Month: March 2009

RPTools

RPTools is a set of five open source programs written in Java designed to assist with managing roleplaying games. They include

MapTool – An online, multiuser, networked, graphical, interactive, programmable virtual tabletop

TokenTool – Create quick and simple consistently sized tokens for use with any digital battlemat that can use PNG images.

CharacterTool – A configurable tool for managing the number-crunching of building and maintaining player characters.

InitiativeTool – Keep track of the flow of encounters

DiceTool – A general-purpose dice rolling application with programmable buttons and extensive customization.

I’ve seen quite a few open source RPG-related projects, but these are really slick looking and are being very actively developed.

RPTools Screenshot

ScribbleLive

This weekend I found myself at a conference that I wanted to liveblog, but of course when I arrived there that morning was the first time I actually bothered to wonder how exactly I’d accomplish that. Fortunately, a quick Google search of live blogging tools turned up ScribbleLive.

ScribbleLive made liveblogging ridiculously easy. I didn’t have to create any account, simply login via Facebook connect. Once logged in, it took about a minute to create a liveblog for the event. Then it took about another 5 minutes to figure out how to set up ScribbleLive so it would automatically cross-post everything to my WordPress install (the hardest part there being finding the *&#! setting in WordPress to re-enable the XML-RPC interface which I had shut off a long time ago for security reasons).

I was very happy with the results and plan to get a lot of use out of ScribbleLive for future conferences and presentations.

WordPress More Tag

WordPressWordPress documentation is all over the press, so it took me awhile to actually locate this. In general, I display the full text of every post on the front page of my blog. The liveblogging I did of a conference this past weekend, however, led to huge posts (4-5K words) being displayed in full on the front page.

After a bit of searching, it turns out you can insert the a <!–more–> tag in a post and then on the front page view, WordPress will cut off the post at that point and put in a “Read More” link that directs the reader to the archive of the full post.

One of the drawbacks of doing this is that the RSS feed will also only show the truncated version, but there are plugins that will override this behavior and force a full text feed regardless.

Human Enhancement & Nanotechnology Conference – Day 2

NOTE: These are essentially my notes taken live during the HEN conference. Note these contain numerous spelling errors and probably some minor errors due to richness of a lot of the presentations. This is far from an accurate transcript of any given presentation. Video and slides from presenters will be available shortly at the conference site.

  • 9:02 AM Liveblogging from the Human Enhancement & Nanotechnology Conference in Kalamazoo, MI
  • 9:27 AM Sean Hays – “Nietzsche and the Philosophical Underpinnings of Human Enhancement.”
  • 9:32 AM SH: Transhumanism, Anti-humanism and Nietzsche’s Overman – a response to the anti-humanism in transhumanism through Nietzceh’s concept of the eternal recurrence and the nature of man and overman as process elements.

    • Continue reading “Human Enhancement & Nanotechnology Conference – Day 2”

Human Enhancement & Nanotechnology Conference – Day 1

NOTE: These are essentially my notes taken live during the HEN conference. Note these contain numerous spelling errors and probably some minor errors due to richness of a lot of the presentations. This is far from an accurate transcript of any given presentation. Video and slides from presenters will be available shortly at the conference site.