Now this is interesting. This dude at nonsensicality.com wrote a pi.cgi program that takes the passed URL and tries to give you a directory to the next bit of Ï€. Now, I can’t quite tell if it’s feeding back primes, I would guess it is but maybe it’s just giving back odd numbers. I’m not sure.

So the funny part is, I found this as a part of Google challenge. A Cory Forsyth was talking about solving the intersection between Ï€ and prime numbers. Google had a challenge where you’d enter {first prime number in Ï€}.com and then that’d take you to the next challenge. If you got to the end, you got a job (I suppose). It turned out to be e and prime numbers but I was still impressed with Cory’s solution in ruby.

Anyway, I was searching for his answer on the web and this cgi program was indexed by google. I had 10,000 digits of Ï€ in a text file so I wanted to see how far it’d work.

It broke at 4096 digits which possibly is a browser limitation. 4095 digits worked which you can see following this OMG HUGE LINK. The slashes were inserted by me and are pretty random. I think his CGI would continue working for a while given an infinite POST string. Unfortunately HTTP POSTs stop at 4096, lol. That’s a big POST.

Maybe he has some memory limits on the input (like 32-bit int or something). I dunno, I’d guess he’s written it in Perl. His site reminds me of my old fuzzylemon screw around pre-blog site. Ah memories.

Bit.ly wouldn’t let me shrink that url, lol.

Matt and Edgar cook up a nod to the Cake and Bacon PA comic. Shocking culinary disaster is completely inverted when the results turn out fine.

i know – but – BUT …. oddly enough, the flavors work

The Flickr set is a sin against food. The domain recently registered (cakon.com) is no small step toward absolution of this validated experiment. Look at what Gabe made.

Arstechnica has a post discussing the upcoming karoke-game-on-crack, Rock Band. It’s the Guitar Hero you know and love (but I’ve never owned) plus plastic drums and a microphone. I think the entire setup gets you a four person band. I’ll get to that in a second. What had me rofl’ing like a wofl’ing (note, this is a wofl: #) is a single sentence made by ars writer Ben Kurchera who says:

Ben Kurchera: “This is the first game that’s lead me to consider buying a bigger house to play a video game.”

Hilariously true. But he might consider a smaller house to afford a video game with the $300 plastic peripheral expense required to play Rock Band. Or store Rock Band? Where are these plastic instruments going to go when they are not being played? Is this a bit different than displaying racks of DVD cases or proudly mounting guitars on the wall? Will the plastic musical controllers end up in the sports bin next to the soccer ball that no one kicks? I don’t know, my PS2 racing wheel wants badly to work with the PS3 in the future. I hope it does so it can lose its dust.

Another thing that Joystiq mentioned their first hands-on experience with Rock Band, the apologized to the keyboard players out there saying that there was no virtual keyboard band member in the game. A sad day for myself but I think it would be bad practice; playing real-life Ping Pong always screws up my real-life Tennis game.

Joystick said that Rock Band would disappoint the Rick Wakeman fans by skipping the keyboardist band member. Wait, who? Rick Wakeman? Uh-oh, I’m supposed to know this. Oh, yeah .. right … that Yes guy. Yes, I know his stuff but how about you say Yes next time? I’m not good with names and Rick Rubin is already taking up a lot of room in my musician name brain space.

Guitar Hero came to appease the mass audience just as Guitar Center appeases the mass would-be noodlers. There’s no Harmonica Center even though Guitar Center sells harmonicas. So if everyone wants to play lead guitar, who’s going to sing “Don’t Fear the Reaper”? No one without a few beers. I think the guitar controllers of Rock Band will never hit the closet or the floor. So maybe people should just buy Guitar Hero III instead?

Of course I thought the amount of controller commitment in Guitar Hero would sink it straight out. And yet here comes Guitar Hero III in full force, commanding all different types of fake plastic guitars on various platforms. They have fake plastic wireless guitars, fake plastic replica guitars, fake plastic flying-v guitars and even limited editions. So maybe my group of friends is different than the other groups in the world with large gaming rooms and large desire for fake plastic skills.

Hard[OCP] is a PC hardware review site. They recently had a forum topic called show your LCD setups. Everyone posted pictures of their LCDs. Some are very standard and some are very elaborate.

Here is some of my favorites from the thread (from about page 280 to page 380).

Holy mother of god. 5.0L V8 450hp priced at (eep) $50k. October 2007.

update: Toyota has cancelled this as of Sept 06. This pic was from March.

Panogames has some Half-Life2 panorama in-game shots. 360° done in quicktime, must have taken a while to sow together. Pretty neat for those people who have played the game enough for these pictures to warrant memories / vacation photos.

Apple is announcing a $2499 desktop.

“8 fully buffered DOIMMs, an incredible design and beautiful, simple access to it all. We’ve had a lot of fun building great configurations for our customers. One standard configuration… Dual 2 2.66 dual core Xeons, 1 GB, 667 MHz FB-DIMM. 250GB HD. Nvidia geforce 7300GT, 256 MB and 16xc superdrive for $2499. I know what you’re thinking. Apple makes the best computers but they’re expensive. We’re going to bust that myth. Similar configuration about a thousand dollars less than Dell.”

Rofl. The cheap mac is here.

I love toothpastefordinner. <3

X-Men Game sucks

CNET reviews the official X-Men game on the 360:

Plugging your game controller into a ham sandwich while pushing buttons and making your own sound effects is more engaging.

Ham. Hilarious. I could arrange and videotape that.

New 360 arcade games

And apparently they are throwing up some new Xbox Live content up. Yay? I hate all this piecemeal charging. I don’t have Live anymore so I’m not even priviledged enough to buy these things …

July 12 – Frogger, 400 points ($5)
July 19 – Cloning Clyde, 800 points ($10)
July 26 – Galaga, 400 points ($5)
August 2 – Street Fighter II’ Hyper Fighting, 800 points ($10)
August 9 – Pac-Man, 400 points ($5)

I’d rather have a MAME box (ala Wookie’s and my dream setup).

PC dying from crap graphics

And finally, Joystiq mentions that Mark Rein of Epic suggests that Intel integrated graphics cards and killing PC games because in reality, that is what is sold in retail stores.

Mark laid out the reasons he thinks that PC gaming is being harmed by Intel. He pointed the finger at Intel’s integrated graphics chips. Integrated chipsets are often incapable of playing the latest (and certainly next-generation) games at any kind of graphics settings. Despite this, they are wildly popular amongst retailers. According to Mark’s figures, 80% of laptops and 55% of desktops (note: he failed to cite a source for these figures) feature integrated graphics. That’s bad news for companies like Epic, which are investing heavily into extremely demanding next-generation games.

It’s an interesting point about PC integrated chips, however, I’d argue that enthusiasts replace the cards with an addon board. But then again, enthusiasts are few in numbers and probably don’t buy from computer retailers anyway. This would be an interesting study to do.

I can’t help but agree with him to be honest. My 360 was super cheap and it’s got an ATI R500 in it. When ATI releases their R600 for PC, the PC will compete again but the card will be as expensive as the entire 360. If the 360 had a good way of typing in commands for more complex games (RTS and MMOs) then the x360 (or any console would just walk away with the market share). However that’s not the case. The reality is, a slower bleed where the advantage of the console is ease of use (no viruses, Windows Updates, no OS complexity). It is not so obvious to casual users.

The advantage of the casual PC gamer is: I already have a PC, I didn’t buy it for games but now that I have it, what games can I play? It’s this retail gaming afterthought role that I think Mark is talking about.

It’s the same old fight.

Gamer’s Quarter is a smaller time gamer magazine (free digital download). They have some real bright spots. Other parts come off a bit amatuerish.

Of note, is a catchy comic strip discussing the Wii, Red Steel and a hot topic among friends: First Person Shooters on a Console

The picture that illustrates the weakness of the Wii in a FPS is the WASD and Mouse overlayed on the Wii-mote. Instead of a fresh start, the FPS feels alien and distant because you’re trying to be a PC experience. :(