My Open Source Game of the Year...

... is most probably OpenTTD. It's the same old Transport Tycoon kind of game - you think! Until you realize that the users have created tons of beautiful content including fully open source Grafics, Musics and Sound effects, but also new vehicles like the transrapid and tons of maps from all over the world! :)

This is one of these old style games created with lots of love and care, but
WARNING: it's highly addictive!

If you're under linux, you need to download the graphics package and unpack it into ~/.openttd. I wish the software would do that for you as well in the same way it downloads sounds, maps, extensions and everything else completely automatically!

Switching my Main Browser: Opera 10.51 Review

Well, Opera doesn't seem to have convinced everybody, but it certainly convinced me to switch over again with version 10.51. Also in my personal test it was faster than Google Chrome beta and today's Chromium in the sunspider test (705 vs. 820 and 10xx ms). It works flawlessly with Google Mail, Blogger, etc. It consumes less memory than Chrome or Chromium, especially with many tabs open and uses less CPU when it's just idling. How I love the browser wars!

You can download the newest bleeding edge version of Opera from their Desktop Blog page.

Resynthesize Tutorial

Resynthesizing can lead to unwanted results sometimes, especially if you have uneven and complicated surfaces. This tutorial shows you step by step how to get the results you want!

Try Openshot for Video Editing!

I've had lots of problem to even convert the AVCHD files from the HD camera at all at first. But now that totally changed. Openshot is a really new and really great video editor that's based on ffmpeg and can read my .m2ts files without a problem. I can deinterlace them and cut them together for output in almost any format from FullHD to QCIF.

The problem is that at least version 1.1 had a slight issue with memory leaks. It grew to consume more and more RAM. So I recommend to close and reopen it before doing the encode. Or you just close it and do the encode with the command line program openshot-renderer! That also means you can easily edit the video on one computer and then encode it on some other computer, e.g. a headless server. And Openshot encodes pretty quickly as well. Even on my slow old notebook I can export from FullHD in a very short amount of time!

Video editing has never been this easy, fun and fast!