Ken Newquist's blog

So it's been two weeks at the gym, and about two weeks of cutting back my soda intake to about a can a day. It's also been two weeks of getting used to the new digital scale at the gym (thus the decimals in the headline). Previously, the gym had had one of the old fashioned adjustable weights-based scales, which the arcane (and archaic) part of my brain always enjoyed.

It's been about a year since I blogged anything about my attempts at geek fitness. Not because I haven't been doing anything ... but because I haven't been doing it consistently. I've been going to the gym periodically, but but nothing like the regular 4-5 days a week I was doing it a year ago.

A whole host of people involved in Star Wars: Saga Edition in one form or another have joined Twitter over the last few weeks. It's great to see -- D&D 4th Edition and Pathfinder have sizable fan bases on Twitter, but until recently Star Wars has been lagging. Hopefully with these new additions we'll see a nice uptick in Saga Edition-related tweets. If nothing else I'd love to see in-game tweets from these folks -- we've had a blast tweeting our campaign adventures, and it's be cool to read about what others are doing.

Nuketown's been upgraded to Drupal 6, which is the latest stable version of the open source content management system. So far, things seem to have made it through the upgrade intact, though I discovered that the Image Assist module now only wants to display images that have been "published".

My family recently got an Asus netbook, which has plunged me once again into the world of Windows XP. Fortunately I came prepared -- while I spend most of my day on a Mac, I occasionally dual boot into XP on my MacBook Pro, and I've accumulated a number of must-have utilities for thriving in Windows.

Launchy: A fast application launcher that allows you to quickly find and run applications on your computer. It's roughly equivelent of Quicksilver on the Mac, though Quicksilver offers more advanced capabilities.

Cute PDF: A free PDF creator for Windows; "print" your document to the Cute PDF printer and it spits out a finished PDF. It's something I do instinctively on the Mac; it's nice to have that functionality in Windows as well.

Bonjour for Windows: Apple's Bonjour software lets you quickly find shared printers on a network. I use this to print to my Airport Express-connected HP LaserJet printer. The alternative is trying to use the Windows network printing utility, and that way lies madness.

Lehigh Valley Comic Con will be held Saturday, August 15 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Schnecksville Fire Company. Admission is $5 ($4 with college ID) and kids 12 and under are free.

This is my first-ever post written on my family's spiffy new Asus Eee PC netbook, aka "The Blue Dolphin", so named because it's small and blue, which led my wife to describe it as a baby blue dolphin on Twitter.

Anyway ... we decided to get a netbook as a direct result of our summer vacation; I could have used it at Origins, and it would have been handy to have for writing on Butler Island on Lake Champlain (where we spent a week hanging out with family friends).

It's a cute little machine -- it ships with a 160 GB hard drive, wireless N support, a 4 cell battery capable of up to eigth hours of use (assuming you use the Asus power management tools), three USB ports, an SD card reader, an ethernet port and Windows XP.

I'll forgive it for that last bit; I don't have the energy to hack this thing to run Mac OS X, and if I have to run Windows, XP isn't too bad (though I am curious about trying Windows 7 on it). The whole thing cost about $300 from Amazon. which made it a fairly inexpensive experiment.

One of my favorite parts of hitting the big gaming conventions is spending a few hours (or rather, a few days) browsing and shopping in the exhibit hall. Origins 2009 was no different, and while I'm happy to say I didn't break the bank, I did come back with a goodly pile of product purchased at the show.

I didn't go into the show expecting to pick up any Savage Worlds books, as our Weird Pulp campaign never really got off the ground, and we haven't played the game in months. But then I went to the Studio 2 booth, and found the brand new Fantasy Companion supplement for Savage Worlds. Published in the same folio format as the Savage Worlds: Explorers Edition, this book repackages the fantasy species information from the previous hardcover release of the game and folds in a bunch of edges, magic items, and monsters from the various fantasy toolkit PDFs.

I like PDFs, but I'd been hoping that Pinnacle would release the toolkits in a dead tree edition. when I saw the Fantasy Companion on the shelf, I instantly picked it up.

Long-time visitors to the site may be wondering what's going on with comments at Nuketown; for the last year or so, anyone could post without having to log in or have their posts moderated. That's no longer the case.

The problem is spam; the site has been inundated with a particularly annoying variety of comment spam that uses random snippets of legitimate text taken from other web sites, news stories, etc. and a smattering of legitimate hyperlinks to provide cover for hardcore porn comments linking to sites that are anything but legitimate.