April 2002

As often happens, I find that one link to a topic leads to others. Right now, I'm on a role-playing games kick. RPG Gateway can best be described as the Yahoo! for RPGs, covering eveything from software to software to dice and other accessories. The Big List of RPG Plots is just what it says: a simplified listing of every basic plot for RPG adventures.

One of the things that every participant in a role-playing game needs is a "character sheet", where the player records the attributes, belongings, and accomplishments of the character he controls. RPGSheets.com is an online repository of character sheets for dozens of RPGs, both popular and obscure.

Have you ever wanted to be a Lego® action figure? Sure you have! Visit the Mini-Mizer and create yourself in plastic!

This, alas, is me:

Apple has introduced the eMac, which resembles an iMac on steroids. The $999 entry-level eMac sports a 17-inch screen (as opposed to the iMac's 15-inch monitor), a 700 MHz G4 processor, and an Ethernet port. Its $1199 big brother adds a 56k modem and a CD-RW/DVD drive. News.com and SiliconValley.com have stories on the new machine.

I cook several meals a week, and I prefer simple, quick meals that my boys won't look at and say, "Blechhhh". Back of the Box compiles menus from (you guessed it) the backs of commercial product boxes. The site lists the recipes in several categories, but I suspect I'll be visiting the "Quick & Easy" page most often.

I can remember coming home after school and being glued to my mom's five-inch black-and-white TV, waiting for the Control Voice to intone "There is nothing wrong with your television set…". The Outer Limits was an undeniable milestone in popular culture. My two personal favorite episodes are The Man Who Was Never Born and Demon with a Glass Hand.

A new metasearch engine has appeared. Kartoo sports a Flash interface that is actually useful, and presents the results of your search in a format resembling a mind map. You can add or remove terms from your search, and search for sites by similarity. Kartoo is still rough around the edges, but useful nevertheless.

I wonder what my high school math teacher, Mr. Callahan, would think of the Prime Number Pooping Bear.

In the market for a new PC? It's hard for the non-techie to make sense of the near-infinite number of PC configurations. Walter Mossberg has some good advice in his recent column, Bargain PC Guide for Savvy Shoppers.

Everything old is new again. I can remember bugging the crap out of my mom to bring home Space Food Sticks when I was a kid. Well, they're back! It seems that they've been manufactured and sold all these years in Australia, of all places, and now they are being imported into the US.

Those of us whose reflexes have degraded a bit since our youth appreciate entertainment that doesn't require split-second reactions. CRPuzzles.com provides dozens of word, logic, and picture puzzles for the puzzle aficionado. A Java-capable web browser is required.

Always listen to your mother. My mom just found the 80's Arcade and passed it on to me. If you've got an urge to play some of the arcade games that helped you waste your youth, this is the place to go.

Well, the worms that write spyware are at it again. A new, "free" media player for Windows silently deletes the AdAware spyware detection and removal utility, if it finds it on your PC. Get the details in the Newsbytes article "Anti-Spyware Program Targeted By Multimedia Player".

LaCie has released Silverkeeper 1.0 as freeware. Silverkeeper allows the user to back up a set of documents to any mountable Macintosh storage device. Note that Silverkeeper does not back up entire volumes. Silverkeeper requires Mac OS 9.0.4 or OS X.

Blat for Windows provides a quick and convenient way of mailing a message with optional attachments from the DOS command line. If you know how to write a batch file, it's quite handy for automating mail tasks.