May 16 2008
Life in general

Boston Apple Store Opens!

The New Apple Store

I went to the opening of the Boylston Street Apple Store yesterday, and got a free shirt! It’s green and resembles the teaser signs that were covering the windows a week ago. Also received a free red iPod Sock, with the date embroidered on the tag. It’s actually larger than the old socks I was using, my iPod Touch can actually fit in it.

Red iPod sock

The line was about a 2 hour wait, but very much worth it. The inside of the store is beautiful, lots of glass and steel. Very Apple. The entire staff (hundreds of people, way more than one would expect, even for the second largest Apple Store in the world) ran by us at one point while we were in line and got people to cheer and clap for them, and then they returned the favor for us when we got inside. The staff was literally lining the stairs and surrounding the door, clapping and cheering everyone who came in the store on.

Apple staff cheers on the guests

The store itself is extremely large. The first floor is all laptops (with at least 3 tables of MacBook Airs alone), the second is desktops, iPods, and iPhones, and the third floor is entirely customer service (with multiple demo stands for classes and other events, and a gigantic genius bar, spanning the entire wall). The centerpiece, the glass stairs, is extremely cool, with frosted steps with some sort of rubberized grip to stop people from slipping, I guess.

The glass stairs

The best thing about this Apple Store is that it’s the first one that I can actually walk to. It’s right around the corner from the Hynes T stop, whereas all the other Massachusetts stores are in malls.

As always, more pictures can be found in my gallery…

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May 12 2008
2 Comments
Life in general

Spore/MassEffect to Use SecuROM DRM Scheme, EA Descends to Ninth Level of Hell

Apparently, Electronic Arts is planning on releasing two of their biggest PC titles this year, MassEffect and Spore, with the SecuROM DRM Scheme. For those of you who don’t know, the SecuROM DRM was included with BioShock, gave owners of the game living hell. For example, should you have to reinstall the game, you would have to call SecuROM to get a new registration code. There was also a lot of fear that it was installing a RootKit on systems (which would allow it to execute commands under the root, or administrator, user account without requiring any passwords or notifications).

Obviously, the announcement that SecuROM was once again going to be used as the copyright protection in popular pc games sparked an outcry from pc gamers. Originally, EA said that SecuROM would check with its servers every 10 days to re-authenticate the game, but they recently took back that statement, and are now saying that it will only re-authenticate the game when you download additional content off the internet, meaning fewer unwanted internet connections.

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May 12 2008
2 Comments
Life in general

Au Sol (French Project)

Over the past 2-3 weeks, I’ve been working on a project for my French class with a friend of mine. The assignment was to do a research project on some aspect of Islam, particularly Islam in the former African French colonies (and even more specifically, Algeria). We elected to research the abuse of women in Muslim culture, and for the visual part of our presentation, we made this movie using a lot of clay, my computer, and iStopMotion 2:

The class absolutely loved it, and compared to the powerpoints everyone else was giving, I’d say our project was probably the most entertaining.

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May 03 2008
Life in general

Iron Man Released

The Iron Man movie came out yesterday, and it is quite possibly the best superhero movie I have ever seen. The only competition it might have would be Batman Begins, but even that seems cheesy and weird in comparison to the highly polished, well-built Iron Man movie. Any nerd will greatly appreciate the amount of gadgets in the film, and even if you get completely lost in the steady stream of geekspeak, the movie is really enjoyable. The action is awesome, without being too unbelievable, and the special effects are unbelievable. It really is completely seamless, as one would expect it to be. Even the comic relief provided by Tony Stark’s assistant robots is acceptable, given the sheer awesome of the movie.

There were two moments in the movie which made the fanboy in me flip out, because they were references to aspects of the Iron Man comics I had completely forgotten about. I haven’t read many Iron Man comics, so I’m not that well-versed in Iron Man lore, but I knew enough to recognize how awesome the references were.

Protip: Stay through the credits.

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Apr 28 2008
Life in general

Boston Apple Store Shaping Up (Again)

When I was on the IFO Apple Store website today, I came across this picture of the soon-to-be Boylston St. Apple Store:

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Apr 26 2008
Uncategorized

Fan Ages and Drizzle

Fan ages – that is, custom-made, unofficial ages for Uru – have certainly progressed a long way. From my first age, Galamay:

To the Fan City of Ahra Pahts:

And now, Eh’ko and the Book of D’eux:

The two ages seen here, Eh’ko and The Remote Age Viewer, look absolutely stunning. They really are Cyan-quality work, and incredibly impressive.

Also, the Drizzle Project is a pretty impressive feat of fan work. Some hackers have managed to decrypt the MO:UL age files, and re-encrypt them using the old Uru encryption methods, meaning that we can put the ages that were once exclusively for MO:UL into URU:CC. I tried it out myself, and after one failure the first time, I got it working completely the second time around. It’s very fun to link to the ages and mess around with the settings just by tapping keys on the keyboard (such as swap the winter Delin for the summer one by pressing Q or W, or make animals appear in Negilahn), plus it includes the flymode patch, which means you can use flymode in these ages and see everything from any angle. It’s very fun, and I’d recommend it to anyone with Uru:CC and the MO:UL files.

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Apr 25 2008
Life in general

New Stuff From the Apple Store

I took a necessary trip to the Apple Store today, and picked up a new power cord for my computer. I noticed the form factor is smaller, it looks like the iBook adaptor now:

In other news, I picked up a Slider Case for my iPod, and it looks pretty good:

I also got some screen protectors, because I thought having a matte screen would look pretty cool, plus protection from fingerprints would be nice. However, I got a few specks of dust on the inside of the film, and I have not been able to remove them. Since the thing holds itself on using static, and dust or debris, no matter how small, produces a large air bubble. Plus, the matte finish makes the screen look grainy and weird. In the end, I took off the one on the screen but left on the back film, which has no matte finish, and is covered up by the case anyway.

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Apr 25 2008
Uncategorized

Echochrome Demo

I just downloaded the demo of Echochrome on the new Playstation Store. It’s pretty awesome, and I’ll probably buy the full version when it comes out. It’s very cool, using cool perspective tricks to solve puzzles. There are 5 laws of perspective (these can all be seen at the beginning of the trailer, below):

  • Perspective Traveling – If two paths appear connected, they are.
  • Perspective Landing – If one path appears to be above another, it is.
  • Perspective Existence – When a gap is blocked from view, making two paths appear to be connected, they are.
  • Perspective Absence – When a hole is blocked from view, it does not exist.
  • Perspective Jumping – If you jump, you will land on whatever appears to be beneath you.

    • Using those 5 laws, you rotate the camera angle to guide the avatar from ‘echo’ to ‘echo’. These ‘echos’ serve as checkpoints, in case you fall through a hole or jump into nothing. It’s pretty easy to get the hang of, but I find that the camera doesn’t rotate fast enough, and the motion sensor mode is too jumpy to be useful. Hopefully that will be fixed up by the final release, but I really like the demo. Check out the trailer below:

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    Apr 23 2008
    2 Comments
    Life in general

    Power Cord Blues, Again

    Well, it happened again. My Macbook Pro’s power cable has, once again, ceased to function due to overheating. This time, the cable obviously melted at the point where it connects to the power brick. Unlike before, nothing I do makes it work, which makes me think it’s been completely fused together. At the moment I’m using my Windows box, since both of my batteries are dead…Hopefully I’ll be able to get to an Apple Store tomorrow and pick up a new cable.

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    Apr 19 2008
    Life in general

    New Headphones

    I bought new headphones today, to replace my graying iPod headphones. I saw them in Microcenter, and I decided to buy them. Only $40, and they claimed to be surround sound and noise canceling, which sounded like a great deal to me. So, I picked them up. They sound great, with very clear bass. Unfortunately, they’re on-ear, not around-ear, but it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be…

    Unfortunately, the SRS does not work. I put in a AAA battery, but when I flip it on, the left ear goes completely silent, and the right ear barely changes at all. Oh well, I don’t need the noise canceling, the cans sound great.

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