The awards for the Independent Games Festival were announced (a while ago). I knew this was happening sometime in March, but totally forgot to check the site again until yesterday. The Independent Games Festival is an outlet for independent game developers to show their creativity and get some recognition for some really creative games. These aren’t your $10 million budget first-person shooter games. The entries developed for this festival/contest are usually really interesting think-outside-the-box games.

If you’ve got a few hours to kill, I suggest you check out the list of winners. Most of the games listed provide a demo or even a full download-able version of the game.

While waiting for the flight to Phoenix last Saturday I was looking around the magazine shop/news stand in O’hare Airport in Chicago and discovered a new type of mentos… mentos sours.
They’re actually pretty good. They come in three flavors in a new green striped box. The flavors are sour apple, which doesn’t taste too different to the regular apple, lemon, which is noticeably more sour than the regular lemon, and watermelon which is very good!

I’m not sure if this is just a test market thing, or if these will start to show up in other places as well. Keep your eyes peeled for the new sour mentos!

I’m a little late posting this since I was on vacation, but Firefox 1.02 was released a few days ago. There aren’t a whole lot of changes, mainly security fixes and updates (which are always good to take care of). Here is what’s new according to Mozilla:

Firefox 1.0.2 is a security and stability update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

Get it while it’s still fresh!

Along the lines of my free games list post, I ran across another list of free windows software broken down into categories. This is a pretty extensive list covering just about everything you need your computer to do. Who knows the quality on some of this stuff though… I guess you get what you pay for.

Free Windows Software

Who would win in a Google battle between God and Satan? How about the pen vs. the sword? (turns out that the pen really is mightier) This site pits opponents against each other based on their rating in Google.

http://www.googlefight.com

Since I’m at Photoshop World in Las Vegas this week, I figured that I should post something Photoshop related. They showed us a cool new feature that is going to be in the next version of Photoshop in our opening keynote. I’m going to try and describe it as best I can, but it might be difficult without some sort of visual… but I’m going to try.

The new tool is a perspective tool. If you’ve got a photo of a something going off into the distance, the example they used was a hallway/art gallery. There was a wood floor, but they wanted to use the clone tool to remove something from the floor. Unfortunately, the perspective of the floor moving into the distance (wider boards to smaller boards) made it difficult to clone something from the clean portion of the floor (smaller and farther back) to the dirty part of the floor (larger and closer). This new perspective tool (or whatever it ends up being called) allows you to place a perspective grid on the floor, wall, or whatever you’re working on. Once this is set anything you do in that area will happen at the right size based on the perspective grid.

A really cool example they used in their art gallery demo was a painting on the wall in front was copied and moved around the corner to an area where they had the grid and it automatically changed the shape of the layer to take the correct perspective of whatever area you were placing it into. It was pretty cool!

They didn’t give any indication of when this would be out or even if it would be in the next version of Photoshop… definitely something to look forward to.

Update: I found out a little more about this new feature. It is actually called “Vanishing Point.” I’m not sure if it will be called that in the final version or not. One of the workshop instructors was the same guy who did the demo of vanishing point in the opening keynote presentation. The class, as a group, was able to talk him into doing a more in depth demo of the new feature. I was able to snap a (LOW res) camera phone picture of the demo. I enhanced it a little bit since some of the features are hard to see in the photo. I outlined the perspective grid in green. Once you lay out the first perspective grid, you can pull the edges up to cover more areas of the photo. In this demo photo, the instructor created the grid on the floor, but dropping in the four corner points and doing some small (drag and drop) adjustments and then was able to drag the grid up on the back and side walls keeping the same perspective. Once the grid is set, you can copy and paste, or use the clone tool in the gridded areas and everything you clone or move will automatically take the correct perspective of the area you place it in. If this doesn’t make any sense… take my word for it, it’s really cool!

I also learned that the new version of Photoshop will be announced “soon.” The instructors, ones who were either writing a book about it, or worked for Adobe, let a few things slip. Your guess to what “soon” means is as good as mine.

Google has released an updated version of their Desktop Search that I mentioned in an earlier post. The new version adds quite a few new items to the search results. There is also a new plug-in’s area to expand the searches even further. The new searchable items include:

• Netscape Mail / Thunderbird
• Netscape / Firefox / Mozilla
• PDF
• Music
• Images
• Video

I’ve had pretty good luck with the desktop search. It definitely works WAY better than the integrated Outlook search when I’m trying to find an old e-mail message.

This afternoon I made a call that I have been waiting a long time to make. I called the Mediacom 800 number and said, “cancel all my services!” It felt so good! Then after work today I stopped by the Mediacom offices and returned my cable modem. I did a little dance as I walked out… finally rid of Mediacom! No more poor service. No more constantly increasing rates (Funny thing is, I just got a letter today saying they’re raising rates again!). You’re probably now thinking to yourself, “Scott, you’re crazy… what are you going to do for TV and high speed internet?!?” Well, I’ll tell you. I just got South Slope IPTV.

My phone company in North Liberty is South Slope Communication Coop., which is part of Iowa Network Services, a coalition of rural phone companies in Iowa that have combined their powers to do things that some of the larger phone companies aren’t able to do (or at least aren’t able to do quickly). Right around the first of the year, South Slope started offering television services in addition to their phone service (which I already had) and DSL internet services. I played with the numbers and for about $12 more per month I could get more than seven times the number of channels I currently have (not to mention superior service). I jumped at the chance and signed right up to switch my internet over from Mediacom cable to their DSL and my TV to the their new IPTV system. Last night the the tech guys from South Slope came and got me hooked up.

The new TV services isn’t really cable or digital cable since it doesn’t come into my residence via coax. It’s probably closer to digital cable than it is to anything. The new video service is IPTV (no, not the place I used to work) Internet Protocol Television. It’s a new way to deliver video services that is slowly catching on as more phone companies are getting faster lines and jumping into video delivery. The video is delivered via the phone line instead of coax cable. The phone line connects to a box (with little blinky lights on it) similar to a DSL modem, and from there it sends the signal via an ethernet cable to the cable box which is hooked to the TV. The cable boxes (I should probably say IPTV boxes) are made by a company called Amino. I got the AmiNET 110 which is just a simple cable (IPTV) box. This company also offers a pretty sleep DVR system as well, the AmiNET500. Unfortunately South Slope doesn’t support this yet. They told me they’re looking into it. So now I have somewhere near 155 channels plus music channels and video on demand movies. So many channels I don’t know what to watch… not that I really watch that much TV anyway. It just overwhelming compared to the approximately 21 channels I had with Mediacom basic service before (that includes 3 shopping channels and 2 CSpan channels - so it’s more like 15 channels total!). I had a few issues getting my ReplayTV working, but eventually got it configured. So far the TV has been working well, and the internet has been flying… and best of all, it’s not Mediacom!!!

The Mozilla Foundation has released a small update to Firefox, mainly to take care of some bugs.

What’s new in Firefox 1.01:

• Improved stability
• International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode. (To show International Domain Names in Unicode, set the “network.IDN_show_punycode” preference to false.)
• Several security fixes.

Get it while its still hot!

UPDATE: Here is a good guide to updating Firefox to version 1.01.