Combo Pool is simple and great fun: use the arrows to aim your ball, and hit c to fire it.
It’s a game where you throw colored marbles against each other. If two marbles of the same color make contact, they merge and upgrade to the next color. Your lifebar diminish with the number of balls on the field. If you lifebar is empty, you enter in a sudden death mode, and your last ball must save you by removing some balls.
Controls : use arrows left-right to adjust direction, and key "c" to launch a ball. Click on the game to give it focus if buttons doesnt work.
You can cheat by only ever firing straight up, but even then you can get in trouble because of the number of balls that form on the axis. Other suggestions for refining the game: allow players to hold the button to determine how powerful a shot to release, and have a button to hold that allows more refined angles.
HX-01 is an animated full-length film on the verge of hitting its modest $6k crowdfunding goal. Its landscape of psychedelic geometric video graphics are just my cup of acid; check out the trailer and see if it’s yours, too.
Hi, my name is hexeosis. For a little over three years now, I’ve been creating and posting animated GIFs on the internet. I’ve been unreasonably lucky to have connected with thousands and thousands of fans from all over the world. Crazy, but awesome!
I’m launching this Kickstarter campaign to help fund the production of a full length, full color, full HD sized animated short film.
August 1941. "Feast of Farm Security Administration ‘Food for Defense’ chickens for the Craig Field flying cadets’ Sunday dinner. Southeastern Air Training Center, Selma, Alabama." Medium format negative by John Collier. View full size.
Flights are getting cheaper this year, but prices vary depending on your destination. To figure out whether a flight is actually a good deal, Luiz Maykot, a data science analyst for Adobe, came up with a simple formula.
The formula is pretty straightforward: multiply the trip’s round-trip miles by $0.032, then add $230.
As MarketWatch explains, if you’re flying between NYC and LA, that’s 5,640 miles total. Plug that into the formula, and you get $410.48, which means anything below $410 (taxes and fees included) is a pretty good deal. For international flights, multiply the round-trip miles by $.08 and then add $200.
Maykot explains how he came up with the formula:
I calculated the average price paid by everyone in the data sample, based on how many days in advance they purchased their tickets (up to 300 days in advance). Then, I divided the average price for each day by the overall average price and did this across thousands and thousands of flights. I was left with a weighted average of the final curve.
Put simply, the number you crunch gives you a general idea of what the majority of flight prices have been in recent years. MarketWatch explains the formula in a little more detail and also includes a calculator to help you do the math, so check out the full post at the link below.
There’s no shortage of system rescue and repair discs you can download and keep handy for when your PC gives you problems, but this one, from reader Paul, is streamlined, simple, and has only a few effective tools on it (and no bloat!)
Paul, who’s a field technician (I remember those days!) sent in his rescue disc to us and explained that he’d just made it available to the public on his web site. Over at his site, he explains why he bothered in a world where there are so many discs to choose from:
There are already so many utility discs out there, I know. Many of the other discs I have used in the past tried to do way more than I wanted, with sometimes 10-20 different applications and utilities that all do the same thing. This overwhelming level of choice does not easily support the faster pace required of field service work. I also wanted to have both my bootable repair environment and Windows utilities in the same package to reduce the number of discs I had to maintain and keep on hand.
This disc started as a bunch of batch files that allowed me to work on multiple computers throughout my day and replicate the same level of quality results on each computer without having to maintain checklists on paper. Even with checklists, I would sometimes skip or miss steps that meant a variety of results when fixing PCs. Thus, an automated utility was born! I have since been using this disc in my own line of work for 99% of the problems I encounter in the field.
Just because the disc is streamlined doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of tools on it, though. You’ll have to head over to his site for the full list (and to support the project!) and for download links to burn your own or make your own bootable USB drive with all of the utilities on it. There are a few standouts though—the disc is a live CD, so you can boot to it and run things like Clonezilla, GParted, NT Password Reset, PhotoRec, Terminal, and some other utilities (even a game of solitaire you can play while waiting for other stuff to finish!)
The Windows Autorun portion of the disc contains a ton of Windows diagnostics for testing, troubleshooting, and repairing bad Windows installs or partition issues, tools to extract or re-add product keys, network testing tools and speed tests, and even some security and malware removal tools. All in all, if you have a Windows PC—especially one you built yourself—or you’re in charge of maintaining others, the disc is worth a look.
