Martin Geisler Online

My littlebrother bought Black & White the other day, and have been playing it constantly ever since… And I must say, that this is probably the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen. The amount of detail in the graphics are simply stunning. If you zoom in, you can see the expressions on peoples faces, and if you zoom all the way out, you end up looking down on your island through some nice fluffy clouds.

The graphics reminds me of Populous The Beginning and the AI-part of the gameplay reminds me of Dungeon Keeper. Peter Molyneux has developed all these games — a very talented guy. Like in Dungeon Keeper you control everything by using your Hand — you can pick things up and put them down again (or throw then around). One of the goals was to remove all icons from the game — this means that you select your miracles by doing gestures on the ground: drawing the correct symbol activates the right miracle.

Black & White also has some quite interesting network features, like a built-in email-client, a weather-system that gives you the same weather in the game, as the one you have outside your windows. Your Creature (you have a learning creature that can help you) also maintains a real homepage on the Internet! When I first heard about this, I thought it was a joke, but it really is true — amazing :-)

I’ve now ordered the EPL-5800PS! The bad news is that it won’t arrive until the 25th of April — that’s 14 days from now… It seams that there isn’t a big marked for these Epson printers, because I couldn’t find it in stock anywhere. Oh well — I guess that I’ll just have to sit tight until it arrives.

I can’t wait to see how my LaTeX documents look when printed by it. I have been using a HP DeskJet 970Cxi for my printing until now. Because it’s an inkjet, the output is slightly fuzzy. Not to mention that I have to move the files to a machine running Windows to print them…

If you’re using Debian and want to use the great (but somewhat slow) Mozilla, then make sure that you include this line in /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://pandora.debian.org/~kitame/mozilla ./

There you’ll find the latest debs of Mozilla. I’ve searched for such debs for a long time, as the debs in the mainstream Debian repository wasn’t updated beyond M18. I’m now using 0.8 which is faster and better that M18. The new version fixes a lot of annoying bugs, like not being able to handle anchor-tags and SSL. The latter meant that I had to install Netscape 4.76 to be able to log in to SourceForge and manage PHP Weather. Now I can just use Mozilla.

In case you’re interested, then I’ve updated the page about myself — there’s now even a picture…

I think I’ve found the perfect printer for Linux. It’s the Epson EPL-5800PS, which have all the features I want:

• Adobe® PostScript®3™. This is the most important feature. I wanted to be able to print to it directly — and not through Ghostscript or some other filter. I use LaTeX for all my writing and it’s easy to convert the DVI-files produced by LaTeX into Postscript files.

• True 1200 DPI output. As laser printers get better and better, I had decided that I wanted to go for 1200 DPI, if that was possible for a reasonable price. And indeed it was :-)

• Lots of RAM — 144 MiB! All the other printer I’ve seen have between 8 and 16 MiB of RAM. You can get 32 MiB if you want to pay about 3,500$, but that’s ridiculous! 256 MiB PC133 RAM costs about 100$ today, so why does it have to be so expensive when you have to use it in a printer?

  This printer have 144 MiB of RAM (!) and it only costs about 700$. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it sure looks like a good deal.

  I don’t really know how much RAM I’ll need. I figure that 32 MiB ought to be enough, since that’s what the other expensive printers got. So 144 MiB should be more than enough, right?

If some of you have any experience with this printer, or have a good tip abot another good printer, then please let me know ASAP! If I don’t find any bad info about it, I’ll probably order it very soon! It looks like I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before I can get it though :-(