Only A Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much…
Wow, what a week for new books, here’s another I’m looking forward to (also from the folks who publish MAKE) “Only a Game takes readers on a fascinating exploration of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) based on the experience of gamers and authors Mark Wallace and Peter Ludlow. When Ludlow’s online persona — an investigative journalist named Urizenus Sklar — began reporting in his virtual newspaper on underage cyber-prostitutes, real-life crimes, strong-arm tactics and scams that had become rife in the popular MMOG “The Sims Online”, the game’s creators (Electronic Arts and Maxis Software) found an excuse to ban Ludlow from the game.” Link.
Adam Tow writes “The big news coming out of the 
From the same peeps that publish MAKE. I’m really looking forward to this book – “What does it mean to grow up with videogames? Even though videogames and computer games play a large role in the daily lives of millions of people, little has been written about the impact this activity has had in shaping the lives of those who play them. In Transmissions from Imaginary Places, 20 people close to the gaming world offer entertaining and thought-provoking essays and anecdotes on games and gamers, and how this often-obsessive activity has changed the world.” [
Dennis on the Amiga forums is building a mini Amiga. He writes – “I bought a Spartan-3 FGPA development board, learned Verilog (after finding out that VHDL was not my cup of tea) and started working on Minimig. Minimig stands for (very originally ) mini Amiga. My aim with Minimig is to built a complete OCS A500 (with some extra grunt and features like 4Mbyte ram and fast 68000 processor) on a circuit board about the size of a floppy drive. Loading of programs will be done by means of a MMC flash card, which holds the .ADF images of the floppies like a sort of hardware UAE!” [
I’m really hoping this iRiver does well; it’s the first tiny MP3 player that you lets make your own games, applications and utilities using Macromedia Flash, then load them up on the device to use. Back in June of 2005 
MAKE pal 
That was quick: here’s a new Intel iMac dissection, looks moddable too – “One can notice that the processor is not soldered to the motherboard, but via a socket. So, it will be potentially possible to change it in the future, if Apple does not prevent such modifications by some hardware or software trick.” [