Another in my short list of cool service providers/ servers/ whatever (I don’t fully understand what Nedstat is telling me in that section) from which people have visited Spinneyhead.
5. 28 June 22:49 Marine Corps Central Design & Prog. Activity, United States
If you were a gamer with money to burn in the late 90’s then the letters SLI will bring a fond tear to your eye. 3DFX decided that their Voodoo 2 graphics card wasn’t powerful enough (it was the fastest thing on the market at the time) and decided to find a way to strap two of them together and double the power. They called this SLI, Scan Line Interleave. Each card rendered alternate scan lines then glued it all back together for display. It was stupidly powerful and very expensive. Needless to say graphics geeks (sorry, enthusiasts) loved it. Unfortunately 3DFX became obsessed with brand and marketing, forgot about engineering, crumbled and their patents and some of ther engineers were finally swallowed by rival nVidia.
It seems that some of the engineering heart that beat within 3DFX survived the collapse and IP buy up and has sprung to life within nVidia as the three beautiful letters, SLI, are back. This time one card handles the top half of the screen and the other the bottom and SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface but the result is the same. Twice the power for twice the money. I really wish I wasn’t already considering upgrading my system. I should probably apologise to my savings account in advance. More factoids can be found here, here and here.
Just when I was starting to think there wasn’t enough free stuff on the web along come a set of free Star Wars games. The description of the Battle of Endor games states that you ‘face hundreds of TIEs’. It isn’t an exaggeration. Better than anything since the original X-Wing and Tie Fighter games in the early 90s.
And another Dyson ad mock up. Not as good as the others, but it completes the required quota of three.
Paisley has an early morning naked cyclist.
Residents contacted police after they saw him passing their windows in the early hours.
One woman said: “This man can�t be the full shilling. The last few nights have been so chilly and he must have been covered in goose pimples.”
Coursework, coursework, coursework. I’ve just finished the second mock Dyson advert for the Stereotypes brief.
I thought I’d try roasting slightly better quality beans, so I picked up some green Santos beans from Whittards on my wander on Friday. They’re not stronger beans, but are more mellow than the cheaper Venus beans. I’m going to mix the two batches 1/3 Santos to 2/3 no-name Venus beans for future brews.
By synchronicity, BoingBoing has a post dedicated to home roasting today, including a pointer to the eponymous CoffeeGeek.com.