Tycho from Penny Arcade pointed me in the direction of Iron Dukes, the Best Web Browser Game from the 10th annual Independent Games Festival. It's really an excellent collection of mini-games with fun mechanics, amusing art and some pretty great item descriptions.

I saw a couple of nice YouTube videos on Gertrude's livejournal when I was checking for the new Platinum Grit. Unfortunately it isn't out yet, but we do have a video for all cat owners, and a kinda groovy hip hop song called Thou Shalt Always Kill. There's also an excellent clip of the latest stunt from www.ImprovEverywhere.com, Frozen Grand Central.

There's a pretty amazing video on YouTube of the four mad days of work three graphic designers went through to recreate the WW2 Omaha Beach landing for the BBC program Bloody Omaha. They used themselves as actors, running all over the beach to provide raw footage, then stitched it all together digitally and added explosions, smoke and virtual props to complete the effect. Amazing.

The recent big news in the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray format war is that Warner Brothers will no longer be releasing movies for both formats, and will join Disney, Fox, MGM and Sony in Blu-Ray exclusivity. This announcement prompted New Line to follow suit, with HBO following shortly after. Engadget has news that Universal's exclusivity contract has expired, and Paramount isn't looking to stick around either. Most foreboding for HD-DVD is news that the porn industry is also thinking about heading to Blu-Ray, as industry support surges for the format.

I suppose I feel good about this news, as the war between the two formats has made making the step to HD a right pain in the ass. I've heard that HD-DVD was cheaper, more open and had a superior menuing system, but Sony's marketing power is undeniable. I started getting an idea of which way the wind was turning when I started noticing small Blu-Ray sections in JB HiFi, Blockbuster and even Myer last year, with no corresponding HD-DVDs in sight. Having a Blu-Ray drive in every Playstation 3 is also a massive advantage, particularly now that PS3s are actually being sold. Players will have to get a lot cheaper and be region free before I buy one, not to mention that I'll need an HD TV to enjoy the show properly, but there seems to be a faint, blue-colored light at the end of the tunnel.

When I was a kid, Sir Edmund Hillary was one of my heroes. He was the first man to climb Everest, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, and spent much of his time afterwards improving life for the Sherpas in Nepal. He was also a New Zealander, which makes him probably my country's most famous hero. He passed on today, aged 88. I imagine he's fighting evil in another dimension, or more appropriately, climbing new and exciting mountains in another dimension.

My Queensland jaunt is over, and I'm back in Sydney. It rained a ridiculous amount when I was up there, which tended to make our beach and poolside plans a bit of a mess. We fell back on eating, movies, shopping and visiting friends. Visiting was usually combined with more eating, which perhaps explains why my work trousers don't seem to fit very well any more. On pretty much the only sunny day up there, Alicia managed to pry me out of bed and get us along to Sea World, which was great. It's pretty hard to dislike dolphins, sharks and rollercoasters, particularly when immersed in a sugar-fueled pulsating cloud of ecstatic children. When Elmo and the rest of the Sesame Street crew came on stage at Sesame Street Beach, I was sure some of the kids were going to explode with joy.

Now that I'm back in big smoke and have put the horrible Jimojo hotel wifi behind me, I can continue my gaming rig research. I've almost made a decision on the CPU, but I'm going to wait until benchmarks for Intel's new 45nm chips hit the net. There's a good rundown of the range on the Tech Report, which includes their prices, which look extremely competitive. Poor AMD.

Merry Christmas everyone. I'm on the Gold Coast for a couple of weeks, relaxing and seeing friends and family. I'll try and post some more info on my gaming rig quest, but don't hold your breath. Cheers.

Since I'm thinking seriously about buying a new gaming rig in January, and two of my friends have been asking about video cards and CPUs, I did a bit of research on the subject. It turns out PC technology is in a weird place right now, which makes building a new system a bit tricky. I started with video cards, which are the heart and soul of any good gaming machine, and found that nVidia are still top of the heap. This is fine with me because I've always liked their cards, but their 8800 range is confusing as all buggery at the moment. The big problem is that they've just launched the sexy new G92 chipset, but instead of creating a new line of high end, midrange and budget cards, they've scattered the new cards amongst the existing G80-based range. We've got the old 8800 Ultra, the 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS cards, and we've got the new 8800 GTS 512, the 8800 GT and the 8800 GT 256MB cards, and their performance isn't easy to rank. Anandtech has an excellent review of them all, but I don't quite agree with their final ranking, particularly as it doesn't look like they had a GTX in their tests. The Tech Report does include a GTX in their rundown, and they look at SLI configs as well, so I think I'm going to go with their numbers (fastest on top).

If you want the fastest video card around and money is no object, the Ultra still rules the waves, even though it's old. The GTX is just a teensy little bit better than the new GTS, but it's a lot more expensive, which makes the new GTS a much better purchase. The GT is still a good card if the new GTS is too rich for your wallet, and it's good to note that if you're in the market for a new GTS, avoid the 640MB or 320MB models - they're the older, G80 based cards. Personally I think I'll grab the GTS 512, although I'll have to wait and see how it's priced in Australia, and how available the cards are from local retailers.

BoingBoing has the excellent story of how a creative bloke called Jason asked Neil Gaiman to help him propose to his girlfriend Maui, at a book signing in the Philippines. It worked of course, even though Neil had to tell Maui a few times to actually read what he'd written. There's also a video of the sweet moment, which makes me smile all the way down to my sub-cockle area.

There's a fabulous mess erupting in slow motion all over the net about Western Digital blocking about thirty file types on their network drives, including AVIs, MPEGs and MP3s. The WD support database even has the nice full list, which has just about every common media file type on there. Obviously someone at WD has been kicked in the balls by a media company rep and gone crazy, implementing this braindead copy protection scheme and garnering his company a tornado of embarrassing publicity. It's a mistake on so many delicious levels too - legit AAC files bought from iTunes can't be stored, Quicktime movie trailers can't be saved, and AVIs from Grandma's camera are rejected. The device has no knowledge of whether a media file is authorized, so it blocks all of them. We've certainly seen other examples of hardware overriding a user's decisions, but never one so clumsy.

I've started drinking a bottled water recently, which makes FastCompany's Message in a Bottle feature on the bottled water industry particularly interesting. It's incredibly popular stuff, which is almost certainly a good thing for a world affected by obesity and fast food, but is it really worth it to fly water all the way from Fiji to New York? I suppose it's all a matter of taste in the end, which is why I like my water with just a touch of flavour. Lemon, pineapple and kiwifruit are great, mandarin and boysenberry are not.

There's a pretty amazing article on Rolling Stone called How America Lost the War on Drugs, with a wealth of historical info about the US government's famously expensive waste of time. It's a really hard problem, but there are a number of what-were-they-thinking moments in there, like the crusade against medical marijuana being run while the rise of meth was ignored. I saw loads of meth users in downtown Vancouver when I lived there, and they were gaunt, horrible scarecrows, jittering and grinding their teeth. Don't do it kids - it's a horrible drug. Anyway, let's hope that the next bunch of puppets that land in the White House might stop making the same mistakes. Yeah right.

You've probably already seen this already, but Time Magazine's What the World Eats is pretty nifty. It shows the weekly food haul for fifteen families from around the world, and unsurprisingly some spend more than others. I also like the people themselves - so many different faces, expressions, forms of dress and environments.

There are a lot of great PC case mods out there, but Datamancer's Steampunk Laptop is worth a special mention. He gets extra points straight away because it's a laptop, and the brass fittings, wooden frame and violin-style F-hole speakers are all superb. It uses a clock-winding key to switch the machine on, and even has a quill-pen holder in the wifi card. Damn, that's some fine work, my good man.

Exile pointed me in the direction of Crayon Physics Deluxe, a 2D puzzle game that looks beautiful. Watching the video is probably the best way to see what the game is about - when drawn, objects fall, tilt, roll and bump, interacting with the environment in a way that seems sprinkled with magic fairy dust. Get the circle to the star, solve the puzzle. Great stuff.

Empire magazine has posted the first real, official picture of Heath Ledger as The Joker from the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight. While he retains the dapper duds of Jack Nicholson's earlier film portrayal, he's covered in grime and filth, which to me makes him less of a cheery, wacky villain, and more of a John Wayne Gacy baby killer. It bodes well for the next installment in the new Batman series, and continues the dark, gritty look of Batman Begins, a movie I liked a lot. Tim Burton's vision was great, but it was too theatrical to really get under my skin. I also liked the character of Bruce Wayne so much more in BB, because he was a real dick - a rich, spoiled, drunken wanker, which is a much better cover for Bats than a serious, focused businessman. The new film is due on the 18th of July 2008, and obviously I'm quite excited.

The NY Times has an interesting article on Rick Rubin, the bearded, guru-esque co-head of Colombia Records. Rubin sounds like a smart guy, with the right kind of mind to institute change in an industry that, to be honest, has been slouching towards its doom for quite a while now. His best idea is to offer an enormous networked music library to consumers, reachable through all kinds of devices for a monthly subscription fee. If the library was big enough, the cost low enough and the access ubiqituous enough, that might just work. It would probably rely on the player to be connected to the library to play anything, but with tech like Wimax on the horizon, that might be possible. Satellite radio runs on a similar model already, and it seems to be doing quite well.

A lot of the article focuses on Rubin's ability to pick successful musicians, and produce successful (and often ground-breaking) albums. It's such a cliche to imagine a record company guy seeing a show and saying "these guys are going to be huge!" but I think there's definitely a vital place for gurus and filters, particularly as now we have access to such an unimaginably large collection of media. Rubin's library will need it, and as long as someone like Rubin is running it, it will be great. If it's co-opted by soulless, tasteless, money-grubbing worms, then the whole system will probably implode. Again.

CNN has a cool video (ignore the ad) of an experimental exoskeleton being developed by Sarcos in the states. In it, the demonstrator lifts hundreds of pounds of weights with the harness, while remaining nimble enough to catch a bouncing soccer ball and even dance. The one glaring drawback is that it's tethered, and appears to be powered via the tether. This is cheating a bit, being able to power an exoskeleton like this is one of the major hurdles to its development. Still, it doesn't seem to be ripping the guy's limbs off everytime I tries to do anything, which is a positive step towards power armour.

There are 15 Unfortunately Placed Ads on Oddee.com that are worth a chuckle or two. The "remember your first girlfriend" one is probably my favourite, just for its enormous levels of wrongness.

I've been meaning to post a few YouTube vids for a while... so here they are.

• First we have a comparison of WoW dance moves and their real-life sources. The Napoleon Dynamite one was pretty obvious, but apparently Orcs love MC Hammer.
• A bunch of crazy cool boffins got their seven foot Tesla coils to play The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy with no speakers - just the 100dB+ noise of the 12 foot sparks. Now this is science!
• Slowing things down a bit, we have a series of interesting instructional videos of Google Sketchup, a 3D sculpting program that seems to combine ease of use with power and flexibility.
• More clever boffins posted a demo of Content-Aware Image Sizing which seems to allow all kinds of irregular resizing that I would've previously called extraordinarily difficult. They even manage to smoothly remove a person from a shot in a matter of seconds right near the end.
• Super Deluxe have done a great ad for Douche, the fragrance for all those wankers you see at wine bars.