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!
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.
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 updater
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:
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.
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.
You can see the trailer here:
(Disclaimer: Trailer not actually available until midnight. 🙁)
My blog’s theme died for a bit yesterday and today. Should be working again now 🙂
I’m working some more on zPhoto, trying to get a stained glass filter working… More on that when it happens.
I’ve gotten back into Flash (I got a cheap-o copy of Flash 5 back when it was only 1 version old…), and am currently writing a basic game engine in Actionscript. It’s difficult, but I’ve already made more progress than the last time I tried to do this, where I worked for about a week and I never got jumping working. I just need to tweak it a bit so the guy doesn’t bounce down the slopes, but slides. Throw in some animation, and presto! A basic game. Then I need enemies, bosses, items, netcode, etc. etc. etc. The whole thing was inspired by The Fancy Pants Adventure, a really good flash game where you run around and off ramps and stuff. I’m not aiming for that kind of quality, that game is amazing. Half that quality would be my best work ever.
I bought a Red 4gb iPod Nano a few days ago, with “It’s a series of tubes!” engraved on the back. I really love it, it is way better than my old shuffle. And it can hold about twice as much music as I actually have, so it’s perfect.
I was bored today (I have strep, so I’m at home sick), and decided to make a dock for my new iPod out of the cardboard box it came in and other various things it came with. You can check it out here:
Credit to this gallery for the idea, I used the exact same method but modded a tiny bit for the nano 🙂
I’ve decided to call my aforementioned Photo Booth hack zPhoto. And I’ve updated it.
New:
Known Issues:
If you know how to fix any of the above, please leave a comment or email me!
Get zPhoto HERE!
Just unzip it and put zPhoto.app in the Applications folder. As always, make a backup of Photo Booth first, just in case… But it shouldn’t matter.
Note: This is based completely off of Photo Booth, and thus has the same requirements as Photo Booth. I don’t know what those are, but this is a Universal Binary. I guess you need a computer with iSight, but I really don’t know. Sorry!
I recently figured out how to open the Photo Booth effects in Quartz Composer. Simply view the package contents of photobooth.app, then it’s Video.qtz under resources. But whenever I modified anything, it seemed to either freeze or take no effect.
Well, after a day or two of heavy experimentation with the file, I’ve managed to successfully put my own effects into Photo Booth:
For those that don’t use Photo Booth often enough to notice the new effects, I’ve added Edges, Pixelly, Trippy, and Blobs. There’s also Kaleidoscope in the second panel, which you can see in the image tray at the bottom. Blobs doesn’t actually work when taking pictures yet, it just produces an all-white image. It looks cool, though 😛
If you want to try out these effects for yourself, you can follow these steps:
If you figure out how to make blobs take a picture correctly, please tell me.
Note: This hack will not change the labels for the effects panels. To do this, you have to edit Video1.strings and Video2.strings in Photo Booth duplicate.app/Resources/english.lproj using a text editor.
Well, I’m officially a year older. Whee.
I opened most of my presents this morning, and apparently there are a few more coming in the upcoming days. These are the ones I opened today:
So yeah, pretty great birthday other than the injured left hand, which makes it annoyingly difficult to type…Oh well. I’m planning on using the money I got to buy a red iPod nano (4gb, thats way more than I need for my entire music collection), then putting some aside for OS X Leopard, then putting the rest towards my next computer (so I’m ready to upgrade in a year or two). I’m a happy teen today. 🙂