I bought a new Headset
For the longest time I've used the Plantronics .Audio 70 "Behind-the-headset". It's lightweight, has clear sound, and has an almost 10 foot long cord. And perhaps that's part of the problem. I keep rolling over it with my chair every so often, and eventually, after 6 months of use or so, the chord will short out. Although the issue is usually right where the cord meets the headset so I doubt I can fault my chair for that. Ultimately I'm not quite sure whether it's smart or idiotic to keep buying the same headset. I just like it the way it is. Other and usually bulkier "gaming" headsets are just too heavy and clamp onto my ears so tight that they start to hurt after an hour.
The last headset I bought was a Microsoft USB headset, which was pretty decent, but it also had the dreaded broke cable issue after a few months of use. I threw it out a few months ago, and have just been using my very awesome (and cheap) Sony MDR-G42 headphones along with my laptop's built-in microphone. That works, but I also use my PC every so often, particularly when I need more horsepower.
So I went out and found the Plantronics .Audio 645 USB headset, which seems to be the successor of the .Audio 70 I used to buy. It's very similar, except that they've added padding, and a USB adapter.
I don't need the USB adapter at home since I have a Sound Blaster X-Fi, but it's interesting that for all intents and purposes, this USB adapter essentially is a sound card. The headset set me back $42, and I doubt that the USB adapter cost all that much. I'm almost tempted to crack it open and take a peek inside. And I feel a bit sheepish having bought a $150 X-Fi if a $2 thumb drive looking adapter can accomplish, well, something similar, anyway.
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Tribes Evolved: GarageGames, InstantAction, and Legions
A good friend of mine alerted me to a spiritual successor of the Tribes series. Tribes, Tribes 2, and Tribes:Vengeance were games that I've wasted enjoyed countless hours playing, modding, scripting, and participating in tournament games with.
The Fallen Empire: Legions open beta started just a few days ago. It's a Torque based game developed by GarageGames and will feel instantly familiar to old school Tribes players.
The interesting part is that it all runs in a browser with the help of a Firefox plugin. An interesting distribution model, and probably a really good idea considering the success of Valve's Steam. There are also other games on instantaction.com, which probably appeal more to casual gamers.
I've been digging through my archives and found the old MoopScript collection that our group used back in the day. Still trying to figure out whether client side scripting is at all possible yet. So far I've replaced the default flag taken/captured/returned sounds with the ones I created for Tribes 2 using Cool Edit Pro.
Flag Voice Pack
Download the ZIP file: Legions Flag Voice (119)
You'll want to first backup your original sound files, since right now they get overwritten. (I'll try to find out whether it's possible to create .zip files much like the old Tribes .vl2 files.)
On XP, the files go into C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\GarageGames\IAPlayer\products\www_instantaction_com\102\install\legions\data\sound\game\CTF.
On Vista it's something like C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\GarageGames\IAPlayer\products\www_instantaction_com\102\install\legions\data\sound\game\CTF
Rename or move the FlagCap.mp2, FlagReturn.mp2, and FlagTaken.mp2 out of the way, then extract the three files from the archive.
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