Wonderful! CBS has posted the original Star Trek series online. Complete with commercials in the appropriate spots ;-).
The video quality is pretty good, but not great.
Link original from Jonah Goldberg at The Corner.
Comments Off on Original Star Trek OnlineI have been using SpellForge for quite some time. It is a wonderful program and I highly recommend it. With high level characters, who have a lot of spells (especially clerics), spell lists can get very long and unwieldy. In one of my D&D games I am playing a 10th level cleric whose spell list (as generated by SpellForge) using the Player’s Handbook and Spell Compendium is 9 pages long. In my last game session, it seemed to take forever to select spells.
To speed up the spell selection process, I created a spell selection wizard called SpellTrack. This is a simple Excel program designed to import spells from SpellForge and then provide a wizard designed to make it easy to select and keep track of spells.
Here are some screenshots:
Spell Selection Wizard
Spell List In Excel
After spells have been selected using the wizard, they are in an Excel worksheet which can be printed out or used to track them as a game session progesses.
While SpellTrack works, I have not done exhaustive testing, a.k.a I am sure there are bugs. Feedback is always appreciated.
Comments Off on SpellTrackOnce again, the Lockergnome has a useful and easy to implement tip that makes my life more enjoyable. Chris Pirillo shows how to improve the video quality of Youtube videos on his website today.
Two options:
I tried it out and it improved the quality of several videos in my favorites; they were actually decent quality in full screen mode. Some other of my favorites didn’t improve. Based upon Mr. Pirillo’s post, I presume that they were .flv video files.
Anyway, I switched my default settings to always the use the high quality video. Thanks Chris.
Comments Off on High Quality YouTube VideosMy map of Ardivan’s Keep, which is basically a redraw of the moat house from T1: The Village of Homlet, has moved up in the world. It has made it into the Dueling Analogs comic honoring the passing of Gary Gygax.
It is certainly a step up, being in the company of the co-founder of D&D and God.
Comments Off on Ardivan’s Keep Map Moving Up In The WorldI purchased the 3.5 Magic Item Compendium shortly after it came out. It is a wonderful product, but it can be hard to find a specific items. While it has several indexes, they are by type of item and cost. There is no simple item index by name.
Mid-December, I typed up an alphabetical item index in pdf format.
One commentJournal entries covering the December 7, 2007 session. We assaulted a camp of 300 goblins and associated monsters. A totally fun game session.
Comments Off on 12/07/07 D&D Game SessionI have finally posted the recap for the November 17, 2007 session.
I don’t know why I didn’t post this earlier. It has been done for more than a month.
Comments Off on 11/17/07 D&D Game SessionMy DM at one of the current campaigns I am in posted the following links to his yahoo group:
D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations
Don’t know if I agree with everything presented, but a very thought provoking post, a least for D&D players.
As a DM, one of the things I found the most difficult was making time and consumables meaningful. Earlier editions, with their 10 minute turns, made time pass much more quickly. This would cause torches to burn out, supplies to be eaten, etc.
3rd edition uses 6 second turns – characters can explore in a couple of hours what would have taken a day or two in previous editions. While more realistic, I just found it harder to track time. Lots of guestimating on if a spell had ended, etc. and supplies never seemed to run out in a dungeon.
Comments Off on Realism in D&D – Skills, NPC Class Levels & EncumbranceI am not reading much Buffy fanfiction these days, but Elais (a.k.a. Christopher Marlowe) from the Succubus Club chat wrote an interesting short piece: Buffy Meets The Hound of The Baskervilles.
It is part of summer fanfic contest of some kind. I haven’t read all of them yet, but all that I have read are pretty enjoyable.
One commentI went to a website today and everytime my mouse lingered over a hyperlink, there would be a noticeable delay and then a window would popup, previewing the site. It was very annoying, as there were a lot of hyperlinks.
There are several web enhancements that do this. The one one this site was Snap, but another incredibly annoying one is Kontera’s ContentLink. Thanks to the magic of Google, I quickly found out how to block them in Opera.
In Opera:
Source websites:
http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/593
http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/ad-block?cid=3719215