Remember Alienswarm? I just read on RPS that its successor is coming out on monday. On Steam. For free. Bloody awesome! Turns out the creators of that awesome UT2k4 mod where bought up by Valve a while ago, took part in L4D and Portal2 development and now got to realize there Alienswarm successor. I'm so looking forward to monday now, demod and me will most certainly spend a lot of time on this, best co-op game ever.

There's also another trailer available on the Steam page.

Just a quick one: I still happen to have some flattr invites (see my recent blog post for an explanation of what flattr is). If anyone wants one, please leave a comment with a valid email below so I can send it to you. I will update this blogpost once all invites are gone.

That's all for now

Update 1: I just got a friendly heads-up that my comments were borked (thanks to a faulty update or rather my own stupidity ). This should now be solved, and there's still one invite left.

Update 2: All invites are gone now.

As some of you might know, I'm an avid user of the tumblelogging service soup.io. One thing that's been really bothering me for some time now though has been the non-existing support of anything remotely resembling the vi keys feature of Google Reader for jumping from post to post. In fact it bothered me so much that I simply sat down last night and created a user script that scratches that itch: "Soup.io vi keys". Feel free to install it into your browser as well

Update: I just uploaded an updated version of the script. Jumping now always works from the element currently scrolled to, regardless whether the element was reached by jumping or scrolling manually.

I recently (yesterday to be exact) got my hands on a flattr invite. Flattr is a new social micropayment plattform that allows participants to spread a small monthly sum of money between all flattr-enabled content online that they liked (by clicking on the attached flattr button). You might want to take a look at the following video for a way more comprehensive explanation. Let me just say that I really like the concept so far and hope that it will catch on.

Anyway, given that I use this here wiki to post all my self created content – be it texts or software – I thought it would be a good idea to create a DokuWiki flattr plugin to quickly flattr-enable said content. You can of course find this plugin at the usual place. And if you like it and are already on flattr please don't hesitate to click the button

Andi had the great idea to blog about the less well known gems in his RSS subscriptions. And since it's been some time I wrote something anyway and I am certainly happy about any input regarding blog posts to write, I thought I should do the same

The Big Picture by boston.com is my most favourite fotoblog. Each post contains a series of pictures related to one specific topic. Topics range from current events such as the recent volcano eruption and its consequences to more broader subjects such as “water” or “the world from above”. I made my way through most of the archives a couple of months ago, and there are simply stunning photographies to be discovered here!

In the J-List side blog by Peter Payne from J-List you can (mostly) find short posts about all things Japan, be it language particularities or social specialities. I have learnt a lot here.

The Moth is currently my favourite podcast, consisting of short stories from the several “The Moth” story telling events held at several major US cities. It's not every week that I'm blown away by the posted story, but there are a couple of real gems in there, so I keep listening.

The Best of Wikipedia tumblelog collects interesting articles from the english Wikipedia really worth reading. Sadly, the blog hasn't been updated in a while, but even the archives can be really fun to rummage through. Keeping my fingers crossed though that the author will start updating again!

Last but not least there's also a YouTube channel of Google Tech Talks which I follow for the one or other pretty interesting talk about various technical subjects from programming related stuff¹⁾ to LEGO to brain chemistry.

That's about all I can think of about to post here right now… if I happen to stumble across any other Gems, I'll certainly post a follow-up