Halfway through the third book of the
Hitchhiker's Guide series, there is
a throwaway reference to a doomed starship, one whose incredible splendor was matched only by the cosmic absurdity of its maiden-day annihilation.
But the story didn't end there. Unbeknownst to many fans, this small piece of Adamsian lore was the inspiration for an ambitious and richly-detailed side-story: a 1998 computer adventure game called
Starship Titanic.
Designed by Douglas Adams himself, the game set players loose in the infamous vessel, challenging them with a maddening mystery laced with the devilish wit of the novels.
The game was laden with extra content, including
an in-depth strategy guide,
a (mediocre) tie-in novel by Terry Jones,
a whimsical First Class In-Flight Magazine, and even a pair of 3D glasses for one of the more inventive puzzles.
Key to solving these puzzles was the game's groundbreaking communications system -- players interacted with
the ship's robotic crew through a natural language parsing engine called SpookiTalk, whose 10,000+ lines of conversational dialogue spawned
16 hours of audio recorded by professional voice actors, including
John Cleese,
Terry Jones, and even Douglas Adams himself in
several cameos (spoiler cameo). Want to experience the voyage for yourself? Then watch this narrated video playthrough (
intro (ads) -
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9? 10 11 12 13) ...or click inside for a information on how to run the game for free on Windows, Mac, and Linux (along with a bunch of other goodies!).
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 22, 2010 -
109 comments
CreativeApplications.Net scours the net for platform independent apps that help sharing and engaging with information. They look at OSX, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Web Apps, Flash, Physical Interfaces, Max MSP development, Processing and others.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Oct 30, 2010 -
4 comments
Google makes Picasa, YouTube, Blogger, and Google Documents, Calendar, and Contacts available to command-line geeks with
GoogleCL, a new, official command-line tool. How to install:
Mac OS X,
Windows,
elsewhere.
Google's examples of what you can do; Lifehacker's "
five nifty GoogleCL tricks."
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Jun 29, 2010 -
26 comments
Mendeley is a cross-platform research management tool which features article databasing, PDF annotation, online backup, private, shared and public collections, metadata lookup on Google Scholar, direct exporting of multiple citation styles to Word, OpenOffice and BibTex, the ability to add documents directly from a web browser, and social networking with other members in your field of study. Like
Zotero (
previously), but out of the browser and with note-taking abilities. For Windows, Mac and Linux.
posted by l33tpolicywonk
on Jun 11, 2010 -
27 comments
The How-To Geek provides hints and tips for a variety of operating systems and popular pieces of software. The how-tos cover a pleasing range of head-slapping I-should-have-known-thats to relatively advanced techniques. Follow the
latest page to read the site in blog form.
posted by nthdegx
on Jul 8, 2007 -
12 comments
Whizzkid develops Linux application for Windows [...]The significance of the development is that Linux and Windows are able to work in parallel on the same computer or server. To[sic] now, the computer world is divided into systems that operate either with Windows or with Linux. [...]
posted by Postroad
on Apr 12, 2004 -
33 comments
Behold Oddpost! Like they say, it really is "indubitably the most astounding web-based email application on earth." I was skeptical, but their drag-and-drop interface is so clean and functional that comparing it to Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail is like comparing a Frank Lloyd Wright house to a birdcage made of Tinkertoys. All DHTML, so it requires IE 5+ on Windows. Netscape, Opera, Mac, and Linux users are out of luck. (Welcome to
the effects of market share.)
posted by monkey-mind
on Apr 6, 2002 -
45 comments
I.B.M.'s MetaPad (NYTimes link) is a slender black rectangle, that works as a PDA and a PC. Best part it's non-OS-centric. In desktop mode it uses Windows XP, in PDA mode it uses Palm OS, also should work with Linux. Not to be confused with
Metapad.
[Via SVN]
posted by riffola
on Feb 9, 2002 -
19 comments
The Winux virus is reported to affect both Windows and Linux boxes/applications. The article says it's "written in a primitive computer language called 'assembly language'." On a side note, who do they get to write these articles? Certainly they are uncomfortable with technology...
posted by fooljay
on Mar 28, 2001 -
5 comments
