software

The Powder Toy is an awesome goal-less, creativity toy, originally created by Stanislaw K Skowronek and now taken to the next level by Simon Robertshaw. It reminds a bit of the classing falling sands games (1, 2), but much more evolved (much, much more). It basically equips the player with a huge set of materials (elements), building blocks and a virtual 2D laboratory in which it simulates a simple approach to electricity, pressure, heat, wind and fire.

The player may save creations on a server or just in a 'stamp' library, to reuse certain design elements. Creations can also be proudly published to the community, which will rate it and eventually develop it further. All of that is solved in-game, without any browser being involved.

Standard creations in powder toy are nuclear bombs, flamethrowers, and basically all stuff that blows up. It is good for a start to get a rough idea. But advanced users build clocks, calculators, collections of logical gates and pixel-by-pixel creations of sub-miniature logics and electronics.

There are currently only videos of the old version like the one below, which will give you a first glance of what this is about, but if you keep looking for 'The Powder Toy' on youtube, the new version should show up pretty soon.

The powder toy includes an auto-update to new versions, which currently show up on a near-daily basis. The development process is fast and open to suggestions of users. There is a forum, that is closely reviewed by the main developer himself.

You can download The Powder Toy from the website http://powder.hardwired.org.uk. While you are there, create an account to enable saving from The Powder Toy. It is all free and the forum and development is very active. The powder toy is available for Mac, Windows and Linux!

I should issue a warning, though:  The Powder Game is a serious health threat, it is highly addictive. Once your first creations get mostly-green ratings, you will find yourself worrying over single pixels/particles for serious amounts of time, just to improve your creations.

Edit: The Powder Toy recently opened its gates to other developers.

Edit: The Powder Toy's website is now: http://powdertoy.co.uk

Orbiter 2010 is out!

The free space flight simulator Orbiter by Martin Schweiger is now available to download in its brand new 2010 version (the last major version had been issued 2006). Orbiter allows you to fly your own spaceship into orbit. And if you want to, it brings you to the planet or it's moon of your choice. You can build your own space station, create and fly downloaded scenarios or just watch the beauty of earth from space.

Being a space flight simulator which allows to fly a space shuttle in atmospheric approach or the imaginary Deltaglider IV with horizontal lift off, Orbiter is also a more and more enjoyable flight simulator.

2010's changes concentrate on graphics and openness for 3rd party developers, including API support and an embedded scripting language. The graphics were partly visible in the beta versions and are a huge step forward for Orbiter, the physics and the atmospheric model have been reworked or upgraded.

With well known 3rd party developers releasing new models synchronous to the new 2010 version, a nice orchestrated roll-out has been done here.

One thing that is still disturbing is, that Orbiter still does not provide native sound output: You will have to download and install Orbiter Sound  from Dan's Orbiter Page if you want to hear your rockets roar. Installation is easy, but I just don't understand the reason not to pack the plugin right into the standard release.

Gladly Orbiter sticks to its roots: Installation is mainly unpacking everything in a directory of choice. This allows running different versions of Orbiter for testing.

If you are into flight simulations, this is a must.

Download. Now.

The new Orbiter logo

While Opera calls the beta version 10.50, the feeling is that of a major release.

The User Interface is slick and slender and fits perfect to the current trend to reduce overhead screen space. While this is an assett for any user, it addresses especially owners of netbooks. Windows 7 and Vista users will like the neat integration into their OS, using transparency effects similar to Google's Chrome browser.

But the Opera developers take it a step further and do not reduce any functionality, instead they top up the features with the improved JavaScript engine "Carakan". The engine is not only much faster (according to heise, using the Sunspider benchmark it is 11 times faster than the current stable's v10.10 release), it finally overtakes Firefox and Chrome, needing nearly 1.5 times as long.

New is also that JavaScript alerts, HTTP notifications and password manager pop-ups are now handled as part of the regarding tab. It is possible now to keep browsing in a different tab, while another is showing a message pop-up.

But Opera's JavaScript is not the only feature receiving a whole new engine. With the new vector graphics library "Vega", graphics, transitions, scrolling and all other animations are made smoother, more scalable.

A Linux version is currently not available, but the first impressions on windows systems are good. Speed, always one of Opera's big advantages, is now taken to a different level. Launching Opera on a windows 7 test system took 3 seconds, while FireFox needs 6 seconds.

Opera 10.50 is a definite beta. Some features are not fully imlemented yet, but the general experience makes hungry for more.

As always, the beta can be installed parallel to a stable release of Opera to allow testing.

Edit 14.2.2010:

While using the 10.50, a crash could be reproduced: While using the web management console of a Synology DS-209, Opera always crashed after some minutes.

It was a long time with a lot of silence. Now I quickly want to share a little gem I found:

Orbiter is being actively developed. The new version has been called Orbiter 2009 until now, but it is being updated to 2010. First screenshot can be seen here.

If you never heard of it: Orbiter is a realtime space flight simulation, created by Martin Schweiger with a definite focus on realism. It is highly extensible, there are hundreds of plugins and add-ons available.

The space ships are sporting a virtual "glass cockpit" or come with 2D and sometimes 3D cockpits.
One famous space ship is the DeltaGlider IV. Check out the author's Gallery for some beautiful picturers. I will be posting some more updates and infos, but for now: I am back :)

For all German fans of Google Earth:

There are extensive 3D packages for the cities Berlin and Dresden. Download and double-click the following files to add them to your places list. The files are small and will only tell Google Earth where to download the 3D data.

Without further ado, here are the .kmz files:

Berlin3D

Dresden3D

In the last weeks I stumbled over one of my new favourite applications:

The XBMC Media Center.

The name comes from XBox Media Center. It was first developed for the Xbox and is now also available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. XBMC is best described as a media hub, and it is free!

I usually tend to more spartanic software like MPlayer without GUI, but this one is great. It is simply built for your comfort. You can view Pictures and Movies, listen to your Music and all that over your home network or you can use plugins and scripts to view YouTube videos, read your favourite RSS feeds, get the weatherforecast etc. And all that with a fluid and sexy interface that is even skinnable!
Since XBMC comes from the Xbox, a great way to use XBMC is a gamepad or nearly any other input device. You have a wireless gamepad? That's perfect. Even the integrated filemanager works with it.

You have to look at it yourself. Start or download it at the XBMC homepage, or go directly to the XBMC flickr page to get an impression.

Changing the not-so-beautiful interface of GoogleEarth for Linux

The Linux version of GoogleEarth ships with it's own Qt libraries and therefore doesn't use the system's theme. But there are at least two themes integrated which look vastly better than the default W98-ish theme.
Try starting GoogleEarth with one of the following commands:
googleearth -style plastique
for a KDE look, or
googleearth -style cleanlooks
for a Gnome look.

As usual, I can't stress enough, that I don't take any responsibility if this doesn't work for you or even damages your software or even hardware or other posessions. Thanks again.

Running GoogleEarth 4.3 on Linux

GoogleEarth 4.3 is still in beta phase, but I finally found out why my installation of it only showed an empty sky, no navigational buttons or any compass. It didn't even connect to the google server. As it seems, GoogleEarth sets itself up to be run as root and that's something I wouldn't like to do on my machine. There are reasons why I like linux and one is that you don't have to be root to run your applications, so without any question that was no option to me.

The reason is, that the owner of the ~/.config/Google/ directory and the .conf files in it are set to root in the installation process. (Google should allready have corrected that, but maybe they want users to run GoogleEarth as root? Shamed be he who thinks evil of it.)

The solution for me (and many others) was to download and install GoogleEarth 4.3 and after that, manually delete two directories:

I use and like Opera and the new version 9.51 seems nice and works great.
But... Flash didn't work.
On YouTube all I got was the text "Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player".

After searching for a solution and reinstalling the linux flashplugin-nonfree package it still didn't work. Being this (||) short to giving it up, I tried F12 and found, that somewhere in the installation process of opera, the "Enable Plugins"-option was disabled. Enabling it solved the problem at once and I'm happy again.

The game Spore by Will Wright is coming and its publisher Electronic Arts released the Creature Editor as a standalone program in advance. To keep it short: It's amazing! - And highly addictive.

There is a free demo version of the creature editor available, the full version costs about 10 Euros.

Reading for free?
With Project Gutenberg that's possible with over 25.000 books. You can download classic books, ranging from Homer's Iliad to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, or H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in a variety of formats. Usually plain text format and HTML-versions are available, but often even additional formats like the plucker e-book reader format or even audio books in mp3 format are available.
The main languages are Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and Tagalog, but alltogether there are books in over 40 languages between Afrikaans and Yiddish.

While the media world whines about it's loss of sales, the open source movement produces more and more excellent content. Using up-to-date open source 3D tools, two beautifully rendered movies went public:

The 10 minute animated movie Big Buck Bunny is a must see. It is available on its own homepage in a variety of formats and sizes and completely open source.

Another, older open source movie you should have a look at is elephants dream ( (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org), released under the creative commons licence.

PortableApps is a very nice software suite for the ultra mobile windows user. You can download many applications that have been made portable, which means they can be run from a USB pen drive or similar devices, storing their data on the stick and (ideally) leaving no traces behind on the host machine.

From the first day on, I used WinAmp. Apart from Pegasus Mail it is my longest used piece of Software. But in the last years, it was developed in a direction I didn't need, like that cluttered and inefficient media library. With mixed feelings I tried out another Player, called AIMP2 ... and uninstalled Winamp right away.
AIMP2 standard skin (the picture belongs to http://www.aimp.ru)