Tag Archives: Computers

Jun 23 2007
Uncategorized

Modding GrApple (UNO)

I recently became sick of my mods (I knew this would happen), so I disabled ShapeShifter and reverted to default Aqua. This is very refreshing, but I like UNO way too much to disable it. The only thing is that Firefox isn’t unified by UNO (or I don’t think it is, I can’t open UNO any more because it claims it only works with Tiger 4.4 and up, even though I have 4.10…), so I went and looked for a unified theme, and lo and behold, I found GrApple (UNO) (scroll ot the bottom to get it). A theme specifically made to match UNO. However, upon installing it I discovered that it doesn’t really look like the picture, and doesn’t really do a good job unifying Firefox. So I did the fix he suggests, and it still didn’t look great. So I figured out how to haxx it myself.

I went into the chrome folder and looked at the toolbar.gif file it had told me to put there:

This is not enough of a gradient to blend properly, so what I did was opened a finder window, and took a screenshot of the toolbar:

And this almost completely fixed it. The main window blends until it gets to the bookmarks bar, where it turns a flat gray:

Update: I have now fixed the bookmarks bar to blend as well:

However the Tab Bar now has the same problem…so I don’t know what to do.

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Jun 20 2007
Uncategorized

Best Buy Has Apple Stuff (Well, Kinda)

I visited my local Best Buy yesterday (I saw Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer, Best Buy is just around the corner from the theater), and was surprised to see that they had a beautiful 24″ iMac on display. I of course went over and started playing with it, and noticed an iPod HiFi next to it, apparently acting as the speakers for the iMac. Didn’t know you could do this. The most curious thing was an open iPod box right in front of the HiFi, with naught but the headphones left. I left it alone, and continued playing with the iMac.

An employee quickly came over and cleared away the box, and then asked me “You aren’t going to mess up the display, right?”

Now, what the hell does that mean? I’m using an iMac 24″, minding my own business, and the guy thinks I’m going to break something. I was insulted, so I said “Of course not” and walked away.

Of course, noticing the macbook display made me stop and check them out. Of course, a brand new gen. 3 macbook pro, and two macbooks next to it, one white and one black. So I played around with them as well, noticed that they had had their batteries removed…Bad move with the macbooks, since the power cords are designed to come out easily. Jostle it too much and the computer loses its only source of power, there goes the demo. Anyway, they were very snappy, as is to be expected. The MBP was right next to a hulking monstrosity of a PC laptop, an inch thick with a huge, useless, led-ridden emblem right under the fuzzy trackpad. Eew.

So at that point I was wondering if they had the Mini and Pro on display as well, and then I saw them. Not the Mini and Pro, but the cheap printouts of said computers propped up in plastic photo holders. With pricetags under them. Seriously, it looks like instead of putting one on display, they just googled it and printed out a picture. It wasn’t even photo paper. Just plain letter paper, with cheap ink. I sincerely hope that these are placeholders, not the final displays. It’s depressing to look at them.

So props for the apple displays and selling apple stuff, but minus about a million for lame displays and kleptomaniac employees

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Jun 12 2007
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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.

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May 29 2007
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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.

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May 20 2007
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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.

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May 17 2007
Life in general

Two Projects

I have many projects going at any given moment, but currently there are two that occupy most of my weekends. The first, and more important, I can’t say much about at this point, but there will be a lot of info about it when I finish in a few weeks.

The second project involves the iMac I recently acquired from my grandmother. It’s a Snow G3 600mhz slot-loading, with 256mb of ram. I have pretty much no use for it, since it’s running OS X 10.2 (10.3 is really the cut-off point for modern application compatibility), but rather than let the perfectly good 40gb hard drive go to waste, I’m looking for a way to use it for backups. I know I can use Intego Personal Backup X4 to periodically back up my stuff to it over my network, but I was also thinking about possibly attaching my external drive to it so I can access it from anywhere in the house. I haven’t decided on this yet though, I need to see if it suffers much of a speed hit first (or if it’s even possible). I’ve named the iMac Hestia, after the Greek Goddess of the hearth. It was the only name that really fit 🙂

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May 17 2007
1 Comment
Life in general

Eve, Post-Op

Well, I’m happy to report that my computer’s surgical operation went through without a hitch. Well, there was a tiny little problem taking off one of the brackets from the disc drive, so one of the screws on it has been basically stripped of the teeth on its head, but it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I successfully extracted the foreign object from the disc drive:
photo-947.jpg

A small, crumpled, ball of paper. It must have slipped in when the computer was in my bag. Well, what’s important is that it’s out now and Eve runs without any problems once again. Yay!

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May 09 2007
Life in general

Busted Superdrive

Somehow a small piece of paper has slipped inside my computer’s Superdrive (that’s what Apple calls their optical disk drives, no idea why), and it no longer accepts disks. When I put one in, it slides in like it should, then the drive hesitates and spits it back out. Luckily there’s no visible damage to the disk, but the drive is basically out of commission for the time being. I’m planning on dismantling the computer on saturday to retrieve the paper from the drive (I would use tweezers, but i can’t really fit them in there…Plus I want to open my computer :P). I would be doing the dismantling tonight, but apparently we don’t own a Torx screwdriver of the right size to open up a MacBook Pro, so it will have to wait. Oh well, I rarely use the optical drive anyway.

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Apr 21 2007
Uncategorized

Having a MyBook is Awesome!

Last night, my computer warned me that my startup disk was almost full, with 2gb remaining. I plugged in my MyBook 320gb, and within 20 minutes I had freed up 26gb of space, a quarter of the hard drive. All by dragging files to the MyBook. Simple as that. This thing is really a life-saver…

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Apr 20 2007
Life in general

Go MS-Hatin' Open-Source-Lovin' Chinese-Speech-Crasher Man!

Apparently a protester crashed Bill Gates’ speech in China today, with a sign that said ‘Free Software, Open Source!’. This guy is awesome. He was ‘tackled by security’ and ‘taken away for questioning’. Oh well, he’ll probably never see the outside of a jail cell for a couple of years, but he’s still awesome.

Check it out on Engadget

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