Serious burn victims get a certain amount of pain relief from playing immersive VR games while they receive their treatment.
Some do not feel the pain at all anymore ! I think this is a really neat application of games to help people heal.
More information in this ArsTechnica article.
A few months ago I searched extensively on the net for something that offered me the same for my ebooks like what iTunes does for my music.
I couldn’t find anything similar – there were a few entries but nothing that managed them centrally.
Today while reading up on the Sony ebook reader (prs-505) which is now sold via waterstones, somebody in the comments dropped the name ‘calibre‘.
It turns out to be a free opensource ebook management software that does exactly what I want it to do. What’s more it is written in Python, so it’s compatible for Linux, mac OS X and Windows!
The only thing I would change is the name – what else can I blame for not finding it a few months ago ?
Sometimes I wonder whether I could come up with a business idea as cool as the one described story below. I think it’s actually not the idea that is missing, but the “cojones” to start up something like that.
This is a fascinating account on how one or more guys combine their online dating sites with real, on-the-ground advertising by using their brains to focus ultra-locally.
The whole blog story reads like a detective story, and that’s what it is.
[Update : I read the comments below the original article some more, and it’s more and more looking like this is a scam operation where the signs are used without identifying marks to score cheap targeted publicity]
Last thursday I bought Far Cry 2 for XBOX 360 from the FNAC.
Once again, the xbox 360 price was substantially more than the PC version (59,99 € versus 39,99 €). Still, I don’t need to buy the latest PC gaming rig to play it on a adequate level, with the XBOX the graphics are more than good enough for me (Ubisoft has developed a new graphics engine).
Far Cry 2 is actually not a follow-up to the first Far Cry story, the only link is the name and what it gives you : unfettered freedom in a large (50 square km’s !) area that is just crawling with bandits, jeeps, houses, more bandit, animals, pipelines and more bandits, all waiting for you to pass by and shoot, slash, fire and bomb them up in ways only limited by your imagination.
There are plenty of weapons to be unlocked, plenty of missions to go through and several ways to reach them.
Bandits are actually very hard to see, you don’t have an augmentation like infrared binoculars or some such to point them out to you. If they are taking pot shots at you and missing, you feel like a fool standing there trying to find them.
You can get an inkling of where they are when you get shot – the streak of red points to where the bullets are coming from. Also your target cursor turns red when it on a baddie (even though he may be hiding behind something).
My tips so far are :
My favourite weapons so far (I’m only 8% far or so, plenty of weapons to unlock) are :
I only saw one of these before, the original, a long, loooong time ago, but this collection of the latest one, the old one and all the variations is simply excellent.
Assembled by mr. Michel Vuijlsteke (and not Michiel as I wrote).
Aaah, that helped me a lot, a giggling session like that.
[I’m gonna upgrade the site today, so you might experience temporary interuptions while I do a backup of the existing pages and content and replace with the newest, latest WordPress version, version 2.6.3.]
A friend of mine recently said he wanted to start blogging, and was looking at WordPress to use as a blog. I quite like WordPress, as you may have noticed. I have been using it for some years now, but there are some caveats to be aware of for a blogger new to WordPress:
There are many more tips, but these are the ones that I practice.
This monday, my new headphone set for my iPhone arrived, courtesy of UPS.
It arrived in a largish box with a very small box in there, which contained the headphones and the ear fittings. You get two colors for the fittings : black and transparant. I opted to stay with the black ear buds. The smallest of the black ear fittings are already installed on them. The wire itself is a fabric cable that seems to be very flexible yet strong, and looks more like it is a woven thread than an audio cable. The microphone thingie with button is made of smooth polished lacquered metal.
You get a small black bag with the earphones to keep them in.
When you hold the headphones plus rolled up cable in your hand, they weigh almost nothing, except that the ear buds look like some glinting pieces of (red, in my case) jewelry. They do look to be very solid made, and give the impression of being indestructible.
I have to admit that I thought the gunmetal rouge would be more, you know, red, like they were shown on the website, where they are a bordeaux red. Instead it’s a more palish red, even going a bit towards the purple-pinkish side. And I don’t want to walk to work wearing pink earbuds ! But you can’t really see them when inserted, and my wife assured me I looked manly enough wearing them…
🙂
How do they feel in your ears ? If you are not used to inner-ear headphones, in the beginning they feel slightly strange. It also seems that I have two different ear sizes : the smallest plug fit tightly in my right ear, and was loose in my left ear. I tried them like that for a day or two, but the uneven fit quickly became an irritant feeling of unbalance : after half an hour I wanted to yank them out of my ears.
So yesterday I changed the smallish plugs out for the medium black ear plugs. They are bigger, but the feeling of imbalance vanished, and they still fit in my ear. What really surprised and disquieted me was the feeling of disconnection you then get, once the plugs fit correctly, with the outside world. The regular iPhone headphones are very loose in my ear, and if I keep the volume to medium, I can hear pretty much everything that is going on around me. These babies isolate you from the world, you feel more remote is how I would describe it. I wouldn’t wear them when running, although they certainly can stand up to the running, I would be too afraid of being run over by car coming from behind me when crossing the road.
The sound itself is everything as described on the V-moda website : crispy, deep, bassy, and since you are more isolated, you really hear even the smallest sounds. I heard cymbals or other instruments in familiar songs that I never really heard until I heard them via the vibe duo headphones.
I also had to turn down the volume on the iPhones – my usual volume is about two-thirds of the iPhone volume slider, and it is now set to about half. Turning the volume up to full I can stand it for a minute or two, but then it becomes very uncomfortable.
Conclusion : I needed a few days to get used to them, but they are very comfortable now, and the audio quality is sublime (mind you : this is not coming from an audiophile, but from a ‘normal’ guy). Your mileage may vary, of course. I can only say that I really enjoy them and the sound they provide me.
I just read this rather horrific childhood recollection from Exiled, a online news office that concentrates on Russia related stories.
Yasha Levine talks about his childhood memories of the russian youth camps.
Myself, I still remember the time I went to summer camp for two weeks. I was four or so and couldn’t read properly yet, so every day to get home I took a bus at random and hoped that somebody would tell me this was the right one or the wrong one. I was scared shitless of all the people I didn’t know. Most of the time I got it right, but I afterwards I had a big dislike for any more summercamps.
Yasha had a slightly worse experience. Here’s an extract :
We lived and slept in huge shacks partitioned into two—one side for the girls, the other for the boys—about twenty campers to each side. I was in the youngest category and we were forbidden to go to the outhouse at night. Instead, we had to use the half-dozen rusty metal buckets distributed in the isles everyday at bedtime. But they were only for pissing. Our handlers forbade us from “going big” in them and threatened to punish anyone that did. But it didn’t help much. Every other night some poor kid wouldn’t be able to hold his stool till morning and would sneak up quietly to the bucket—not out of respect for fellow campers, but for fear of getting caught—and squat right there in the middle of the room. Sometimes they missed and the piece of crap would lay there until morning, stinking up the room.
He goes into quite a bit more detail that’s worth reading if you want to be horrified at the traumas he undoubtedly got from those stays there. I say undoubtedly because his writing style when he describes his experiences is pretty raw there.
Hope you got over most of the traumas, Yasha. Reading yours makes me realise my experience was nothing troubling.
Yesterday morning while bringing the kids to school, Sam suddenly stopped at the school entrance, went back a few meters and picked up a metal ringlet in an S shape.
“Look dad”, he proclaimed proudly, “I found the S van Sam” !
I wrote this post you are reading now because I was commenting on a post by John Scalzi, a very good science fiction writer who also maintains the “Whatever“, a blog since before it was cool to blog.
In one of his posts, he gave 10 childhood nuggets, and the comments all went some way towards what are your earliest memories. Reading all these comments made me recollect what I still could.
This is what I wrote there :
My earliest memories are when I was somewhere around two years old : sitting on my little red plastic tractor and rolling down the neighbours driveway, again and again and again. I think my dad was mowing the lawn.
Also playing with something (a toy windup robot ?) on a (glass?) table with my dad sitting in the background reading his newspaper. That’s a precious memory for me, as my parents separated not long after and I never saw him again in real life. I just have this sense of this calming presence of his in a chair.
Oh and one other, although of this one I’m not too sure if I constructed it from hearing about it from my mother : being in the shower with him, having these long legs next to me, and reaching up and yanking on his apparatus and asking what it was for.
There are a few more memories since then that I can remember, of riding in the car to the airport, then sitting on his lap in front of the big steering wheel of our Citroen car, his arms guiding my arms. Never a face, but always a sense of being.
Lots of my posts here are non-specific or about technical things, but I figured that if I could post it there, I could post it here as well, for posterity. I imagine my sons reading this or other stuff later on perhaps. I find it becomes important for me that my sons get a feeling on how I became what I am now.
My dad died in Australia of a heart attack when I was 18. I had just sent him a letter that I was coming over to visit him. He never got it.
And damn straight I’m carrying some emotional baggage with me because of that. But that’s for me to carry.