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iPhone Gaming

Andi — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:06:51 +0200

A large number of items in Apple's iPhone AppStore are games. In fact there are so many games that it is hard to find the few gems there. That's why I want to share three games I enjoy on the iPhone.

Galcon

Galcon is described as “arcade action Risk with planets”. The game is very simple, you start with a planet that produces space ships, those ships can either be used to defend the planet or can be sent to capture other planets, which will then produce ships as well. The bigger a planet is, the faster it produces ships.

The goal is to capture all the planets of your opponent. The game actually exists for various platforms, but the touchscreen of the iPhone really enhances the action of the game.

I only played the free “Galcon Lite” version so far. The 3.99€ version adds a phone-to-phone and internet multiplayer mode as well as various other features.

Aurora Feint - The Beginning

The Beginning is actually a free promotion game for a not yet available iPhone MMO game. When the real game will have the same quality and addiction factor like this promo game it will be a huge success.

Aurora Feint The Beginning is a action/puzzle game which has some similarities to Tetris. You need to clear blocks displaying different element symbols by aligning three of them in a row.

What makes this game so addicting is that the developers added some kind of RPG system. By “mining” elements you gain experience points which then can be used to buy upgrades. This could be better skills (like earning more experience per cleared element) or special items.

Vay

Vay is not a new game. It was released 1994 for the Sega CD console and was now ported to the iPhone. And this is a huge advantage for the game. Unlike most games in the app store which are rather small and targeted to occasional players, this is a *real* game with hours of gameplay.

Vay is a classic Japanese RPG. You're the prince of a medieval country and on your wedding day, some attackers kill your parents and kidnap your wife. Only some mythical artifact can help you to get her back… nothing new here but the story is well executed and even comes with a few video cut scenes.

The developers took some time to make this game work well on the iPhone. All menu items to access your stats or to change your equipment use the standard iPhone UI elements. The game autosaves automatically whenever you leave it (or you get a call). For 3.99€ you can't go wrong with this title I think.

What are your favourite iPhone games? Please let me know in the comments.

Tags:: iphone,; games,; review,; rpg

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Infrared File Chooser

Andi — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:07:41 +0200

This is a tool I've written for Ding - my standalone mp3/video player.

The InfraRed File Chooser (or short irfc) is a remote controlled menu for selecting files and loading them by an assigned program. You can add as much filetypes and assoziated programs as you want. By using Perl or Shell scripts you can extend it's usefulness much more. The GUI is created with Perl::GTK and it uses RCU::Lirc to fetch the remote controllers commands.

Download: irfc.tgz

Changes

17.01.2006
- Added patch by Frank Schubert to fix the DROPREPEATS option
05.09.2002
- Added a patch by Kees Cook:
  - Event-based lirc (to not take 100% CPU)
  - Added “Back” command to move up in the directory tree
  - Small GTK clean-ups to reduce the size of unused space in the status window
  - Cleaned up GTK clist
  - Added file extension visibility
07.08.2002
- Option to change the listboxfont - Makes it more readable on TV

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DokuWiki Beginners Screencast #1

Andi — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:03:15 +0200

This weekend I started with something I wanted to do for a long time – a screencast series for DokuWiki beginners. The short 5 to 10 minute videos shall explain basic DokuWiki concepts to new users.

This first screencast starts where every beginner starts and explains how to create your first page in Dokuwiki.

The screencast has English subtitles to make it easier to follow my mediocre English pronunciation. The video is hosted at dotSUB which makes it possible to translate the subtitles in a very wiki like way. So if you like to make this video more accessible, help to translate it to other languages.

Remember this is my first screencast with audio so be gentle with your criticism . But I'm open for tips how to improve future ones.

I already made another screencast dealing with using links and creating new pages in DokuWiki. It's not transcribed yet but I hope to release it someday next week.

Based on the feedback I get, I like to do a few more of those screencasts in the future. So please let me know what you like to see explained about using DokuWiki.

Tags:: dokuwiki,; screencast

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Tip Jar

Andi — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:25:28 +0200

If you liked one of my posts, projects or other work consider giveing a small tip through paypal: Give a tip.

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Wanna meet?

Andi — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:28:00 +0200

There are two events in Berlin this month: Web 2.0 Expo and Barcamp Berlin. I will attend the latter, but not the Expo¹⁾.

Anyway, I live in Berlin. So if you are in town for the Expo (or Barcamp) and want to meet for a beer and some DokuWiki talk – just let me know .

Tags:: berlin,; meet,; event,; barcamp,; web20expo

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¹⁾ far beyond my budget and I have to work anyway

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Prepared for the cold Season...

Andi — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:55:38 +0200

No more cold feet for me. Beware of the killer bunnies:

Found them on ThinkGeek but bought them on amazon.de.

Tags:: montypython,; slippers,; bunnies

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Wishlist

Andi — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:33:40 +0200

Here are some things I'd like to buy sooner or later. It's mainly a list for my self, but if you want to help out just contact me

A 42” LCD or Plasma TV. HDTVready of course – about 2700€
XKCD Shirt: “Regular Expressions” – $17
XKCD Shirt: “Sudo” – $17
XKCD Poster: Height – $15
Navy Firefox Shirt – $15.69
Roomba Vacuuming Robot – $200
digg Shirt – $17.95
Tii-Shirt – $20
The End is near Shirt – $20
LibraryThing Shirt – $18.99
Arch Linux Shirt – $20
w00t shirt – 26€
8-bit Tie for the rare occasions where I have to wear a tie – $15

Amazon Wishlist

Here's my wishlist at Amazon Germany.

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Because everybody is doing it...

Andi — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:03:46 +0200

The new meme seems to be to blog about having no time for blogging and to post a desktop screenshot instead. At least that's what my peer group seems to think.

Very well then. Here's mine:

XFCE on a 2560×1024 dual screen setup with this background image: The Beams.

But of course that's not how I ever see it. Usually my desktop looks more like this:

Notice the clever layout of background windows for XChat and Jabber? It makes sure there will be no 5 minutes of continuous work because I will be distracted by every update

Okay, you're next. You know you want it. Share your desktop.

Tags:: desktop,; screenshot,; meme,; wallpaper,; dualscreen

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More DokuWiki plugins

Andi — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:25:37 +0200

DokuWiki can easily be extended through plugins. And because DokuWiki is an excellent framework in it self, doing so is really really simple.

Besides the pirate plugin I mentioned in my latest blog post, I worked on three other plugins in the last weeks. A quick description of what they do follows.

Oh and remember to use the popularity plugin from time to time to give feedback which plugins you use.

Amazon Plugin

The Amazon plugin isn't a new plugin. In fact it is one of the oldest available. I released a first version of it back in 2005. Since then I never updated it and though it still worked, it was missing a bit of polishing.

This syntax plugin allows you to easily embed some book info into your page by just feeding it the ISBN of the book. Or use Amazon's ASIN id to reference Video Games, Music CDs, DVDs or anything else sold at Amazon. The plugin will fetch data like title, author, publisher and the book cover via Amazon's API.

The new updated plugin now correctly deals with UTF-8 encoded data, can handle books with multiple authors, works with ISBN-13 numbers and can optionally display the cheapest price at Amazon. It supports the Amazon stores of Germany, France, Canada, Britain, Japan and the US. If you have a Amazon associate ID you can configure it in the config manager.

Bureaucracy Plugin

Some people (like me) use DokuWiki as a lightweight content management system for their website. A common task is to provide a form to make it easier for users to send feedback or to order additional information.

So far there where only two plugins providing a way to embed a form into a DokuWiki page. One is the contact plugin which is rather limited. The other is the form plugin which has a somewhat cumbersome syntax and some really crude code constructs. But I liked the idea to be able to define your form in wiki syntax.

So I started my own form plugin called Bureaucracy. It allows you to define a form with as many fields you like, while trying to keep the syntax as simple as possible. The plugin will take care of the form validation and sends the entered data to the designated email address.

Future versions may also have the ability to send data to a given URL, create a wiki page or store it in a SQLite database. Let me know what you would want.

SwiftMail Plugin

A reoccurring problem people seem to have with DokuWiki is that sending mails fails. We even have a FAQ page for it. The culprit is not having PHP configured correctly for sending mails. This is mostly a problem when running PHP on Windows.

The SwiftMailer library works around this by implementing its own SMTP mailer which can talk to a remote mail server without the need for a locally installed MTA.

The SwiftMail plugin integrates SwiftMailer into DokuWiki. Users can simply configure their ISP's mailserver (with optional SSL support and SMTP authentication) in the configuration manager. This should make running DokuWiki on Windows systems quite a bit easier.

Tags:: dokuwiki,; plugins,; amazon,; bureaucracy,; forms,; swiftmailer

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