Monthly Archives: March 2007

Mar 29 2007
Life in general

Vista Isn't THAT Bad…

Ok so I finally installed the new Boot Camp drivers I posted about last night, and Vista is working a heck of a lot better than it was before. For one thing, the trackpad support is much better, with accidental touch detection (so typing stuff and having your palm on the pad doesn’t make the cursor go all spazzy) and other great stuff. The wifi support is superb, I can finally connect to my network without a hitch…

…But…it’s still Windows….I consider my computer to be pretty top-notch (dual core 2ghz processor, 1gb ram, nothing to sneeze at, and definitely in the upper-middle range of computer performance. However, Vista still runs as slow as a turtle while OSX is breezing by. I’m trying to not become completely biased against Windows, but gosh darnit Microsoft…you make it so hard for me! Yes, flip 3D is nice, yes Aero is pretty, but if people have to disable these things to save performance on their computer then Vista isn’t much better than XP is it? Hmm.

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Mar 28 2007
Life in general

Boot Camp 1.2 With Vista Support!

My biggest roadblock in providing a decent review of Windows Vista is the fact that I just don’t know what is a Vista problem and what is a problem from my lack of drivers (for the Mac hardware I’m running Vista on). Well, Apple released Boot Camp 1.2 today, which (among other updates such as audio, video, and iSight stuff) adds support for Windows Vista. I have no review just yet, since I’m still in the process of downloading it. For some reason the download page did not work in Firefox, it gave me that “thank you for downloading” message, but it never actully downloaded. So now I’m downloading it through Safari.

On a completely unrelated note, a huge thanks to Logan for recommending the Shapeshifter theme Eternal Aqua, I love it and I’m using it (in conjunction with the delicious message boxes of UNO) as my main theme. Thanks!

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Mar 27 2007
1 Comment
Life in general

Optimized Firefox, UNO, and Shapeshifter (aka, why doesn't anyone make good Mac themes?)

So I was bored today and reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog, when I came across a post about UNO, a mac ‘theme unifier’. It takes a bunch of applications that most mac-heads use, and modifies their look a bit so that they all match. It sounds like a great idea, and it works pretty well, but there are a few big flaws:
First of all, it doesn’t support nearly enough applications. The ones it shows in that screenshot on their front page are the whole shebang. That’s less than 15.
It doesn’t really work that well with iTunes 7.
And lastly, it doesn’t do a great job with Firefox if you’re using a theme. Which I am. Namely this one.
But the finder and OSX message boxes (and login) are drool-worthy enough to make me keep it. Whatever.

Another thing I tried out today was Optimized Firefox. It’s a specially-compiled version of Firefox which is optimized for the Mac. It’s pretty cool, though there aren’t too many noticable differences. The main thing is that you can get a version which uses Aqua buttons and things, so Firefox is better assimilated into iShiny™. Personally, I like having theme-defined buttons, but I guess it’s a personal preference thing.
Somthing I find a little wierd is that Mozilla doesn’t allow unofficial releases of Firefox to use the Firefox icon or name, so technically this is the Bon Echo browser, not Firefox. Don’t be fooled, it’s basically the same. And the icon is just missing the actual fox du feu.

Finally, a complaint. Why doesn’t anyone make good themes for Shapeshifter? They’re all so ugly! I don’t want my shiny Macbook Pro to look like its running OS9! I don’t want tiny, pixelly squares instead of buttons! I don’t want “titanium” themes that are so shiny and shrink-wrapped that they make it impossible to use the computer! I’ve been running Cold as my theme for a while, but I’ve kinda fallen in love with Aqua again so I’m giving Shapeshifter a break until someone makes a better theme for it. Think about practicality and elegance. I don’t want the shiniest possible OS ever (cough cough vista cough cough), nor do I want one that makes everything neon orange. Who would want that?! I mean come on, people!

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Mar 25 2007
2 Comments
Life in general

On Deleting a Comment

I feel a little bad that I just deleted a comment here, but the commenter was being really rude. I would like to think that most people live by the philosophy of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” but evidently this isn’t true since somebody posted a comment telling me one of my old photoshopped images sucks…

I usually believe in freedom of expression, but this is my site and here I am the master of this domain, which means you really don’t have the freedom to say whatever you want. I reserve the right to delete and edit comments, I’ll just feel guilty afterwards. I just don’t want to turn into a control freak, editing everyone’s comments to fit my liking…

On a lighter note, THIS IS MY 300th POST! Yay!

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Mar 23 2007
1 Comment
Life in general

TMNT Released

I went and saw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie today, and was somewhat disappointed. After the awesomeness that was the original live action movies, I was expecting some really good stuff from this CGI epic. However, the humans were very stylized (yeah yeah, it’s going for cartoony not realistic), to an almost ridiculous point. Another thing was the accents of the Foot Clan leader (not Shredder, he dead) and Splinter were very annoying. Not standard, stereotypical, cliché asian accents that we all know and love, but strange accents like a stereotypical accent but then under-pronounced, like the voice actors couldn’t be bothered to do a good job.

On a brighter side, the action sequences were pretty good, especially the Leonardo/Raphael battle scene (sorry if that’s a spoiler, but I’m not telling you the outcome so yeah). The plot moved very fast at the beginning, to an extreme amount, but it’s aimed at already hyperactive kids high on sugar and popcorn (by the way, the theater was filled with a low-level din for the entire film, due to it being packed with little kids).

All in all, it was a good movie. A little lacking visually, and not nearly enough ‘dudes’ ‘cowabungas’ and not a single instance of the famed ninja rap:

Too bad, but still a good movie. It had a rap called ‘shell shock’ which I guess is the replacement for GO NINJA GO NINJA GO!

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Mar 21 2007
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Record-Breaking Uniques!

Woot! A Series of Tubes just got its 194th individual visitor today, which breaks my old record by 1! Thanks everyone! :3

To celebrate I’ve opened up an archives page using the awesome Extended Live Archive plugin (which I unfortunately just lost the link to, sorry!). It uses AJAX and is basically awesome. Check out the new Archives tab up at the top there to try it out!

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Mar 21 2007
1 Comment
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Uru For Mac Follow-up

Now that I have used Uru on Mac for a day or so, I’m writing a follow-up review. All in all, it’s much better than trying to deal with Vista on unsupported hardware, and it performs about the same as the windows client does, which is good. There is no noticable lag (I got a tiny bit in the hood, but it was momentary), link times were not extreme, downloads for ages are decent…They’re slightly faster than on Vista, actually…but again, my wifi card is not supported with Vista drivers yet so that could be the problem.

One annoyance though. It doesn’t do windowed mode. You have to run it full-screen, and you don’t have nearly all the resolutions the windows client does. I had to use 1280×800 (as opposed to the 1440×900 that is the native for my default monitor, or the 1650×1080 for my external), which isn’t horrible but it looks blurry. Oh well.

Also just a general Uru gripe, dual monitors are useless, you can only use the primary one. Which is annoying when your secondary is so much bigger (15″ vs 22″, 22″ wins). It’s even more annoying when said fullscreen app renders the secondary monitor useless, since it blacks it out too and doesn’t let the cursor go over it. Whatever.

All in all, Uru for Mac is a great thing, and a long-awaited development, I think (since Uru was the only Myst game not compatible with Mac, not counting the fact that it’s next to impossible to run any of them on Intel macs…). If it had windowed mode it would be perfect.

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Mar 20 2007
9 Comments
Life in general

Uru For Mac – Released!

Cyan has finally released its Mac client for URU! Hooray! I’m downloading it as I type this, but here are some shots of what I have so far:
the mac updater for uru
The updater

uruicons
The icons on the dock. There are two, the shown updater and one named ‘Myst Online’, the actual name of the app.

So yeah, it’s still updating, but I’m hoping that there’ll only be one icon on the dock when it’s actually running (not updating), I like my dock as uncluttered as possible. But the new icon is mad pretty:
Uru icon
The new über shiny icon :3

UPDATE: Not sure why I didn’t do this before, but I realized that anybody interested in this post will probably be interested in running Uru: Complete Chronicles on a Mac as well. Happy Mysting.

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Mar 19 2007
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zPhoto "All" Filter

One thing I just tried for zPhoto. Putting all the effects on at once. It basically comes out a garbled mess. I’ll probably have to take out the extreme ones like pop art for it to work, or do it first. And Sepia and Black and White kinda cancel each other out, plus if you remove or modify the color thermal doesn’t do anything but make it all bluish…so I really don’t think its worth it to put in an “all” filter.

The only reason I say this is because I saw ‘photobooth all filters on at once’ in my referral search strings, so I tried it out.

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Mar 19 2007
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Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End Trailer!

You can see the trailer here:

(Disclaimer: Trailer not actually available until midnight. 🙁)

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