Tag Archives: Computers

Apr 20 2007
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Uru Pod Series Ends, Other Stuff Too!

Last night the fourth and final pod in the Uru Pod Series was opened to the public. It’s called Tetsonot and seems to be broken. It’s way under the ocean, and it seems to be flooding. The bottom floor is up to my knees in water, and the power is emergency lights only. The whole place is very creepy, and very much like Stoneship. The other pods were Negilahn (a forest), Dereno (an arctic environment), and Payiferen (a desert). As much fun as they all are, there only seems to be one thing to do in them, which is to wait for a portal to appear and jump through it. So while it’s great to have the new content, many people have become restless and want larger ages.

There was another subtle update for uru on mac, which is that the mac client now supports widescreen resolutions! That means I can run it at my computer’s native resolution, and it looks awesome. Still no windowed mode support, but Uru is looking better than ever.

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Apr 10 2007
Life in general

Stripping the Words From a Cruzer 1gb USB Drive

I bought a Cruzer 1gb USB Drive a while back, since I really needed a USB drive. I liked it enough for a while, but the white writing on it was really ugly and the orange light isn’t the best color in the world, but I can’t (easily) change the light. What I could do was strip the words off of the drive though. I thought of a lot of different ways I could do this, but I asked my uncle and he recommended nail polish remover or gasoline. I didn’t have any gasoline on hand, so I used nail polish remover. After an hour or so of rubbing and some buffing with cardboard and buffing cloths, I have a really nice-looking USB drive. I wish I could make it shinier, I want a PS3-like finish on it, but I’ll settle for what I have. It does look really good I think:

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Apr 10 2007
1 Comment
Life in general

Messing with Wiimotes

My friend Cutter has a Nintendo Wii, as you probably already know if you’ve been reading my blog for a while. Well over the weekend we discovered via the intertubes that you can connect a wiimote (the controller for the Wii) to a computer using bluetooth. So of course we got my computer and within an hour we were playing Contra III on an emulator using the wiimotes as controllers. We used DarwiinRemote to collect input from the controllers and map buttons and such (actually we ran two copies of it so we could use two wiimotes at once), and to get mouse capabilities we turned on the Wii (once the controllers were paired with my computer they couldn’t pair with the Wii, so it was controllerless, we just needed it to power the sensor bar) and put the sensor bar on my computer. Since my screen is way higher-res than Cutter’s old TV, the cursor was way more accurate:

Another thing we did was mess around with our Miis on my computer using some programs Cutter found. The main thing we did was back up the Miis and giver them all gold pants:
gold1gold2

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Apr 05 2007
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Life in general

A Tear Shed For the Lost

This video makes me sad. The PS3 had such amazing potential, but it’s a huge failure. The insanely high cost, the crap games (worse than the Wii’s titles), the Blu-Ray player (which is probably what boosts the price up so high, the PS3 costs as much as the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there…), the insanely over-pumped specs (which make the console awesome, but really are unnecessary), and the little things (no rumbling controller…wtf?) make the PS3 a failure.

Sony, seriously. Take some time out, remove the Blu-ray, lower the specs a bit, and ditch your current games (since they’re all on blu-ray discs). I’d say selling consoles is more important than having the best-looking one out there. Seriously, removing the Blu-ray will lower the cost alone. And make it more popular.

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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 21 2007
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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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