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Books

Submission + - A New Book About Classic Graphic Adventure Games (blogoscoped.com)

j_philipp writes: As a fan of the genre, I've compiled and edited a book called "Graphic Adventures: Being a Mostly Correct History of the Adventure Game Classics By Lucasfilm, Sierra and Others, from the Pages of Wikipedia". As the title says, it's collected from the pages of Wikipedia, with slight or heavy editing as well as additional material — depending on what was needed to make it work in book form — and with many additional creator interviews I conducted with people like Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry) or David Fox (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken...). There's also many screenshots from the games. If you liked to play Loom, Monkey Island, Space Quest, Myst and many others, perhaps this is something of interest... and because the book is GNU-licensed, you can grab the free download if you like.
Books

Submission + - A New Book About Classic Graphic Adventure Games (blogoscoped.com)

j_philipp writes: As a fan of the genre, I've compiled and edited a book called "Graphic Adventures: Being a Mostly Correct History of the Adventure Game Classics By Lucasfilm, Sierra and Others, from the Pages of Wikipedia". As the title says, it's collected from the pages of Wikipedia, with slight or heavy editing as well as additional material — depending on what was needed to make it work in book form — and with many additional creator interviews I conducted with people like Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry) or David Fox (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken...). There's also many screenshots from the games. If you liked to play Loom, Monkey Island, Space Quest, Myst and many others, perhaps this is something of interest... and because the book is GNU-licensed, you can grab the free download if you like.

Submission + - New gadget photo comics (sallysellsyoustuff.com)

j_philipp writes: Slashdot, my neighbor and I are creating these gadget & tech toys photo comics. Today we've tested the Star Wars Force Trainer — which analyzes your Beta brain wave activity to measure concentration, allowing you to move a sphere with the power of your thoughts — and today we're also going live with the site. Let her know if you like the stories!

Comment Re:On your marks, get slashdotted, go! (Score 1) 55

Thanks for this feedback Reziac. A just-sorted-by-date section does make some sense, I will ponder what is feasible here in terms of navigation (one prototype of the site had a specially colored "Misc." section but I was not yet completely happy with it). Pls note you can already search by year (e.g. [1923], or in combo with a keyword) and you can search by decade by entering e.g. [1920s] or [1930s], and then page through the first 1,000 results.

And you're right, sources are included independent of whether an ad can be bought from there (and if there's a buy link there, it will be independent of whether or not I have an affiliate account with the site... I consider it useful). This is a museum and gallery site that's meant to be enjoyed by people and to be useful, and everything else is secondary to that goal. As you might expect I will run into problems if server costs are making me bankrupt, but other than that, I'm happy if I just cover server costs (if more, I'm very happy too of course, but not in a way that clutters the site or anything).

Comment Re:On your marks, get slashdotted, go! (Score 3, Interesting) 55

As the creator of the site, I'm hoping for the best :) For what it's worth, I'm using Amazon S3 for the storage of the images (which needs to be paid by bandwidth, admittedly, so I'll have to watch my costs closely), and due to caching there should be no database connections on any ad page once it has been viewed for a first time (unless I iterate the version of the site or clear the cache... never before searched queries do cause database connections, naturally). But none of this guarantess uptime during slashdotting... again I can just hope for the best!
Businesses

Gallery of Past Tech (and Other) Advertising 55

theodp writes "The Vintage Ad Browser takes you back to the days when Google conjured up images of Barney Google (1948). When the hip music player was a Walkman (1982). When Osborne meant state-of-the-art in computing (1982). When Big Picture TV meant 12" (1948). When compact camera referred to a Pocket Instamatic (1972). And when wireless meant getting phone calls 300 feet from the house (1982)."
Google

Submission + - Google Chrome, the Google browser

Philipp Lenssen writes: "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google say Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."
Google

Submission + - Google Translation Center for human translations

Philipp Lenssen writes: "Discovered earlier today, the Google Translation Center is Google's service to "request, provide, and review translations." (You likely won't be able to sign in, and parts of the program are already removed again.) This site is not directly connected to Google's machine translation efforts — at least not on the surface, though it does utilize some of Google's existing translation tools — but seems to be a marketplace in the making to connect those looking for translations with those offering translations. However, several people in blog posts and comments argued that one of the motivations for Google to offer this service may be to feed their statistical machine translation system more input... to achieve better automated results in the future."
Google

Submission + - Google News Adds (Special) Comments

Philipp Lenssen writes: Google News now allows individuals or organizations who are mentioned in news stories to add comments. (I've posted some screenshots.) "Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as 'comments' so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report," Google writes in the official Google News blog. Comments (for the US version of Google News only, right now) need to be sent to news-comments@google.com and will then be manually approved to verify that the sender is indeed who they claim they are. You can check out a live example at Google News.

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