Dreyfus’ Berkeley Uni Podcasts

I’ve heard that Dreyfus is a great speaker, his work is well cited and seems to be very important. Fortunately Berkeley is generous enough to offer their lectures to the public. Here are the ones I’m interested in now:

Philosophy 7 Existentialism in Literature and Film

Philosophy 189 Heideggers Being and Time, Division II (Three Day Delay)

Yahtzee on Narrative, Embodiment and AI

The World Ends With You.

A major thing that turns me off from JRPGs and a lot of games in general is when I don’t feel that I as a player am contributing anything to the story. All I seem to do is wheel the characters from one whingy, boring dialog to the next; events are driven by their actions, not mine, and all I am is little angry id who takes over for the combat, spending the rest of the time jumping up and down in the back of the main character’s mind, yanking on nerve endings, trying to make him stop acting like a pillock.

Stroke & Nirvana

Neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor’s personal account of the experience of having a stroke, and the separation of left and right hemispheres.

Leads to Buddhist philosophy.

Very emotional.

Miyamoto’s game design

The New York Times are running an article on Shigeru Miyamoto.

According to Mr. Miyamoto, gameplay systems and mechanics have always come first, while the characters are created and deployed in the service of the overall design. That means a focus on the seemingly prosaic basic elements of game design: movement, setting, goals to accomplish and obstacles to overcome

Interesting to me because of all the projects I recall where characters were always designed earlier.

Ubuntu Google Earth

Google Earth kept killing my X server whenever I tried to launch it, just after the Splash screen appeared. Apparently this is a common problem with a common solution. Here’s how I got it to work using software OpenGL emulation:

sudo apt-get install googleearth-package
sudo dpkg -i googleearth_4.3.7204.836+0.5.2-1_i386.deb
(source and source) sudo wget http://librarian.launchpad.net/7037027/libGL.so.1 -O libGL.so.1
(source) DISPLAY=:0 ~/google-earth/googleearth %f

I was able to enable my hardware drivers and run Google Earth from my desktop icon without any problems at all.
System -> Admin -> Hardware Drivers -> NViDIA : Enable

Interview Transcription

As part of a recent study I ran at University I had to interview some people. I did it over Skype because the participants were from various locations around the world, and so that I could easily record our conversations.

To do the recording I used Call Recorder, a commercial application which offers an unrestricted 7 day trial. Once that period had expired I just created a dummy user account on my OSX laptop, then installed it for them using the same Skype username: Instant 7 days more free use.

Once I’d recorded the interviews as .MOV files with a separate audio track for myself and the interviewee I then mixed them down to MP3s using FFMPegX, a shareware frontend to the command line ffmpeg.

To do the transcription I used Transcriber, a FOSS package that I initially ran on Windows, but since I’ve moved to Ubuntu I’ll use it here in the future.

33 Today

It’s my birthday today!

Drinks round my place at 8pm, hitting the town afterwards. Give me a buzz on the usual channels if you’re about.