Haxer : conlangs (constructed languages) can often be quite interesting affairs, but only if you go to the trouble of actually creating an entire dictionary and grammatical rules. (google 'lojban' for the premier example.)

For amusement value : Random phrase generators!
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound/

Kung Fu Moves
illusory rabbit spirit
iron paradise defense
murderous buddha seizure
shining chopstick hand
seven paradise maneuver
resplendent jade kung-fu

All time favourite:
Superior Acupuncture Frenzy (to my enemy : I will heal your spiritual wounds with acupuncture, leaving you so confused I can just leave you standing here!)

www.seventhsanctum.com is also highly amusing.

Nerio : Opera has always been my favourite non-firefox browser. Something about it just feels very *fast* and snappy, like it has a telepathic interface into my brain and it's started doing things before I even tell it to. Just a lot of little touches that really add up in the UI department that make it *look* responsive, but it's a real pleasure to use nonetheless. Oh, and the inbuilt adblocker ('content blocker') works rather well once you give it a list of IP's to ignore - pgl.yoyo.org/ads .

Haxer : The easiest roguelikes to get into are Angband and Oangband - you can learn the ropes fairly quickly, and unlike ADOM or Nethack survival is actually humanly possible. Angband gameplay tends to be much of a sameness after a while, though - Oangband is my current pet, but Nethack is truly the mother of all RPGs for detail. In nethack it's possible to do anything - it has rules for things like 'hitting anything with a cockatrice turns it to stone - including if you fall on one', or 'eggs not laid by you have a 50% chance of hatching in your pack'.

My original goal was actually to write a roguelike of my own, but then I realised that a plain text rectangular grid wouldn't give me the space to do all the cool stuff I wanted to, so at current I'm going for something a little more graphical (sprite-based most likely, and problably on hexagonal tiles.)

Rich : Try out LyX for a document editor, provided you can download a few hundred megs of Ubuntu packages. It produces LaTeX and .pdf output, both of which are (traditionally) acceptable document formats for university papers and what not - Before .doc was TeX :p There's something very much 'cleaner' about a document rendered in TeX that you don't get with Word - kinda like the difference between vector and raster graphics.

I used to have a whole raft of web development ones (editcss, validator, etc.) but I haven't gotten around to reinstalling them yet. I find I don't really need to use them any more, though the validator one is funny for seeing what big corporate websites still use broken HTML Sites like the LG website with 23 HTML errors and a zillion warnings is amusing to me :p

[Adblock Plus]

Firefox users unite! Tell 'ole lws about your list of installed Firefox extensions

Currently in use;
Adblock Plus - Blocks ads. Blocks darned near every ad under the sun. Makes internet 50% less painful.
DownThemAll! - intelligent link finder and downloader, for when you want to do something like 'download all the .pdf's linked to on this page' without having to break out wget and pattern matching syntax
ImgLikeOpera - Turns off loading of images except from cache, until you tell it to start loading images. Great for poor me on dialup* - makes the internet usable again. (*or $22/gb university broadband.)
Scrapbook - The best way to capture those pages that you simply must read, but don't have time to right now. More convenient than my usual wget -rl5 [site] and much easier to browse through afterwards
Aardvark - A fast and intuitive tool for selecting html elements in webpages and nuking the ones you don't want, ostensibly so you can clean up all the crud before you print something. Very handy for web designers as well.
Stylish - allows you to apply your own styles to webpages.
Surfbook - 'session history management' - tells me where i've been and which pages I went through to get there.

My $0.02;

Nope, reviews (on the levels of publicity that anything I would publish would recieve) don't matter to the product. However, they *do* indicate to other, like-minded people what software might be good for them, what they might like to take for a whirl. In effect, all we are doing is passing around our experiences with certain software - which saves other people time in doing it themselves, and may introduce them to the Next Big Program they will use foreverandever.

This matters.

Rich : Actually, the guitar is custom made by a mob down in Brisbane (capital city of my State) who use CNC machines to do all the rough woodworking instead of hand-working, so for the same price you get a whole lot more guitar. Funnily enough, if it had been a cheaper guitar he'd problably have gotten off scot-free - apparently it only had thin lacquer (bascially grain sealer) as a finish, which Wes tells me is because heavy estapol-like finishes dampen the sound somewhat.

Oh, and in Aus we have a TV mob called 'Chasers' on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Co., the last bastion of meaningful television) who do a lot of comedy stuff - one segment on 'The Chaser's War On Everything' involved inviting a couple of well known aus musicians into the studio to see 'how hard they rocked'. The metric for that was 'how many strings can you break on this guitar in 60 seconds?' - the guy who won (Quan from Regurgitator) broke four :p

(oh, and hand-tools were allowed after forty seconds Surprisingly, hammers work better on guitar strings than saws)

L36 Dunadan Warrior, dlvl 47, owned by Smaug the Golden. I propose that 'D' is more threatening than 'V'

Nerio : I was told 'Tandis qu'ils dorment, nous gangerons' translated to 'While they sleep, we will gain' - which in my particular circle of friends makes for an amusing personal creed, because quite literally we're usually up at 4am doing crazy things while everyone else is sleeping. (Sausage-egg burgers taste *really* good at 4am, but falling off mountain tracks at night while randomly bushbashing up a hill is less so :p ) So what would the word 'gain' look like in francais?

Rich : XFCE was a kind of middle-compromise for me that offered neither of the two thing's i'd want - eye-candy (Gnome/KDE) or truly blazing speed (*box), though the speed might just have been my imagination. It's funny though - openbox + gnome-panel, correctly configured, actually offers a better interface than default Gnome itself (menu bound to right-click anywhere rather than a button on the screen, scrollwheel for desktop paging, etc.)

Also KDE apps drive me mad. Mad. Anytime I use a Gnome app, it Just Works, but KDE apps I use (a la Quanta, etc.) always seem to be slower and crashier (the second once resulted in the nuking of an entire web project, rah!)

Postscript : Who here knows a foreign language? One of the projects i'm contemplating is a CRPG game (based a bit more on realism than traditional games), and I'm after people who know how other languages for the purpose of creating spell incantations and so forth. It's always cool in a game when the strange arcane words actually mean something to a speaker of the 'arcane' language

Superman       95%
Supergirl      87%
Robin      77%
Batman      65%
The Flash      60%
Iron Man      55%
Spider-Man      50%
Hulk      50%
Green Lantern      45%
Wonder Woman      37%
Catwoman      20%
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.

Maybe it came out that way because i answered 'no' to the question 'do you wear a push-up bra'..... :p

*shakes fist at IE*
It's a pity IE only supports background-attachment:fixed for the body element. I've seen some very creative uses of CSS that simply cannot be, due to IE's CSS support or lack thereof.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/ -> if you haven't already, check out some of the CSS demos here.

OS : Dual boot of Ubuntu 6.06 Server (with the desktop stuff built on top.) and Windows XP SP2. My secondary computer (a celeron 566) runs Ubuntu Server with a desktop added with a mind towards fastness.

Skinnables : erm... not much, really; open/blackbox window manager (s consider that a 'shell') and themes for the two major window widget sets that roughly all match up. (There's a GTK+ theme which does all the GNOME apps, and a QT theme which does all the KDE apps.)

FLOSS software : lol!

Productivity tools :
- Firefox (1.5 because 2.0 is messy to get working from backports),
- Thunderbird w/ enigmail for mailing people about my plans for world domination.
- xterms by the dozen (i have an entire virtual desktop of just terminal windows.) In linux, the best ways to get things done often nvolve terminal windows (wget -r for the win!)
- Quanta Plus for PHP/XHTML web development, with the gubed PHP debugger.
- zim, which I cannot live without, for jotting down to-do lists, ideas, and brainstorming.
- KATE and tea for my text-editing needs - KATE for heavy lifting, tea for quick hacking. Both are leagues above most windows software and KATE is roughly analogous to OSX BBEdit. (that's high praise!)
- Inkscape for vector illustration, still trying to get a hang of the interface,
- Abiword for word processing, because OpenOffice.org sucks.
- LyX for TeX-based semantic document editing with inline math formulae (Rich problably understands why semantic > presentational - analogous to why stylesheets > font tags)
- Thunar file manager, which is a nice, clean explorer,exe like file browser (which of course doesn't suck as much.)
- maxima - a symbolic maths package which is a very good way to cheat on your maths homework, as well as solving differential equations and simultaneous systems on the side.

Non Productivity
- Amarok for music playing when I'm feeling indulgent, Rhythmbox/XMMS for when i don't have 300mb of ram to spare. (amarok is really really heavy handed on system resources, but the features are full justification.)
- gaim for MSN/Jabber, xterm+irssi+screen for IRC that never ever dies, even if you close the window.
- The Battle For Wesnoth, truly the most awesome open source strategy game ever. (comes for all platforms, go get it at wesnoth.org.)
- angband : a text-based hack-and-slash game that draws on Lord of The Rings - has many variants and had me truly addicted for a few weeks. (addicted to a *ascii display* game? It's very definitely possible.)


On my iBook (inherited ) I use some of the same apps, but mostly I get by with what OSX comes with plus what my brother lifted from the mac labs at JCU (isn't the OSX concept of programs as single files great? ) For text editing I often find myself using nano in a terminal, or TextWrangler (the free version of BBEdit, which is the single best reason to use a Mac ever.) I'm not really using it at the moment, but once i get back to university i'll probably stock it up with apps as my mobile needs see fit.

On windows, I use Dreamweaver 8 (only slightly better than Quanta really) and Photoshop CS2, the single best example of why open-source software has some catching up to do. I also use xplorer2, which is a very nice file browser. In the way of games, all I was playing was Neverwinter Nights (best RPG evarr) and Warcraft 3, by which I really mean DotA.

I don't play anything, unfortunately I got turned off musical instruments whem my mum tried to force me into playing the flute (which I didn't want to do, at all, in primary school.)

I;m currently in they second year of my Electrical Engineering/Maths degree (it's a bit fluid at the moment.) I was going to do computer science instead of maths, but casual inspection of the laughable excuse of a compsci degree offered at JCU was rather discouraging for someone who's been living on a computer since the age of 4 Subjects on 'introductory Computer Technology -> this is a mouse, kids!' and so forth...

About college : I have another four years to go - I get back to college in about three weeks, and I can't wait because home is driving me up the wall what with the crappy dialup and no intellectual challenge and no-one interesting to talk to :O I'm actually glad I have 'crappy' speakers - the bass simply isn't powerful enough to keep anyone awake, ever. Headphones are better if you're reasonably stationary anyway Luckily I live on the 'quiet floor' of my college and I'm good mates with all the people who happen to have the phat bass, so they understand that I do actually sleep sometimes

Oh, and how are the initiation rites and so forth at your college? I have the misfortune to live at one of the maybe 2/8 residential colleges at JCU that actually still have embarrassing fresher rituals (i.e. we haven't been sued into the stone ages _yet_ by irate american exchange students.)


And funny story that may make Rich cringe : my brother has a $2000 custom acoustic. He lives in a mining town out in the outback desert, usually renowned for utter lack of anything resembling water. He went out to play a gig on new year's lunch, and it rained all over his nice guitar - cracked lacquer, warped soundboard, the works :? How unlucky do you have to be?

If I may weigh in here;

I've been using Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 pretty much exclusively for the last few months - I've become quite partial to the *box family of minimal window managers (openbox, blackbox), and the linux multiple-desktop model. (Scroll wheel on empty patch of desktop -> scroll through your virtual desktops!) Seems I've reversed polarity in the last year - I've gone from using AS for the pretty value to using a relatively spartan desktop (might chuck up some screenshots later.) Basically, it takes a second or two to load up, and my desktop loads it uses 40mb RAM/0mb pagefile (100mb ram if I afford for the luxury of the GNOME panel - taskbar, altdesk-esque desktop pager, and application menu.)

As far as the windows versions of *box shells go, I found bblite and the other one i tried (xoblite?) to be unstable and generally not faithful to the linux versions of same (the second I expected, courtesy of 'for something to be better it must be different', but the first was a show-stopper right after my computer hung for the seventh time.)

Incidentally, it amuses me how fast and *pretty* openbox/blackbox are. There are some very nice, smooth themes for them, which look better than you'd think when the only type of skinning you can do is specify element sizes, gradients/solid fills and lines, and this stuff all runs blazingly fast on the oldest/crappiest of computers.

RE the 'skinning apocalypse' : I lost interest in skinning about a year back because it simply wasn't fun or exciting or challenging anymore, and I already had the AS skin I wanted in the form of Porcelain (which i never got around to releasing a final version of ) I don't regret my skinning days in the least, because I got to hang out with other like-minded skinners and soaked up / learned a lot about the use of photoshop and graphic design in general.

Nowadays, I pour that creative energy / desire to learn into web design. (Rich, you're scarily prescient!) I'm currently working on a updated version of a website I did for a friend's parent's business (www.orrbodies.com), which the discerning connoiseur wil notice is tableless css-layout XHTML 1.0 Trans - and even better, I actually get paid significant money! (this is a very good reason to pick web design over skinning.)

Also, there's far more interesting stuff to do in web design - I think I already pushed the envelope of Astonshell skinning as far as I my sanity could take it, but web design is still a booming field of innovation (usually having to do with IE's flaws, natch.) The final reason is, as rich says, designing for an audience rather than yourself - I'm currently doing up a personal website which will provide a place for me to post up my rantings for discussion. The concept of having a personal website that embodies me and all my ideas is quite an exciting one to me.

All the good non-dreamweaver PHP/HTML IDEs are on linux, it seems (as well as PHP and Apache themselves), though I still boot windows to use Photoshop, because GIMP sucks in very major and fundamental ways - it doesn't even have 'shape' tools! Rounded rectangle drawing involves use of a python script, etc....

The other thing i've found is that the 'elite' of astonshell users - i.e., those who rise to the top of the forums, have a tendency to be the power-user type for whom non-windows OSes will tend to be a natural and exciting step. Maybe think of it as a logical progression in terms of customisabiliy - Astonshell allows graphical customisation to limited extent; Linux allows me to choose which of 30 window managers will draw my window frames, and which of 10 panel programs will provide my 'taskbar'. (though in these terms, OSX is actually a step backwards in terms of customisation - it's all very rigid and pre fabricated, but it can run all my linux apps anyway via remote X11 connections to my linux server, so that's alright )

It's interesting to note that I made a personal mirror of the Ubuntu x86 binary repository before I left university, which takes up 14gb - yet in that 14gb, there are thousands of useful and amusing programs, and I discover a few every day. At the moment my addiction is Zim, which is like a personal wiki that I use for brainstorming and writing down whatever I happen to be thinking about. (providing the DNS name points to the right server at my university atm, you can see my rantings at caradoc.jcu.edu.au/zimwiki or zim_html.)

On life : I have the supreme fortune whereby my life has been, to date, completely free of personal tragedy of any significant kind. However, the trials that you go through are largely responsible for the kind of person you are - most of the people I know who 'have everything' are people I don't really want to become close friends with. The other thing I like to say is that the principle of 'equivalent trade' applies to everything - if you lose something, you *must* gain something else in return, even if it's not obvious or what you wanted at the time. In hindsight, if I had oodles of friends in school, then I problably wouldn't be the prodigy I am today, and in the present time I'm both prodigous and knowing of many friends, so it turns out that I win at life to date (i just had to wait a bit.)

All right, linux-related thread hijack over

-lws

Postscript : nerio, can you translate 'Tandis qu'ils dorment, nous gangerons' for me? I'd like to check to see if it means what i'm told it means

Aww, we lose our 'what superpower would you have' thread. I propose we start that one anew =)

They posted the link to the Admins forum on the astonshell forums, but you aren't part of it =)
Try emailing them; I'm sure they wouldn't mind giving you the beta (or at least they aren't going to be rude )