Stronghold is cheap, available, and runs great on the EEE 701

Medieval city and siege simulator Stronghold has arrived on DRM-free game service Good Old Games (GOG). It is an old game, and it is pretty good. However, rather than evaluate the game as a game, I’m going to take a look at it in a very specific techincal sense: how well it suits play on a low-level netbook.

Seen here: Asus EEE 701, Stronghold on attached USB drive, and tiny cramp-inducing notebook mouse.

Stronghold is a decent enough RTS with good character, low system requirements, and doesn’t require too much micromanagement, though it won’t change your life or addict you for hours on end (which can be seen as a good thing). It’s six bucks American, and yours forever. I’ve also found that it’s a good game to take on the go, especially if you’re an owner of the diminutive Asus EEE 701 series.  

1 billion pushups progress: Day 1

I’m voluntarily pursuing the hundredpushups.com program over the next six weeks and blogging about it so I don’t crap out. Here’s day one:

Day 1

Briefly, I did five sets of pushups, of decreasing amounts, with 60 second rests in between each. I’m guessing this is set up in decreasing fashion so that I don’t overexert myself. Incidentally, I’m pairing this exercise with an hour of walking 3-4 times a week. Again, nothing spectacular, but any exercise is good, or so I remind myself.

First post: http://drfrog.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/hundredpushup/

Recipe: Red Hot Salsa by Jacques Pépin

The following is a basic enough recipe for fresh salsa, from Jacques Pepin’s book Fast Food My Way. It’s good stuff, but darned if your choppin’ hand isn’t sore afterwards. Blogging about it here so I have it forevermore.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups diced (1/2 inch) tomato
• 1/4 cup finely diced jalapeño or serrano chile pepper (more or less depending on your tolerance)
• 1/3 cup coarsely chopped onion, put in a sieve, rinsed under cold tap water and pat dry
• 1/3 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
• 3 tablespoons ketchup
• 2 tablespoons water

Directions:

• Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate.

Discovered via Fast Food My Way. Great book, great series.

The Road to a Billion Pushups (hundredpushups.com)

I’m in my early thirties, skinny with a slowly widening middle, I could use a lot of exercise, and am terribly lazy. Not too long ago, I spied a reference to hundredpushups.com on my newsreader, and the simplicity of the program immediately attracted me. The site author has devised a basic program centered around a single exercise in an effort to get him, me, and anyone to set a realistic goal toward being physically able to perform 100 pushups in a single sitting (pushing?) within six weeks. The program is available from the web site itself, or in printable form, including a cute little booklet you can print and fold from a single sheet of paper.

A month and a half to 100 pushups. We'll see, little folded up booklet. We'll see.

The benefits and attraction of the program are pretty obvious:

• The program is extremely basic, if not inadequate, but is not at all overwealming: all you do is pushups! A bunch of them!
• Vitally important: The website is friendly, well-documented, and encouraging. It scales down according to ability and age, and works with you at your own level. It encourages rest, but pushes you forward.
• Requires very little commitment in time, and seemingly little effort.
• Certainly couldn’t hurt skinny arms and chest, nor flabby arms and bellies.
• Pushups are a base, chest-thumping indication of manhood. Of course you want to do more. Once you hit fifty or sixty, you’ll probably be one of those jerks who can’t frickin’ wait for someone to give you a reason to drop and give twenty. 

Hulu Embedability Test: The Theme to Benson

I’m testing the ease of embedding Hulu videos into WordPress with the theme to my favorite sitcom of all time: Benson. (Also included: the show intro fade-in.)

posted with vodpod

Non-fun fact: the opening theme is precisely one minute in length. Paul Junger Witt ran a tight ship.

Conclusion: Mostly Success, Partial Fail. Embedding video into WordPress isn’t as easy as it should be. Though Hulu cooperatively offers pretty open embed code intended to be easily copied and pasted into a blog, and a simple clip editing tool that lets you isolate your chosen clip, WordPress will ignore the code entirely. Instead, you must figure out your own wizardry or use a service called Vodpod (which requires you to enter your WordPress username and password on a third party site, ick) to post your chosen clip. Three services to post one clip to one site, not exactly a paragon of usability.

More importantly, since I’m not sure how Vodpod wedges the video into WordPress, I have little faith that the video in this post will continue to function in the future. Does it link directly to Hulu, or does it work through Vodpod? Fortunately, there is not a single clip on the web that is actually important enough to worry about in this fashion, and the nature of Hulu is such that skittish studio execs can pull their precious IP at any time, so embeddable video should be seen as temporary anyway.

As a bright and cheerful aside, however, the first two seasons of Benson can be seen freely on Hulu, until Sony (who now owns the series rights, if the watermark is to be believed) gets their britches in a bunch about their content ownership rights, which is almost inevitable. So see it now.

Seriously, though, if I could queue up an episode of Benson, followed by It’s A Living (the waitress-cleavage show), and Small Wonder, interspersing it with extinct “KOFY TV 20 San Francisco” service breaks featuring station owner James Gabbert, it would flash me back so far into boring Saturday nights in the 80’s, I would up-end a box of off-brand Legos and Micro Machines onto the floor. There you would find me, gazing wistfully at the pages of Nintendo Power and a Radio Shack catalog.

Multitasking with Hulu. Windows shell is bblean. (http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean)

Spelunky updates again, .99.5

The tireless Derek Yu offers another minor release, includes some bugfixes and play improvement. Perhaps not that worthy of an entire post, but this game is really, really good. (Explore a system of caves! Die in hilarious ways!)

Placeholder site.

Direct download.

Eegra also fumbles his way through a profanity-laced half-description of Spelunky on his latest podcast. Bless him, though, his depiction of a bemonacled octopod is ten tons of wonderful: