An arcade game for volleyball fans, a new version of Blobby Volley is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. I tested it on Windows and it’s pretty challenging. The game is only 2.32 MB and supports network play. It takes some practice at first, at least it did for me and quite a bit too! I highly recommend the tutorial mode if you’re having difficulty getting some points in at first – I actually managed to score more than 5 points in that mode. An addictive little game.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/blobby.

Today’s post is about a free portable application that lets you write encrypted notes onto your flash drive. The application is called Steganos Locknote and it can be found here: http://locknote.steganos.com/.

This application is really handy and easy to use! Its size is 296KB plus your data’s size. Each “document” you make (say one for your passwords, another for private notes, etc) is an executable file that’s encrypted and locked by a password.

The excellent site, Retro Remakes, wrote about a new asteroids remake named FilaxTeroid. Since I never get tired of testing Asteroids games, I gave it a try. Nothing new, a standard Asteroids game but with very nice graphics and sounds. The game is just over 4 MB and completely portable. The download includes a Windows and Linux version. I don’t think the game is entirely finished though as the Options menu doesn’t link to anywhere yet; hopefully the game writer will continue working on this great game!

I’ve been in between computers lately, working on an old Win98 machine with 98 MB of RAM. In my attempt to make that machine a little faster while shopping for a new PC, I tried out a few distributions of Linux, one of which is a portable Linux called Slax. I ran it off a CD but you can run it off a flash drive just as well. Instructions on how to do that can be found here: Linux on a Stick.

On the Slax site, they have tons of “modules” which are compressed software files and a huge selction of games (134 of them to be precise). Slax is a a pretty neat distribution as you can have any operating system on your PC and still have Linux by booting from CD or flash drive.