Wow, impressive. That’s all I can say…

zedge.no is a portal for free (and paid for) content for your phone, and works all over the world. I’ve already managed to download (via gprs/wap) several free games, ringtones and themes.

The way it works (it’s all explained on the site once you’ve registered) is that you browse through the site, and add items to your account (basically like a shopping basket). You then use your phone’s gprs/wap internet connection to open their wap portal, login, and access your ‘basket’, to download the items to your phone. No cost to you other than whatever your phone provider charges you for wap/gprs access (which, in South-Africa, happens to be R2/mb as of rather recently, across all the networks…)

They even allow you to upload your own themes and ringtones and what not, which is probably how most of their content is free… (And possibly not licensed mind you… Hrm…)

So, click, choose, have fun.
Tell them I sent you. Heh.

A friend of mine, recently single (again and again and again), and recently ADSL’d, has been quickly getting into the whole online gaming and lan gaming (elsewhere known as a LAN Party) thing, as I did a while ago.

This got me thinking. (I know, odd eh?)

In the 8 years I’ve been in Cape Town, I’ve been to about 3 or 4 public lan gaming events, and about as much private ones. The public ones I picked up on www.langames.co.za back then. They keep a list of upcoming langaming events, costs involved, as a user you can opt-in to going to a lan game, etc. Quite cool, even though the interface hasn’t changed in years.

Other than the fact that these lan games are usually made up of about 40% battling with cabling/seating/power, 40% gaming and 20% sharing and copying if pirated warez, it’s still great fun when the gaming bit starts. Especially if you attend a 24-hour lan game. What is also nice is you get out of the house, and end up in parts of your town that you’ve never been to in all likeliness. Special mention here to the guys at www.lan2k.com, as they recently held a lan game at the Castle of Good Hope, and they’re trying to arrange to have one on Robben Island. Excellent idea. Good luck guys!

The gaming community in South-Africa is big. Most of the more serious gamers all have some kind of South-African-Broadband connection (ADSL, iBurst, Sentech‘s mywireless, whatever. None of them are really broadband anyway… See www.myadsl.co.za for reasons why), and most of them either actively sit and chat in IRC channels somewhere, or actively post on one or more gaming-related web forum sites (I’ll be listing the ones I know of at the bottom of this entry.).

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I haven’t read something quite as funny recently…

Lovely stuff. It’s a review on the latest Lexus GS430. I don’t read car reviews, but this was hillarious and a good 5 minutes spent. Follow the link to the UK Sunday Times. Make sure to read page 2 as well.

One of my Google Alerts this morning was on a review of a laptop that came pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux.

The laptop is for sale from linuxcertified.com. The model number for the laptop is LC2210D. The specs look pretty decent, and include a Centrino 1.80 Ghz processor, 512 MBs of RAM, Intel Extreme onboard graphics card (apparently these are not that great for gaming though…), 40 GB drive and a 14″ screen.

From reading the review and the laptop’s specs, it seems that linuxcertified.com managed to get the installation a bit wrong, with things like default settings etc. On the spec sheet it mentions that the S-Video port was not tested under Linux, and in the review it mentions that default settings like the mouse acceleration was too fast and that things like mp3 playback didn’t work. I suspect this is probably due to the fact that it’s a relatively new laptop with newish hardware components, and they likely did a vanilla install of Ubuntu and changed nothing in the settings for the front-end.

Perhaps Linux needs a proper non-interactive automated install system (Maybe there is one?) for similar hardware setups? Similar to those Windows CDs you get with your name-branded laptops (Dell, HP, etc), that end up putting a vanilla install of Windows on the laptop, with all the hardware specific drivers and tweaks loaded…

*shrug* Don’t take my word for it, go have a look at the review yourself. I don’t have one of these laptops, so couldn’t tell you myself.

Did I forget to mention that it’s only $1089 (on special ’till 15th of May 2005) for the Celeron version?

Update 2005-05-13: Another Google Alert this morning pointed me to this article at Tom’s Hardware about HP working with the Ubuntu Linux project (my current Linux flavour of choice) to come up with

an operating system that is tailored to work 100 percent with the hardware – including wired and wireless network, Bluetooth IrDA and IEEE1394

. That’s what I was talking about. Excellent news.

A website I’ve been checking regularly, even though I can’t buy anything from them (They ship to US addresses only), is www.woot.com.

The concept is really pretty simple. Have an item (anything from blenders to hifi sets to car radios to shavers) on sale, for a good (better than retail) price, for 24 hours only. First come first served (or until stocks last). 24 hours later, no more of the old item, and a new item makes its appearance. $5 shipping for most (if not all) items, and there’s usually (if not all the time) a good guarantee/warranty on the items. That’s it. Great stuff I think! South-Africa needs something like this.

The other day I came across this website that showed pictures of some person called Gibby’s “Game Room”. It’s more like a game house. I then found a mention of it on Joystiq. It’s a wonderful nostalgic look back into the history of gaming. See if *you* can name all the consoles in that third pic?

Today, once again at Joystiq, there is mention of Arcade Heaven. It’s basically some guy’s own home arcade, with classics like Joust, Zaxxon and Space Invaders. (If you’re old enough to recognise the actual arcade boxes, then you’re older than me…). They even have a coin change machine and a sweet-catching machine (like those teddy-bear catching things…). Oh to spend just 10 minutes in that room.

Ah yes. The online comic. What a wonderful way to start they day.

Dilbert. Garfield. UserFriendly. Penny Arcade. There are so many.
It first starts with you bookmarking all the links to your favourite online comics, so you can read them sequentially. Then you become clever and put them into one bookmark group in Firefox, and click the “Open in Tabs” button, to open them *all* in a single second. It all sounds kind of tedious no?

Yes it is. So then there was Dailystrips, which allowed you to create a config file with your favourite comics in, use a cron entry to fetch your comics daily, and you could read them at your own leisure, and you’d have a handy archive to boot.

And then I found The Darkgate Comic Slurper. This handy website util allows you to tick the comics you read, and it creates an RSS feed url for you, to stick in your favourite RSS reader, to get your comics delivered to you via RSS. They don’t have as many comics on their list at Dailystrips does, but I found that the ones I read were all there…

So what’s *your* favourite web comic?