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My roommate recently alerted me to the handiwork of the lyrically-named Johan Van den Brande, who apparently has far more free time and Commodore 64 know-how on his hands than myself. His Twitter system, called BREADBOX64, is coded in C and takes advantage of an Ethernet add-on cartridge to allow a completely stand-alone system, unlike Twittjr. And the really impressive part is that it runs on just 64KB of RAM and a 985KHz CPU (yes, it’s so slow we have to use Kilohertz)!

Since the oldest computer I had growing up was a Windows 3.1 pizza box, the only ancient hardware I know how to run is IBM-compatible DOS machines, and I’m always fascinated by people doing crazy things with C64s or Apple IIs or Amigas. I especially envy the C64 for the amazing “retro-hacker” community it has built up, and it’s really nifty that someone thought of putting Twitter on one, just as I did with the lesser-known PCjr.

I have just discovered what is quite possibly the most utterly terrifying videogame in existence. It is called Eversion, and it definitely should not be played alone in the middle of the night in a completely silent house (hint: I did this and immediately regretted it). Here is a screenshot:

What’s that? You don’t believe me? Well, it’s your funeral. Just make sure all the lights in your house are turned on before playing. Hell, go for all the lights on your street. It can’t hurt.

Despite having attended RIT for two years now, this summer is the first time I’ve had a car in Rochester, and I figured I should have at least a vague idea of where I was going before I put foot to accelerator. Since dead-tree maps are for old people, and I like finding electronic solutions to my problems, I ended up buying a TomTom ONE 130•S, which is about as entry-level as you can get in terms of GPS devices.

I’ve found it to be quite a useful little gadget, and incredibly easy to use at that. It may be an entry-level model, but it doesn’t feel like the features have been deliberately crippled to make you want to upgrade. If you just need to get from point A to point B, the 130 will get the job done with minimal hassle. Mine is the “S” version, which means it can speak the names of streets and highways; the pronounciation is invariably mangled, but it still confers the advantage of knowing what street signs to look for without taking your eyes off the road.

One oddity I noticed was that the speech synthesis frequently says “semicolon” in the middle of highway names. I’m guessing that the underlying map data expects the synthesizer to pause for a beat when it sees a semicolon, instead of saying “semicolon” aloud, but such is not the case. It might also be something weird in the data for Rochester, since I’ve only noticed it here.

Speech glitches aside, the only bad thing I can really say about this TomTom is more about the software that comes with it: It seems very intent on always being loaded in the background, setting itself to run at startup and minimizing to a tray icon when you hit the Close button instead of actually closing. The option to disable the former behavior is unintuitive, and the latter can’t be disabled at all. It seems like a well-made piece of software otherwise, though, so I’m willing to give TomTom the benefit of the doubt, and the device itself has yet to disappoint me in any way.

Interestingly, after being guided along the same route to and from work for a few weeks, I’ve unconsciously memorized the turns to the point where I don’t need the GPS anymore, though I still couldn’t tell you what roads I’m driving on. Excellent procedural memory, terrible semantic memory. Whee!

As you may have deduced from the contents of this blog’s sidebar, I am an active Twitter user, and so are many of my friends. Among people I’ve met who don’t use Twitter, the most common question is: “What is it for?” A valid question indeed, as one must be wary of investing time in activities whose ultimate purpose is not known. I will explain, if only to give myself an easy out the next time someone asks me what is up with this Twitter thing.

Many people see Twitter’s tagline “What are you doing?” and equate it to publishing every boring, mundane detail of what goes on in one’s everyday life, ala the infamous “Twitter shitter“ example. While I suppose one could use Twitter in this way, they surely wouldn’t retain many followers. The point of the whole thing, at least in my mind, is to tell all your friends about things you might mention in a normal face-to-face conversation; the old “What have you been up to?” line. If something is so mundane that you wouldn’t bother mentioning it or showing it to anyone in person, you’re probably not going to tweet about it either.

Beyond that, Twitter also serves as a unique mode of communication, a way of carrying on a conversation with someone. It’s close to the immediacy of instant messaging, but is much less intrusive, and every message is a broadcast to everyone who’s interested in what you’re doing. This makes Twitter particularly well-suited to casual queries not directed at any one person, though it can of course be used for more direct communications with the handy “@username” idiom. Some might find it strange that status updates and conversations are mingled together in the same timeline, but I find Twitter’s ultra-simplistic approach appealing (and there’s always Direct Messaging for private exchanges).

One might point out that all of Twitter’s features appear to be a strict subset of the communication tools that Facebook provides, and if you said that today, you’d be right. A year or two ago, it was a different story, but Facebook is always reworking or revamping something. Since Twitter appeared on the scene, Facebook added some new features that brought them up to parity, such as displaying wall posts in your timeline as “targeted” status updates (mimicking the @username thing). Right now, I only perceive two major differences between the ways that Facebook and Twitter approach social networking:

• Facebook is much more private and self-contained than Twitter. Unless you choose to lock down your timeline, everything you post to Twitter is out there on the internet, where absolutely anybody can read it (and maybe respond to it). On Facebook, typically only your friends or the people in your social group can see your status updates, and privacy is a much more fine-grained affair than Twitter’s boolean switch. This follows directly from the fact that…
• Facebook is a vastly more complex application than Twitter. Facebook isn’t even an application; it’s a platform. Where Twitter goes the ultra-simplistic route, Facebook’s design is multi-faceted, all-encompassing, and extensible. It’s not just status updates, it’s wall posts, photos, videos, groups, organizations, comments, discussion boards, polls, and just about every form of social interaction you could possibly think of (and probably a few more that you couldn’t think of).

It’s that last one that rather turned me off Facebook, and made me willing to check out Twitter. Facebook is so huge and complex that you can spend hours each day just wading through all the different channels for socialization, and while some people may enjoy doing exactly that, I always get the sense that I’m wasting a lot of time for very little gain. Twitter is social networking on easy mode; it has exactly the functionality you need to see what your friends are up to, and no more. I can appreciate that kind of focus and simplicity.

As a side note, I’m definitely not a fan of Twitter’s 140-character message limit, mostly because I frequently want to say things that are a good bit longer than that. I’m not sure exactly what Facebook’s limit on status updates is, but it seems much more reasonable by comparison. Might Twitter allow longer messages in the future, in a way that doesn’t require click-throughs and API tomfoolery? I hope so.

Valve’s Team Fortress 2, a game which myself and a host of other CSHers are quite fond of playing, recently received a large update that not only included new unlockable equipment for all classes, but changed the method by which said equipment is awarded to players. This has resulted in a predictable amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the game’s notoriously unpleasable fanbase, but in this case some of their complaints may actually be warranted.

The main reason for changing the unlockable system is that the old one, to be honest, really sucked. Valve, being Valve, struck out into uncharted gameplay territory and required players to grab a certain number of achievements in order to unlock each new piece of equipment. This turned out to suck for two reasons: On the one hand, impatient players who just wanted their new weapons NOW could easily knock off all the achievements in an afternoon using servers and maps designed expressly for the purpose. And on the other hand, those who wanted to earn their unlocks legitimately had to “grind” through numerous arbitrary tasks, many of which could only be completed by expressly focusing on the task itself rather than just playing the game and having fun.

For this new update released just last week, Valve promised to change everything. Unlockables would no longer be tied to achievements; and what’s more, the new system could not possibly be “cheated”, no matter how many custom maps or server hacks anyone created. And in those respects, they succeeded. Whether or not the new system actually has fewer problems than the old one is another matter entirely.

The new system is time-based: At certain time intervals while playing the game, any given player has a random chance of being handed a random piece of equipment. No other factors enter into it; number of items gotten increases linearly with amount of time played. Not everyone is entirely sure this is a good thing, especially those impatient players who are now unable to quickly grind out their unlocks on achievement servers.

But what’s really getting on everyone’s nerves is the fact that the new system feels cheaper than the old one, primarily because you can randomly be awarded a duplicate of an item you already have. Really hoping you get the Spy’s fancy new invisibility watch? Too bad; even though you’ve spent the past week playing TF2 and little else, all you’ve got to show for it are six pairs of boxing gloves, five flare guns, three Ubersaws, and a partridge in a pear tree. The new system may reward you for large time commitments, but there’s no way to actually work toward something you want.

The details of the new system, and  the rationale behind it, are explained by Valve in this blog post. Ironically, they say one of the features they plan on adding in a future update is the ability to trade items to other players. This completely ignores the fact that players are being awarded duplicate items right now, and don’t have any way to trade them; you’re at the mercy of a random number generator, and this makes the system feel incredibly cheap. Why Valve of all companies would stoop to this level of half-assery, I can only guess. They could have easily put off the whole thing until the next update (which would be a very Valve thing to do), and then they would have time to do all the features the system should have had right off the bat.

One can only hope that updates to the new item system will come earlier than the usual three-month waiting period between class packs. Otherwise, I can easily see new players being turned off by the arbitrary mechanics of item awarding. I’m personally not too perturbed over it, but only because I don’t take TF2 as seriously as most players do (the Steam forums will probably still be boiling with RAGE over this issue months from now).

Update: A few days after I posted this entry, Valve issued an update that added milestone achievements for the Sniper and Spy. This seems like an extremely slapdash solution, because it brings back all the disadvantages of the old system, and resolves few of the issues with the new system. Unfortunately, since this is probably considered a “good enough” fix, it’s likely that we won’t see any major changes to the system until the next class update, three months from now.