Stop levelling and start living!

According to an article in The Age, many psychologists now agree that online games can lead to clinical addictions and other conditions classified as "mental health problems".

Reading this quote from a poster on the WoW_Widow mailing-list, (I ripped of their slogan for the title of this post), I think I agree:

"My husband is addicted to WoW [World of Warcraft]. Our one-year anniversary is coming up in three weeks and he doesn't want to go anywhere for it because he won't get to play. I feel so neglected and he even turns me down for sex because he'd rather play the game ... I feel more like the mother of a 13-year-old boy than the wife of a 27-year-old man."

Of course, this somewhat-new phenomenon has lead enterprising individuals to seek new business opportunities, and that's alright, but... I wonder... who's going to buy this... and for whom ?

Walking

Paul Graham has a video on Dexter, the first dynamically balancing biped robot. He's certainly more impressive than the Walking Table.

Farewell email for those who hate their jobs

http://www.chriskula.com/2005/08/farewell-email.html

Equivalent lenses and diffraction limits

Luminous-landscape has a very thorough article about equivalent focal length and how diffraction limits resolution at low aperture. The fun part is that it's written by two very knowledgeable people and yet they apparently can't agree on the minimum aperture at which resolution becomes diffraction-limited for a given sensor.

Who's right ? I have no idea. I just know that when I use a good tripod and a good lens opened-up to oh-I-don't-know,-about-f/8.0, the result is generally sharp enough.

The open-source Aeroqua

DailyMotion hosts a cool demo of Beryl, an upcoming window manager for Linux. It borrows liberally from Aqua, Aero and Looking Glass, and adds a touch of open-source exuberance, going ridiculously overboard with themes and 2D or 3D effects.

Provided there's an easy way of disabling the more epilepsy-inducing animations, it does seems like Linux will soon be getting a top-notch window manager of its own.