at the PoleDeceptions UndergroundYou may also find something of interest at this other site by Steve-o Stone

A couple of Index Astartes PDFs detailing the history and doctrine of two Space Marines chapters in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, namely the Blood Angels - one of the First Founding Legions and the the Flesh Tearers - one of the successor chapters of the Blood Angels. These two PDFs were (supposedly) released in conjunction with the recent availability of the entire range of Blood Angels miniatures in the UK online store (I always thought the Blood Angels range were available for online purchase but I might be wrong ...)The fluff for the savage Flesh Tearers Chapter is quite interesting - currently there are only 400 (and dwindling) Space Marines (usually a full Chapter has ten companies of 100 men each) left in the Chapter due to losses attributed to the Black Rage inherited from their Founding Chapter, the Blood Angels. Due to the low numbers of active Space Marines, they have no reserves and each Marine is proficient in Assault, Tactical and Devastator duties unlike other more conv

Just a quick random post. I've just had word that Writers FM has been heavily featured inside Francine Silverman's newest book, "Talk Radio for Authors - Getting Interviews Across the US & Canada." Even though I'm actually in the UK ;) Interested? Buy the book by calling 1-877-BUY-BOOK, or visiting Fran's blog online at http://booktalkradio.blogspot.com/ Oh -- and I met Countdown co-host