Wish you had a new episode of Radio Active to listen to? Never fear, a new one is on the way, but in the mean time you can listen to Episode 17 of The Secret Lair podcast, in which I talk with hosts Chris Miller and Kris Johnson about S.M. Stirling's alternate history/modernized pulp novel The Sky People.

In this book, Stirling creates a solar system in which Venus and Mars were habitable, just like they were in the pulps - Venus is a jungle world complete with near-human civilizations and dinosaurs, while Mars is a dying desert planet populated with ancient civilizations.  Unfortunately, we found the premise to be a lot more interesting than the actual book.

• Get Episode 17 of The Secret Lair

My review of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is up on SCIFI.com. I think what ultimately pushed this game to a B- was playing it with two of my friends last Monday. While it's story mode was entertaining, what really made the game (and I found this to be the case with earlier versions to) was playing with friends.

We all experienced a strong surge of nostalgia playing the game, and as a casual fighting game among friends, I think it works well. I personally enjoyed the fact that -- unlike previous iterations -- I didn't have to spend hours or $20 on a strategy guide to learn combos because they were available via an in-game quick reference menu.

While the game lacks the depth of its predecessors in terms of fatalties and combos, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. As I said in my review, I don't think it's worth buying at full price, but it's a worthwhile rental, especially if you have happy memories of lining up quarters on Mortal Kombat arcade consoles as a teenager or college student.

I've been experimenting with analytics on Nuketown for the last few months, setting Google Analytics to watch the site's web traffic and Feedburner to keep an eye on the RSS feeds.

Over all, things are going about as well as they usually do, with no huge spikes up or down. The top referrers -- the sites that send me traffic -- continue to be gamingreport.com and rpgbloggers.com, in that order, which just goes to show I should have been posting news items about my Nuketown game reviews to gamingreport years ago.

What I find most interesting about these two analytics tools though, are the most popular pages they report. These were the most popular pages for October 2008 according to Google:

I recently did a full restore of my my Mac from Time Machine, Apple's built-in backup utility for OS 10.5 (Leopard). I had to undertake this radical step because Boot Camp refused to create a Windows partition, complaining about "unmovable files" that could only be eradicated by reformatting the drive and reinstalling Leopard.

Overall, I found that Time Machine worked well. After reformatting the Mac and reinstalling OS X, I was greeted with an "import your old data" screen which included the option to restore from a Time Machine backup. I browsed to my Firewire drive, picked a restore point, and the Mac spent the next few hours restoring my data. In the end, I had everything back.

Well, almost everything.

One of the challenges of running a Star Wars campaign is finding a way to incorporate plenty of Jedi and their Sith nemeses without tearing asunder the canonical Star Wars timeline. The Expanded Universe has helped with this, providing a number of Dark Apprentices to serve as fodder for Jedi who some how escaped Palpatine's murderous purge, or rose with the New Jedi Order, but even then the Sith "Rule of Two" ties the hands of GMs looking to unleash their own Dark Lord on the galaxy.

One area where Star Wars: Saga Edition could use some help are its creatures. There are certainly a number of them out there, particularly the iconic ones from the movies, but the system tends to come up a little short with more mundane critters.

After my third session of Star Wars, I thought back our summer playing D&D 4th Edition, and got to wondering about converting monsters from that book with use in Star Wars. Now I should note that I think that at a fundemental level, Star Wars plays differently than D&D. It's less about dungeon crawls and more about relationships - relationships between characters, between master and apprentice, between organizations. Those were always the main drivers in the movies, and in almost every case the heroes only came up against monsters/creatures as a consequence of the story.

For example, the encounter with the trash compactor beast in A New Hope came into play because Han and Luke were rescuing the princess. Luke's random encounter with a wampa ice beast on Hoth led directly to his vision of Obi-Wan, and his training on Dagaboh with Yoda. Han and Luke were going to be fed to the sarlac because the crossed Jabba the Hutt. Because of this, Star Wars needs fewer monsters (and more NPCs) than D&D, but it's still nice to have choices.

The November 2008 edition of SF Site is online, with reviews of the far-future space opera House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, the modern fantasy/demon hunting novel The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison and the Robert E. Howard-inspired Adventuers of Corwyn by Chad Corrie, which (like Conan) looks at the hero at different points in his lifetime.

Its TV column Babylon 5.1 looks at Doctor Who, Smallville and The Sarah Connor Chronicles while Nexus Graphica looks at the new Joker graphic novel.

A few years back i bought a HP 1020 LaserJet printer; I'd just gotten one at work and found it worked great with my Mac. When I saw one on sale at Staples, I lept at the chance to get a good USB laser printer for about $100. It turns out there's one problem with the 1020; while it's kissing cousin -- the 1022 -- has drivers for the Mac, the slightly older 1020 does not.

When I first got the printer, I couldn't find any 1020 drivers for Mac OS X. I went with the 1022 instead, which was fine because the driver worked like a charm. And then HP changed them.  Apparently, the 1020 was never supposed to work on the Mac, and when updated 1022 driver was released, it stopped working for the 1020.

This has proven problematic when I've occasionally had to reinstall the drivers, but fortunately folks have figured out how to work around HP's wrongheaded decision to drop 1020 support on the Mac. This article details how to get the functional driver and install it on your Mac (up to and including 10.5 Leopard):

• How to Install Drivers for the HP Laserjet 1020 on Mac OS X

They also suggest an open source driver that should work with this line of printers (Warning: Unix command line magic ahead):

I got off to a great start to my summer reading list, but it slowed down significantly after July, when my spring-summer run of work conferences ended (which had given me plenty of time to read on cross-country plane trips), and I had to double-down on my projects to meet start-of-semester deadlines.

The other problem? I ran into Moon of Skulls, a collection of short stories by Robert E. Howard.

Three weeks into our new Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign it became obvious: we needed a blog. Or at least, I needed a blog.

Even without leaving the Vargis Tau star system and its binary world of Zebulon we'd still managed to accumulate a dozen-odd NPCs, three or four ships, three adventure write-ups, a handful of locations. While I had references to all this stuff on my computer, it was in the form of adventure notes, and not readily browseable.

Thus, the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Blackrazor Edition) blog was born.

It's a WordPress blog, and there's a reason I went with that instead of a wiki: I'm looking at rolling out WordPress Mu at my day job and I needed to quickly get up to speed with the standalone version. I have a lot of questions about how to effectively use WordPress to manage a large-scale web site (and by 'large scale' I mean several dozen pages that you actually need to be able to find stuff on, rather than just a stream-of-life style blog).