Hi all,

On my semi-regular 'hunts' for nice games for kids (age 3 to 9) to play, I encountered this site/blog (pixelprospector).

The URL above links to a post with a link to a youtube video of ten minutes that shows you 190(!) recent freeware indie games and their download links.

From some of these games the quality is simply amazing and worthy to be mentioned here in the DC forum.

http://www.pixelpros...-games-in-10-minutes

1. Newsletter Editorial

Hello dear readers.  Yet another month has gone by, and you know what that means, time for another DC newsletter filled with magical surprises and ghosts from future's past.

The most important thing to talk to you about this month is our NANY 2011 event, whose December 31st deadline is fast approaching.  NANY stands for "New Apps for the New Year" and it's where everyone on DC is asked to help celebrate the new year by participating in the release of new free software applications.  If you're a coder, we want you to pledge to release a new program as part of our NANY event -- and if you're not a coder, we want you to try to find a way to help out the coders, by volunteering to test beta versions, help think up ideas, and just in general share your talents!

By the time December 31st rolls around you are going to be sick of hearing me talk about NANY so you might as well unsubscribe to the newsletter now if you're getting that feeling already.  NANY is one of the funnest things we do in DC, it's our big winter online holiday party, and we love to get in the spirit of it.  I hope some of you will be inspired to make your first posts on our forum and say hello and join us in the festivities.  Everyone is welcome -- and please help us spread the word to your coder friends.

This year I'm determined to release at least one big new application, and hopefully more than that; I even started a poll (link below) to help me choose which application to write.  And if you are a coder, I'm really still hoping to see some new coders stop by and maybe collaborate with me on a project or two so we can really make this year's NANY special.  In particular, I've been getting into board games and board game designing recently (you'll see a couple of threads highlighted below that reflect that), and one of the possible projects I'd like to get help working on for NANY is card/board game design utilities, and a possible online library for prototyping new games...

Funny:

• http://coolmaterial....d-facebook-statuses/
• http://coolmaterial....ook-statuses-part-2/

To cool betas out this week, Internet Explorer 9 and Flash Player 10.1 64bit.

Haven't tried them myself too much, only just installed a short bit ago. But everything I have tried works fine.

They're worth giving a test drive! P.S. sorry for the non-standard theme in the screenshot

Looks like hybrid hard drives might start to become the next big thing:

Simply put a Hybrid HDD is a mechanical drive with some NAND flash on it that is automatically used by the drive to store data for quicker access. A hybrid drive really just attempts to do what my setup of two drives (SSD + HDD) does manually: put small, frequently used data on NAND flash and put larger, less frequently used data on platters.

In theory you get the best of both worlds, the overall capacity of a HDD and (most of the time) the performance of an SSD... Seagate's Momentus XT should become the standard hard drive in any notebook shipped... Compared standard 2.5" drives, the Momentus XT will set you back an additional $50 - 90 depending on the capacity point. The added cost is absolutely worth it.

I have a couple of folders (one with a lot of images and one with some documents), that I would like to have duplicated on another machine on the LAN. They are not updated that often, so there is no need for any fancy real-time cooperation stuff, I just want them to be synchronized maybe once a day or even once a week.

I've looked at SFSS which has been discussed a lot here, but it does look like it's probably overkill?

Any recommendations on easy ways to achieve this?