Via Lasse (in Norwegian) I discovered TrackMania Nations, a free arcade racing game for Windows. Partly as a challenge to him and myself, but mostly because it’s been a while since I took my PC for a spin, I decide to install it on my fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.04, AKA Hardy Heron. Below is the procedure I followed, which worked well except for lack of proper sound effects. Of course, before I did anything, I checked out the Wine AppDB to make sure that my work wouldn’t be in vain.

1. If you haven’t done so already, install Wine. When it works, it’s a brilliant way to run Windows applications on Linux. Get it via the Applications/Add/Remove menu, System/Administration/Synaptic Package Manager or open a terminal window and type “sudo apt-get install wine“
2. Download the Trackmania Nation install file (its about 500 MB). I couldn’t get the website to work properly with my Linux browsers, but from Lasse I got this handy torrent link (which also is a nice example of legal torrent use, BTW).
3. Install Trackmania by double clicking on the .exe file, or open a terminal window and type “wine tmnationsforever_setup.exe” . After installation, the files can be found in the directory /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TmNationsForever/ .
4. Trackmania also needs DirectX to run. You’ll find an excellent installation guide here. It’s actually easier than it looks at first sight, and well worth the hassle as so many Windows games depend on DirectX. (BTW: the two DLL files you are asked to copy to the Wine directory, can be found in C:\WINDOWS\system32)
5. If TrackMania failed to install a desktop icon, you can open the folder mentioned above and double click TmForeverLauncher.exe . This starts the configuration utility, where you set screen resolution, sound, language etc.
6. Double click TmForever.exe, and follow the instructions on the screen.

With a bit of luck, you’ll log on to the network and see something like this:

Yes, of course it works full-screen as well. With full resolution.

Problems to resolve:

1. The sound doesn’t work on my install

2. I can’t seem to get softlinks to the application to work - no desktop icon, in other words

3. How to stop playing TracMania - it’s horribly addictive!

Spring has arrived in Oslo, and with it a flood of fresh, juicy prey for Ada and Linus. After a wet and dreary winter, it’s lovely to see the cats enjoying the mild weather. Yesterday, Linus put all doubts about his hunting prowess to shame by catching a mouse and carrying it proudly into our living room. Problem was, the mouse was very much alive. I managed to get the frightened creature outside, where it was promptly rediscovered by Linus. Later, Ada joined the party, and for the next couple of hours they were chasing it around until the dinner signal lured them inside. This morning, the mouse was gone.

While I do see the problem with cats preying on a bird population under pressure, I have no qualms whatsoever about them going after mice or rats in an urban, rodent-infested environment. As long as they kill their prey, that is. And at the moment, Ada and Linus seem to have a hard time getting the job done. Of course they play with their food, in the sadistic manner you just have to ignore to be a cat lover. But to me, it’s pretty obvious that they don’t know how to kill a mouse.

I could blame their delinquent mother, who abandoned them in a barn long before they were able to cope on their own, let alone aquire basic hunting skills. But that really doesn’t help them. What they need is quite literally a kind of boot kamp for kitties. Or some friendly advice. Why isn’t there a real Cat Whisperer around when you need one?

The last week or so I’ve been Flickr-mailing with Edward from Malta, who runs the blog Fuq tal-linja. He has used some of the Creative Commons-licenced pictures I took on our holiday to Malta last August to illustrate postings about the fascinating Maltese bus network (yes, I’m a bit of a public-transportation geek myself). Now Edward has taken it a step further, and created a brand new blog theme based on my photos. No, I don’t speak Malti either, but it does look really, really nice.

…is now well and truly launched, and you’ll find it at Shabd books. This is also the first time I’ve seen the cover of the Hindi version of “Life in the Universe”. Hindi is the 19th language my books have been translated into, which makes me quite proud, actually. I think I’ll celebrate by making a lovely Aloo Palak tonight. I used to hate spinach when I was a kid - I should have taken up Indian food much earlier.

Or as Jon Stewart said the other week: a 73 year old white, conservative male - all the change America is ready for?

According to this study, having a cat (as we all know, we don’t own them) reduces your risk of a heart attack by almost a third:

Cat owners “appeared to have a lower rate of dying from heart attacks” over 10 years of follow-up compared to feline-free folk, Qureshi said. The magnitude of the effect — a 30 percent reduction in heart attack risk — “was a little bit surprising,” he added. “We certainly expected an effect, because we thought that there was a biologically plausible mechanism at work. But the magnitude of the effect was hard to predict.”

Now take a look at the guy above, who is part of my work environment, and tell me that it isn’t so. I’m just wondering whether having two means a 60 % reduction? (Via Slashdot)

According to Newsweek, “the expert is back”. People now crave reliable information, preferably created by paid professionals. What’s more, expert-created content is Web 3.0. And exhibit no. 1 is * drumrolls * Google Knol. You know, the Wikipedia-killer that was launched last December amid great fanfare, and which still has only one (1) article/knol on offer. If you want to read up on insomnia, Google Knol is definitely the place to be. For the rest of human knowledge, Wikipedia still rules.

If Knol doesn’t satisfy you, you could always enter a search term in Mahalo, a brand new “people-powered search engine” that is “based on quality and vetted by real people” (how this model differs from your run-of-the-mill user generated content eludes me). When I search for my surname, Newt Gingrich is the top hit. Do the same in Google, and the Newth family website gets highest ranking. So much for real people, apparently…

But seriously: it’s really too bad that this is such an amateurishly researched hack piece. As a professional writer and blogger, I am occasionally paid for writing stuff that ends up on the web, and of course I hope that this will evolve into new business models. I just don’t trust former AOL executives or Andrew Keen to tell me how it will be accomplished. Keen’s statement really is a gem, even for him: “Nobody wants to advertise next to crap.” Right. Which is why Adsense is such a failure.

A nebula that looks like a cat’s paw print! Now if they could only find a nebula that looked like this…

Before we travelled to Kerala recently, we naturally googled and read up on our destinations, and found useful tips on sites such as Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree and Wikitravel. What you usually don’t get in written material, though, is a visual sense of a place. Flickr is an immensely rich source of pictures of exotic locations, but most pictures (including my own, I have to admit) are still not geotagged. Which is where Google Maps enters the picture.

Although the image quality varies a lot, there’s no reason not to check out your destination. Shown above is a satellite image of the immediate area sourrounding our hotel in Fort Cochin, Ballard Bungalow (a lovely place and highly recommended, btw). By clicking and dragging, you can take a virtual walk around the neigbourhood and check out the distance to the famous chinese nets, for instance (in this case, click and drag the picture a couple of frames to the right to see them). Or see how far away the nearest bus station or ferry jetty is.

The first time I did this was last year, before we travelled to Malta and I wanted to check out the sights, beaches and transportation options of Bugibba. Google Maps can also give you a trip down memory lane. This is the hotel in Zanzibar where we spent part our honeymoon, for instance. Yes, it is pretty isolated, isn’t it?

…this brilliant mashup of two things that really occupy my mind at the moment. And who knows, maybe a hindi-speaking reader could enlighten me as to what BollyBama is saying? (Via BoingBoing)