Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forOctober, 2004 | back to home

8 October 2004
Filed under:Computer Games,Personal at10:51 am

Having finished a self-imposed game-free hiatus I just downloaded a bunch of game demos.
* Kohan II was OK but nothing special (rave reviews notwithstanding)
* Doom 3 wouldn’t run properly on my machine (no sound)
* Axis and Allies wouldn’t install at first then turned out to be very similar to Kohan II as it was produced by the same developer
* Medieval Lords, Nexus and Superpower 2 had no tutorial modes and just plunged you straight in to rather complex games so I became confused and bored
* Tribes: Vengeance had a demo that was so limited I couldn’t really get a flavour of the game.

I had been looking forward to hours of demo-playing fun to give myself a break after a tough couple of weeks but it looks like if I want to play anything I am going to have to play some of my old favourites – eg “Combat Mission”:http://www.battlefront.com/products/cmbb/cmbb.html. Or maybe this is the universe’s way of telling me I shouldn’t be playing games?

7 October 2004

The “Diskmeta”:http://diskmeta.com/ search engine ‘works on all Windows platforms (98 or higher)’ and ‘ is fast, intuitive and unfussy. You can also view the raw text in a special preview window but doesn’t have a preview facility like X1, dtSearch or the new Copernic Desktop Search’. Unlike some other desktop search engines it supports a variety of “boolean operators”:http://diskmeta.com/en/doc/request.asp.

The free version (for non-commercial use) only indexes txt, .doc and .html however – for indexing PDFs you need to pay, and Diskmeta doesn’t index Outlook email.

Thanks to Jeremy Wagstaff for the heads up.

Also see “here”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001230 and “here”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html#001202 for earlier coverage of hard disk searching programs.

4 October 2004
Filed under:London,Personal at5:38 pm



Yummy cake

Originally uploaded by derb.

Went to the lovely wedding yesterday of “Simon and Mary”:http://www.sandm.co.uk/ (more of my pix here, more of other people’s pix coming “here”:http://www.sandmwedding.co.uk/ shortly)

which they held in a cottage attached to “Kew Gardens”:http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/. I saw people there from my old computer journalist days I hadn’t seen for years. And by a bizarre coincidence the wedding was on the same day as the wedding of another friend a year ago yesterday. Ah lurve…

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