Well, the beta is public now. And they added some more games. So go ahead and knock yourself out with awesome old school gaming bliss!

Also on Joystiq.

The mixes I made so far (you can order them as well, or expand upon them, by entering their codes here – unfortunately, there’s no way to link directly to a mix – Edit: Links added, see comments!):

• Schoggifrucht (Mix 54802): My first try, tasted too much like Mango I found, but maybe that was just due to bad mixing. The approach was right, but I didn’t find enough nuts in there.
• Schoggifrucht II (Mix 55349): More nuts, awesome, and my favourites (Pecan and Cashew), too. But suddenly, the “Frucht” bits were too sparse, I needed those Mango back.
  
• Schoggifrucht III (Mix 55510): The perfect mix! Fruity and chocolatey and corny, no raisins or other stuff I don’t like.
  

mymuesli

I hear that the mymuesli site makers were on TV and all over traditional media as well meanwhile, so this might be old news already. For me, it was a revelation: I never started eating Müesli for breakfast (and often, didn’t eat breakfast at all), because I just hadn’t found one that I liked, and eating through all of them just to find that there’s yet another one I don’t like didn’t sound all too appealing to me.

So my personal alternative to mymuesli isn’t really “eat local Biomüesli”, but “eat refined Kellogs stuff or even nothing at all” – and suddenly, it’s way more biological (all the contents adhere bio guidelines and have certifications and whatnot, too), and makes a lot of sense from a health and nourishment point of view as well.

Anyway, a thorough recommendation: If you live in Switzerland, Germany or Austria, and feel like trying the user-friendly web2.0 interface and tinkering your own (rather expensive, but worth it) Müesli, there isn’t really much that should stop you

GOG Header

Yay! I was watching Good Old Games for some time now, was always looking forward to it since I first saw it. Today, I got the beta access key, a reason to rejoyce and share

First off, it’s awesome because you find games you always wanted to play but never found time to, then it’s awesome because you find games that you never knew were good. Finally, there’s no DRM, and it’s cheap … I’ll let their advertisement speak for itself:

1. We’ve got games your 10-year-old won’t be better at.
2. So you’re cheap. It’s okay – we are, too. ($10 max, currently)
3. You buy it, you keep it. (No DRM!)
4. All games are Vista and XP compatible. (with compatibility hints)
5. Extend the experience with tons of cool and exclusive add-ons.
6. We’re bringing together classic games and a classy community.
7. It’s so easy, your gramma’s probably already playing.

Store Layout

The Welcome Mail

Admittedly, this is a bit of a teaser in another way too, because the beta is only open for those who signed up for it before September 8th, so I’m sorry, you’ll probably not get in. Yet.

The catalogue they have is already impressive by the way. Not only do you find Fallout (both, of course), Descent (all three) and Earthworm Jim, but also underestimated gems like Sacrifice that I’ll love to play again

Now let’s just hope the silly publisher paranoia dies down and they realize that “Help, they sell our games that we don’t sell at all otherwise, and that are pirated all over the web without DRM right now, it’s evil”  doesn’t really make sense.

Or what do you think?

Update 08-09-27 22:34: I played through the tutorial of Sacrifice meanwhile again – gee, that game is really good, even after all this time Sure, the controls are a tad dated, the configuration options could be slightly better, and the graphics show their age, but the game has charme! Something many current-day games sorely lack. And, the payment and download and installation process went entirely smooth, no problems whatsoever – a really good impression the site makes here, continuing in the “no DRM, no hassle” vein Something I gladly pay for.

Stack Overflow

If you’re a programmer, you know the problem of solution googlability. It’s particularly prominent in mainstream languages (and one of the things I decried in my What’s Wrong with VBA series, as VBA is particularly bad in that respect); you have a problem, you google for it, unless you’re coding in a good awesome well-designed freak language like Ruby, Python, or Haskell, all you get back is trash and spam.

So, since you’re reading blogs and a programmer (or you’d have stopped reading by now, I guess), you know Joel on Software. Now this guy and his team have done something: They took the Wiki approach of “everybody can edit”, added Digg’s “let’s vote stuff up”, and made the whole thing a generic programming Q&A site.

Behold, and witness, the rise of Stack Overflow.

From his launch post:

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. This is a community project, so I’m being careful to avoid saying this is how it will work… that’s up to the community. But this is roughly what I have in mind.

Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? [...]

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

Sounds great! It has tags, it’s not restricted to one programming language, it could provide the framework for thousands of programmers collaborating. And the best thing: They plan to “keep it ad-free and open to the public forever”.

You’ll need an OpenID to log in – I got one at myOpenID myself. Too bad it’s not possible to log in without, but whatever – I guess this approach has more promise than the closed one that Microsoft tried to force upon us with that whole Live ID crap, but still shares the same weaknesses (which are, mainly, another party involved and a central point of failure).

Nevertheless, I do think this could be awesome. Let’s see where it goes.