When walking through the city of Breda, where I work, I noticed a few stickers at various places on the pavement. They had QR codes printed on them. At first I thought these were just litter, but eventually checked them with the QR code reader in my phone. It turns out they are part of an art project. Read more
I guess every cloud really does have a silver lining. Soon, so will the fans of King's Quest. After the hopeful news I could report this morning, Phoenix Online have revealed their new website. Not only does it look great, it also comes with great news! Read more
Nearly 4 months ago, it was announced that Activision had shut down the fan-made game based on Sierra's King's Quest series, The Silver Lining, reneging on a deal made by the developers with then-copyright-owners Vivendi Univeral. A lot of fans, including myself, were outraged at this decision. The TSL team had already named itself Phoenix Online Studios and that name may yet be appropriate. The mythical bird would die in flame, but then be reborn from its own ashes. A commenter alerted me to something stirring on the official TSL site. Read more
During the fifth week of my search experiment, I have used Cuil as my primary search engine. Cuil is apparently pronounced "cool", although, like with Teoma (pronounced "chawmuh") I really can't bring myself to say it that way – to me it looks French and I keep thinking "queel" in my head. Anyway, the odd name aside, Cuil was launched with great fanfare as a "Google killer". That is quite the bold ambition and if you want to beat Google at their own game, you had better bring some seriously innovative ideas to the table. Even more important than great ideas is a great, near flawless implementation of those ideas. This is where Cuil not just falls short, but fails miserably. Read more
In my search engine experiment, the last week of April was for Yahoo!. From the list, that is the oldest search engine I have ever used. It started out not so much as a search engine, but differentiated itself by being a directory, where links were organised into categories. Of course, the web has grown explosively and it is no longer feasible to keep everything organised this way, but Yahoo! has maintained its portal function and remains one fo the most visited sites on the web. Read more
