Twitter Chatter: Push Notification vs Background Processes
I recently had a good discussion over Twitter with a PC fan about the reasons for Apple’s iPhone Push Notification in their upcoming 3.0 release.
Here’s the conversation via search.twitter.com:
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)
Even More Twitter Helper Apps
Here’s another nice little Twitter helper application for you Mac using Twitter folks. Its a very simple plugin for Quicksilver. After the simple installation, you just activate Quicksilver, hit ‘.’, type your Tweet, Switch to the action pane, type TWEET and hit enter. It will alert you via Growl with the results.
…ok, it way more simple than it sounds with my crappy description. Get it and learn for yourself.
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.
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
Mac Users Finally Get Skype With Video
Nothing better than a geeky company challenging other geeks to be “brave” and try their new pre-beta (isn’t that called alpha?) software. Today Skype called out the manliness of all OS X users by challenging us to be “brave” and try their new Skype with Video preview. Unless, you are a little pussy that doesn’t want video? Frankly though, if thats the case, please turn in your nerd glasses and your penis and step away from the computer.
I’m answered the challenge already by downloading it and signing in. However, since I don’t have a super-cool MacBook yet I don’t have a camera to test it on right now. I’m hearing good things though and plan to give it a whirl when I get home tonight. If you want to look me up tonight so we can get in our convertible, hold hands and drive off the cliff together into the scary abyss that is “preview technology” you can find me on skype as “mikehyb” Until then, be careful out there. The world of Alpha software is a scary place.
iChat Is Really Pissing Me Off
On Sunday my parents got them selves a shiny new 17″ iMac, much like my own except they have the fabled Intel chip residing in their machine. My Mom’s all excited to join the Clut of Mac and all and last night we tried to to a video chat with iChat 3. I have never experienced so much damn trouble with any thing Apple before in my life!
Every damn time we tried to connect (we tried inviting both ways) we get “[User] did not respond”. I’ve had this issue before a few times, usually a restart or something fixes the problem (annoying, but not the end of the world), however this time nothing I seemed to do on either of the computers worked. I cranked up the iChat bandwidth, I cranked up the Quicktime bandwidth, I restarted my machine, and I even setup the iChat video test accounts on both of our buddy lists. Both of us could connect just fine to the Apple test accounts, but we couldn’t get it to connect to each other! It was driving me insane! Sadly we had to give up…and now I’m here bitching out into the nothingness that is the internet.
You let me down Apple. I thought that the latest update (10.4.5 with iChat 3.1.1) would fix this problem, but it seemed to have just made it worse. I doubt it could be any internet connection problems on either end because we can both connect to the test accounts without issue, so who the hell knows what the problem is. For shame Apple, for shame…(I still love you, because this is still better than anything else, but…) for shame.
If you too are experiencing the maddening events I just spoke of, feel free to peruse the links I collected last night. They didn’t seem to help me, but maybe you will have better luck.
One of Apple’s many support discussions on this topic
Some guy’s blog post about it.
A list of the Apple testing accounts
Dual Displays and DVD Player
Let it not be said that I am a 100% Apple appologist. Here’s an issue I have discovered tonight with DVD Player.app: If you have 2 displays (spanning), you can full screen the DVD window in the second display, but once you click on anything on the other display, the DVD window pops out of full screen. Very annoying.