Idea: PodQuests

The other day I had an idea about PodCaching - where podcasts could be linked to a certain location - so you could go to some scenic spot and listen to all the comments by other people about that location. This was even mentioned by Adam Curry on yesterday's podcast! Anyway here's today's idea:

Do you remember those "which way books" of olden times? You could choose your own path in the story and decide how the adventure progressed. Imagine taking that idea and applying it to podcast playlists! A person (or team) records a series of events - like entering a castle, picking doors, dying horribly, etc. Then at the end of each clip, there would be directions as to which playlist item to switch to to hear the next part of the story - only, you'd have choices. You might even imagine having a "live" component of this where you have the person with the iPod start in a given location in the city, and move about the city in sync with the adventure.

Great news! Laszlo w/o having to have the server software on your website

The repercussions and benefits of having Laszlo free and Open Source are starting to happen. One of the biggest things holding back widespread adoption of Laszlo is that you have to have the presentation server running on your own server - you cannot just create some application and upload the swf+resources to say some freewebs server space. It looks like in the coming months that is going to change. This is amazingly cool news! What that means is that not only will you be able to just create the application on your own system and just ftp the resulting app up to your website, you'll be able to do things like mail it around to friends, embed it in web pages, truely collaborate with other developers, since you could create a sourceforge project with the lzx files and let anyone download and help create it! There'll still be the need for the presentation server, but it becomes more of an application building tool on your local desktop. There will still be the need for the server if you want to do some special things like persistent chat I think, or calling java on the server, but this opens the door to hundreds of new apps.

For me this also seems like a step in the direction of the holy grail for Laszlo (ok, perhaps the holy Dixie Cup) runnable applications (.exe) on your desktop w/o the browser at all ...

Idea: PodCaching

Time for some serious thinkage. I've been listening to many Podcasts the past few days and it's amazing how this idea of taping an amateur - style radio show and making it available via mp3 using RSS to syndicate it is catching on. While riding home on the train last night a thought occurred to me - what if you could combine Podcasting with Geocaching. Meaning instead of subscribing to a "show" you subscribe to a "location" - a GPS location. These locations could coincide with Geocaches so you could do things like listen for hints as to where to find the cache, list to others talking about the history of that location, or some funny thing that happened there.

Imagine further with me here :) Say you were going to go to a local restaurant. You could query the location and load into your iPod all the comments or interesting things about that restaurant. Heck! You might even get to listen to the owner of the store read to you the menu! Or imagine you want to go to a local museum. The night before you go, you request the feed for that location and in the morning you can take with you a series of stories, guides, comments and other great things around the museum. You might listen to someone who knows how to find the best art pieces quickly, or where to park nearby and save some money.


If anything, it would be very cool to plan to go to some park or scenic spot, or even ask you travel across country - you could have someone who's already done it travel along with you and point out great spots to stop or eat.

How to make explosive flares in GameMaker

I spent way too much time last night trying out various effects in GameMaker 6. I did however come up with a really interesting explosion effect as you can see from the link above. If you have [GameMaker] you can try it out with [This GM6 file]

Kindred spirits

Every so often I am reminded of what really brought me to the internet, and it's true sprit. When I first starting using the net - wayyy back with wierd things like *gasp* gopher sites - I was astounded by the ability to find other folks who were "just like me". Meaning folks who liked Star Trek, or The Geek Code, or developing sites using some new language called HTML. It impressed me so much I created a little org called the HTML Writers Guild ... Of course I completely had no idea that it'd explode into a huge organization which exists even today in a modified/merged form. Anyway, getting back on topic here, every so often you run across someone online who's sorta on the same wavelength as you. I ran across this person's site a few weeks ago somehow - probably on delicious and suddenly find his blog and posts everywhere... Stuff like that happens on the 'net. It's happened waaay to often to me for it to be a mere coincidence. I think the net is a facilitator of a basic human desire to find others of like mind. I had a similar experience with finding another website of like-minded folk last month with this site: Ozone Asylum.

And so, long windedly and round-aboutly (yah I know, I know) here's a blog you should give a click to and check it out if you have found stuff on my blog of some interest.

My Game: Crystal Fantasy Shooter

I'm working on an interesting game using [GameMaker] called "Crystal Fantasy Shooter" which will be a combo of an RPG, a side scrolling shooter and a fighter like Double Dragon. It will be pretty fun I hope :)

The above is a link to a very early prototype if you want to give it a try.

Pure CSS Image Rollovers

Busy with work, but I ran across a neat way to to image rollovers without js and without having to preload images. Pretty cool. BTW the link is in the title above. And here's a big hello! out to all you RSS subscribers. If you subscribe to my blog please drop me an email sometime. [email me]

Sword of Fargoal

I stumbled across a really nice dungeon crawler game this weekend, called Sword of Fargoal. Basically it's like NetHack or Rogue, only with beefed up graphics and retro style presentation. It's a real jem! Give it a go.