I downloaded Risk: Factions the other day while looking for another good multiplayer game on the PlayStation Network that wasn’t a beat ‘em up and I have to say, I was really impressed. For anybody who has played the board game, the objective is pretty much the same ol’ game.  The have added enough new and interesting twists though to keep you coming back and playing again and again.

When playing, you have the choice to play by the traditional Risk rules, or to play the Factions mode.  Personally, I haven’t tried the old rule set just yet because Factions is so much fun to play. In most games, you have the choice to achieve three objectives to win.  This might be as simple as taking over on continent or it might be more complex like taking over two enemy capitals.  When you do so, you get special abilities that make playing a very rewarding experience.

The factions in the game are humans, cats, robots, zombies and yetis.  The battle animations for each are really priceless and fun to watch again and again. 

Risk: Factions is available on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and well worth checking out.  If you like strategy games, this is a game you just have to download.

As Mitchelaneous moves into it’s seventh year of bringing you the best of well, whatever I happen to be bringing you for the day, I want to spread the love around.  I’m looking to accept your articles, tips, resources and more to be published right here on Mitchelaneous.com. At the current date and time, you would be exposing your work to around 15,000 visitors a month and over 800 RSS subscribers.  What do you have to lose?

So what kind of content am I looking for?  Here are some basic ideas:

• Online Application Reviews or Tips
• Desktop Program Reviews or Tips
• Great Wallpaper
• Web Development Help or Tutorials (CSS, HTML, PHP,etc.)

That is just scratching the surface though.  If you have an excellent idea for a tutorial or series of articles you’d like to write, just let me know and I promise you we will find something that works.  I am looking for original work only right now, no reposting content from other websites and really I want to give a person out there a shot to get some attention that has not had it before. 

Each post will be followed up with a short bio and a link back to your own website, so hopefully I can help generate some traffic back to your website too.  If you are interested, please feel free to use the contact link above to reach me or drop me an email at mitch@mitchkeeler.com.

While looking for more group-based games for the Wii, I stumbled upon Wii Party.  As long as you don’t set your expectations too high – this is a great group-based game for the Wii.  Like the Mario Party games before it, it is meant to be played with a large group of people rather than by yourself, and will take you through several types of games to play – with a few mini games thrown in for good measure.

Now, you can play this game by yourself – and it does have a few modes that support solo player mode.  However, playing against the computer just is not nearly as fun as playing with a friend. 

With over 80 mini games and several different game modes – you are sure to find some games that are your favorites and some you consider to be duds.  Thus far, my favorite of the different game modes has to be Spot the Sneak – where one player secretly gets an advantage over the other players in a series of mini games.  Then after each round, everybody has to try to guess who the "sneak" was. 

Wii Party is a great game to pull out and play this upcoming holiday weekend.  It is simple enough for everybody in the family to play, and as long as you keep in mind it is a simple party game and nothing more, you will have a great time playing it.

For many, Joomla is the prefect content management system for their websites. It can help you keep track of and organize your communities photos, audio or video. So, with that said – what extensions out there are the most popular for this script that seems to do it all?  I decided to take a look.

Here are the top ten most popular ways to extend Joomla and give it more power:

JCE

An award-winning, configurable WYSIWYG editor for Joomla! based on Moxiecode’s TinyMCE. Includes advanced Image/Media, File and Link handling, plugin support, and an Administration interface for editor configuration.

Community Builder

Community Builder suite (CB) extends the Joomla! user management system. Key features: extra fields in profile, enhanced registration workflows, user lists, connection paths between users, admin defined tabs and user profiles, image upload, front-end workflow management, integration with other components, like PMS, Newsletter, Forum, Galleries.

Exposé bridge

Exposé is a Flash-based tool which allows you to create eye-catching slide shows of your pictures on the web. A list of the features supported by exposé includes the following: – direct linking to a photo or album – a slide show can be automatically started and much more.

VirtueMart

The complete e-Commerce shopping cart solution for Joomla! – used by thousands of store owners. It can be run in Store- and Catalog-Mode. With its powerful Administration Tool you can handle an unlimited Number of Categories, Products, Orders, Discounts and more.

Jumi

Jumi is the set of custom code extensions for Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x in their native modes. Since 2006 more then 200.000 downloads. With Jumi * you can include php, html, JavaScript scripts into the modules position, articles, category or section descriptions and more.

Joom!Fish

JoomFish is the solution for your multilingual website if control over the translations matters for you. The core extension is free of charge and allows the translation of any content within your Joomla system. With an easy extension it is also possible to translate any 3rd party extension available for your favored CMS.

ChronoForms

I always needed to create custom forms for my clients websites, Or to migrate their old websites forms fast and easy to new Joomla websites forms, this was pain, as I was using other components for doing this, and create everything from scratch at web based tools.

Akeeba Backup

Akeeba Backup Core is the successor to the now famous JoomlaPack component. In a nutshell, Akeeba Backup Core is an open-source backup component for the Joomla! CMS, quite a bit different than its competition. Its mission is simple: create a site backup that can be restored on any Joomla!-capable server. Its possibilities: endless.

JCal Pro

JCal Pro is a W3C-validated, multi-language events calendar component with a gorgeous, CSS-based front-end display. Feature highlights include, native Joomla! permissioning for event creation/management and event viewing, multiple calendars including private or public calendars, WYSIWYG event descriptions, and more.

Ozio Gallery

Ozio Gallery 3 is available and ready for Joomla 1.6 Photo Gallery that uses a 3d flash animation (TiltViewer Design/Development by Airtight) to automatically display the images in a particular folder or from Flickr.com.

There you have it.  Have another favorite Joomla extension you think deserves to be on the list, or you would like to let others know about? Leave them in the comments!

The slate blue color makes it ideal for use in nuclear tape facilities and it is certified for low leachable halogens and sulfur. It also provides sunlight and UV resistance for up to one year without the backing deteriorating or delaminating. This product is especially ideal for applications in the shipbuilding, nuclear power plant and stainless steel industries.

So with that said, they do also have user reviews for the item too.  here are some of my favorites:

When we found cracks in the containment structure, we used to have to shut the whole plant down; then there was a lot of hassle with the nuclear regulatory agency about structural integrity and environmental contamination. With this quality duct tape, that’s all in the past. Now, when we see a cracked or crumbling wall, we just bring out the tape. The slate blue blends right in. I do recommend that you use use double layers for openings near the reactor core.

Is the world coming to an end?

As capitalism collapses around us and society falters, I began to get anxious about what supplies I should have on hand now that the turnips are planted. I was guided towards the 3M Nuclear Duct Tape, bound to be useful when the reactors start melting down, and then saw Amazon’s superb “What Did Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item” list. I was thunderstruck! Of course! In the end times, I’m going to need an electric toothbrush, a Rubik’s cube, and a Swiss Army knife! Not sure the Midnite Minichamp is the one I’d go for, though, it doesn’t have a toothpick, and dental hygiene will be critical in the coming collapse. Maybe I’ll get my Nuclear Duct Tape in red to match the knife, it always pays to look well put-together.

Stay away from this guy!

After a long night of beer and hot wings, I decided to overnight this tape to my house, as I knew what was going to happen.  After the epic birthing of a giant brown monster, I used 3M’s performance plus nuclear tape to seal around the bathroom’s door into the bedroom. To my surprise, my wife and children never did smell what I had to endure.  After 5 months, 29 days, I removed the tape, and I was happy to find no sticky residue left on the door frame.

A tape for every political party, after the end of days of course…

If you’re a nuclear technician and a Democrat, there’s no better high-performance duct tape for your facility than the SLATE BLUE nuclear duct tape.

Maybe not so good for a BBQ?

As I do most Sundays, I was working in the back yard on the grill. Because the dude next door is an Al Qaeda operative and he doesn’t lock his shed, I figured, hey, what the hell, let’s beef up the grill with some bomb grade plutonium. Because I didn’t have anything handy to hold it in place, I stuck it down with this 3M nuclear duct tape. After all, I don’t want my burgers exposed directly to radiation! That seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I threw a steak on the grill, not only was the steak cooked way too quickly, but the gamma rays jumped right through the tape and caused the steak to start glowing. It also tasted funny, so I can’t say I recommend this product at all!

Last but not least, a heart-warming summary of the king of all duct tape…

The tape works. It protected the house from certain doom and its occupants. Don’t tape your whole house if you don’t have time. It might be better to just tape yourself and your loved ones from head to toe.

Are you sold yet?

Need to share a screencast in a hurry?  Have a Twitter account?  Screenr will help you create and share your own mini tutorials from your desktop with the world.  The benefit here is that you can use a web-based recorder, on Macs or PCs to share how to do something or how something might look.

Here is the video tutorial I created, while testing out the service:

Screenr is simply the easiest of the online desktop screen capture solutions out there to use. All you have to do is hit the record button, choose the size you want to record and start capturing.  While I did not, you can also record a video track if you want to do commentary as you record. I like the fact that you can also download the video (as a .mp4 file) or publish to YouTube too.  I wish the video screen was a ‘bit more customizable, but hopefully that will be a feature to come in the future.

Once you are ready to publish, you can instantly share it on Twitter – or wait, and publish it elsewhere first.  You can tell the target for this tool is to be another Twitter companion, however you don’t have to use it that way if you don’t want to.  The developers have kept that part of the equation very free and open.

When push comes to shove, I could see myself using this tool again to create more quick tutorials.  Screenr is simple, to the point, and doesn’t waste your time with fluff.

• 10 Tools to Turn Firefox into WordPress’s Little Helper
• Super Mario’s Boo Desktop Icon
• WordPress
• Bubble Wrap Wallpaper
• WordPress Sucks? Try Nucleus CMS
• LifeType is Your Blogging Solution?
• Best of the Blogging Scripts
• Nice and Easy Forum Setup with bbPress
• This Year’s Christmas Desk-orations
• Beautiful Blogging with Textpattern

Hope you all have a great new year, and 2009 brings you all the good things you, want, need and love.  I’ll keep doing my thing here, day after day – doing my best to deliver you the best random geek candy from around the Web.

Also, be sure to check out the best web hosting podcasts of 2008 too!  Great list of great shows!

• Dotclear – Great Blogging Alternative
• Easy Blog Publishing with Zomplog
• Eggblog, the Free PHP MySQL Blogging Script
• Beautiful Blogging with Textpattern
• Database-less Blogging with Flatpress
• A Wiki/Blog Hybrid in WikyBlog
• Habari = Next Generation Blogging Script?
• WordPress Sucks? Try Nucleus CMS
• Small, Yet Powerful Blogging with Pritlog
• Media Publishing Made Easier with Loudblog
• LifeType is Your Blogging Solution?
• Flexible Blogging/CMS with Serendipity
• The King of Kings is WordPress

Have any other blogging script suggestions you would like for me to check out?

Some of the features included in Dotclear are:

• Automated install
• Fully customizable themes
• User-friendly administration
• Naturally optimized for search engines

You can read more about the many features of Dotclear over on their features page.  Did I mention they promise you can get it up and running in a minute too?

One minute install from Dotclear on Vimeo.

If performance is your main concern, Dotclear is fast.  It promises to be as responsive as possible, no mater the quantity of the blog.  Need some help to get it going?  They provide a pretty nice documentation guide to go along with as you customize it to fit your own needs.

Since it will not cost you a thing, Dotclear is definitely worth checking out.  

Starting to wonder, where it all gets dumped to?  Is there some poor sap somewhere looking at my e-mails and laughing – or maybe somebody has been sick? 

So where is my SumoSac?  Not a clue (hopefully somebody from Sumo Lounge might be reading this.  Coming from somebody who does nothing but customer support day in and day out, makes me feel good that I’m delivering better support than these guys right now.

Come on, Sumo Lounge – prove me wrong!