Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Been a while since I linked to a any of my articles for The Guardian...

...so here are a selection of recent pieces on managing desktop PCs, on dealing with large amounts of information, on web-based meeting technologies, and on Sun's Linux Java Desktop System...

Enjoy!

As my latest Guardian piece shows. [Update: or at least did until the web site team kindly fixed things!]

Where it says "a Launch button in the lower right mimics Windows XP's Start menu" , it should read "a Launch button in the lower left mimics Windows XP's Start menu".

Ooops.

But then, I am the person who once fell down the stairs in the middle of the night when I couldn't remember which side of a door the bathroom light switch was. And it was a house I'd lived in for a year or so...

In the world of gaming "clicky thing" is more than just another checkbox on an LJ poll - it's likely to refer to any of WizKids' range of click base games, from Mage Knight to Crimson Skies.

They're a quick and interesting way to get into figures-based tabletop gaming, and I already own a pile of Mechwarrior and some Indy HeroClix (for the 2000AD characters!). I find the rules and backgrounds interesting, and the quality of the models has improved dramatically over time (and unlike jaq, I don't have the patience to paint minatures!).

A recent arival in their range has been Shadowrun Duels - a game using much larger, more detailed, figures, and elements from FASA's classic fantasy/cyberpunk crossover Shadowrun role playing background.

I've been looking at these for a while, and finally succumbed and bought my first figure yesterday. Silver Max is a dwarf rigger, a tech hacker character. As the blurb on the WizKids' Shadowrun site says - "So he’s short . . . he’s got tech." I like that attitude.