On this episode of Radio Active, geek fitness gets a gut check, Nuketown delves deep into statistics, I discover a new path to gaming adventure with the Pathfinder RPG alpha, I try two new online productivity tools and offer my thoughts on how to write a better role-playing game adventure in less time.

Presently on hiatus, the long-running Quantum Muse webzine publishes an eclectic mix of science fiction, fantasy and horror short fiction, with occasional doses of uncategorizable fiction mixed in.

Home of the dire shark, UncleBear.com's been published since the mid-1990s in one form or another. The site's changed a lot over the years, but it remains true to its geek (or rather, post-geek) core, offering essays, commentary, and news about all the things that geeks love. Regular features include reviews of bad movies, the Random News Table collecting game and geek headlines from around the web, and posts about long-running game development projects like the light-weight RPG Imagination's Toybox and the generic espionage game DoubleZero.

A speculative fiction Web and graphic design company. In addition to its design and consulting offerings, GreenTentacles also features speculative-fiction themed articles and news for the speculative fiction professional.

The mother of all gaming conventions, held annually in Indianapolis, IN. Four days of role-playing, card, board and strategy games (as well as just about any other kind of game you can imagine).

A libertarian think tank whose site features daily commentary, news about upcoming events and conferences, audio and video podcasts, research papers and more.

'The home page for Nuketown editor Kenneth Newquist's gaming group. Primarily dedicated to the Dungeons & Dragons 3.x campaign set in the World of Greyhawk, it also includes links to our other campaigns, including Fading Suns, Spycraft and Mutants & Masterminds.

Shark Bytes is the unofficial fanzine of Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Savage Worlds game system. PDF issues are released on an irregular schedule, but are worth the wait: each has tons of edges, optional rules, commentary, and setting material. Each issue is themed -- the Spring 2008 edition, for example, deals with the supervillain setting Necessary Evil.

I've made a few tweaks to Nuketown's information gathering capabilities, updating a newer verison of the Google Analytics module for Drupal that includes the ability to track downloads and monitor Drupal search terms. I've also added the FeedBurner module and redirected the primary feed and the podcast feed to FeedBurner.

The upgrades should be transparent to everyone; the old feeds automatically forward to the new FeedBurner ones, so no one should have to resubscribe to anything (or so say my tests with iTunes and the Radio Active feed earlier today).

The ultimate goal here is to get a better grip on download numbers for Radio Active. Analog, Dreamhost's stat crunching program, tells me that Nuketown averages about 8,500 MP3 download requests a month. That seems crazy high to me, and I have no way of knowing how many of those requests failed, and how many successfully completed.

It did raise my curiosity however.

Thus, the new FeedBurner and Google Analytics modules, both of which should tell me more about what's really going on. I've also changed Nuketown's access.log from a 3-day log to a 30-day one, and with all three tools at my disposal I should be able to get a better idea of what Radio Active's audience really is.

I spent a couple of days messing around with Darwin Streaming Server, the open source port of Apple's Quicktime Streaming Server. Here's what I learned from my poking and prodding of Darwin installed on a Redhat Linux box:

1. Darwin streams over port 7070 by default. There's an option to have it stream over :80, but since Apache also uses :80 to serve web pages the two servers will conflict if you're planning on running them on the same box.
2. Darwin will stream .mov and .mp4 files, but the movies must be hinted. I'm not sure how one goes about hinting an .mp4 file; I assume you can add such hints via Final Cut Pro.
3. Darwin will not stream individual MP3s, but it will stream MP3s as part of a playlist. The Quicktime Streaming Server under Mac OS Server may appear to stream individual files, but in reality it just pretends to do that by by creating playlists for each individual file. You could do the same with DSS, but it's cumbersome via the web interface; it's likely something you'd want to script. On a related note, there is "muse" add-on for Icecast (another open source streaming server) but it has the same playlist limitation; there's no streaming of individual files outside of a play list.