March 30, 2005
Enemy Territory available for OSX :)
To my delight, Enemy Territory, the free (as in beer) Doom style game based off of Castle Wolfenstein has been released for Mac OSX!
ET is an internet only game where teams of soldiers play off against each other in a series of sorties capturing various targets, stealing goods, etc. Like most shoot-em-ups there's various characters that can be played such an generic soldier, engineer, field ops, covert ops, etc. There's also some cool features like being able to go under cover.
The download is 268mb but it's a whole lot of fun once you join a server :)
March 29, 2005
Engadget Podcast changes?
I guess many people may have noticed already, but the Engadget Podcast crew has changed between episodes 22 and 23 (where there was also a few months break).
Phillip and Len used to be the podcasters at Engadget but something must have changed at Engadget as their podcast now has a new presenter, a title song, and more professional or rather commercial sound about it.
I'll give the new crew a fair go, but I kind of liked Phillip's topics and style of presenting which had a cool hacker feel to it. He spoke from a hacker's perspective and often chose topics to talk about that were a bit more technical and gadgety - not to mention the "simply cool geeky" things like ipod hacks, the TV-be-gone, and some laser capable of melting plastic that he came across! (listen to episode 22, pretty insane! :) )
Interestingly, there's also been no mention between the podcasts about the change - which makes me wonder about what happened.... hmmm.
Well, hopefully Phillip and Len start up another podcast then if they're no longer involved with the Engadget one.
March 21, 2005
Couple of cool OSX apps :)
In addition to Torsten and Andrew's list of cool OSX apps, there's a few I've come across I thought might be worth a mention:
* Airfoil - lets you transmit any audio to your Airport Express, not just through iTunes.
* Spike - easy to use filesharing based on Rendezvous, simply drag a file to Spike, and others are able to see and download it.
* Delicious Library - cool looking DVD, CD, and Book shelf organiser, with integrated Amazon cover and iCal borrow reminder support.
* Snapz Pro X - the ants pants of screen capture utilities, even able to record a desktop session to a quicktime movie.
* Transmit - nice and easy to use FTP client
* iPodderX - Podcast download manager with integrated Podcast directory
* ext2fs - allows mounting of ext3/2 formatted drives under OSX.
Looking forward to finding more :)
March 16, 2005
APT and my old Hifi
Even though I'm using OSX on a daily basis now, I'm still very fond of my Debian systems, of which 4 real systems and countless VMware images surround me just in one room here.
What I like the most about Debian is it's package maintainence and update facilities, specifically apt/dpkg. With only a 2 commands the entire system can be updated even down to the most low level libraries:
$ apt-get update $ apt-get dist-upgrade
Also, all applications can be installed on demand, with dependencies, all resolved directly over the network:
$ apt-get install mozilla-firefox forrest groovy eclipse-sdk
Personally the reason why I like this is because the ability to update the software on the system gives me the feeling like I've somehow just got a new computer, and this reinvigorates the excitement and rush one gets when making a fresh purchase.
Looking back, I remember the last time I purchased a hifi system (it's a while ago as it's still sitting in Australia waiting for me to start using it again when I get back from Germany), I was totally psyched, and couldn't stop playing music, rearranging the speakers around the room, adjusting the EQ, purchasing CD's, downloaded MOD/S3M's for my Amiga, etc, just to learn and see what it could do.
After a few months though, I became used to it's high quality of sound and had experimented with all its features to the point where the excitement and rush of getting the hifi wore off.
Part of the reason why the excitement wore off was because I'd experimented and used all of the features the device had to offer, and I had to either spend money and get a new hifi or some 3rd party extension to have newer features.
Casting this forward into APT, everytime I do an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, I know I've got the latest and greatest software available from the APT archive, and that there's a whole new set of features that have just been installed on my system.
A whole new set of features means there's always something new to discover in addition to the depth and complexity of a Unix system anyway, and for me, this helps retain the adventureous feeling of having a brand new system. So much so, that I usually apt-get dist-upgrade daily :)
One of the first things I did when I got my Powerbook was to see if APT had been ported to OSX so that I could still have access to the wealth of open source and freely available software that make up the Debian archive.
It was great to see that Fink was already available, which is a port of APT/DPKG to OSX, amongst other things. Also, yesterday I came across the OSX Gentoo project which also looks awesome, allowing you to emerge Gentoo apps just like under a Linux system.
March 15, 2005
Sending & Receiving SMS from your Powerbook
Just discovered another nifty utility built right into OSX. Sending and receiving SMS text from your Powerbook via your Bluetooth enabled mobile phone.
Takes just a few minutes to get up and running with a T68i. Simply activate Bluetooth on the device, pair it with your Powerbook, open up Addressbook and then right click on any of the entries to select "Send SMS Message".
In addition to this you can receive SMS texts automatically and dial people on your phone and accept/deny calls using your Powerbook. All the details are in the link above.
Just have to work out how to use the Powerbook as a speaker phone for the T68i and I'll be all set :)
March 14, 2005
The world of the Powerbook!
What can I say, it's truly an awesome machine!
After almost two weeks of constant use I've really started to settle into the daily use of such a well integrated machine.
The hardware itself looks gorgeous, with it's shiny metal casing and keyboard, rather than black plastic. The screen is great, very clear and crisp, and since I've got the 17" there's lots of real estate to play with.
The operating system itself is a developers dream, at the base a Unix system, with a sexy and functional desktop on top of it.
The operating system is really well integrated with the hardware, for some reason it even reminded me of the olden days when I owned an Amiga :)
Over the past few weeks I've really enjoyed finally being able to take advantage of things like suspend/resume that works in an instant (finally!), automatic wireless networking that chooses my preferred network depending on where I am, and bluetooth configuration wizard that makes it easy to connect devices like an external mouse, phone, etc. These things took me ages to get working right under Linux.
OSX includes a lot of cool applications, and I also bought iWork which included Apple's new Pages software and Keynote which are great, but there's also a lot of non-tangible features & gizmos included that just give you those butterflies in the stomach when you see them.
Everyone has probably seen the Apple dock and it's magnifying effect when you move the mouse over an icon, but there's also the genie shrinking effect when you minimize an application - and, if you press the shift key while minimizing or maximizing it does it in "slow motion". Try it out while playing some quicktime video :)
Expose rocks the planet, with it's animated window resizing when searching for a particular application (try out the shift trick above as well for slo-mo expose! :) ). Also look for the fast user switching effect, where you're entire desktop rotates into the new user's desktop like a rotating cube. :)
Whats also been amazing are some of the applications out there that are totally amazing. One that's really impressed me is Quicksilver, which lets you do an blindingly fast incremental search for applications, files, data and more.
For more GUI gobsmacking I also installed Growl and Synergy which provide a popup style notification system, transparent and context sensitive.
Torsten has also put up a list of applications that we've come across over the past few weeks and installed as well. Adium, SubEthaEdit, DragonBurn, iPodderX, Virtual PC, Transmit, and more.
Well, there's much more to write about, but for now, time to return back to the Powerbook :)