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Stay the hell away from the "gaming industry" as a career. Find an interesting job in programming something else, and write games as a hobby.

I muck about designing single-player maps for my favourite games. Occasionally, I even get round to releasing one. People seem to like what I do, even if the plots are wilfully obtuse and cryptic.

I probably could get a job in the gaming industry, but I really can't be bothered. I'd rather be able to completely change the ending of one of my maps at a whim than have to follow some long, drawn-out design spec for a game I might not particularly enjoy. Working on Half-Life n could be great, working on the more likely Barbie's Fashion Designer n+1 wouldn't be.

So, I'm messing about pushing quirky game engines around, building scenes more complex than any in the original games, concentrating and tweaking the gameplay I enjoy. I don't bother with voice acting (in the style of Marathon, plain text can beat all but the very best voices), new textures are those I mangle together with the Gimp and my digital camera.

I build maps I enjoy playing. If anyone else likes them too, then that's their problem. Why do I do this?

'Cause it's fun. Isn't that what games are about? :-)

Alkaline batteries provice significantly more power for a given size vs. any type of rechargable battery.

Which is why if you put alkaline AAs in a digital camera, they might last ten shots before being completely exhausted... Why is this? I've never heard a satisfactory explanation. ;-)

As for charge-in-camera Li-Ion batteries, my increasingly elderly Fuji Finepix has one (descendants of the camera all use AAs, apparently), and it's been absolutely fine. I still get 120+ shots from a single charge (and I use the preview-before-save thing a lot, so actual shots taken is probably 200+), and the camera's heading towards three years old.

Still, I think I'll buy a new battery for it, before they become completely unavailable!

In my experience, Epson really cares about color-matching. Their printer ink actually has a larger gamut than standardized CMYK, and their drivers come with very well-calibrated color profiles (and are ColorSync-compatible on the Mac.

... Which is why all the printouts on my iBook with my Epson Stylus Photo 1290 at first had a truly horrible mauve haze to them. Disabling ColorSync and manually tweaking the colour balance has helped a lot, but I must have wasted loads of ink and paper getting the colours vaguely match up with the (calibrated!) display.

I had to do something similar in The GIMP on Linux when the printer was connected to my PC - moving my photos to the Mac, I thought I'd be free of such pain. It would appear not.

Seriously, if anyone knows what might be going on, I'd love to know. The purple problem has stumped everyone I've asked so far... :-)

I believe some interview with Gabe Newell said that their inspiration for HL2 was to be an eastern european city. I think they did an awesome job.

I'm in the non-Eastern-European Brussels at the moment, but I can't help but see City 17 everywhere. There's even a Combine Citadel in the middle, or perhaps I mean the European Parliament - it's definitely slowly consuming its way through the city anyhow. ;-)

Just open it as a 'raw' image file, 640x480x16bpp. You say you'll have to write a program specifically for this? Sounds like you are a true /. geek! :-)

Oh crap. I win the 'Geek' prize, then.

I wrote a really poor PHP program to do it - and ended up with a fairly uninteresting screenshot.

Okay, so KDE on a Gamecube is pretty useless, but it does show that the cross-compiler is working on complex software (even if it is just for a PowerPC), and that pretty resource-intensive software will work on the machine. Plus, I bet the people doing it have learned a lot in porting this stuff to work on an unfamiliar, undocumented hardware platform.

Now, port Linux to run on any generic Postscript printer! :-)

Just open it as a 'raw' image file, 640x480x16bpp. You say you'll have to write a program specifically for this? Sounds like you are a true /. geek! :-)

Oh crap. I win the 'Geek' prize, then.

I wrote a really poor PHP program to do it - and ended up with a fairly uninteresting screenshot.

Okay, so KDE on a Gamecube is pretty useless, but it does show that the cross-compiler is working on complex software (even if it is just for a PowerPC), and that pretty resource-intensive software will work on the machine. Plus, I bet the people doing it have learned a lot in porting this stuff to work on an unfamiliar, undocumented hardware platform.

Now, port Linux to run on any generic Postscript printer! :-)