Blast to the past: Brøderbund's Living Books

As some of you may know, I always post retro things to my YouTube channel. A few years ago, I posted a few videos with demos of me playing some old interactive books from a defunct company known as Brøderbund. They had a whole product line called the Living Books series. These were amazing interactive, animated children's books.

These products were amazing in that they offered so much multimedia (animated graphics, sound effects and music) for the time. This was software that could really put your (early 90s) multimedia PC's or Mac's capabilities to good use. I used to have hours on end of good fun from these games since the in-game world was so responsive to your actions.

The fascinating thing I found about the videos I uploaded was how popular they were. My YouTube channel has over a million views, the bulk of which is supplied by views of the Living Books videos that I posted. Many people post comments to ask me to post more gameplay videos. I would, if I owned more Living Books, but even now I only posess Just Grandma and Me, Arthur's Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare and Ruff's Bone. All of them are great titles that offer hours of enjoyment.

You might be thinking that these wonderful products are now lost in the mists of time. You would have been right about that until recently. A company named Wanderful, Inc. has revived many of the Living Books titles on mobile Apple devices. Pretty apt, since a lot of parents these days buy iPads for their kids. Check them out here.

MR2 Swaybars

It was a Good Friday and I had two Whiteline swaybars and MR2 reinforcement plates sitting on my bedroom floor. I tried my best to resist up until then, but moments later I was outside jacking my car up and preparing it for a swaybar swap.

Installation was about as smooth as I imagined. The rear swaybar was a bitch to install as I needed to drop the cross member a bit to access the bolt holding down the swaybar mount. I also found along the way that the exhaust mount on the cross member wasn't bolted in! So all up it took a few hours to install the rear swaybar. The front swaybar was considerably easier as I didn't have to stick my hands into any odd places to remove the mounts.

First driving impressions

I have a conservative understeer setup at the moment, with the front set up to Medium and rear on Soft. First impressions - turn-in is much snappier but I think there is a loss of feel at mid corner. I might go soft at the front to see if that is fixed. I'm definitely quicker in the corners as I found that I didn't need to slow down to any less than 50km/h at ANY corner on Lobethal Road. So in summary, Whiteline = good :)

Putting my trust in Google

After years of hosting a blog on my home server, today I migrated all my Typo posts over to Blogger. My intention is to stop running public-facing web servers at home since I don't have the time to keep them all patched up. Rising power costs are another factor, as it is actually quite expensive to run a machine 24/7 with 16 hard disk drives connected to it. All relevant Typo pages and posts have been recreated in my Blogger account.

My current scheme is to go with the devil I know - and that is Google. Until recently I avoided most of the hosted stuff like online storage, but slowly I have been opening up to these technologies. I figured that since I always used Google services, Blogger would be a good choice since Google already has all my personal information. Is my trust misplaced? Only time will tell.

I was recently concerned about how Google canned Reader, since that is a product that I have been using for many years. Still, I am willing to trust Google to maintain all the other services I use. Am I crazy or what?!