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A Series of Tubes
An archive of old posts.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
OS X Leopard
So the WWDC (World Wide Developer’s Conference, an annual Apple event) keynote was given yesterday by Steve Jobs. Frankly, it was kinda boring. No hardware updates for anything, no new features for the iPhone (save for the addition of custom apps, more on that later), but a lot of updates on Leopard, Apple’s next revision of OS X.
There were 10 Leopard features either announced or elaborated on at WWDC:
- A new Desktop – with the addition of Stacks, pseudo-folders on the Dock, a new semi-transparent menu bar, and a reflective, 3D dock
- A new Finder – with a new Sidebar and the ability to browse your other macs over the internet, plus coverflow! 😀
- Quicklook – a pseudo-app built into Finder which lets you quickly view documents without loading any other apps, great idea since I hate Preview…
- Complete 64-bit support – a bit more technical than the others, OS X is now completely equipped to run on 64-bit processors. Just like most applications these days are “Universal,” meaning they run on Intel or PowerPC, the same will be true with 64-bit and 32-bit apps. Everything will work on either a 32-bit (like a G3, G4, or Intel Core Duo), or 64 bit (like a G5, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Xeon) processor just fine.
- Core Animation – again, kinda techy, but in essence this means that any app can have really shiny animation effects without lag, without much effort from the guy making the app. There’s a really impressive demo of this in the Keynote, with that apple tv intro movie, but interactive. Thousands of videos, all playing at once and moving around really fluidly, with no lag.
- Boot Camp – Boot Camp is faster, and now it’s built-in, which means no more disc burning to get the drivers. Yay!
- Spaces – a virtual desktop manager, lets you organize windows into different sectors to keep everything neat and clean. This is one of my most anticipated features.
- Dashboard – of course, the Safari web widget, over 3000 widgets written, yadda yadda…
- iChat – cool stuff here. Better audio quality for voice chat (this is mostly improvements for the video aspect of iChat), the addition of backdrops, some cool Photobooth-esque effects, and Theater, which lets you stream video files, documents, etc. over iChat.
- Time Machine – old hat, automatically backup stuff, instantly restore it, slick interface, uses Quicklook, all that good stuff. Another of my most anticipated features.
So yeah, that’s Leopard. Some time in October release date, I’ll be buying it. 🙂 For more info and deets, check out Apple’s page on the matter. Speaking of Apple’s website, there was a complete and total redesign of the site to finally bring it out of the Panther-era tabs it had at the top. It’s very slick now…but it’s hard to find the movie trailers page, and the newest trailers section has disappeared…Too bad…
Anyway there were two other announcements. One was Safari for Windows, which from what I’ve heard, sucks. It’s got too much smoothing or something, and apparently there are already 8 serious security flaws in it. Of course, it is in beta (the beta is available for Mac as well, it is crazy-fast…), so some amount of issues are to be expected, but really, 8 holes? That’s pretty rough.
The last announcement was the inclusion of AJAX and Web 2.0 support on the iPhone, meaning that developers can write their own webapps for the iPhone and basically have custom programs like that. However, this isn’t realizing the iPhone’s full potential as a portable Unix machine (it has all of the pieces required to make OS X: Unix, cocoa, darwin, core image, all that good stuff). This means that only Apple will be able to make real apps for the iPhone, which I don’t really have a problem with, but there could be so much more. Oh well, maybe they’ll change their mind.
Site Memberships Revoked
I’ve decided that since I still got someone registering as a member here, despite the fact that I removed the link to the register page, the new registrations must be spammers. Thus I have deleted all 7 of the people who registered. If your account was deleted, I sincerely apologize, but since I don’t think anyone real registered, it’s cool.
Ocean's 13
I saw Ocean’s 13 today (it was released yesterday), the third in the Ocean’s trilogy about a group of 11 men (initially, one more is added in each movie, hence Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12, Ocean’s 13) who are criminals of the highest calibur, con men. They rig casinos in their favor, steal from the rich, all that good stuff.
Anyway, this one was pretty good. I hardly remember the first two, but this one was good. Good plot, nice jokes, I could’ve used a little more planning in there, or some explanation of how they got their hands on the Chunnel digging machines (both of them, used to simulate an earthquake in their latest target’s hotel/casino), but overall it was a fun ride.
My favorite part was (I’ll try to be vague here, it’s near the end) when the 13 fly away with a whole class case full of diamonds, with the case intact hanging from a helicopter, and the target is so stunned he just stares dumbfounded and murmurs “my diamonds…”
Batman Begins is AWESOME
I just saw Batman Begins for the first time, and it was freakin’ insane. It’s so dark and deep, and full of action….I can’t string thoughts together anymore…
Great Minkata Map
Found this great Minkata Map while browsing around, and great instructions for how to use it. It really helped find the 4th cave, since it shows the shortcut there. 😀
Uru Episode 1: Scars
This post is way, way, way late, but I’m going to post it nonetheless. So Uru is now an episodic game, with all the storyline advancements and content releases occurring in one week every month. This month’s episode (the first episode ever) was called “Scars”, and ran from the 19th to the 24th or 25th. There’s some disagreement about when exactly the episode ended, because there were new things discovered on the 25th and 26th, but they might have been released on the 24th.
Anyway the episode was very dramatic. It started off with a collapse in the cavern, which trapped two teenage girls, one being the daughter of Michael Engberg, a member of the DRC. The other girl was immediately killed. After some time, it was discovered that a Bahro was in the collapse with Wheely Engberg. The excavation continued.
On the 22nd, Wheely Engberg was killed by the Bahro. It was reported to have screamed “Noloben” (an age from Myst V on which the Bahro were tortured and experimented on), and then brutally murdered her.
On the same day, Douglas Sharper (another member of the DRC, who had been on a hunting expedition in Negilahn to try and find the predator killing all the animals) returned, and told a wild tale of a Bahro civil war he had witnessed. There were many Bahro who tried to kill him, and many who protected him, but the battle was brutal.
On the 23rd, Michael Engberg was seen at the memorial site, then linked to the Great Shaft and disappeared. He is still MIA.
On the 24th, the DRC decided that despite all the tragedy that week, they would go ahead with the planned release of Minkata, a new age. This cheered up the whole community a lot, as can be seen by this poll. The age is a huge desert age with a bunch of tiny caves in the ground. The goal of the age is to find all 5 caves and touch the stones in them. Touching a stone puts the entire desert into night, and touching it again brings it back to day. The age has a lot of new music, which is very awesome.
And that’s basically all that happened during Episode 1 of Uru. If they continue to be like this, Uru will definitely become much more popular in no time. This episode brought it back up to #1 on Gametap again, where it still is today.
Spleen Archive – New Buttons
The Spleen Archives has made some snazzy new buttons, check ’em out:
Those are all custom buttons, which he made with Photoshop Fireworks CS3.
Upgraded the Site
I’ve upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.2. Apparently K2 (the theme I use) doesn’t work with 2.2 yet, because of the new widget system. I had to disable the cool new widgets to maintain the blog’s look (which I really like), but yeah. The solution is here:
Forum topic on K2+WP2.2
Optical Speaker Recommendations?
I’m looking into purchasing an item which has optical speaker ports and no analog out, so to use sound I’d have to get optical speakers. Does anyone know of a good speaker set for under or around $50 which has optical input? I really don’t care if it’s surround sound or anything, I’d actually rather just have a stereo set, it just has to have optical input.