Hot upcoming PC games

This article was written  By Mohamed Mostafa our guest for today , if you are crazy about games like him :D you might find this article interesting.

you can reach Mohamed at "shockoshocko@hotmail.com"

1. Grand Theft Auto 4, release date: Nov 18, 2008

I know that some people already have GTA 12, but let’s not talk about that, this is the long anticipated GTA 4 hitting PCs on Nov 18, you will play as “Niko Bellic” a recent immigrant to Liberty City who finds himself immersed in a world of crime and tries to make the best of it.

2. Need for Speed Undercover, release date: Nov 17, 2008

The next installment of the very popular street-racing series you will be playing as an undercover cop, offering some new interesting features, it will be great like “Most Wanted 2”.

3. Prince of Persia (2008), release date: Dec 2, 2008

The prince is back, in a new storyline, art style and gameplay, the events in Prince of Persia occur in a completely separate timeline from the Sands of Time trilogy.

4. Call of Duty: World at War, release date: Nov 11, 2008

After “Call of Duty 4” whose scenario was about modern warfare, “Infinity Ward” decided going back to World War II, this new entry will be using Call of Duty 4 engine, it should be great.

I think we will not have time to study after all this games :D if you have another game or opinion you want to share , don't hesitate to post it in the comments.

Me , My Friends and a Hard Disk Drive :)

we ( me and 5 more friends )  had to prepare a presentation for our college about How Hard Disks work ,  the subject it self isn't that hard but the problem was in TeamWork , how can all of the team members cooperate  in the same project effectively without wasting time in non-useful arguments.

At the beginning we have faced a lot of problems but finally we managed to get over it by avoiding -as much as we can- to be like one of those people.

• people who don't do any thing.
• people who want to do every thing using their own method or style.
• people who like to manage the team but they actually work less than they talk. :D
• people who are used to be followers, waiting for orders to start doing something

however we managed to make something that is not bad for students in the first year.

you can Download the report from here and the presentation from here

by the way ... we also had a lot of fun :)

Project Touchless

Touchless is a free open source application hosted by CodePlex and built using .Net technologies , it enables you to do some touch tricks by using a webcam that tracks color based markers.

According to the project main page it is divided into two parts:

-Touchless Demo is an open source application that anyone with a webcam can use to experience multi-touch, no geekiness required. There are 4 fun demos: Snake - where you control a snake with a marker, Defender - up to 4 player version of a pong-like game, Map - where you can rotate, zoom, and move a map using 2 markers, and Draw - the marker is used to guess what....  draw!

-Touchless SDK is an open source SDK that enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input, geekiness recommended.

they provide a nice video which demonstrate all the features off the project.

the first thing you might need after launching the demo is to set webcam and ensure that it is working then you will need to create markers, you should use a distinguished one so the camera can easily recognize and you can create more than marker , actually you will need more than one to play the demo's included.

the demo that I liked most is called the image demo were you can rotate , move and resize a photo with two markers like pictures in iphone or Microsoft surface.

and here is a screenshot where I was able to control a picture with two screwdrivers :D.

the second demo is a small snake game.

there is also another game that you can play with three other players

the last one is a paint demo where you can draw with markers.nice drawing,isn't it ? :).

Finally I hope you enjoy Multi touch with Touchless :D.

Analogy Screensaver

Screensavers were made originally to protect old CRT monitors from a problem called Phosphor burn-in which occurs when static image or text is displayed for long periods of time however they were used later on for other purposes like entertainment and security.

Modern CRT's are less vulnerable to burn-in problems and LCD screens doesn't face this problems at all so screensavers have lost their main goal that they were designed for , another thing is that screensavers consume power as when running computer normally and it causes screen aging.

According to wikipedia :

A typical LCD screen loses about 50% of its brightness during a normal product lifetime, if left on continuously

So the best thing to protect your screen is simply to turn it off when not used or configuring your computer to set the screen into a lower power mode and that could be done from power management in most modern operating systems.

However , sometimes you need a good or useful screen savers to be displayed if you are going to be idle for few minutes...

and here comes Analogy (the reason this article was written) a useful screensaver that displays a nice hybrid format clock into your screen.

Analogy is available for windows and OSX and can be downloaded from here.

Robot Band

I found this funny video on youtupe..hope you enjoy it. :)

WebMail Notifier - Firefox Extension -

If you are a firefox user and you don't use mail clients like outlook or evolution then you might found this firefox extension useful.

WebMail Notifier will notify you when you receive a new message in your mail inbox and I found it great because of the following reasons :

• Simple and just do what it says.
• Supports Many mail services like gmail , hotmail and yahoo and others..
• Low memory usage compared to installing a complete standalone program.
• Much more better than using mail notifiers found in Chat Clients like MSN , yahoo ....

The Preference dialog is easy to understand and edit.

Hope you found this extension useful.

Search Google in 2001 !!!

the Giant Company Google is Celebrating it's 10th Birthday, and in the honor of this occasion Google will give you a one month chance to search entries found in their old index (January 2001) where

"ipod" didn't refer to a music player, and "youtube" didn't refer to much of anything. !!!

the search page is found here.

Another thing is that it's not 100% like that of 2001 results as they have removed some sites also you will not find ads in search pages.

also when you search for a page you can see it's old archived version by clicking "View old version on the Internet Archive ", for more information see this FAQ page.