Have Laptop Will Travel

Netbook-friendly Gaming!

Originally posted on November 16, 2010 @ 9:26 am

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I know, I know, one of the first things they tell you when you purchase a netbook is to forget gaming. You see, netbooks aren’t made to handle games. Sure, it can handle web browsing, watching non-HD movies, and maybe a little Photoshop (yes, I know of a few people who do that on their HP Minis), but gaming? No way, they say.

Well, we wouldn’t expect much from our netbooks in the gaming department. Most of them are running on a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB RAM, and of course no video card. Those specs alone could make Firefox choke in the middle of watching a video on YouTube. [Read more…]

Google buys BumpTop. What this means

Originally posted on May 5, 2010 @ 10:42 am

Although I’ve never imagined myself downloading and using it, I’ve always kept an eye on BumpTop. BumpTop is an interesting piece of software: it replaces your usual desktop with a 3-D desktop that literally tries to mimic a real, physical desk. With real, tangible objects that you can manipulate.

BumpTop makes the items on your computer’s desktop more like their real-world counterparts. Icons and folders are assigned a virtual weight based on the amount of memory they take up and their importance to you. You can move them by click-and-drag, or fling them across the BumpTop space. The program determines their importance based on how often you use them, but you can also alter that by hand. [Read more…]

Play Quake on your browser via HTML 5

Originally posted on April 6, 2010 @ 8:48 am

This here is the future of gaming, folks. One day in the not-so-distant future, we’ll be playing games on our browsers – without any plugins of some sort.

Played Quake Live before? If you haven’t I suggest you do it – it’s an excellent port of Quake Arena with better graphics, and you play on your browser. However, it uses a plugin, so it’s not exactly the most optimal way to play games on your browser. Same goes for Flash-based games like Farmville.

So what if you can play Quake 2 on your browser – with no plug-in needed? All you need to do it woud be HTML 5 and WebGL. And Google has pulled it off, apparently. Check out the video demo:

According to Download Squad:

They started off with Bytonic Software’s Jake2, a Java port of the open source Quake engine. From there, they re-compiled the engine using the Google Web Toolkit (also OSS), created a WebGL renderer to display the graphics, moved multiplayer communications from UDP to WebSockets (part of the HTML5 spec), and bolted on an emulated filesystem to allow game and preference saves.

However, I’ve looked for the download link in the Google Code page. I can’t find it anywhere. [Read more…]

Switcher lets you use Mac OS X Exposé on Windows

Originally posted on March 2, 2010 @ 7:39 am

I have to admit, I like playing around with my computer’s settings whenever I get myself a fresh install of Windows. Since Windows XP’s default blue Luna theme isn’t really much to look at, I usually install the Zune theme first before anything else. However, Windows 7 was so amazing that I actually decided to keep it vanilla for the longest time.

Until now I haven’t tweaked Windows because I actually love how the Superbar and all the other changes work. I can say that this is the first version of Windows I was practically very satisfied with. [Read more…]