TAS game videos

Recently I have been getting slightly addicted to TAS (Tool-Assisted-Superplay) game videos. Basically people with a lot of spare time on their hands play console games within emulators, they use the emulators ability to take snap shots in order to produce a perfect run and complete games in record times. It can be quite fun to watch a game that you spent ages completing many years ago completed in ten minutes!

There are lots of videos available at NESVideos. These have to be downloaded using BitTorrent though. Plenty of videos can also be found on YouTube (search for "TAS ").

Super Mario 64: (the 120 star version at NESVideos is more fun though)

Super Mario World: (again, the full 96 level one at NESVideos is more fun)

Thoughts on Freebase

I have been evaluating Freebase a fairly new site that is aiming to create an open database of everything. Think Wikipedia, but with user definable relational structure.

Here are my thoughts:

Weaknesses:

• Permissions too lapse.
  Not extendible for uses such as a social network, could not easily be used to store private data for a website.
• No notion of functions.
  Wouldn't it be really cool if users could submit functions as well as types, e.g. a function from post codes to latitude and longitude.
• Can Metaweb Technologies be trusted?
  This is a lot more complicated than Wikipedia for other organisations to replicate. If Metaweb goes bust or bad is all the data lost?
• Needs more data.
  It will be interesting to see at what rate the size of the database grows and what the typical method of inserting data will be. Many users will not go as far as learning the API but the current user interface is a bit too clunky for contributors. Refactoring using the Freebase site is currently more-or-less impossible, and a lot of refactoring should be expected for an openly writable database of everything in such an early stage!

Cool:

• Users can create HTML only data driven web applications.

Possible (Mis-)uses:

• To store low sensitivity, yet private, data (using cryptography).
  Think of it as a replacement for Amazon S3.
• A truly open social network.
  At some point soon Facebook, Myspace, etc. have to face the openness interrogation that awaits most successful technology companies.
• Free hosting with unlimited bandwidth.
  When the site is out of alpha anybody will be able to query the database.

Make the Vista Alt+TAB more like the Mac task switcher

I was really excited to here about Flip 3D but was a bit disappointed when I actually saw it. The previews are big, and they are live which is great, but they are all on top of each other and only use one monitor -- not great. I wanted something a bit like when you press F10 on a Mac.

The closest I have managed to get is some registry tweaks to make Alt+TAB behave a bit like I want, here is what I have come up with:

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AltTab] "OverlayIconPx"=dword:00000064 "OverlayIconDXPx"=dword:00000000 "OverlayIconDYPx"=dword:00000000 "ThumbSpacingXPx"=dword:00000014 "ThumbSpacingYPx"=dword:00000014 "SideMarginPx"=dword:0a000000 "BottomMarginPx"=dword:00000064 "MinThumbSizePcent"=dword:00000064 "MinWidthPx"=dword:0000015e "TopMarginPx"=dword:00000258 "MaxThumbSizePx"=dword:000007d0 "MaxIconSizePx"=dword:0000015e "TextBottomPx"=dword:000001f4

It is not great, the way it spans monitors could be more tidy, if the tops of the monitors are not aligned some of the live previews go off screen and the previews could be bigger. However it is, in my opinion, better than the default Alt+TAB behaviour.