Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

It looks as though the highly anticipated science-based video game Spore, from the makers of SimCity and The Sims, is particularly low-ranked on Amazon. Although the game has met with some lackluster reviews, that’s not the reason for the pitiful rating. It’s because of DRM. Electronic Arts decided that Spore should include [...]

The passionates vs. the non-passionates by Robert Scoble. Great article on what makes a successful company and how to get new users for your products, whether that be a blog or a piece of software or something else entirely. The descriptions of “non-passionates” rings very true with me.

Kingston is selling a bunch of flash drives for pretty cheap with free shipping. This is a great opportunity for new students to grab a flash drive if you haven’t yet. They come in very handy if you’re using public computers at school. I know I never leave home without mine! [...]

After McCain finally released a technology policy, Lawrence Lessig takes a comparative look at the two candidates’ policies. Save our intarwebs!

I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look.
In traditional Lifehacker style, I’ll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat and MusicTracker (displays currently playing [...]

Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.

Surprise, Surprise. Vista gets seriously pwned at Blackhat 2008 [via Gizmodo]. The exploit is actually based in a bunch of Java and .NET exploit that takes advantage of Internet Explorer’s ActiveX controls. Giz claims that this has potential to infect many other systems (theoretically because they’re not based on platform specific technologies). [...]

Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet!

I remembered reading an article on ifacethoughts a few months ago about keyboard shortcuts in web browsers. One or two of them stuck, and I keep wishing that more had. I really like using scroll click (press down on the scroll button of your mouse to click) to open links in a new [...]

Until recently, I didn’t toy much with the default “look” of Ubuntu. I changed my wallpaper and that was about it. But one of the great things about Linux is how customizable it is. I hadn’t toyed around much with Screenlets or Avant Window Navigator, despite having both of them installed. [...]