February 2005 News

Yeah, not news - but this is the only way I can reach all of ye, so sorry about that.

Anyway. What do you guys feel about doing a group project sometime in the future? I can't say I have any ideas into exactly what, but something which includes is all making some sort of pixel art that can be fitted together.

Examples include things like a quilt, or a train or something along those lines. But those are terrible examples and I'm positive you can come up with something better.

So yeah, I'd like your thoughts on that.

On another note my tooth is killing me and I'm going to get some nutmeg for it.

So who's going to the deviantART Summit in Los Angeles, CA this June? Any of you pixel artists going to show up? It's in a jet hangar!

There's a feature length Wallace and Grommit movie on the way. Huzzah! If you're not familiar with the Wallace and Grommit films you should be ashamed of yourself.

In other movie news the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer can be found exclusively on Amazon.com.

While looking for textures I came across digitalthread.com, a handy site that has all sorts of tips for designers. There's a neat section on adding shortcut actions for common repetetive tasks in Photoshop and Imageready.

Whether you're a breakdancing fan or not you've gotta take a look at this insane breakdancing video (7MB).

Check eeeeeeeeet!

If you've played a first person shooter tactical game like Rainbow 6, Counter-Strike or SWAT you'll appreciate this funny little article.

One of the funniest non-animated shows to appear on network TV in ages is the critically acclaimed 'Arrested Development'.

This week The Onion interviews Mitchell Hurwitz, one of the show's creators.

For this week's "user-created" competition, The Screen Savers had a contest to use only MSpaint to create what was behind the mysterious orange door located on their set. 7 pm tonight, we shall see who wins.

It seems that plenty of hackers are going to try to ruin our Firefox. Yes, you heard that right. Stiennon (Vice President of Threat Research at Webroot) has spoken to the media telling us that he expects there will be spyware for Firefox by the middle of the year! While we sit comfortably with our "0 Found" Ad-aware scans, hackers are at work on a new generation of spyware.

"Firefox was written for the existing world of Internet Explorer exploits, but it has its own vulnerabilities that will be exploited," says Stiennon.

Google is now offering an alternative to MapQuest. Google Maps (beta) gives everything that MapQuest would in a better, easy-to-use interface (pretty nice design, too).

Try it out!

Everybody's competing nowadays. AOL has started beta testing its own new stand alone web browser [link]. Anyone with an AOL or AIM screen name can use it. However, instead of basing it on Firefox, AOL has based the browser on something geeks wouldn't expect: Internet Explorer. As if IE didn't already have enough loopholes, do we need a bunch that are labeled "AOL"? From reading reviews, AOL does the usual by loading your computer with spyware and adware upon installing the web browser. Skip this and Get Firefox!

The Onion is finally giving video games their due respect. Make sure to check out the fantastic interview with Sim-magnate Will Wright. Although I've never really played the Sims or Sim City or basically anything that Will Wright has made, I really appreciate what he's done for gaming. Here's an excerpt that really speaks volumes about his character...

One of the things we fundamentally decided when we designed the first Sims was that we wanted people to be able to put in their family, no matter what kind of family it was, without any judgments, like, "Oh, we don't allow those kinds of families in our games." In general, we try to make our games... not as politically correct, but as inclusive as possible. The same thing is true just in general gender issues. The only difference between males and females in The Sims is whether they leave the toilet seat up. Otherwise, they have the same social abilities, the same sexual options, whatever. The idea is that games should promote some sort of gender equality, especially in a game like this, where players are meant to read in and become the authors.

Read on...

Finally! Valve announced today that the crowbar and some other goodies will be available for Half-Life 2: Deathmatch sometime in the "next month or so". Now there's actually a reason to play that game. No multiplayer shooter is complete without some sort of melee weapon sneak attack and there's none better than the satisfying thwack of a crowbar.

Sony has finally announced March 24th as the release date for the $250 Sony PSP. The PlayStation Portable will be able to play games with advanced graphics, play music and videos, play certain movies (PSP exclusive) like FF:Advent Children, and more. Even though I am pro-Nintendo and anti-Sony, I can safely say that the PSP is delicious. I really hope that the DS can come out with some better games before the PSP's release.

Check it!

Added a zoom in/zoom out script to the pixel art detail pages so you can examine every last little pixel. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Also added color depth calculator for GIF files... we'll have a script run through and calculate how many colors were saved on each piece!

The little known Redmond, WA based "Micro-soft" has officially joined the fray against Yahoo and Google with its new search engine.

Also featured in the above article...

"Moore's law in action: Challenging a basic tenet of the semiconductor industry, researchers at Hewlett-Packard have demonstrated a technology that could replace the transistor as the fundamental building block of all computers."

Neato.

Try and ignore the floating eyes and just enjoy this great site about Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena. Fascinating stuff.

Note: I found this interesting link on the massive blog Fishbucket.

Brainsur at slashdot.org writes "Today Bill Gates visited Belgium to talk about the Electronic ID card introduced last year in Belgium as experiment. Microsoft announced that they will integrate the electronic identification into the Windows Software so they can deliver more security and privacy on the internet. The register has more news."

Click here for the Register article

A good time to switch to Linux, my Belgium friends.