As many of you may know, the next installation of Half-Life 2 will be Episode Two. It picks up where Episode One leaves off. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Episode Two, then you can check it out on Steam.

Anyway, Episode Two will come bundled with two games — Team Fortress 2 (teaser trailer available here), the sequel to the hugely popular Half-Life 1 mod Team Fortress, and a game called “Portal”. Portal is a puzzle game of sorts where you are given a gun that allows you to create portals that you can travel through. Frankly, it’s a bit hard to explain, so I suggest you watch the awesome trailer.

You can either download a high resolution version or watch this crappy YouTube quality version:

If you’d like more information about this cool game, check out this great fan site run by a buddy of mine.

A new version of WordPress has been released. All WordPress v2.0.x users should upgrade immediately as this is both a security and a bug fix release. Go download it now! :)

Update: Mark Jaquith has one again provided a changed files package for those who are currently running v2.0.3. This package saves a lot of time by allowing you to just upload the changed files.

Yep, that’s right, I was born exactly 22 years ago this minute! :)

Check out these incredibly funny spoofs of the new Mac commercials:

Gaming

Performance

Networking

This one contains swearing and discussion of porn, so be careful if you’re at work and have your speakers on. ;)

I’ve updated my video quicktags plugin to support the WYSIWYG editor. So, if you use it and want to embed YouTube or Google Video hosted videos in your blog, then this plugin is for you! :)

Found this randomly online and thought I’d share. :D

The latest incarnation of the great WordPress plugin, Bad Behavior, has been released. It’s greatly improved over the previous generation of the plugin and is a highly recommended upgrade. I’ve been using the alphas and betas for quite some time and it’s been working great. :)

And for those not familiar with Bad Behavior, it’s a first line of defense anti-spam plugin. It doesn’t check comments or anything like that to see if they are spam, rather it attempts to block spam bots from ever accessing your site in the first place. It does this by examining the request headers and such and is very accurate. It’s not replacement for Spam Karma 2 or Akismet (which should be used in conjunction with Bad Behavior), but it spots the recent spam screens for those plugins from filling up with tons and tons of spam as well as stopping bots from harvesting e-mail addresses, etc. and using up your bandwidth.