• Approximate Conversion from Points to Pixels

Kings Quest IX: A Silver Lining, a fan game inspired by the old Sierra Kings Quest series has been in development by Phoenix Online Studios since 2002. They were due to release it this month, but in September Vivendi, who now own Sierra, responded in the way most corporations do to their most fanatical fans: they sent them a cease and desist letter. So the Save Kings Quest IX campaign was created, and, surprisingly enough, Vivendi found a clue and has said they can release the game.

So, kudos to Vivendi for responding so well. Obviously what happened is that some middle-manager with delusions of legal competence sent the original cease & desist letter to Phoenix. When the SKQIX campaign got underway and the petitions started appearing in the Vivendi forums, upper management got wind of it and realised that ticking off your fan base isn’t really a good idea.

So I’m looking forward to the 1st release of this early next year.

Google Earth has been updated and now includes hi-res shots of Penrith & surrounding areas. Google maps has not been updated yet, in fact the Sydney CBD is still low-res on there.

The high-res photos of Penrith are fairly out of date. The Krispy Kreme donunts in the carpark of Panthers isn’t built yet on the photos, and the Penrith Homemaker Centre is still under construction, which means that it’s at least older than 2003

Doesn’t matter though, finally, I can see my house from here!

Gmail has had an update, which doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot. They’ve added a Google Talk advert on the left under the menu & renamed the ‘Move to trash’ drop-down menu item to ‘Delete’.

Also it seems that now, when you’ve ticked a mail item, the drop-down menu only displays the options available, rather than just disabling the ones that you can’t use (eg. If a mail item doesn’t have a star the “remove star” option isn’t there, whereas before is was just greyed out). If you have no item selected, all the options are in the menu, greyed out.

I know Google likes to roll this stuff out incrementally, so is anyone else seeing this?

I understand the removing of the disabled menu options, it un-clutters the interface, but as for the renaming of ‘Move to trash’, it also begs the question "Why?" I know some people found having to select a menu item rather than clicking a button annoying, and I imagine that Google is aware of this, but how does renaming the menu option help? I just found it momentarily disorienting as I searched for ‘Move to trash’ and couldn’t find it. (Only a brief moment mind you ) I can imagine how less tech-savvy users are coping (remembers back to ISP help desk days. *shudder*).

Great archaeological photoshop contest. There are some seriously talented people out there.

This one is my personal favorite

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Skype version 2.0 beta has been released. There’s a whole bunch of changes and fixes in this new major version, but the only one anyone will be talking about is the video call feature. While this is nifty, and a nice marketing feature, for me the more useful new feature is the contact grouping. This is something that’s been available in all the major IM clients, and it will make life easier now that I can group all my work, family and friend contacts separately.

Video talk’s still cool though

Standard yadda yadda about this being a beta-preview, YMMV, etc.

Oh, the user interface is all shiny and updated too.