BPDW.COM

So it’s been almost a month and I still can’t find any mention of how Mac people can get their Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl on. I spent a few minutes last night downloading everything and putting it in the right places. Here’s how you can join in. All the items are free. You will need an Intel Mac [for now, at least] to run ZDoom.

Get the latest ZDoom build from this forum thread, the epicenter of Mac ZDoom development. [EDIT 20090923: The download link on the forum post is currently unavailable; check there for the most current version, but here's a mirror of the one I used to get this working.] Ignore the bleatings of “Get a real computer” from entrenched Winbags.
- Unzip the archive and put ZDoom in Applications or wherever. Start it once and note the plaintive wailing that you’re missing an IWAD:

Get an IWAD so ZDoom will run. I used the Freedoom Complete IWAD. Take the doom2.wad file from that archive and put it in [your home directory] > Library > Application Support > zdoom. You just need that file and it needs to be in that folder, not a folder inside that folder.

Get Urban Brawl from Mancubus. It comes in an archive with a bunch of other files that make it ready to run on a PC. The only file you need is action2.wad, you can scrap the rest. [But while you're there, you should grab Action Doom 1 too.]

Okay, now start ZDoom. Did it complain that it couldn’t find a Doom WAD? No? Great! You put it in the right spot. Now click on “Show WAD Options,” click “Add” in the tray that slides out, and navigate to whereever you put “action2.wad.” Your WAD options should look like this.

Click “Launch” to start busting heads. If you get a terminal window, you probably chose more than one WAD file. You gotta pick one at a time.

I don’t know how well this will work with other Doom source-ports like PrBoom, because the author clearly wrote it with ZDoom in mind, or else I’d try it with the Wii too. Also, there are some dark spots I’m not sure are supposed to be so dark, but I played up to where !SPOILER! Haggar joins you last night and it was very very playable. Nonetheless I would love refinements from the audience, if there is one. I might have just packaged it all up myself, but these components all come from completely different sources and asking permission is tough.

Feel free to ask questions here in comments, I will try to reply [in comments] as time and intelligence permits.

EDIT 20090924: Updated link to Freedoom IWAD — thanks Gary!

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I feel this Best Buy pricing phenomenon is best described in the terms of an Infocom text game:

> LOOK BLUESHIRT
A thin trail of spittle glistens on his chin.

> LOOK MEMORY CARDS
They are all Sandisk SD memory cards. One is 2GB, one is 4GB, and one is 2GB Ultra High Speed. Which one is the most expensive?

Okay, this kind of wandered a bit, but you get the idea.

Tags: money, SD, retail

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!!! WARNING !!!
January 6, 2008 — This takes any 10 or 13 digit number and URLs it.  It broke my flickr links for a few days there.  So if you’re using this with QuickPost, maybe don’t use this.  I will work on a better solution in the coming days and weeks.

We now return you to the original pitch.  -B.
Ever wanted to blog about books, but not interested in giving any money to The Website That Sells Everything?

I work in a library and I want to encourage the borrowing of books through my library and others like it. I am not the only one. It will take a little time to develop or cobble together something that will serve as a versatile and media-rich alternative to the plugins that stick splashy ads for The World’s Biggest Bookstore all over your blog. I hope to explore that in 2008.

Today, though, I got all inspired by Banas’ adaptation of his favorite WP theme to include 2.0 widgets:

If you entertain fantasies of there lurking somewhere, somewhere, a theme, widget, or addon that will spontaneously uncork the fountain of wisdom you’ve been waiting to pour out onto the internet – well, please don’t stop fantasizing on my account – but the only thing that’s going to uncork that fountain is you.

And Banas was right. So I started small, by bastardizing Daniel Coe’s ISBN to Amazon Link WP plugin. Daniel’s well-formatted code made it rather simple to change the Amazon URL his script creates to a simple WorldCat link, like the one you see here to my favorite book, Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy”: 0575061596.

It will do this with any 10 or 13-digit number. That means if you put a ten digit [i.e. US or Canadian] phone number in a blog post, it will turn it into a WorldCat link unless you put the area code in (parentheses) or something. It also means that if leading zeroes cause the number to be other than 10 or 13 digits it will probably be hosed, so count the digits.

Unfortunately, right now, this only makes links to WorldCat, a database of OCLC member libraries. WorldCat, by its membership nature, doesn’t index all the world’s libraries, but it’s a start. You could print the resulting page and take it to your local library, where a staff member will glean the knowledge they need to get the book to you.

Thanks, Daniel, for making your plugin available under the GPL.

Download it here: WorldCat Wordpress Plugin [16K ZIP file, should work OK with OneClick Install]

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Well, we lasted almost nine months with no TV in the bedroom, but it was getting to be about time to be able to lie in bed and watch Curb — I mean, Trading Spaces. And so we are jumping on the LCD bandwagon — the cheapest one of its size by a country mile that, should it not quite live up to our expectations, we can actually return to a brick and mortar store over here. [We could've saved $20 and bought one from a leading online retailer, but I hate doing wholly virtual business. I once paid far too much for the first commercially available mp3-cd player, an off-off-off-brand that arrived dead.]

Using my patented customer research method [googling "{manufacturer} sucks"], I found only one complaint — dealing with the manufacturer’s customer service, and if I have any problems with the set I’ll just take it back to the local Costco store. Case closed. Time to check order status again.

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At Costco tonight, noticed that the successor model to our faithful Olympus D-40ZOOM camera [the one that powered britainandabbey.com] runs $199.

We are unfortunately compelled to search for a new camera. Last year in the Bahamas, the D-40 lost its shutter button and the little ring around said button that controls optical zoom. After a few months of operating the camera with either no zooming or minimal zooming activated by sticking a sharp implement in the ring area and working the lever, I finally bought a replacement button/ring assembly from Olympus parts and installed it. At some point during this process I screwed up the sensor for the card door, so now the camera thinks the door is always open. I called Olympus about them fixing it: $179 plus shipping.

The D-580 costs $199 at Costco and about the same online. The advantage of buying from Costco is that if this happens again I can return the darn thing, in six months or three years [Costco's return policy is endearingly liberal].

[8/9/5: Comments closed to thwart spammers. This is by far the most comment-spammed item on the site.]

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• Preparation H “with Bio-Dyne”: Conan O’Brien’s secret wrinkle weapon, with a sinister-named yeast derived additive deemed too freakin’ awesome for American patoots
• Smirnoff Ice: Canadian version contains vodka instead of malt liquor — smoother and stronger
• 1990 NES Game Genie: initially available only in Canada because of Nintendo’s legal machinations
• WWE Pay-Per-Views in Movie Theaters: Okay, you can watch them in some US theaters now, but this trend started in Canada.
• Pepsi Max: In Canada, they [used to] sell a Pepsi that was, like, one-third Aspartame and one-third less calories. Sort of the precursor to today’s Pepsi Edge. They still apparently sell P-Max overseas.
• A Beer with Lance Storm: well, of course

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Ben & Jerry’s and PSU are using soundwaves to freeze ice cream in storage. The linked article estimates that the technology will be available for homes in 5-10 years. Sounds good to me, I’d love to be able to decrease my reliance on chemicals. This cell-phone-sperm-damage thing has me seriously spooked in general.

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…get the thumbs-up from Kevin Kelly.

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In the course of researching the Slansky book for that little Reagan rant, I discovered that OCLC is presently open-testing a solution much like the thing I asked for back in January: a search of all its member libraries’ collections. You search for a book on Google [author, title did it for me] and look for the result called “Find in a Library” [the OCLC site says they are working with Google to get the “Find in a Library” results listed at or near the top]. So I posted about it on MeFi, because that’s what it’s for, and someone else chimed in with this, which is also brilliant and not subject to possible discontinuation at the end of the month.

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I hope I don’t have to fight the local power monopoly over it, but I admire very much the idea of being not just self-sufficient, but providing more power to others. After all, the sun is shining on us whether we soak it up or not.

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