Acer Aspire One playing QuakeWorld

I’m visiting my sister for her birthday, and after a BBQ we’ve come inside to watch telly and consume her Internet. Amy’s playing QuakeWorld on her Mac, and with her suggestion I installed ezQuake on my sister’s Acer Aspire One netbook. I didn’t really expect it to actually work, but it does - with OpenGL too. And it plays very well, I’m just as crap on this as I am on my proper PC at home

If I didn’t have a Macbook, I’d be off to the shops tomorrow to buy one of these things, they’re quite cool. So are the EeePCs, but these Acer things appear to have a more powerful CPU.

Mind you, maybe I’ll get an Eee 901 and have a decent battery life too. But then I have a Macbook too.

Readers of my blog… convince me to buy an Eee 901 - I have a Macbook, why should I bother buying something smaller that effectively does the same? I also have a Nokia N810…

It’s amazing just how cheaply we can talk to each other now. The other day I had a two hour Skype video call with someone, later that same person phoned me using a cheap call service and it cost him zero pence per minute; so after finding out the name of this company and signing up I can also now make free phone calls during the day.

On Friday I needed to demo some software I’d created, and talk about some design ideas for it. After five minutes of attempting to talk through the stuff over the phone we both gave up and used XP’s Remote Assistance to great effect. I was able to speak on the phone (using the previously mentioned free call service) while waving my mouse around his screen. It was really productive and worked extremely well.

Today I received a letter from BT telling me my cheap mobile discount plan was due to expire, and unless I phoned them they’d start charging me for it. So I phoned them to cancel the plan as I never really got any benefit from it. While on the phone BT told me that I now have free evening and weekend calls to all BT landlines.

So now I can ring people for free, which is how it should be.

I find this all quite interesting since I am ploughing my way through the Best of 2600 book I bought earlier. Right now I’m at the part where the American phone system is being split up, resulting in loads of little phone companies, confusing dialling systems, long distance providers and the general confusion that arises when something like this happens. There’s a lot of articles from the 80s in this chapter of the book where people attempt to guess what the future will be like, and whether it’ll be just as confusing. Well 20-odd years on and it’s not as confusing in general - we can at least direct-dial numbers for most places on the planet now, but choosing just who should carry your calls can be a complicated and time consuming process.