Linux Archives - A Bugged Life

A Piece of Childhood

A couple of years ago I downloaded The Ur-Quan masters, a rerelease of a game I used to play heavily in my grade school years on the PC. It had a checklist that fulfilled a sci-fi geek’s wish: lots of ships, lots of aliens, a commentary on man’s struggle against insurmountable odds, explosions, and yes — even more aliens. Star Control II was also unique as it was the first (and maybe only) game that had audio software that simulated a Sound Blaster PC sound card. In other words, even if you were on PC Speaker, you were enjoying 16-bit audio, albeit dumbed down in quality. But still.

Star Control II was nominated as one of the greatest games of all time by both Gamespot and IGN and as i said above, was re-released as an open source community project in 2002. It ran on Linux, Macintosh, XBOX, PSP, and the PC. Wait a minute — if it ran on Linux, there probably would have been a version in development for other iterations of Linux. So I searched for a Maemo version.

Eureka.

Star Control II on a Nokia N900. Grab it before Fwiffo does!

HP 2133 Mini Note PC First Impressions (with photos!): Kills the ASUS eee 900?

The ultra-light phenomenon has just tipped once again. With ASUS releasing the eee and eee 900, other manufacturers have gone light (see ACER’s Aspire One product feature) and now the market has definitely tipped. HP has just released the Mini Note PC to the Philippine market last night and I was lucky to have taken home a demo unit from the event. I think this was because I won the wackiest pose on the HP wall — I balanced the Mini Note on my head.

Here’s a short size comparison between the HP Mini Note PC, my 13 inch MacBook and a standard sized Samsung F400 (Bang and Olufsen) mobile phone:

HP desktops and laptops have always had that reputation of being good but *cough* expensive. Their direct competitor would be Toshiba in terms of pricing and “status.” But I was floored to see something that night that made me realize how companies are now trying to -reinvent themselves to the new market. The HP Mini Note PC is the cheapest full functioning ultra light PC I have ever encountered. I can’t believe how much style and features were packed into this thing, with an array of choices for the operating system and a ridiculously low price, it isn’t funny.

Let’s check out the full package, specs and pricing: