Ugh, I’m never going to meet my months workout goal now.

That wasn’t a very interesting blog post now was it?

Mac OS X tip of the decade. Hyped up a tad lad.  I intended to mention this weeks ago after discovering a neat trick in one of those “hmm, I wonder if…” type moments, but I’m Mr forgetful.  Quite often I need to choose/open a file which I already have in front of me in finder, the software doesn’t offer a drag-n-drop method and I’m thinking gawd, it’ll take ages to navigate to the file in the file dialog.  For instance when uploading a file to a web site. Well, turns out you can drop the file onto any gap on a standard mac file dialog.  Neat!  Slight bug though, sometimes when you do it it will navigate to the folder but won’t select the file, but if you drop it a second time it will select.  Either way it’s a time saver!

When I first tried Blender on the Mac I dismissed it because it looked like just another linux/windows port that didn’t use the Mac interface properly.

Well, after giving up waiting for Autodesk to get Maya universal, or in fact to upgrade the free Personal Learning Edition of Maya to version 9, which it doesn’t look like they’re going to do, probably because when maya was by Alias they were an alright bunch, but Autodesk acquired them and Autodesk are money grabbing thieves who care not for the mac.  So, i’ve tried Blender out again and followed a few pages of a guide and I’ve discovered that my hasty conclusion was wrong.  It’s not un-mac-like because of laziness but because Blenders interface is all very unique.  It’s actually a really nifty piece of software.  I just wish I had some 3D Modelling skills, but heck, I can’t even model in 2D let alone 3D.  But that doesn’t stop me trying!  Do you like my attempt at following the first tutorial?  I dunno why but the head melted a bit… looks like the elephant man employed as a lollipop lady with hobbit feet.

Google Documents and Spreedsheet, meet Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time and other garbage.

Waaa Waaa!  Google have gone nuts, or has my browser?  One of the two have, maybe both.  You can’t get any closer to having Safari 2.0.4 than having Safari 2.0.4 can you?  Ah well, I loaded Firefox and tried it in there instead.  It is all stylish and pleasent on the eyes like most of Google’s services but I don’t think I’ll personally use any of it.  I was interested in using the spreadsheet because I still haven’t got a good spreadsheet app on my mac, they’re either bloated and take an age to load, like Openoffice/Neooffice or they are some unusabliy limited freeware effort.  I can’t seem to be able to figure out how to do certain things with Google’s spreadsheet though, things that are must have features for a spreadsheet.  For instance how do you complete a sequence of numbers?  Usually you can just type say “1″, then “2″ and “3″ and then drag select them and then expand a box in the direction you want it to complete the sequence.  I just can’t seem to do it in Google’s.

I’ve gotten my mitts on Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for my DS Lite.  It’s spot on fun from Nintendo and surprisingly eventful, constantly surprising things happen.  I love it!  I’d describe it as a light-hearted cartoony final fantasy, you walk around colourful maps occasionally being pulled into step-based fights.  It’s got quite a sense of humour too, in my last playing session I came across 2 Kooper Trooper’s who had been fitted against their will by alien probes and the probes were making them speek in l33t.  Seriously, they called my characters n00bs and said things like w00t and pwned. lol nintendo aren’t trying to be hip with this, they’re taking the piss out of the culture. lol

Lastly, Arrgh I want me’s a Nano Product Red!  Actually, I want a pink nano but i’d risk being beaten up for having one.  But the Red one is defo’s the next best thing and you’d be doing your bit for charideee.  But arrgh, for some reason it isn’t appearing on the UK apple store site, it’s on the UK Apple site but not the store.  Grrr.

Windows Vista RC2 was released this weekend, it is supposedly the last milestone until it’s released for manufacture.  Although, knowing Microsoft they’re probably find a way to release another beta even after it’s gone to retail.

I haven’t really been bothered to play with it but I wanted RC2 for the bug fixes, I just wanted to get it set up quickly as I had gotten it with RC1.  I kept fluffing up the drivers though, I kept trying to find the latest and greatest graphics and sound drivers but somehow I always got into a muddle and ended up having re-install it again, if I just tried to roll-back the driver I ended up with curious unknown device dialogs popping up left right and centre.  In the end I just gave up trying to update drives and left it at the ones Vista installs by default, I’m not even going to bother with the Apple driver cd now.  So I ended up staring and that screen in the photo for a large slice of the afternoon.  It’s set up nicely now, touch wood.
You can still use the Beta 2 serial, which is neato.  Hey, imagine if they let me carry on with this serial even with a retail copy!  Ha wishful thinking.
Was impatient to get windows back up and running because I’ve gotten back into Elder Scrolls: Oblivion again after not bothered to touch it for months.  In fact, it turns out I wasn’t all that far from completing the main quest, none of story made any sense because fantasy plot-lines never do to me, I don’t have the necessary equipment brain wise to fathom any of it but it was certainly entertaining regardless.  Seemed to end all rather suddenly though and in no time at all, in true RPG style you’re left alone wondering… hmmm, what shall I do now?  Kill some boars?
Speaking of RPG’s, I watched that South Park episode again and I think my favourite line is “Kenny, get ready to turn on trueshot aura, at that moment I will use intimidating shout.”  Probably struck something in me because I seem to remember using intimidating shout a lot when used to play it (seems like ages ago now somehow) and it gives me a bit of an embarrassed sshudder to hear Cartman saying it.  haha.

Hey!  I’ve I just this second accidentally had 3 camera raw files (.orf files from my camera) selected in finder when I double clicked on them and in the process discovered to my surprise that you can open more than one raw photo at a time in photoshop’s camera raw import dialog and it looks like it will process multiple photo’s with the same adjustments in one go.  Ha, how cool!

Jotspot looks great, it’s a free, easy to use wiki but it goes futher than just wiki html pages. It also has wiki spreadsheets and wiki calendars.  Tons of stuff perfect for collobrating and managing projects for almost anything imaginable.  Unfortunately, despite the gloss there are fundimental problems.  It doesn’t work at all well with Safari, it looks fine until you try to do things, for instance you create a spreadsheet and discover you can’t click on any cells, or you create a wiki page and it tells you the browser doesn’t support WYSIWYG.  It’s a shame and surely an online collaborative tool relies on being truely cross platform.   I wonder if there are any OSS PHP etc wiki systems with this many features you can install yourself on a server.  PHPWiki IMO is ropey at best and only does pages.

I downloaded a nightly of VLC the other day and discovered to my delight that it now supports the Apple Remote. You have to go into preferences and drill down to Interface->Main Interfaces and place a tick against “Remote Control Interface”.

Unfortunately i’m finding the odd bug with this nightly, but that’s to be expected.

I’ve forgotten to add the first letter style to the new theme, I like having a chunky first letter. All Olde English. Oh heck. Ah well. I was going to quickly write some things I’ve been meaning to blog but all of a suddenly my mind has gone blank. I discovered a bottle of nicely chilled white wine rather too early in the day…. Not to mention the Leffe. Oh Jez I think I’m an alchoholic.

Eddie does a good Che Guevara.. My newly found obsession with photography is getting more expensive. I now have the DSLR, the kit 14-45mm lens, a tripod and from today a remote control so that I can take pictures on the tripod without risking shaking the camera when pressing the shutter release. The next purchase will be a 45-150mm lens. And then maybe even a macro. Crikey. Well, I say expensive but I’m still a tight arse, I saved a fiver, yes 5 square pounds by purchasing the remote second hand on Ebay. I’m slightly regretting being so stingy though because I’m not finding it to be terribly reliable. I dunno if the battery is running low or what, but I doubt that because it’s supposed to last 5 years and an obscene amount of uses before the battery fails. Hmm, I suppose it’s possible it has been pressed continuously during transit or storage. Also, the zoom and exposure buttons don’t do anything, only the shutter button, I don’t need them though so I don’t care about this. Also, it didn’t come with the instructions and I had to scour the t’internet for a PDF.

KDE on Mac. Someone, or some people have ported KDE, and the QT foundation to Mac OS X. This is more than just an X11 recompile and I’m quite excited about the possiblities. When you launch one of the KDE apps it fits in really well with the Mac environment, the app’s icon is displayed in the Dock as it should be and the app’s menu bar correctly uses the mac’s at the top of the screen rather than being contained within the window. This is a great step in the right direction for a true cross-platform GUI, and one that doesn’t rely on some smelly, slow interperated language. I think this was it but now i’m not entirely sure because i tried it a week or so ago and forgot to note the URL. Sorry Susan.
Tesco Office. Tesco, the UK’s #1 supermarket, a shop which makes me shudder… is going to be selling it’s own branded cut-price software, including an Office clone and some anti-virus security bundle. When I first heard about this I thought oooooh I bet it’s OpenOffice, that’ll do the open source crowd some great PR. Unfortunately it isn’t, Tesco’s Office is going to be based on Ability Office, which as far as I can tell is a Windows only wanky shameful MS Office rip-off.

I’ve admired Bleep.com for a long time but I never think to check there for music, because their catalogue is far from exhaustive and it’s mainly dance/electronic based, of which there hasn’t been an awful lot i’m interested in recently.

Anyway, today I went to iTunes to purchase “So This Is Goodbye” by Junior Boys and then I stopped for a second to wonder what the alternative online stores are, I checked Bleep.com and am sooooo glad I did. Not only was it a pound cheaper, 6.99 rather than 7.99 at iTunes but it’s encoded at 320kbit/s (almost obscenely high!) and without any DRM, and this isn’t any dodgy Russian thing, the artists get the royalties they deserve. I also bought the new singles/b-sides compilation by Tortoise, it’s 3cd’s of music and just 8.99! bargain. Also, you can pay by paypal so you you don’t have to go through too much torture in the way of registering.

We took Eddie for another country walk, this walk was from bakewell to hadden hall and back and offered plenty of scenery to try out my camera, I’m still far from a photography expert though. Tell you what, what I’ve noticed now that there’s more photo’s in iPhoto made on it, when you scroll up and down through the thumbnails its really really obvious which are from the DSLR and which are from the compact because the DSLR ones through and through have more vivid colour, the ones from the compact look kind of pastel compared.

I bought a registration for FlickrExport a few weeks go and I realised today that it’s a bit silly to have paid for FlickrExport and yet be using a free Flickr account. So I’ve finally paid for a pro one today, however I didn’t upgrade the account I have been using because it isn’t included in public searches and tag pools, I occasionally upload screenshots to it and these are considered copyrighted material, if they notice they flag your account to not be made public. So, i’ve setup a new account, a pro one for photo’s and I’ll use the free one for screenshots and dodgy things I guess.
The Scobe or whatever he’s affectionately known has been praising some beta software by Microsoft, Codename Max (sounds way to much like Mac’s), I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is so I was intrigued to try it out. It has a flashy interface which requires a good 3D card I think, so I have to boot into bootcamp for that. So I booted into Vista to download Max and install it, and do you know what? The Installer told me I need XP! OMG! In fact, even better it told me to “upgrade” to XP.

What do you think about this Harry?  Windows Vista RC1 (the proper RC1) is downloadable to all and sundry at this RC1 Download page.

Supposedly only technet, msdn and CPP members have access to it, but as it turns out if you were one of the many who downloaded Beta 2 and received a key for Beta 2 you can use that same key to install and activate RC1.

And the good news is that it works with boot camp now, people have moaned that the Mac Driver CD that you burn doesn’t work but I haven’t even needed it, Vista seems to have all the drivers in place anyway, must be just things like the iSight and what-not that doesn’t work but thats not going to hurt much.

You know what, it does seem really fast somehow, in some ways faster than OS X, though I wager that it’ll start to slow up once you’ve installed all yer junk and have been using it for a few months, like windows always does.

To be honest though, I can’t really say whether or not I like it because I don’t believe you can judge an OS until you have all your stuff on it, access to all your files and have lived in it proper, when it’s full of all your photo’s and music and stuff.  One thing I’ll say about the design though, it kind of feels cold, they’ve added a very slight hint of blue tint to the transparent glass theme and it’s all very icy.

It does this optimizing thing now when it boots for the first time and it takes an absolute age so they’re showing some stupid Microsoft style marketing spiel whilst it does it, it’s the same crap you used to get during the install of previous versions of windows and I was kinda hoping they wouldn’t bring them back, particularly because they always end up look more and more hilarious as the OS ages.  It’s things like “The most secure version of windows ever”, and “Get your work done faster”.  I don’t understand the point of advertising the thing to you when you’ve obviously already got it because you’re looking at it.

So yeah, I bought a job load of ebay-ed GBA games to play on my DS Lite the other week and I have them all now. Just look at my collection, anyone would think I was some games nut, seriously, I’m as casual as casual gamers get. But yeah, my main reason for going mad on the the second hand GBA front was to catch up on some Zelda action. Those 2 GBA carts at the topmost of the pic are Zelda 1 “The legend of Zelda” and Zelda 2 “The adventure of Link”. These 2 games were originally on the NES… Nintendo’s first ever console (or the famicom in japan), it was an 8-bit machine, not great compared to today’s standards, and these 2 GBA games are direct ports, nothing has been tarted up. But ya know, I grew up with a ZX Spectrum, I knew crap graphics. So I knew what to expect, but I also thought that 8-bit graphics weren’t any reflection on the game-play and fun to be had. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Both Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 are incredibly frustrating, fiendishly hard with very little payoff. Also, I kinda figured that playing the very very early zelda games would shed some extra light onto the whole Zelda saga, and maybe uncover some lesser known secrets I wouldn’t know from playing the more modern incarnations. Sadly, it also turns out that the NES was too underpowered to have much of a story-line with these games. In fact, the first zelda has sod all dialogue at all. So sod that, anyone want a couple of free zelda “NES Classics” games?

Zelda 3 “Link to the Past” was originally release on the SNES (Super NES, or Super Famicom, or that one that had a shitty looking bolbus case in america but had a nice slimmer and more colourful case everywhere else for some reason, as if they figured american’s would only buy it if it also had a fat arse) and the difference between that and the 2 NES games is incredibly stark. I now can’t believe what a jump in technology it was. It must be particularly stark with this Zelda game because the artistic design was a triumph. It looks beautiful because the use of colours and the bitmaps are faultless. And so is the gameplay, I had forgotten what games are like when they get your adrenaline pumping, because I haven’t played a game that manages it in so freaking long. When you reach a boss at the end of a dungeon in Zelda 3 you perspire and shake with desire to throat the bastard, and when you finally manage it you can hardly walk straight with a buzz. I haven’t played Animal Crossing for 2 days, Gabi is going to be so mad at me.

Just so that you hate NeoOffice more than you already do it sometimes, upon loading it opens a browser window with their homepage. Thanks, I’m sure all your users really appreciate that. Well, the jokes on them, because when it opened last, you’ll see from this screenshot that one of the Google Adsense Adverts had quite an unpleasant word to say about your mother.