I’ll be heading over to AnimeBoston later today, so if you see a guy wearing a Heartless shirt with pinkish/purplish/bluish hair and jeans, it’s probably me 🙂
A Series of Tubes
An archive of old posts.
Tag Archives: Life in general
Cafepress Not ALL Bad…
More news from the ‘Someone set us up the bomb!’ T-shirt v. Cafepress battle! See the previous post for filling in on what this battle is.
Cafepress is shipping my shirts! 😀 That means that they actually took my order, and I’ll get my shirt. Happy times for all! Well, just me I guess, since the store is still down, pretty much for good…So you guys can’t buy one (yet, I’m still researching ways of making this plausible), but at least I have one…
One idea is to print it on some iron-on stuff and just buy a black t-shirt and iron it on. I don’t really know how that stuff works, but I assume it wouldn’t come out horrible…
Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb!
I finally made a Mooninite Bomb Scare t-shirt. I got the idea for this back when the bomb scare actually happened, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until just now. It’s $19.99, and one dollar of that goes directly to my wallet :D! If you enjoy A Series of Tubes, you should buy one! Maybe eventually (if they’re popular) I can lower the price, but for now that’s the least I can charge. Oh well! 🙂
UPDATE: Good news and bad news. Good news is that I added women’s shirts to the store! Now the ladies can have Mooninite goodness too! The bad news is The Man has shut down the store for violating the Cafepress terms of use (aka, putting a picture of a copywrited character on a shirt)! I really hope I can find somewhere else to host this, and that anyone who ordered a shirt before gets it (mainly me, I doubt anyone else bought one)…Sorry everyone! Here’s the image that was on the shirt to keep you entertained (It’s a transparent PNG with white text, so chances are you won’t see the text at the bottom unless you save it and open it with some other program):
Click to see the image (Careful, it’s a biggun’)
How To Contact Me
I just got a suggestion that I make it easier to contact me, and I realized that I don’t have a contact me page. Well, now I do. Hooray for talking to Zib! 😀
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:
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:
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.
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.
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!
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!