We Temporarily Interrupt Our Programming For A Geek Update

Firefox 3.5 and Fast Dial

I've updated to Firefox 3.5, and it is (as advertised) much faster than the previous version. Not a lot of obvious changes, except for a little button in the tab bar to open a new tab. The update went well except for my FastDial Add-on, which I've become quite fond of. Fast Dial, available here, makes a blog page that's a visual depiction of your favorite sites. It's a visualized bookmarks list. Here's a screenshot of my FastDial page:



I typed "firefox 3.5 fast dial" into Google, and ended up at : http://userlogos.org/node/8372?#comment-10495, which had easy advice on fixing it. I was glad to get my FastDial back.

---

Asteroids : The Movie?

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Universal has won a bidding war over the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids". In "Asteroids," initially released as an arcade game in 1979, a player controlled a triangular space ship in an asteroid field. The object was to shoot and destroy the hulking masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both.


There is no story line, defined character, or mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch. Universal is in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game it is translating to the big screen, such as "Battleship" and "Candyland".

CrunchGear has an online poll asking, Would you rather watch this movie for 90 minutes, or play Asteroids for 90 minutes? So far, the game is winning 2:1.

Wired offers a somewhat sarcastic take on the movie.

---

CrunchPad Debuts Soon

The CrunchPad will be less than a laptop, less than a notebook, and less than a netbook. It's a flat-screen, wireless web browser. The design team's challenge has been, "What if the browser could boot without an OS? How different would the world be?"

This is going to be a browsing device only. No "lite" version of Word. You will be able to do word processing, etc via cloud services. This might be very interesting.

---

Offline Wikipedia on iPhone

Patrick Collison has written an application that puts an updated version of all Wikipedia text content onto your 8gb iPhone or iTouch. Very cool for when you're going to be off the grid but want access to the knowledge base.