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I got 10. Artist Fabien Gonzalez is the artist behind this imaginative work. [via theCHIVE]

Pay what you want. If you bought these four games separately, it would cost around $50 but we’re letting you set the price!

All of the games work great on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely. There is no time-limit on your downloads.

You can support charity. Choose exactly how your purchase is divided: Between Frozenbyte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Child’s Play Charity. Also, if you like this deal, a tip to the Humble Bundle itself would be much appreciated!

 

Butler Monkey

This is the obvious first. Me and my girlfriend have often talked about the uses of having a monkey butler. He would wear a monkey-sized suit, and maybe a bowler hat. Trained to cook, and mix drinks, he could serve me food during the day, and be a barman by night. He could also answer the door to people I don’t like, and tell them “The Master is away from home.”, meaning I don’t have to talk to them. I think I’d call him Squire.

Tailor Monkey

By teaching the monkey to sew, and whatever else is required for suit making, I could start a small business producing suits for butler monkeys. They have to come from somewhere, right?

Sidekick Monkey

Sidekick Monkey would accompany me around, being helpful to me, and doing general sidekick things. If I said something witty, he would be there to high-five me. If something dramatic happened, he would be there to say ‘Holy cattle prod, Simon!’, and if something bad happened to me, he would be there to turn into Ninja Monkey. Which leads me to..

Ninja Monkey

Ninja Monkey would be my silent assassin. Wearing a monkey-sized ninja outfit (produced by Tailor Monkey) he would stalk the shadows, eliminating evil-doers. Or people who piss me off. He would have lightening-fast reflexes, a bad-ass sword and some of those throwing stars.

Secret Agent Monkey

Secret Agent Monkey could be my personal spy. From a disguise as the local shop keeper to paragliding over your house with a pair of binoculars, there would be no escape for the information-collating tail of Secret Agent Monkey. I imagine he would drink Martinis.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list of uses for monkeys, it’s a good start. If anyone wants to buy me a monkey (preferably trained in one of the above professions), feel free.

Chapter and Verse is a funky program for Windows that makes the audio books for you, from .mp3 or .m4a files, quickly and easily. All I did was open up Chapter and Verse, import all the MP3′s (which it converted to .m4a through iTunes automatically for me, as files need to be .m4a), then set up chapter names (default was each track was a chapter), added some metadata such as the book name, author, and a cover image, clicked ‘build audio book’ and it made  me a finished .m4b audio book in about ten seconds. It even added it into iTunes for me!

After that, I synced it to my iPhone, and everything worked, chapters displayed & working, and all for free, and the whole process was rather quick. During my Googling I found a lot of people trying to achieve this, and you may have found this from Googling the subject yourself, in which case: go get Chapter and Verse. It’s exactly what you need.

http://lodensoftware.com/chapter-and-verse/

Originally, I moved to Linux as an alternative to Windows. For me, Windows was sluggish, bloated software that was a pain to use. Every 6 months, I’d have to reinstall because it was virus-abound, or the OS just had given up and decided to break its own (metaphorical) legs and crawl for the rest of it’s life. This alone was a HUGE pain, as I’d have to set aside an entire day (or even a weekend) into getting everything sorted. First, backing up everything, then reinstalling Windows (and having to go through that annoying automated telephone system to register it before I got locked out) – then installing all the drivers I needed to get graphics working, networking up, etc, so I could go online and download newer drivers than the ones I just installed. Then, put all my old data back onto my system. That’s just too much work in my opinion, so I gave Ubuntu 7.10 a try (I had previously tried Fedora a year earlier) and was happy everything just worked. I first installed it, then, after realising I didn’t need to install the drivers I decided to go add my preferred software, only to find it came pre-installed. After the 3 hours it usually took just to install Windows I was shocked to find the 30 minute install Ubuntu took was ready to go immediately.

Since then, I’ve been using Linux as my primary OS (I had to use Windows for Delphi in college, and Visual Basic in the first year of university) and never looked back. The conversation with my flatmate made me think about the main reasons I continue to use and love Linux – though bear in mind these are mostly related to Ubuntu, but are pretty applicable across all Linux distros.

Getting it up & running is simple.

In 30 minutes, I can install a complete, working system, without loosing all my data. I put my home directory on it’s own partition. This means when I reinstall Ubuntu, I can just tell it to mount that partition as my home directory, and I get to keep all my data, but get the new OS. I get all the programs I use installed from the disk, and don’t have to faff about with the 20 CDs (really, 20) I had to with Windows. In fact, it’s so easy that when Ubuntu 10.04 was released the other week I decided to go for a clean install (I like that ‘fresh desktop’ feel), so I just popped in the disk, told it to get installing, and sat down to watch an episode of Scrubs. By the time the episode was over, the install had finished, and all my accounts (like Empathy) still worked perfectly (I migrated from the Lucid beta).

The community

One thing I really like is the Ubuntu community. When I got into using IRC, I found that #ubuntu-uk was full of friendly, funny people, all happy to help whenever I had a problem with my system. My hats off to you, IRC people, for fixing my system when I broke it. The other thing is the release parties – the first time I went to one was the 9.04 release party in Manchester, where I met a load of interesting people, some I still talk to regularly. I think it’s great that a group of people just get together to celebrate something as simple as a new version of some software (because, that’s all it really is), and I spent the evening out with a group of Ubuntu geeks, drinking beer and sharing stories about all sorts of geeky things. Finally, I find everyone in the community to be really friendly. Admittedly, I don’t really see much outside the Ubuntu UK community, but just the UK community would keep me using Ubuntu – the amount of support they provide is fantastic. I never saw this with Microsoft (or Apple). I’m not saying it didn’t exist for them, but I certainly didn’t (and still don’t) see one for them.

The ‘Open Source spirit’

Or, at least, my take on it – I won’t pretend I fully understand all that stuff with GPL and what-not (yet). Recently, we had the Ubuntu 10.04 Jam in Manchester, where a bunch of local people got together to fix things, just for love of the software they use. I really like that if there’s a problem with a program, you get the option to fix it. Now, I get that you could argue it should be perfect on release, but nothings perfect – there’ll always be bugs in software (as much as that pains me to say). If you have the know-how, you can, should you choose, jump in and help out. The good thing about this is that things can get done faster, rather than submitting a bug report to some faceless company, and standing by as it doesn’t get fixed.

Launchpad

Launchpad is really cool, in my opinion. A great, central way to submit bugs, and see how well they’re doing. It’s much nicer to have somewhere to submit the bugs, track how they’re coming along, and not be left in the dark after hitting a ‘submit error report’ button that at the most would say ‘Thank you for your feedback’. I mean, how do I know that even sent anything?  Also, a great way to get up-to-date software through the PPAs it provides. Some things I like to stay up to date with, rather than living out of Ubuntus standard repositories – Launchpad provides a simple way of getting them.

It’s free

One major point for Linux is that everything is free. The operating system is free. The software that runs on it is free. I haven’t spent a penny on it, ever. Back on Windows, my choice was go buy the product I wanted (at an absurd price), pirate it, or get a free, bad knock-off that didn’t work how I wanted. Linux has got me away from that – everything I want is free. Meaning not only have I got more money in my pocket (or would have…) and everything on my system is now 100% legal. It’s a good feeling.

It’s easy to use

Ubuntu is easy to use, right from the go. I installed it to both my sisters laptop, and my mums, before running off to university one weekend, saying “I’m sure you’ll work it out” , purely as an “I’ll explain it to you another day, I have to go now” excuse. I didn’t get any questions about how to do anything – they both worked everything out themselves (and they’re not technical people. At all.) Another friend switched, and from ridiculing Ubuntu last year, he now enjoys using it. The only question I got from him was about the notification update for 10.04 update.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good look into why I choose Linux (and in particular Ubuntu) above anything else. I don’t think it’s the end-all OS, but for me, it’s pretty much a hit on the mark. This has also got me interested into why other people use Ubuntu, or Linux, or whatever their OS of choice is, and why. Not as to why they don’t use the others, but why their OS does it for them.

My friend Mike then pointed me in the direction of Feedly. I promptly ignored him, as usual. The next week, he told me again, so I went and had a look. Feedly is a “magazine-like start page“ for your RSS feeds, and the best reader I’ve come across. Having said that, I haven’t really used many RSS readers, but let’s ignore that. Feedly interacts with your Google Reader account, essentially acting as a new front-end for it.

The cover page is a mix of featured and must-read articles (must reads are just favourites, really). Each article is displayed in a magazine style format, with an image from the post (if available) or a random filler image. Clicking the title expands to the full article for your reading pleasure!

Feedly also has a ‘Latest’ page in the traditional reader style, just a list of articles organised by date, grouped by day. It also offers options to view the latest from a single feed, or a category of feeds.

A cool feature of Feedly is the ‘Popular’ page – this shows you some articles that are popular, related to subjects you read about, from all sorts of feeds that you don’t subscribe to. This is really handy for finding new feeds to read, about things relevant to you.

If you’re into RSS readers, go check it out. I can’t imagine not using Feedly now. The interface is simple, clean, and friendly to use, and it makes life so much easier when you’re just browsing through unreads to find some interesting articles. No longer does the giant list of ‘to-read’ articles blend together in an amalgamation of grey! Feedly installs to your browser, and whereas I don’t know an exhaustive list of which browsers are supported, I know Chrome & Firefox are. Just head to http://Feedly.com and it’ll let you know!

First, I installed my IDE of choice – Code::Blocks (version 8.02), available from the repositories. I’m going to assume you can get Code::Blocks set up and compiling C++ yourselves. Once that’s going, you need to link the GLUT/SDL libraries. You only really need GLUT or SDL, but I have both so I have the choice. For this, we need to download and install a few packages – namely freeglut3 and freeglut3-dev for GLUT, and libsdl1.2-dev for SDL. If you want to check out what they installed, GLUT files are installed to /usr/include/GL/, and SDL to /usr/include/SDL.

Second, we need to link CodeBlocks to the correct library files for it to be able to compile GLUT/SDL programs. Open up Code::Blocks, and click through to Settings > Compiler and debugger.., then hit the Linker settings tab. Under ‘Link libraries’, you simply need to add the values “glut” for GLUT, and “SDL“, “GLU” & “GL” for SDL.

That should be everything finished!

To give it a try, have a go running the pieces of code over on http://www.ferdychristant.com/blog/articles/DOMM-72MPPE, where I found out how to do all this!