Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

These impressions are a bit off-beat: they’re about feet. More specifically, they’re about a special shoe from Vibram (based right here in MA!) called the FiveFingers Classic. Part of a new breed of barefoot shoes, the Fivefingers Classic is all about minimizing what’s on your feet while still providing protection from pointy/hot/painful surfaces. I picked up a pair of these recently because, let’s face it, waterproof Merrell hiking boots are not summertime footwear. Plus, all of the extra cushioning and support that regular shoes provide tends to weaken the muscles in your feet and ankles over time.

Actually putting the Fivefingers on is a bit funky; the toes (as you can probably tell) are separated. If your toes are really close together like mine are, you have to get used to spreading them out a bit when you put the shoes on. Once you get the shoes on, there’s a small strap in the back you can use to adjust the fit a bit. If you’ve picked a good fit for your foot size, you shouldn’t need much of an adjustment.

So how do they feel? Surprisingly like…walking barefoot! The bottom is thick enough to protect you from sharp rocks and hot asphalt, but still thin enough for you to feel the surface you’re walking on. Not to quote from the marketing literature here, but I do feel a bit more connected to the surface I’m walking on. With my hiking boots, there’s a half-inch of thick rubber and socks sitting between the bottoms of my feet and the environment. With the Fivefingers, I can feel the grass and the texture of the road. It’s certainly a different experience. I’m going to go for some longer (~3 mile) walks this upcoming weekend to see how they hold up under pressure. Vibram claims that they’re well suited for just about everything except seafaring and mountain climbing (for which there are other models).

If you miss the feeling of not wearing shoes, or would just like to get away from overbearing, padded shoes, give these a try!

Munchkin, a card-based tabletop game by Steve Jackson, bills itself as “a tasteless parody game which brings the essence of the dungeon crawling experience - without all that messy roleplaying!” Mocking Dungeons and Dragons and various other tabletop RPGs, Munchkin is all about kicking down dungeon doors, grabbing as much treasure as possible, and backstabbing your “allies” along the way. It’s an extremely entertaining card game, and manages to keep itself fresh with periodic “expansion” releases that add new dungeon and treasure cards.

The basic premise of the game is pretty simple. Everyone starts at level 1. The object of the game is to reach level 10 before anyone else does. You do this by fighting monsters and playing various cards that allow you to instantly increase your level by one. Each turn, you pull a card off of the “door” deck. If it’s a monster, you get a chance to fight it. To beat a monster, your level needs to be higher than the one listed on its card. But wait! How are you supposed to slay a level 20 Plutonium Dragon when your maximum level (before you win) is 9? Treasure! Various bits of treasure add to your level for the purposes of slaying monsters. An Extremely Impressive Title(tm) and a Flaming Broadsword of Unfairness later, and your level 1 character is effectively level 7. Defeating a monster gets you a level and a number of treasures, drawn from a “treasure” deck.

This brings about an interesting issue. Since you start with no treasure and most things in the game are above level 1, how do you defeat anything? By asking other players for help! This usually won’t come free; someone might offer to help you, only to demand first pick of the loot. Managing your relationships with the other players is the crux of Munchkin; it’s hard to win without other people helping you, but only one person can stand triumphant at the end of the game. Deciding when to help someone and when to hinder them (there are plenty of cards you can use to make monsters stronger or make players weaker) plays a large role in whether you end up winning. Of course, there’s a healthy amount of luck too (as any collectible card game player can tell you). You never know when someone is going to use a Transferal Potion to swipe your game-winning victory over a Potted Plant out from under you (Greg can tell you more about that).

It takes about an hour to finish a game, and if the D&D fantasy theme doesn’t jive with you, there are various other Munchkin sets modeled after science fiction, pirates, and Lovecraft-ian horror (to name a few). If you have a few friends to play with, you’re sure to have an entertaining time!

It’s been about two weeks since I switched to Sprint and picked up a Palm Pre (my photo-laden review). It’s easily the best phone I’ve ever used, but it’s not perfect (what phone is?). A few of my extended-use impressions:

The Good

1. The proximity sensor is sweet. I’ve never used a phone with a proximity sensor on it before. The gist is that the phone can detect if it’s pressed up against your face. Combined with accelerometer and orientation data, the Pre managed to do some nifty things. Answering a call is as easy as picking up the phone and putting it against your ear. To hang up, just put it down (face up). Want to turn on the speakerphone? Put the unit face down on a table or other hard surface. It’s much easier than trying to find a soft-button on the screen.
2. The IMAP IDLE support for push email works well. I have my Gmail account set to “deliver messages as they arrive.” They show up on the phone at the same time they land in my webmail inbox. This is ever faster than my BlackBerry 8700g, which took at least a few moments to show new emails in its inbox.
3. Universal Search works a lot like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I really like how I can just start typing on a launcher or home screen to search for…well, just about anything. The Pre auto-matches contacts and emails, and allows you to search Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia by default. Some enterprising WebOS developers have figured out how to add new search providers on their rooted phones; I can only hope when the SDK becomes available that someone writes an app to make it easy to add new ones. I’d love a built-in reddit or Amazon search.

The Bad

1. Notifications stick around forever until you dismiss them. I’ll echo Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun on this one. It’s great that the Pre’s notifications are relatively unobtrusive when they come in. But, to use Kevin’s words, the Pre is “…like an elephant, though: It never forgets them until you dismiss them.” Would it be so hard to watch to see if I had checked my Inbox since a New Mail notification came in, and then dismiss it automatically? Why do I have to manually dismiss every alert that comes in?
2. The App Catalog has a depressingly small number of applications. I’ll blame this squarely on the fact that Palm hasn’t released their Mojo SDK to the public yet. Come on guys, the platform is brand-new and you have people itching to start developing for it. Get us the tools we need and we’ll fill up that catalog!
3. Copy and Paste only works in editable fields. More importantly, actually figuring out how to copy and paste is an exercise in futility. I finally figured it out (hold the gesture area and press C, V, or X), only to find that you can only copy stuff out of editable text fields. 99% of the tme, I would like to grab a snippet from an article or some such. As it stands, I can’t do that with the Pre.

Most of my issues can be fixed in software, so I’m confident we’ll see improvements in the near future. In fact, rumor has it that we’re going to see an update shortly…

For the past five weeks, Katt, Greg, Scott, Tim, Ryan, and I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons on Friday nights. Ryan and I have played on and off for a number of years, starting with Second Edition and moving through 3.0 and 3.5 before arriving at our current campaign using the 4.0 ruleset. What I’ve noticed over the years is that the game has become much more accessible to a common audience. To really know how to play Second Edition D&D, you needed to have tables and rulebooks pretty much memorized. Arcane ways of displaying statistics (anyone remember 18/xx Strength scores?) and a really clunky combat system (THAC0? Negative armor class?) made it next to impossible to sit down and understand anything if you’d never played before.

Things got much better in 3.0 and 3.5, where the old systems were tossed out and rebuilt to be much easier to understand. Every action in the game turned in to a check; one would roll a d20 plus some sort of modifer based on your skills and stats). Keeping track of your abilities was still a pain though. How does one keep track of a power with “X uses per day” when the flow of time in the game world and the real world is so different?

4.0 fixed that problem, although the changes drew outcries from D&D “purists” that claimed the game had been “WoWified” (a derogatory reference to Blizzard Entertainment’s popular World of Warcraft). The game’s focus shifted to streamline things; instead of tracking individual powers, everything was reclassified as “at-will” (infinite uses), “encounter” (once per battle), or “daily” (once in between extended rests). In addition, the list of skills (formerly enormous) was pared down. Things like Spot and Listen (skills that few people took) were combined in to skills like Perception. Not only did this grant one’s character access to a larger range of skills, it made performing skill checks (comparing one’s ability to do something with its difficulty class, a number representing how hard it is to succeed at something) much easier.

So far, I’m enjoying the revised system immensely (as the one running the adventures!). It’s far easier to keep track of player and monster statuses in combat, and I don’t have to spend time running all sorts of confusing calculations just to see if Katt’s arrows hit the goblin in the corner of the room. My players seem to be enjoying it too; the less they have to focus on the “metagame” (keeping track of the game in order to play it), the more energy they can devote to thinking out their actions and role-playing their characters.

If you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons (or any other tabletop RPG), what sorts of experiences have you had between editions?