A few quick geeky reviews of things I am using that I find interesting....
First of all, the Amazon Kindle I received as a Christmas present (although it arrived in late January.) There are all sorts of general reviews of the Kindle all over the web, so I'm not going to go over the pros and cons. This device is obviously a 1.0 release and has some bugs in design and needs some features. But how has it changed my reading over the last few months? First of all, the electronic delivery though the cell network is brilliant. I can order a book and have it a few seconds later. I get Newsweek delivered before it hits the newsstands. I love it. The reading experience takes some getting used to, but I got over that quickly. It's great to be able to carry around Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (which is a thick book), Philbrick's Mayflower, and Newsweek in the same small package. I really am finding my Kindle to be a great way to read, and I look forward to what Amazon does with future releases.
Secondly, I had the need to generate a 19th-Level Dungeons and Dragons character a couple of weeks ago, which can be a pretty daunting task. Luckily, I happened across The Only Sheet, an Excel worksheet that assists with character generation. It uses Visual Basic, so you have to be running a Windows version of Excel (I run Excel 2003 under Parallels Desktop). It is amazing. You can download class and race files for just about everything in all the books, and changing one thing changes everything on the Character Sheet. It made generating the character a small task, rather than one that could take hours. It even has a live play mode that allows you to use your laptop during play and add "buffs" as you go. I highly reccomend it to anyone who is serious about D&D.
David+
Am I allowed to reveal my sin of envy here in public?
Can you absolve me over the internet?
Bosco+
www.liturgy.co.nz
Posted by: Bosco Peters | April 27, 2008 at 04:03 AM