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Addon Spotlight: Readers' bag addon recommendations
Thanks to everyone who responded to part one of this two-part series with their bag addon recommendations! If there are ones I still missed out, do let me know in the comments below, and as ever, links mean prizes! It should be noted that all prizes are imaginary. In testing all the addons I've looked at so far, I've come to the conclusion that bag addons are all extremely similar, but most have some feature that helps them stand out from the rest. It's not a great surprise, after all, there are only so many ways that an addon can say "hey, look at all these things you have"! Today we're looking at two more bag addons, in addition to the three we looked at last week. I confess right now, one of these has almost persuaded me to move away from my beloved Adibags, not for certain just yet, but it has certainly been a very interesting couple of weeks. Baud Bags I mentioned last week that the one bag option was so intuitive and logical that I didn't really see why Blizzard didn't make it standard. I should clarify, having ruffled some feathers by saying so, that I didn't mean to force all you separate bag lovers into having one big bag -- I am an advocate of adding options, not of removing them, and so, it seems, is Baud Bag.
The Game Archaeologist and the SysOp's Sinister Stratagem
When you think of MMORPGs, I wouldn't blame you if your mind stayed rooted firmly in the past decade or so, perhaps taking a brief vacation to 1997 before returning to today's 3-D polygonal glory. But it's not like people just woke up in the late 90's, looked at each other, and said, "Hmm. Online multiplayer RPGs. Let's make it happen!" On the contrary, history had been building up to that moment for quite some time. Tabletop RPGs and computer MUDs (multi-user dungeons) were both important ancestors of modern MMOs, just as was a mostly forgotten piece of software lore: the bulletin board system, also known as the BBS. In layman's terms, BBSes were like pocket internets -- host computers that allowed anyone to dial up and use special programs remotely. While BBSes weren't (initially) tied together like the world wide web, they featured a lot of the elements that would make the WWW so popular, such as email, forums, and, yes, online games. Today's special one-shot Game Archaeologist will take a brief look at the history of the BBS, as well as a couple of its games that could be considered "MORPGs" (like the renowned website, the "Massively" part would be a while in coming). Dial up, gentle readers, and make your hissing modem noises!
Turn your Apple IIe into a Linux terminal
As he even points out, this isn't the first time this has been done, but Quag7 has written up a very detailed, simple, and often hilarious (I feel the same way about Michael Bay!) guide for converting that old Apple ][e you've got sitting around into a Linux serial terminal. In this case, he runs a serial connection between a modern (everything is relative here) Gentoo distro and the ][e using ADTPro as a go-between. Hook up ADTPro on both, get the serial hooked up and running on both, install a term program on the ][e and then make sure everything can talk to each other (at 9600 baud-- remember baud? Oh those were the days), and voila, you've got an Apple ][e that can run a Linux distro. Why would you want to do this? No idea.But why else do we do this kind of crazy stuff (like hook an Apple ][e up to a game machine, or even an actual Mac)? We do this, my friends, because we can.[via Waxy]
