Some Mac Users Are Idiots Too
A guy writes an opinion piece about how Macs should be more user friendly because he was playing with software that shows the user the Unix underpinnings of OS X, something no one sees otherwise, and in the process he decided to delete the folder /usr because he’s pretty sure he already has one of those. Well guess what? When you delete the folder that Unix uses to store its vital system applications, your computer stops working. You can get it going again with a reinstall of the operating system, as he did, but the real joy of this article is this parting paragraph after he says how his Mac should have never let him do this: (emphasis mine)
Imagine if I was a novice user…yikes! Support calls, yelling, crying, and more. Woohoo! What a party. I still consider myself to be relatively new to the Mac, although I do have familiarity from yore. Nevertheless, this is not the intuitive and simple way Macs should work.
Yeah… Its tough to imagine the guy that decided he didn’t need a second /usr folder on his Mac so “What the hell?! Lets delete this.” as a novice user… Yeah, thank god you are such an advanced user! If you were any less computer skilled you would have just spent your time pounding on the top of your mac with a bone and screeching at the sky. (via Daring Fireball)
Notes: How to fix a lack of flash video sound in OS X
Today, all of a sudden the audio for flash video died in all browsers on my G5 iMac at home. Restarted. No go. Call the computer and “fucking piece of shit” while clicking on everything but changing nothing in my system preferences. No go. Restarted again. No go. Then I found this:
Every once in a while though, on Mac OS X it can happen that these Flash video players don’t have sound anymore.
It is pretty hard to figure out why, and the solution is quite random, but on macosxhints I found a comment mentioning that it could be a sampling rate problem:
1. open /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup
2. check the properties for Built In Output.
3. It might be set to 96KHz. Change it to 44KHz and audio in Flash will return immediately.Now, I don’t know what software it is messing up that setting, but I am glad it can be fixed.
Odd. But it worked. The issue I’m having is what do I set it too if it happens again?
via fredericiana
Hexen Lives On OS X (and so does Heretic, Doom and others!)
Who says Macs and OS X don’t play games? Sure they don’t play some of the new ones, but I have news for you: Those new games are just rehashes of the classics. By “classics” I mean of course: Doom, Doom 2, Hexen, Heretic, and Duke Nukem. Why screw with the new when you can rock out all night playing the originals on your OS X machine.
Yup, Nukem and the boys from ID Software are all playable on your mac. How? What’s the cost? Does it suck? All these questions will be answered below on a per-game basis:
1. Duke Nukem
What you need:
You need the Duke Nukem OS X install software (get it here). If you want to play more than just the shareware map, you need the retail edition of the Duke Nukem Atomic Edition. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve had a hell of a time finding a usable ISO anywhere on the net, and if you buy it from somewhere expect to spend $20.
Cost:
Free for the shareware level, $20 bones if you want the levels and you don’t already have a disk.
How is it?:
The shareware plays nicely for the most part. There were a few hangs, but very minimal. What can I say? Its classic Duke with lame sayings and pictures of girls dancing that I’ve found are less likely to give me a chubby all these years later.
2. ID Games: Doom, Doom 2, Hexen, Heretic…
What you need:
The awesomely named Doomsday Engine. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if this software is just a crappy alarm clock and has a dock icon of an erect penis, I’m downloading anything named “Doomday Engine”. You will also need the WAD file from any of the ID games you want to play. You may still have these in a dust covered floppy box and if not, a quick torrent search will give you a rar filled with all of them…or so I’ve heard.
Cost:
Nothing really. Just the time and bandwidth you are usually using to download and view porn.
How is it?:
Is “so bitchin’ I creamed myself” too strong? Maybe a little. I had a few jitters and one game of Doom found it freezing for a split second every minute or so, but I haven’t noticed it since. Other than that, the sound, graphics and everything play as smoothly as on a Pentium 100 with 24 Mb of RAM.
Quake and others?
I’ve heard things here and there that Quake(s) can be on OS X as well, but I haven’t been able to track down any installers or front-ends as of this posting, but please leave a comment or get a hold of me if you have the goods on getting Quake or any other classic game going on OS X.
So there you have it, classic shotem-up games rockin on OS X! In fact, I played them most of the weekend and the only side effects I felt were an increased sense of awesomeness and a strong urge to kill a monster that throws fireballs with a shotgun.
…luckily for her, I have no idea where Rosie O’Donnell lives.
Gawker is an open source time-lapse video maker that uses your iSight camera. Of course you could also just use iMovie’s time-lapse settings that I just found, making this post rather pointless. Not only that, but seriously, how many people really do time-lapse video these days on a regular basis? No one. You know you will never get the seconds you lost reading this back, and for that I apologize.
Apple has released a new commercial making fun of the “security” features that Vista, the newest version of Windows, baked in where instead of actually protecting you, they just constantly ask you questions about whats going on. Seems like one way to go except for the flaw that everyone just gets into Robot mode eventually and keeps clicking “Allow” out of sheer annoyance.
This might be my new all-time favorite Mac vs PC commercial. (via Daring Fireball)
Leah Culver is a Blonde Genius
Lean Culver of the surprisingly named leahculver.com, came up with a cream dream supreme of an idea. She had those zany, heavily laden with venture capitalist cash Web 2.0 companies sponsor her bid for a new laptop. At $150 a square inch, she sold roughly 40 ads and got her new laptop for free. After it was all said and done…and engraved…it looked like this.
My first thought: How can I get a sweet piece of this action? Could I make a St. Louis version? Would people actually by into this? Do you have to be a cute blond to get this idea off the ground?
Will these questions be answered? Be sure to keep checking Hell Yeah Bitch! .com for the thrilling conclusion where we find out the answers to those questions, in order, are: “Do your own.”, “Yes.”, “Probably not.”, and “It wouldn’t hurt.”
So who wants to by an add?
Here’s the video of the process.
Here’s more general info on engraving a laptop.
Quinn Is Back, Now With ‘Snarkiness’
Quinn is truly the Minesweeper counterpart on the Mac. That one addictive game that while using that OS I have to make myself not play it in between tasks. (For the uninitiated, Quinn is a beautifully designed port of tetris to OS X.) The difference being that Microsoft installs Minesweeper by default on all Windows machines, and Quinn is was is distributed by a third party developer, Simon Haertel. Last month, Quinn was ruthlessly shot down in its prime by the god dammed Russians, I mean the Tetris Company because it infringed on its copyrights. Well, its back and here is the wonderfully bitchy description that the site now carries. Emphasis mine.
Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game, which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here. Written specifically for Mac OS X, it features a neat user interface, perfectly integrated with Aqua, and a smooth look and feel for best user enjoyment. The goal was not to reinvent falling-blocks games with yet another modification of the rules, but to preserve the simplicity of the original idea. Still there’s everything you might expect—including a two-player mode, network play with Bonjour support, an onine server list, and five different multiplayer rules.
Nice work Simon. Stay strong brother!
If you are running OS X, and you don’t have Quinn, go get it.
Via Daring Fireball
There’s No Way I’m Going To Write About Boot Camp
So I’m minding my own bussiness today and all suddenly I hear a pounding at my door. It kinda sounds like a hard knocking, but not too hard…I think it was meant to be pounding though. I open the door and I see three nerdy looking guys standing outside covered in sweat.
“Whats going on?” I try to ask, but I’m cut-off by the nerdiest of the three.
“Were you asleep?!!!” the little nerd in the back drops and passes out from exhaustion, ” We’ve been trying to knock down your door for like 15 minutes out here. Do you have one of those fire-proof metal doors or something?”
“No, I think its kind of a plywood, cheap hollow door…”
“Shut up!”, the nerdy one retorts as he begins to catch his breath, “The reason we are here is because we know you have a website…”
“Yeah, Hell Yeah Bitch! .com.”
“…and its 1:00 in the afternoon and you haven’t written anything about how Apple released Boot Camp today! What the hell man!? When Apple releases something, especially as unexpected as this, you are supposed to drop everything and write a long comment on it basically saying what everyone else is.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” I lie…I totally know, I was just trying to get away from endless Apple posts. I had no idea the Nerd Police knew where I lived or worked. “What is everyone else saying?” I continue.
“What?! They are saying that this is a throw down move by Apple. They are saying that this is HUGE! By our records, you own two Apple computers, you should be screaming about this all day on your site like everyone else!”
“Sorry guys, I just don’t see the big deal. Its just a way to dual boot Windows on your Intel Mac. After everyone installs it and boots into Windows they will stare at it and realize that Windows sucks and wonder why they took 20 gigs of HD space for this useless experiment. I’m not going to take up space on my site for that. Thats space that could be used by a picture of Kate Beckinsale.”
“What?! A picture of Kate Beckinsale? You aren’t even doing that anymore, you are just using her as a title and posting pictures of other chicks! Its freaking stupid!”
“Ok…Well I know that. I’ll work Kate back in eventually…”
“You write a blog! You have to write about this! Everyone is! In fact, they already have!”
“I know my site is technically a ‘blog’, but I really hate calling it that…it seems so trendy, like its a big fad..”
“Sweet Captain Picard shut up and go write!”
“Look, I’m not writing about Boot Camp. Its just something to preoccupy the world for a day or two and then it will settle to the background where a few college’s will use it regularly and nothing more. In fact, if you buy a Mac to run Windows on it, then you really didn’t need or want the Mac to begin with. You are just buying it to be cool and not getting any of the benefits of it…its like buy a Livestrong bracelet for the fashion…lame. See you later Nerds.”
“We aren’t done yet Flynn!”
“Hey, I think I hear people playing Ultimate Frisbee in Forrest Park..”
“Whoa, really? Lets go boys!” and the Nerd Police hopped in their Mini Cooper and took off.
Stupid Nerd Police, trying to make me write about Base Camp just because everyone else is. Screw that. I have better things to do. Now, time to go check my Double Matches on HotorNot.com!
Google’s GDrive Needs .Mac Features
According to Kevin Rose’s first sudo-podcast Google is set to release yet another web application. This one is to be called GDrive and will be online storage with an ever growing amount of storage allotted to each user. This is a cool idea, even though this could be done already with the right applications you could turn your GMail account into a sudo GDrive. Rose believes that this will be the first step in a unification of all of Google’s new and current web applications. For instance, your GMail will be stored on there…your purchased Google videos will pop up there as well as your Writely documents and the list goes on and on. I agree with Rose 100%, the creation of GDrive is something that needs to be done to start to bring together this universe of seemingly unrelated Google projects. That being said, GDrive would go from a nice idea to a killer app if they upped the anty, stuck it to Apple and released (or an open source app was created) a backup program like that of Apple’s .Mac Backup application. If you got a couple of gigs of space on this drive it would cover your email, documents and other needed system files with no issues, and the creation of a very user friendly app like Apple’s Backup where you just check the pre-programed items you want and it backs them up for you is just the thing that could make those last few holdouts move to a virtual Google Web OS once and for good. This Google version of .Mac would need to begin with backup, but it could easily move on to all the other things that .Mac does. Google already allows you to make a quick and dirty website, but they could expand to an online version of their Picasso for photo sharing (maybe someone could hack this to make it work like Apple’s Photocasting?) and even syncing between computers. With the introduction of GDrive all of those applications would be fairly easy to roll out by Google and they why would anyone pay for .Mac when they can have all the features for free and just see a few ads on their emails and blogs? I love Apple, but this is a huge opportunity for someone to really take the time and get the applications right so that they can give real competition to a server that everyone could use, but no one really wants to pay for.
Of course we all know Google’s track record for waiting forever to release OS X apps , or not releasing them at all. I have no reason to think that line will change and although said, it will be forgiven to a degree if they release a nice API that will allow those smart, handsome open source guys to whip up exactly what I’m talking about in both Mac, PC and Linux flavors.
Anyone have any idea why this wouldn’t work or more reasons to add why this would be the greatest thing since “Sample Day” at the grocery store?
Needed: OS X Backup Program That Doesn’t Suck
A while back, Dan asked for a little technological present and he later got it…kinda. Ok, now its my turn to get stuff I want.
Remember my failed attempt to con Apple’s (.Mac subscriber only) Backup app to work on my iBook? I failed. Twice. Even after a tutorial update to include Tiger, that method is too much work…I’ll do it if I have to, but I want an open source mac backup program. I know there is an open source disk imaging app, and I don’t want disk imaging. I want an open source version of Apple’s Backup app. Here are my requirements:
1. Have pre-loaded locations for the main backup-ed items on a Mac: Preferences, Documents, Safari, Mail, Movies, iPhoto, etc…and have the ability to add locations too.
2. Backup to DVD, CD, and of course WebDAV drives.
3. Multiple Schedules
4. Clean interface.
Is that so hard? Thats all I want. If anyone could make this, they would be my hero. There’s an ever so slight chance that I might get motivated to learn to program for OS X and try to make this myself, but lets me real….thats just not going to happen. Backup software is the one area that the open source area really doesn’t have much to offer. A few mac and windows disk imaging programs, Amanda, which is still stuck on using tapes, and a few other “not ready for prime-time” players. Some wonderfull person should make me a backup program and fill one of the much needed open source backup holes.
…Actually, if someone wanted to make a better version of Amanda, that has a nice interface and isn’t stuck on tapes, to run on linux, I would be ok with that too!