Since the service’s humble beginnings as an improvement on the way we used web mail, many new features have been added, some neat and some pretty useless.

However, they’ve just one new nifty feature to save us from ourselves.

Enter Mail Goggles. If you enable this feature via the Gmail Labs link on your Gmail page, a new feature will kick in late at night on the weekends: After trying to send an e-mail, it’ll ask a series of math questions to ensure that the sender is sober and not about to send something they might regret.

I have to admit, this is a long overdue feature that I think may have saved many of us from certain embarassing situations had it been available in the past.

Though, I think other web services should roll-out a similar feature - especially Twitter.

YouTube - experiencewii’s Channel.

Lets take Death By 1000 Cold Cuts for example. In the response to Tory Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s ill-timed quip, players are invited to fire a cold cut cannon at Ritz’s floating head.

First off as a reaction to tasteless comments it seems well, a tad tasteless to make a video game. However, it suffers from another issue that’s far worse: it isn’t very fun. The game only lasts about 30 seconds, if that. I will give it credit, though, for reminding players to vote on October 14th.

Surely there must be something more exciting south of the border (after all, their election campaign is more exciting than ours…)

Sadly, no. Over there we get Polar Palin, where you play as a polar bear trying to blow-up oil rigs in Alaska while avoid Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin driving a tank. It’s a better concept than Spaced Invaders with cold cuts but still isn’t very fun.

It’s rather disheartening given that there was some really cool stuff during the American primary season. I seem to recall one game that feature Barack Obama dueling Hillary Clinton at rock-paper-scissors among others.

Perhaps I should just suck it up and grab a copy of Stardock’s The Political Machine 2008 which has received decent reviews. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a Canadian counter-part (then again, it’s difficult to develop such games in a country where set election dates are ignored…)

Yes, the right half of the screen shows you the kind of goatee a REAL man is supposed to have while the left half contains an embedded video showing off the really creepy thing you need to attach to your face in order to achieve that “real man” look.

Okay, those late night infomercials demonstrating home hair-cutting equipment are frightening enough, but put up online using new media tools and GoateeSaver.com may well just be the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

So The Unofficial Apple Weblog received an anonymous tip that Apple is set to announce a subscription service for iTunes.

To TUAW’s credit, they state right at the beginning of their post that this is probably B.S. Unfortunately, even with that preface, that rumor is now spreading across the intertubes. The only reason I can think of for this shoddy journalism is the "If you say it enough times, it’ll come true," mind set.

However, that makes even less sense! For Apple to do a subscription service, the songs would need to become unplayable if the subscription wasn’t renewed. That means good old Digital Rights Management meaning the songs will only be playable in the iTunes software. Yuck.

That’s not an experience I’m in any hurry to repeat.

Recently, I’ve become very happy with eMusic. It’s not the all-you-can-eat buffet bloggers are hoping Apple will introduce but the music downloads are plain MP3 files that’ll play in any audio software and work on any portable music player.

I realize they don’t offer anything from the big-four record labels but I realized something while browsing their selection: I don’t listen to much music distributed by the big labels anyway. It seems typing in the name of an artist I enjoy on eMusic is far likely to return results than on larger services. 

Oh yeah, and unlike other DRM-free (and, well, legal) music sites, it’s available to Canadians, too.

Me: Excuse me, how much for the Blackberry Bold?

Sales Dude: That’ll be four-hundred dollars.

Me: Wow, I can swing that.

Sales Dude: Alright, let me just print out the contact

Me: (cutting him off) Oh no, I want month to month.

Sales Dude: Sir. Four-hundred dollars is the three-year contract price!

Me: (exasperated) What? Well, how much is it without a contract?

Sales Dude: If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

Me: (with a heavy sigh) Give me an iPhone.

Well, no, I’m certainly not about to give up on my Crackberry addiction and get an iPhone, but Crackberry.com has unearthed a Rogers Wireless flyer showing the latest and greatest hopefully soon to finally be released Blackberry as $399 on a three-year contract. Meanwhile, the much in demand iPhone sits at $199.

It looks like I’ll be using my now archaic Blackberry 8700 for a while longer.

I’m a huge fan of the Lucas Games and Sierra OnLine style point-and-click adventures have frankly found video games in general lacking since the genre’s apparent demise sometime in the late ’90s.

Fortunately, it seems there are always independent developers who are willing to take nostalgic desire all the way to revive lost art forms.

So, for anyone else who shares the same love of Maniac Mansion and the Space Quest series, we have Nanobots.

Created by Erin Robinson and Vince Twelve, Nanobots is by far one of the most enjoyable independent games I’ve played in ages.

The story concerns a group of tiny robots created by a hippie trying to teach machines to love. There’s a slight problem though. While he managed to create tiny intelligent robots with emotions, they kinda hate each other.

However, a problem soon arises that they’ll have to work together to solve.

The game play is pretty reminiscent of Manic Mansion, one of my all time favourites. Each tiny robot has it’s own skill - Strongbot can move heavy objects, while Audbot can communicate with anything, etc.

In order to solve the game’s puzzles, you’ll have to switch between the different bots and use their invidual specialties to accomplish various goals.

And the best part: It’s a free download!

Fortunately, it seems that is not the case, as I was certainly excited to see my first piece for The Escapist go live this morning. Stumbling into the Kingdom of Loathing is the story of how an online browser-based RPG based around stick figures became a success for the creators.

Enjoy.  

(from Wikipedia)

A funny thing happened when I installed a new hard drive last week. I ended up switching to Linux.

I realize that’s kind of like saying I accidentally walked in a Buddhist temple and now I’m a convert, but it happened.

After popping a new hard drive in my trusty laptop, I reinstalled Windows XP then once I finally got everything reconfigured (I don’t want to think about how long it took to get XP to acknowledge that I have an Ethernet port, let alone my wireless card…) I decided to make a small Linux partition and install Ubuntu to tinker around with it.

That’s where it got strange. In the week that followed, I only booted into Windows once and only for about a minute to test something.

I mostly use open source software to begin with, so really, Ubuntu had almost all my go to programs right out of the box (Openoffice, Firefox) along with a few other neat toys so I really wasn’t missing much.

Fact of the matter is, this free operating system is really impressive. The biggest complaint I hear about switching to Linux in general is hardware compatibility. Well, I’m not sure what hardware everyone else is using but while Windows XP had me ripping my hair out trying to get my wireless card to work, even though I had an official driver disc, Ubuntu recognized and was able to use it right after it was installed.

The second complaint is that a lot of work in Linux-based operating systems still gets done through the command line interface instead of just clicking through window boxes. Well, I have a little story about that, too.

Over the weekend, I finally decided to suck it up and use the Windows installation. Realizing that I’d barely configured it, I grabbed Windows Live Installer to reinstall Messanger and Windows Live Writer (still my favourite blogging client) and was met with nothing but errors as I tried to install them.

After an hour of Googling, I found out I had to go into the DOS prompt (yes…command line) and manually register a bunch of .DLL files. So really, there isn’t exactly any safety from the command line line Windows either.

Maybe I just had bad luck with the Windows installation and good luck with Ubuntu’s but overall, I found setting up Ubuntu to be far less painful than Windows (particularly the part where I left Windows update running all night and by morning, it still wasn’t finished downloaded SP3.)

While it’s come a long way, do I think Linux on the desktop is ready for primetime? I’m going to have to say no at the moment.

I’m not a programmer, but I do enjoy tweaking my computers and I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty with the command line. For the mainstream user though, there are still some issues.

Proprietary drivers for one. In Windows (or MacOS for that matter) thing like DVD and MP3 playback work right away while Linux forces you to go looking for the restricted codecs package which not an obvious move.

Then we’ve got compatibility issues. Many Windows programs will run fine under Linux using Wine
but I’m not sure how to go about explaining that to someone whose trying to get Bejewelled to work and is used to just click on the install icon their web browser dumps on the desktop.

Now I just wish I could find a blogging client as good as Windows Live Writer or figure out how to get it working under Ubuntu.

Anyway, upon open the e-mail, it even made reference to people I do know casually, so I thought perhaps this was something legitimate. Well, I went to the site and gave it a shot, was not impressed and went to delete the e-mail for good.

Then something caught my eye, they mentioned having received a positive write-up on TechCrunch. Now I was curious as to what had been written about them since the search was pretty lame and they seem to advertise via spam.

Head over to TechCrunch, punch in the company name and get: “No posts found. Try a different search?”

Who exactly do they think these people think they’re fooling? Do they seriously think no one’s going to check? I’d send them an e-mail admonishing this practice but that would probably only confirm to some bot that I’m a live person and get even more offers to have my equipment enlarged.