I played the original Contra games on the NES and SNES as a kid, and love them. I was surprised to learn that the series had been revived on the Nintendo DS, and it's pretty well done IMO. Contra 4 seems to capture the spirit of the SNES "Alien Wars", and extends it a good deal. Great fun, and some of the finest 2D graphics I can recall.

http://www.konami-data.com/officialsites/contra4/

The Wine project has released version 1.0, you can read the news release here:

http://www.winehq.org/?issue=348#News:%20Wine%201.0!

NASA has posted some images of soil samples magified to show detail of the Marsian soil. Take a look:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ph...Composite.html

I ran across this link earlier this week, and it's pretty interesting. I've only done some basic testing, but I'm thinking it could be good for finding new artists.

http://www.pandora.com/

Great fun watching the crew enjoy the open space of the new module.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCH0y-KwhbU

The NASA page for this project contains several interesting areas. Only 5 hours after landing there were new photos from the surface already in the gallery. Congratulations to the team!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/

A composite image of Mars path during retrograde. Mouse over the image for references.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080511.html

Pretty interesting technology, they've got some videos that demonstrate the results.

http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm#video

I guess the day could come when media players will scan every video, song, and picture to determine copyright compliance. Walkman anybody?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ref=technology

Today Serval has completed many of the main updates to the website, and I am checking on new features available to our members.

Most of the new items for users and social group activities are found in the UserCP page. There are options for creating and joining groups (for like minded users to share information), create personal image albums (public and private), as well as manage your contact and friends lists.

These kind of features could be useful in several ways for SPS members, I hope they can open up better sharing of ideas and information. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know, whether in the main forum, via a private message, or you may reply to this post if you like.

Two weeks now and I've not posted a proper weblog entry, being busy with my OS upgrade and other issues. So I'll start off May fresh...

Some pretty interesting watches by the designer. Prices supposedly are up over $100,000 for some models.

http://www.romainjerome.ch/en/home/home.aspx

As of this evening I've got the last thing configured that I really need to have... my WACOM tablet.

I've got my nVidia TwinView dual monitor system configured the way I like it, and using the settings found on this webpage the Wacom fits in exactly as I want it to, with the tablet only active on my main monitor, while my normal trackball can still stretch across both displays.

Having done this, I've got to say that the end user setup experience still has an incredibly steep learning curve. There are no GUIs on these configurations, everything had to be manually typed into my xorg.conf file using gedit (notepad) all while granting myself root permissions via terminal to save the file.

This will never work for average end users. I've got nothing bad to say about Ubuntu, when it's working it's exactly what and how I want it. But working with configuration does make a point of just how well Microsoft has the average user covered.

I had some xorg.conf errors, and some issues with mounted driver permissions, all on a clean install. But those have been worked out and I'm getting settled in.

Here's hoping for smooth sailing!

An interesting page I ran across this week.
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

Pretty interesting site about ACW artillery and projectiles. I've been reading on the ACW for a few years now, but this hardware is a still something I want to learn more about.

http://www.civilwarartillery.com/