A Man and his Penguin

Two more packages you've got to have

1. Kobo Deluxe. This is a retro-styled space shooter, but rather than being the usual "You're a spaceship travelling up the screen and you have to shoot other spaceships travelling down the screen", you are a spaceship in a 2D universe, having to destroy enemy space bases. The catch is, that the heart of the base is protected by labyrinth-like structures, with nodes on the outside which, when shot, will destroy one of the structures. Shooting the actual structure itself won't do any damage.

This game becomes seriously frantic, because the outside nodes can fire at you, as can the heart of the base inside. There are other enemy ships, which start off fairly benign, but then other sorts of enemy ships appear which are fast and destructive. Eventually, the nodes actually shoot ships at you!

Very frantic, and leads to some exhilarating moments when you start off surrounded by bases and have to fly right in between them, with nodes shooting Azgardi ships at you :-)   (Long-time Mac gamers should know exactly what I mean by "Azgardi").

2. Mozilla-beagle.  This is a Firefox extension that enables Beagle to index the websites that you visit! Yes, this is seriously cool. If you remember recently reading an article about telepathy, you could do a search in Beagle for "read my mind". Beagle would pull up the e-mails you sent to your clairvoyant, your copy of the Gordon Lightfoot song "If You Could Read My Mind", and the article that you read in Firefox but forgot to save to your home directory!

I don't really use Beagle - on Dapper I had it completely disabled - but at least this should help me find quotes that I read on Bash but can't remember and didn't save :-)

Problems installing vcdimager

Yesterday, I thought I'd share some MPEG files with a friend from India. Unfortunately, those files were on a VCD.

I'd just thought that I could drag and drop the files onto my hard disk, but I tried using the Finder and Ubuntu. I even used Disk Copy on the Mac to try and make a disc image of the VCD and then copy the files off that way.

It didn't work. So I went to the trusty repositories and found a package called "vcdimager". I tried installing it, and it told me that the dependancies it needed were unavailable!

So now I'm really annoyed. I've mentioned it on the Ubuntu Forums and I hope the MOTUs fix the problem, or that someone provides me with another way to get the package(s) I need.

Now I'm wondering: Why can Quicktime read the files from the VCD, but nothing copy them? Surely it's all just reading?