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Pommes aux Pommes

chrisdye — 2011-07-26T11:33:42-04:00

Correct:
- accurate
- exact
- appropriate

Considering the decreased traffic on Sillytech, I'll give you two weeks.

Mr. T has good advice for today or any day

Alex — 2010-05-09T21:34:38-04:00

Little Bundle of Joy

Gbrowdy — 2009-11-07T07:53:49-05:00

Hello all you Mac lovers out there!

Macheist is offering 5 little apps free of charge. Whereas normally registering these little gems costs $15-$25 or so each, you get them all, fully registered, FREE!

Download, Install, Love.

apples to apples results are in

Maryam — 2009-08-09T23:51:20-04:00

hey guys, just letting you know I finally wrote my answer for last weeks apples to apples. Go check it out and identify yourself if you are the winner. good luck!

Apples to Apples: Dispensable

Maryam — 2009-07-31T16:41:18-04:00

Green Card: Dispensable

1. Not essential; unimportant: dispensable items of personal property.
2. Capable of being dispensed, administered, or distributed.
3. Subject to dispensation, as a vow or church law.

You have a week?

Apples 2 Apples: Pointless

stretch — 2009-07-19T21:37:33-04:00

Pointless:

"serving no useful purpose"
"having no excuse for being"
"without rhyme or reason"

Apples 2 Apples: COMPLICATED

Apples2Apples — 2009-07-12T09:51:42-04:00

Chronomporph, you said you couldn't get this to work. The next green card is COMPLICATED.

"difficult to analyze or understand"
"convoluted - not simple"
"complicatedness - puzzling complexity"

But Where Can I Get A Poutine?

vinny9 — 2009-07-04T00:02:32-04:00

Apple WWDCgasm

goodladd — 2009-06-08T14:30:16-04:00

I don't own an iPhone, but this is a pretty sweet new feature:

There's a new feature [in iPhone OS 3.0] called Find My iPhone. . . . it will allow you to see on a map where your phone is. . . . You can send an alert tone to your phone that will play, announcing it's lost. It will play even if you left your phone in silent mode. . . . If your phone is really lost, there's a remote kill switch to wipe your phone of all your data.

I'm also super-stoked to discover that Leopard users will be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard for a measly $29. Hello, new iMac!

Pride

goodladd — 2009-04-29T22:25:57-04:00

The final assignment in the class I'm teaching this semester was basically: "pick a social issue or news item and respond to it in some way using humour." One of my of students produced this.

(Inspiration here � click "Watch the Video".)

Fun game

vinny9 — 2009-04-24T12:36:59-04:00

Flight Control for the iPhone/Touch is a great game. For it's temp price of 99c, it's a total steal and very much worth it.

F That

vinny9 — 2008-10-15T12:58:57-04:00

For the last year, I'd been hoarding my gold-pressed latinum to buy the ever-imminent new MacBooks and they were finally announced yesterday. Which turned out the be same day I bought a refurb'ed white and plastic MacBook.

I don't care about the aluminium. I don't give a hoot about the new trackpad. I'm not a fan of glossy screens. I could care less about the multi-touch (and I just did and will probably continue to do so at regular intervals). Here's what I care about: a similarly specified refurb'ed white Macbook goes for 250$ CDN less.

The only thing I liked about the upgrade and that gave me a moment's pause was the graphics chip. Diablo 3 is coming out probably next year-ish and well before our next computer upgrade is due so this purchase is going to be the laptop that will allow me to summon Zombie Wall. I'm going to have to rely on Blizzard's usual kindness to lower-end machines and play it on rock-bottom resolutions.

So I decided to get the latest old-school machine and spend the difference on a refurb'ed Time Capsule, which I've been eyeing for nearly as long. It will come in very handy with two laptops in the house. And I can recoup some of its value by selling my old Airport Express and my current USB-anchored external HD.

My reason for writing this is to offer people drooling over this new bejewelled and gilded scarab a way of getting (in my view) a little more bang for your buck.

Smells Like Melted Plastic

vinny9 — 2008-08-20T16:33:15-04:00

MagSafe Adapter replacements

No kidding. I just had to buy a replacement due to their crappy design. I reinforced my replacement with some electrical tape. I'll be going to get my refund.

Comix

vinny9 — 2008-08-06T10:21:34-04:00

Calvin and Jobs

Platforms to Stand On

dustin — 2008-06-09T19:15:13-04:00

My company currently makes games for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

The first 2 have a good business case. Lots of people run Mac OS X and Windows, and buy games to play. (Thank you to all the customers who keep us small developers alive.)

Linux doesn't have as good a business case for us. Not very many people buy the Linux versions of our games. But, I foresee Linux continuing to grow in leaps and bounds on the desktop. And our codebase is in Java, so it isn't that much extra work to make Linux versions.

Going Mobile
The mobile OS wars are warming up fast. In the past we've gotten some scattered requests for PocketPC or Palm versions, but it hasn't seemed worthwhile. Apparently there was good money to be made selling Palm apps in the past, but greedy distributors (hearsay says Handango) and a decaying platform have destroyed it.

J2ME and BREW cellphone apps are making money, but only for a few big companies (at least in North America). The carriers have been very greedy distributors, and locked down their platform tightly.

Apple's iPhone is fresh mobile platform coming on strong. They've publicized their app distribution rate as taking a 30% cut. That's a lot better then most desktop games distributors (Yahoo Games typically takes 70%). Apple has been tremendously successful at iterating the iPod from version1 to perfection. They're following the same process with the iPhone, building a mobile platform from the ground up. I think the iPhone will be one of the long term mobile platform winners.

Google Android is the other mobile platform I'm keeping an eye on. Open-source and available for carriers to build on. Apps are written in the Java language, but using G's own VM and libraries. (A nice end-run around SUN, straight to Java developers.) It hasn't launched on any real phones yet, but I think it has huge potential. The first Android phones are supposed to be available "soon."

You already have a computer in your pocket (your cellphone). The big question for software developers is: what platform is your next one going to run?

FYI

vinny9 — 2008-05-09T14:32:40-04:00

45$ Apple credit to Canadian owners of iPods (bought before Jun 04)

Random Links for March 9

dustin — 2008-03-09T07:00:02-04:00

The vitamin D miracle: Is it for real?

Google is starting to measure page load time in rankings.
They announced it for AdWords. Makes sense to eventually use it for natural PageRank as well.

Calibrating an Apple laptop's battery for best performance.
My MacBook Pro has some battery issues. Hopefully this will help.

ICO plugin for Photoshop.
Allows creation of favicon.ico images in Photoshop.

Bof fri fleu

goodladd — 2008-01-16T15:45:56-05:00

This seems far too upbeat, considering the subject matter. Shame on you, Massachusetts Department of Public Health!

Dustin's Money Wants to be Freed of Its Wallety Prison

vinny9 — 2007-11-30T14:26:30-05:00

Vancouver Apple Store Opening?

Fonz + Mork = ?

goodladd — 2007-11-22T22:21:32-05:00

Do we think this was before or after that show jumped the shark?

Slownikki

vinny9 — 2007-11-14T18:09:38-05:00

Lifehacker's Top 10 Quicksilver plug-ins

In other news, my refurbished MacBook had to have its hard drive AND RAM replaced since I've bought it. So I'm pretty disappointed that Apple QA dropped the ball on that, but I can't complain too much because both repairs were free since it's been <1 yr and done on the spot at the Apple Store in Laval.

Playing games with Apple

dustin — 2007-06-14T05:42:57-04:00

Amongst all the iPhone and OSX 10.5 hubub, I haven't heard much said about the part of the Stevenote talking about games. EA announced they are soon going to be releasing Mac versions of a bunch of their games. John Carmack also demonstrated ID's next engine which will support Macs along with the PC, XBox 360, and PS3. That's a nice announcement in itself, but it's really just the beginning.

Soon...

Apple is going to start selling games from the iTunes store.

In fact, they already do sell iPod games from the iTunes store, alongside music, movies, and TV shows. Desktop games is a natural next step for the store. Digital distribution is just getting started for games, but it's projected to take an increasing share in the future, just like digital music sales. There are already a number of "game portals" selling downloadable games including Valve, Yahoo Games, MSN Games, and RealNetworks. Most of them only sell games for Windows though. It makes a lot of sense for Apple to compete in this market with their iTunes store. They can even use it to give a nice boost to OSX.

Apple will only sell games if they support Mac OS X.

This will provide a huge incentive for game developers to make their games support Macs. "You want us to sell your Windows game from our massively popular iTunes store? Sure, as long as you have an OSX version we'll sell them both for you." The downside of this is that Apple wouldn't be able to match the full roster of games sold by other stores ... at least until they convinced a large enough portion of the industry to support Macs. EA's the largest publisher in the world, and ID's engines get licensed for use by a multitude of other companies, so they'll be able to hit the ground running.

This would be a deliciously clever move for Apple, using the iTunes store to give even more boost to Mac OS X. I don't have any real knowledge that this is Apple's plan, but it's not such a big stretch really. Everybody in the downloadable games biz knows about the increasing role of the "game portals" and online distribution. It's the exact same situation that the music industry has undergone. Games are more complicated to sell since they are code and not pure data, but it's not a big deal in practice.

I'm pretty much 100% certain that Apple will start selling games from the iTunes store in the next year or two. It's a natural fit, and something I've been thinking about for awhile now. The WWDC announcements mean it might be coming sooner then later. The only real question is whether they will sell pure Windows games to Windows users, or whether they will use this opportunity to force a massive influx of games to OSX.

What do you think?

Mac Update

vinny9 — 2007-04-27T22:52:12-04:00

In point form:
- Camino is still awesome. Why, oh, why won't they add RSS support? Jerkasaurus!
- I tried to disable AppleSpell (I'm not a 12 yr old) but every damn app kept harrassing me that it couldn't find AppleSpell so i turned it back on even though it eats ram for no good reason.
- I ditched bitrocket and went to azureus. The ability to cherrypick files within a torrent is too awesome. Any other osx clients do the same?
- iMovie is so easy to use. I've only abused it once with the grace of a knitting hippo but plan to have more fun with it as the kids get older
- iPhoto hasn't choked on 5000+ photos. Not too shabby.
- Quicksilver. Greatest thing ever. Like a command line for a GUI.
- Tinkertool let me tweak a few more things in OS X that were bugging me.
- NeoOffice is working well. Good conversion of OpenOffice.

Next up: Garageband for podcasting...

How to disable QuickTime movies opening webpages

dustin — 2007-04-26T03:37:54-04:00

Some QuickTime movies contain embedded "HREF tracks" that will open a webpage in a browser window during the movie (or at the beginning or end). This is highly annoying, not to mention a possible security risk. I looked far and wide, but I couldn't find a way to stop QuickTime from opening website links embedded in movies it plays.

The fix is to set movies to open in the excellent VLC media player instead of in Quicktime. VLC will play the movie properly, but ignore any links inside of it. On a Mac you can do this by doing "Get Info" on a movie file and changing the "Open With" selection box to be VLC. Then click the "Change All..." button below it.

2 finger scrolling

dustin — 2007-04-13T04:28:49-04:00

One of the coolest things about the newest Mac laptops is that you can scroll in windows by dragging 2 fingers along the trackpad up or down. Like the scrollwheel was to the mouse, this is an excellent innovation.

I point it out because I saw iScroll2, which apparently adds the feature to older PowerBooks and iBooks. Check it out if that's what you've got.

Return of the Mac

vinny9 — 2007-04-05T13:05:54-04:00

I'm back... Here's what I've done to my little MacBook.

I've got Camino running as my main browser. Safari just doesn't cut it though it does have some nice features that Camino does not (mostly RSS). I grabbed a recent Intel-optimized nightly build from here. Will probably grab one every couple months or so.

There's a neat trick to adding address bar searching. Just bookmark a website's search URL and then give it a keyword. So to use google I'd bookmark "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s" add the keyword g. Then to search on google, I'd just type "g sillytech" in the address bar. You can add all sorts of searches including wikipedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc...

I haven't had a chance to try out iChat yet. It seems you either need to use .Mac or AIM for iChat and I only know my brother on AIM and he's touring South East Asia (bastard!). But I did install the Chax plug-in. It looks like it adds some useful features.

I installed Quicksilver. It looks very useful but I haven't used the MB enough to really feel the difference. It does look like it will be worth it over the long haul. There are some very good tutorials at Lifehacker.

I'm moving my photos over to iPhoto. I'm liking the ability to put slideshows together and keyword stuff. I thought about using picasa or flickr but I really don't want all of my personal pics online and I don't want to have to manage 2 sets of pics so this works out quite well for me. It also lets me burn sets of pics to discs quite easily for family.

Keywording a lot of pictures is not as simple as it could be. I have to select a group, then drag them to the keyword. It seems more intuitive to drag the keyword to them or even just click the button while they are selected. Keywording 6000+ pics is going to take some time. I did learn that using the trackpad for a long time hurts my wrist. Time to dig up my USB mouse.

Oh: trackpad. I didn't have it set to recognize clicks so I was always using the button. I enabled click on trackpad and it's a much nicer experience, especially the two-finger tap to right-click. That is awesome. I just wish it wasn't quite so sensitive. It's just a hair too trigger-happy and there doesn't seem to be a way for me to adjust it. I did enable "ignore accidental input".

Still don't like or need Expose. I'd rather have Spaces.

For my RSS needs I installed Vienna. I would prefer a browser solution but Camino is not doin' it. Vienna is very simple and it just works. Don't need much more than that. I took a look at Shrook but it was not for me. I also tried using Shiira (a new browser on the block; it supports RSS). It's way too early in it's development to really be of use. It's pretty slick with some nifty features. If it moves along at a good pace, and lives up to its potential, I can see myself switching down the road.

I'm going to try out Front Row and iDVD on the weekend.

I hope I haven't exhausted people's curiosity/patience. Let me know if you want to hear more.

MacBook First Impressions

vinny9 — 2007-04-02T01:14:32-04:00

I got my MacBook on Friday and have been poking around in it all weekend. I had asked a few questions here and gotten some great responses (thanks, guys!).

My first move was to do what I do on my windows machines: partition the HD to keep my data separate from my OS. This way if I need to upgrade to Leopard, it should be even more painless (perhaps that's just my Windows mentality though I did read it on a few Mac sites as well).

In any case, this website gave a great step-by-step method for doing exactly what I wanted. It works flawlessly so far. I've got it split 25GB/50GB on my 80GB drive (you lose some in the formatting and splitting). I install everything to my primary and download files there. All data (pics, torrents, music, etc.) goes to the other drive.

Once that got setup, I had to choose how to set up my dock. For a windows user, this is one of the weirdest parts of the Apple OS. It's like a taskbar + start menu. I have it along the bottom of my screen just because it looks asymmetric on either side. I like symmetry. I have it scaled down with magnify on mouse-over and also set to auto-hide (which I never did with my taskbar in Win). It's an interesting design paradigm that has its advantages and disadvantages. I like being able to launch programs from there (something I hated in windows: the quicklaunch can only handle a couple icons otherwise it's too small and cluttered). I dislike minimize in OS X. Why does it add the window to my dock?! It should just alter the program icon in the dock so that if I click it, boom, it's back. It's not like I'm going to launch it again.

Dashboard is stupid. Thanks for wasting my RAM. I immediately found an app to disable the bastard. Like I'm desperate to know the weather every damn second or to have some fancy ass calendar for no reason. The date is up there in the top right and iCal is at your fingertips. Anyways, Dashboard is a waste.

I'm using Camino for browsing. Not a fan of Safari. It's ok but I can't get it fullscreen?? WTF?

Digression:
Those 3 window buttons are very weird for a windows user. The red X doesn't close the app; it just closes the window, the app itself is still running. So I have no window interface for closing the app? Why? I definitely prefer the Photoshop paradigm to the Gimp one OS X seems to use. When I'm working in an app, I like it to fill my screen. Less clutter, more workspace. Also, to the green + button: you're a fickle asshole. Sometimes you fill my screen, sometimes you get 10 pixels wider. Can we get you to always fill my damn screen??? I hate you green + button. I can drag the bottom corner to make the window bigger so make my window bigger already! Ok, ranting over.

Camino is nice but it could use a keyboard shortcut to cycle tabs and better extension support. I might flip to Firefox if there's an extension I can't live without but for now I'll survive. There are a few options though, it might be ok.

I tried BitRocket at Gil's suggestion. It worked quite well so I'll stick with it until I find a reason to abandon ship.

iTunes has been very kind to me. My main box is a Windows PC upstairs on my 2nd floor. It has my iTunes with all the songs I've been ripping to it. I was really hoping I didn't have to repeat it on the MacBook. Good news, iTunes sharing works flawlessly between the 2 machines over my WiFi. All the songs are upstairs, I hit my Shared library and, bingo, I can play all my songs. Bonus: I have the Airport Express as my home router/wifi base with AirTunes. From my MacBook, I can fire up my PC library and then route the output to my sound system over wifi. Sweeeeeeeet!

iPhoto is quite cool. I'm not sure I'm ready to abandon my PC photo filing system. I'm going to need to become a bit more used to this interface and add Photoshop for the Mac. I do like the keywords and integrated slideshows. I can see myself switching in the near future.

Terminal has made its way to my Dock. It rules.

Finally, there's Finder (the system explorer for us windows users). The Application folder in Finder is so important it should really be its own application. It's so vitally essential to the OS but its placement in the Finder window totally underplays how crucial and how often you're tooling around in there.

Hardware-wise I love the machine. You really do need more than 512 MB of RAM. top is telling me I'm using almost that amount right after I finish booting without having done a thing. I love the white look. I'm in the honeymoon phase where I'm babying it but Ben like the swirly pattern the screen makes when you press the LCD display. Time to duct tape gloves on the little rat... Screen is gorgeous, photos look awesome. I haven't had a chance to spin a DVD yet but I'm really looking forward to it. I love the two-finger scroll-wheel substitute, I love the two-finger right-click (I should film a movie with that name). I don't like Shift+Ctrl+Option+OpenApple/squigglythingy (command?). 4 is one keyboard "shifter" too many.

Still investigating iChat, iMovie, iDVD and how to eject a disc with that eject button....

Sorry for the mega-long post. I'll put it behind a cut if someone reminds me how to do it.

Iraq descends into lameness

chrisdye — 2007-04-01T18:44:45-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6510000/newsid_6515100/6515133.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm

Mac Daddy

vinny9 — 2007-03-29T00:00:16-04:00

I recently ordered a MacBook (the White 2.0). I was going to wait until Leopard came out but the new features don't look all that compelling (other than maybe Spaces). I thought there might also be a hardware update in the next few months but I bought the MacBook refurbished (~$250 less) and any new Macbook wouldn't hit the refurb store for a long time.

This is my 3rd Apple product. iPod nano -> Airport Express -> MacBook. Well played, Apple. Boot Camp was the clincher...

Anyways, I've got a few questions:

1) Browser? Safari seems more than adequate but what about Firefox or Camino? I like the Firefox extensions in Windows. Does that give it a leg up on a Mac as well?

2) Torrent clients? For, um, sharing... improv tips...

3) How much space on the HD does OS X take up? Any useless apps that are typically uninstalled to save space?

I'm sure there will be more to come. Any advice or tips to a Mac n00b are welcome. If I remember, I'll post my impressions.

Awesome software only on the Mac

dustin — 2007-02-24T03:24:59-05:00

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Tools was one of the last sessions from day 1 of Northern Voice. It introduced a number of helpful tools for blogging or just being more productive on your computer. They're all listed on that page, so check them out (if you use a Mac). I'm going to be trying out a few when I have some more time, since a number of them looked awesome.

Everybody was free to go up and demo some of their fav tools, in true unconference style. It turned out that only Mac users did though. Throughout the session there were a few "Does this run on Windows?" questions asked. The answer was always "uh no... it's mac only... but there might be a windows equivalent" (except for the FireFox extensions, which are cross-platform). As a Macintosh Cult member, it made me smile to see the tables turned, in terms of software choice.

It's great to see the wealth of tools available on Mac OS X now. Full credit goes to Apple for giving out free dev tools, and winning massive mindshare amongst the creatives and hackers who are building the future of software.