Author: James

NPPL Houston Canceled

After much speculation, NPPL posted that NPPL Houston has been canceled due to ex-hurricane Ike. Which sucks, because I was planning on going to it.

Most of Houston is still without power. There are still problems with the water supply. And our $352 million stadium, who’s parking lot was going to host the NPPL, is broken. Great job, architects. And FEMA (aka the fun police) is using the parking lot for whatever they’re doing or not doing.

There will be no replacement for this event. The next event is San Diego, November 14-16.

They make no mention of any sort of refunds, though of course they are going to have to issue them. Plane tickets and hotel reservations are also going to need to be sorted out.

DM9

Yesterday, there was a photo of Ollie using what was believed to be a DM9, and last night, Dye posted a video of the new DM9, though I didn’t notice since I was too busy playing Spore, which is awesome by the way.

The video just consists of fading/focusing shots of the marker followed by the features, which most seem to be patent pending. Thanks for letting me know Dye; I was planning on copying that.

It seems to be a DM8 that’s been milled with a new eye holder thing. The milling, I think, looks kinda like the old Shocktech DM5, but with more and sleeker lines. They also finally removed the on/off that no one ever used.

It’s nothing really game changing or new, but it’s what you would expect from Dye.

Mythbusters Build 1100 Barrel Paintball Gun

Always ones to do something completely ridiculous to demonstrate something, Mythbusters build a 1100 barrel paintball gun to paint the Mona Lisa.

They used it, and a single gun attached to a robot, to show the differences between a CPU and GPU, or more precisely single-core to multi-core processors. It’s not really a good explanation, but it does look cool.

TechPB Apparently Has A New Site Coming

So, some guy emailed a video of his finding of the new techpb.com. First, I didn’t know TechPB had a site, nor have really ever paid attention to TechPB, and second, it’s located at http://techpb.com/Joomla/.

Probably wasn’t supposed to mention that, but it’s indexed by the Googles, so whatever.

Anyways, it’s a Joomla powered site. The application with the most known security vulnerabilities last year. The menus seem to be done in flash, an incredibly horrible choice.

There is no RSS feed, so I probably won’t be reading anything from them unless they get that done.

There’s a forum running Fireboard, which I’ve never heard of, but it seems pretty lacking.

They have some other sections like gear, game footage, opinions, and a manuals section. The manuals section seems decent, but there’s nothing too great or interesting.

In the video, it says that it used a different approach to ads, which is kinda true. You’ll various other sites with the stupid folding ads thing. It’s actually pretty annoying since it uses a good amount of CPU, and depending on your platform or browser, it’ll screw up the layout of the page.

The sites definitely not ready for public consumption, and they have a lot of work still to do, but I think it could be an okay site. I don’t think it’s going to be a major goto site, but it’ll have some following.

Update: It seems that they at least moved it, so that link doesn’t work any more. Also, changed the logo as per request via Mike, and actually did it since he asked in a totally cool way.