They are cute creatures, whose only natural predators are gravity and uncontrolable urge to keep running all the time.

Snobli Run is a small game where you try to prevent the extinction of these cute creatures.
It was made in mere 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2011 by me and Ilkka Leino.
We are currently planning to expand this project into a full game for the iOS and Android devices.

You can play it here.

Valve, the company behind games such as Team Fortress 2 and Portal and the very successful computer games distribution platform Steam, claim to be more profitable per employee than Google or Apple. This is pretty good, since Google has about 24 400 employees and made a profit of 6,5 billion dollars in the year 2009. With simple math, you can calculate how much that is per employee, which is around 270 thousand dollars of profit per employee. Although Valve Corporation has only 250 employees, this means that the make at least 66 million dollar profit in a year. At least, I would assume that the real number is a lot higher.

Personally I am not a huge fan of Valve’s games, but I do know they have a strong fan base. They operate the Steam, which is a must have software for any PC gamer. Steam is probably the source of most of their revenue. Valve tends to value their customers more than other companies around by providing a constant amount of updates even to their old titles. They also host the communities around the games and try to collect as much as possible data from their customers.

What is so special about Valve?

Can Steam keep up with the competition with all these new distribution channels popping up?

Mining

Quite boring. Time is mostly spent on looking at asteroids.

Trading

Quite boring. Time is mostly spent on looking at jump gates through the market screen.

More coming later

Enough said

Well… I bought Aiptek 14000u graphics tablet mainly to speed up my work with textures. The tablet is quite fine actually, sleek design and good pen. Pretty good bang for your buck!

Bur the thing i had problems with was that the damn tablet lacks support for two monitor setup… It was pretty frustrating. I tried everything to get it to work, from re-installing windows (tried out Windows 7, which is nice by the way) to manually editing the driver files. No luck with that.

After about a week I decided to do some extra research on the subject. It turned out that the damn media tablet was actually a Taiwanese Waltop tablet. Luckily, the Waltop site had more recent drivers to download than the Aiptek site. I installed the Waltop drivers and a new menu popped up in the tablet setting. This new menu was about working area! I could set the tablet to work on the screen I wanted it to work on : )

So the morale of the story is don’t spent days trying to get your Aiptek tablet to work with your two monitors! Just get the drivers for the real product you bought, meaning Waltop media tablet.

Oh, and do not bother with mailing Aiptek support…

Well, this video is quite interesting, although I think they skip alot of recent history of the Internet (the video ends at TCP/IP).

Found it here (thanks to KrazyKommy for link)

Cool: The Complete Animated History of the Internet.