Let’s play Sim Iraq!

By Mark O’Neill

The latest tool in the US government’s arsenal in the war on terror – a virtual reality Sims game. Or as the Pentagon likes to call it, a ‘Human, Social, and Cultural Behavior Modeling program‘

Just a few days ago, I mentioned how the US intelligence community was using ‘Second Life’ for training. Now it seems it is also building virtual reality models of Iraq to get to know the place better.

They are hoping that by using these Sims-type games for training, they will discover :

how people communicate; what avenues of communication are traditionally trusted; who in that culture holds power and influence; how do tribal and trade associations interact; and where/how can societal behaviors contribute to options for stability and reduction in conflict potential.

Or they can just do what I did when I played the Sims. Set up a penthouse, buy a hot-tub and invite lots of hot girls around for a party.



Go for a spin in Google Earth’s F-16!

By Mark O’Neill

I am just about getting the hang of this flying thing in Google Earth’s flight simulator. But now it has just got a lot cooler! A very enterprising person has made an overlay picture of a F-16 cockpit that you can use while flying.

Just double-click on the file to open up Google Earth, load up the flight simulator and take off.

Make sure you’re using the F-16 though and not the other plane. Then as you fly, you can see the cockpit panels in front of you. Remember though that it’s only a picture so there’s still no sound.



Express your love geek-style

By Mark O’Neill

Only six days to go until Valentine’s Day so you need to start thinking now about how to best express your feelings to the love of your life (unless the love of your life consists of a computer!).

As a public service to our geeks, Geeks Are Sexy will now help you to make this year’s Valentines Day one to remember.

How about a T-shirt that takes one of the greatest love ditties of all time and turns it into Geek-Speak? You can even give the lady of your life one of her own.

While wearing that Romeo (or Juliet) of a T-shirt, you can then proceed to the next stage by giving him or her your best chat-up line along with a geeky Valentines Day card (nothing beats telling them that they “are your Tetris“)

While they are swooning to that, you can then serve up some tasty nutritious Macaroni and Cheese and a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Then snuggle up on the couch and watch a nice romantic movie that both of you will like.

Then get him or her over to the bedroom area and show off your geek sex techniques (cue predictable one-liners about “defragging their hard-drive”).

But if giving him or her a T-shirt doesn’t rock your boat then here’s even more gift suggestions.

Oh and if you don’t have a Valentine yet then this year may be the year for you. Here’s five ways to say “Be My Valentine!” to a geek. I just love the idea of ambushing them in World of Warcraft.

What are your Valentines plans?   Got any tips to share?

Color code your Windows Explorer folders

By Mark O’Neill

foldermarker.gif

Despite my best efforts, my Windows Explorer folders are sometimes a bit of a mess.  Files tend to get scattered around like confetti at a wedding while countless folders containing an assortment of finished work, half-finished work and random musings are all mixed together in one big jumble. My folders are so disorganised that Google Desktop took one look at it and instantly asked me to uninstall it from the desktop.

A friend of mine who suffers from the same disorganization problems suggested Folder Marker which allows you to color code your Windows Explorer folders.   So after finally sorting your files into the right folders, you can then give your work folders a certain colour, your personal documents another colour and so on.  Oh man, I can just see the neatness fanatics jumping all over this one.

You can also assign certain logos to your folders such as “high priority”, “half-done work”, “important files” and so on.   It even lets you upload a few of your own icons if you’d rather use them instead.

So it’s basically the Windows version of the office filing cabinet.   We’ll see if it motivates me to keep everything in the right folders but at least my Windows Explorer is now showing a splash of colour.    Nothing like orange folders to perk up your monitor screen.

Dell says good-bye to AMD

As early as only a year ago, AMD was the number one processor choice for computer geeks world wide. Sure, their mobile platform would suck batteries like a hoover and could melt through your desk at the drop of a hat, but they were the favorite. The underdog. The company we supported because they stood up to the bigwigs at Intel. In fact, they were kinda like Linux.

When Dell decided to start marketing machines with AMD processors about two years ago, blogs and online communities such as Digg exploded with joy. Much like when Dell announced Linux based machines.

Today, unfortunately, Dell has stopped shipping AMD based computers via their largest hardware outlet: dell.com. This might seem like the final nail in AMD’s coffin. The gaming market was their last string and since Intel took over with their newest Core 2 Duo’s, it has been all down hill from there.

Dell stops selling AMD-powered machines online [Engadget]

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DailyIdea.tv: Why a Geek Will Steal Your Girlfriend this Year

One of the most controversial articles we’ve ever posted: 12 Reasons why a geek will steal your girlfriend this year, certainly made more of an impact than we expected. Some liked it, others didn’t, but what really counts is that the most positive comments we’ve received on it so far came from the ladies. Yep, that’s right… and while being on the subject of pretty ladies and geeks, Nikki Key, the lovely host of DailyIdea.tv, featured our article in her latest web show. I invite you to check it out below, and as always, don’t be afraid to leave your comments!

Synchronize your IM chat history

By Mark O’Neill

Since I spend approximately 14 hours a day online, I tend to use instant messaging a lot. I use all of the major services via the Pidgin interface as well as Skype and Google Talk.

Which all work fine, but the one thing that really annoys me is having to find a certain message at some point in the future. I often get clients who agree with me on something one day and then deny it the next day. If you use Google Talk then it isn’t a problem as everything is logged and searchable in Gmail. But try searching your Skype chat history or your AIM chat logs, and you’ll start to see what I mean. Finding one message from say 6 months ago is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

IM-History claims to be able to help you overcome that problem and so far it seems to be doing a pretty good job of taming my wild chat logs. It doesn’t support Google Talk which is actually OK with me as I have Gmail to index what was and wasn’t said. But it is doing a first-class job of searching and filtering my Skype chats for the past 2 years as well as my logs for AIM, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger. Since I don’t use IRC, I don’t know if IM-History supports it but I see no reason why it wouldn’t. If someone wants to test that, please let me know what you find out.

When you install it for the first time, it will access your IM accounts and download copies of your entire available chat history (assuming you have already saved these records of course). It then runs in the background and synchronizes with your IM programs so as you chat, the IM-History logs update immediately. It stores text, photos, links and URL’s and you can then filter the messages to find what you are looking for :

imhistory.png

It also supports multiple programs so if you have two Skype accounts or three AIM accounts, just add them all and when you log onto one of the accounts and begin chatting, IM-History starts updating.

It also follows the Foxmarks model by also offering your chat logs on the secure https IM-History website. So you can access your chat logs from wherever there is a computer with internet access.

Quickly re-name your files with Mess Rename

Mess RenameBy reading the title of this post, most of you probably thought “Why the hell is he posting about that, does he think we’re idiots who can’t rename a file?”, and normally, you would be right to think this. But when I stumbled on this utility, I knew everyone would love it, especially those of you who take billions of pictures every week with their digital camera.

Mess rename is a cool little renaming tool that takes 3 seconds to download, 2 to install and 1 to use… no manual required. The only thing the software does is take a bunch of files and rename them according to certain rules. Remember the 600 pictures you took at that last party you went to? Remember how painful it was to rename every single picture file to make them sound significant after dumping them on your hard drive? With Mess rename, you won’t have to do this anymore. Renaming those P039*.jpg files to something like party2008_(1,2,3…).jpg will now take you seconds.

Do you know about any similar tools? Which one do you use? Let us know in the comments!

[Via La Chronique de Nelson [French]]