Published on August 30th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under programming | No Comments
A company called Fromdistance has released a program for Series 60 Symbian cell phones, which allow you to use your phone as a Web Application SMS Gateway.
Basically you download the Series 60 (Symbian) client and install it on your phone. It will check their server for any “queued” messages, and if it finds any it will send them out – so the message will come from your number, at your expense (or for free, if you have free SMSes).
You can “queue” message by sending an HTTP POST to their server, which means you can implement it into a website, intranet, Facebook App, etc.
It can also check your received SMSes for a keyword or phrase, to flag them as “inbound” messages, which are then sent to their server and forwarded on to your web application.
That allows your web app to communicate with people via SMS, and allows them to communicate via SMS with your web app.
See FromSMS
Hope someone found this interesting, helpful, or financially beneficial (in which case feel free to share with me).
Published on August 27th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under Uncategorized | No Comments
I saw this on my way home from work – it’s a Lamborghini Countach. I want one. When I was younger a had toy of one next to my bed, it was my dream to own one (but white).
More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Countach :)
Published on August 27th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under Team Fortress 2 | No Comments
A scene from “The Dark Knight”, reenacted by Team Fortress 2 :D
Published on August 25th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under Quest for Glory, games | No Comments
I finished the “Quest for Glory 2” remake a couple of minutes before it was released, which was rather fun – chatting with people on the internet about it, but not being able to say anything, haha. We did manage to find the download URL before it was officially published tough – but only by a few minutes.
I didn’t end on as high a score as I could have, but I did skip a few quests. Now to go back and start with a new character in Quest for Glory 1 :D
Published on August 25th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under games | No Comments
AGDInteractive have released their remake of Quest for Glory 2, so go and download it!
I’m providing one of the download mirrors, so I got the game a day early – we were told we’re allowed to play it, but not release it or any information about it until the official release. I grabbed a few screen shots, so you can see the difference between the original and the remake, which are below.
The game looks great and yet still feels just like the original. They’ve added an option to make navigating the alleys easier (note, this is an option you can choose, the original style is still there). Personally I’ve found fighting rather frustrating, but maybe I just miss the original Quest for Glory 1 style (where all you really had to do was press “up” to attack, and occasionally dodge).
This game is DEFINITELY worth playing, even if you’ve never played the original – though I do think it would be much easier if you’re importing a characters. There are also a few easter eggs, such as Al Emmo making a guest appearance ;) Maybe I’ll write a separate post about the easter eggs.
Published on August 22nd, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under games | No Comments
For those of you who don’t already know, I’m a huge Sierra “quest game” fan – my favorites being the “Quest for Glory” series. The problem is, these game were made ages ago, and feature very low quality/detail graphics, so aren’t as fun as they could be:
Quest for Glory 1 – Original
Anyway, a long story short, the first “Quest for Glory” was remade featuring much better graphics and mouse support, but nothing was ever done for “Quest for Glory 2″.
Quest for Glory 1 – Remake
A group called AGDInteractive Studios (who re-made some of the “Kings Quest” games) have been busy re-making Quest for Glory 2, and it’s due for release very soon. The exciting part… I know when the release date is, and I’m going to be providing one of the mirrors for the download :D Which probably doesn’t mean much to anyway, but it’s pretty cool to be involved, even if only in a very small way.
So keep checking for more news on the release ;)
Published on August 17th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under Uncategorized | No Comments
I spent the morning sorting out all the stuff on my computer – I wrote close 20 DVDs, and now have 43 GB more disk space free, but what a mission.
I’m in the process of ripping all of the DVDs I own to “.avi” so I can just watch them off my hard drive, but it turns out I own 30 DVDs… I thought it was closer to 10 – who knew I was that rich. Anyway, I’m having second thoughts about ripping them because of the disk space, and time, it would take. On the other hand, it saves having to look for the DVD I want to watch (and frees up my DVD drive, if I need to use DVDs/CDs while watching).
I haven’t ripped the last few music CDs I’ve bought to MP3 either, so I spent some time doing that – I own something like 40 CDs… which is quite frightening. Once they’re ripped I normalize them – so it’s a fairly lengthy process in all. What’s ironic is that I’m going to be backing up all my MP3s to DVD (despite having the original CDs), so that I wont need to rip them all again should anything happen to my hard drive – so I guess I’m really just backing up the time it took to rip them.
I still have another 10 DVDs or so to write, possible more – not to mention the DVDs I need to write for other people. I’m considering hiring a DVD-writing-slave to do all this, and all my backing up, for me.
Stupid computers, life would be so much simpler without them. So much to listen to, so much to watch, so much to read, so much to backup.
Okay, that’s the end of my rant. At least I’m (mostly) harddrive-crash-safe, and have more disk space. The weather outside is awesome, I should’ve spent the day at the beach.
Published on August 15th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under Uncategorized | No Comments
I didn’t think much of these videos by their titles, but they’re insane.
The first shows they’re able to easily cut objects out of a video – as if they were filmed on a blue/green screen – without having to cut out the object in every frame. It’s called the “Interactive Video Cutout“.
The second shows how videos can be enhanced by using photos. Basically photos are higher quality, and thus more detailed, than video footage. By combining the two, they’re able to “upgrade” the video quality. This is the really insane one, personally it seems too amazing to be true, but anyway: “Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene” (more info here).
Now if only that software was available for download… I would spend hours playing with it.
Published on August 15th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under this site | No Comments
I FINALLY got around to changing the theme on my blog… I guess I was kinda inspired by last month’s webstats – so I may as well give my visitors something slightly more pretty to look at.
It’s a modified version of a free theme, and I got Michelle to make the new header – thanks Michelle! :D
Published on August 10th, 2008 by Hypn. Filed under movies | No Comments
My brother and I went to watch The Mummy 3. We both really enjoyed the first two, but knew better than to expect too much from the third one. Nothing could have prepared us for such trash. I was considering walking out, about 15 minutes into it, so after my brother suggested doing so it didn’t take much to convince me. It’s not wonder Rachel Weisz didn’t want anything to do with it – I actually admire her more for that.
“She speaks yeti!?!?” – lame.
