Wet Christmas
They have mounted speakers on the side of downtown Norfolk buildings for the holidays. Christmas carols don’t sound quite right when it’s 60 degrees and raining outside.
I hate that I’m not buying software anymore, but a software license. Half-Life 1 was fun, but I don’t like the idea of playing Half-Life 2 enough to go online and beg for the publisher’s permission every single time I want to play it. That’s an irony, too, because a Mac version of HL2 has a much better chance of seeing daylight than the Mac HL1 did. I’d almost certainly have bought it.
DHTML Lemmings on the web. One more way to kill a few minutes anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Ever type up a really long rant for LiveJournal, then realize that typing it’s gotten it out of your system and it’s just not that important that the rest of the world see it? 🙂
Phase One complete
Yes, Virginia, you can fit a futon, mattress and all, in a Hyundai Elantra.
Spent my first night in the new house. The room I’ve slept in for the past three months had crappy A/C, but this morning I woke up a bit chilly – raininva will be pleased. Glad I found my bathrobe in the move. This week I start unpacking what I have with me of my office, which is little more than a mess of boxes at the moment. The commute is easier (it seems so far) than the previous commute, which is nice. I have to find out why the smoke alarm emits random stifled beeps all day, but last night I was far too tired to notice.
Had the sense to take some ibuprofen before bed, so didn’t wake up too sore.
So, it seems a Mac shareware developer released an app which, if you enter a pirated serial number, erases your Home directory – your system and applications survive, but every personal document, music file, movie, e-mail, website, password, etc. is GONE. So, is this just desserts for pirates, or equivalent to burning someone’s house down for punching you in the nose? Discuss.
Switching to Fighter mode
There’s a cross-platform flight simulator called X-Plane which is quite competitive with the well known MS Flight Simulator. It’s extensively modifiable, playable over networks, and has an amazing amount of third-party material available.
Today I found the VF-1 Valkyrie file! Custom cockpit, swing wings, and even details like gear doors and vectored nozzles operating perfectly. It doesn’t transform, but that would be asking a lot. And you can even fly it over the deserts of Mars! There’s a nice movie of the fighter running in X-Plane too.
There’s also files for the Space Shuttle, the Marine Dropship from Aliens, and somewhere (haven’t found a link yet) Thunderbirds 2 and 3.
9-inch bitmapped glory
Here’s a website that brings back some old Mac gaming memories.
Warning: you might need an emulator to run some of thse titles. Even a newer Mac may need to emulate an older one.
We should rewrite the script so we win
All three completed Space Rogues episodes, plus the blooper reel, have now been posted on the movies page of my website. Yes, they are QuickTime, and yes, they are huge files so you’ll need broadband. I tried MPEGing them and DivXing them, and they didn’t get smaller either way. One day, I hope to generate new movies from cleaner originals.
I’ve only been meaning to post these for years.
I just love scanning for pixels
Junkyard Geek got his old Umax SCSI scanner to work on his G4 tonight – a desktop machine that doesn’t approve of third-party SCSI cards, and certainly doesn’t want to talk to obsolete Umax stuff. Luckily, other hackers insist on writing *nix drivers for their obsolete hardware, and some among them are amused by tweaking said drivers to work on Panther (with a little fiddling).
Thanks very much to those who contributed to Rain’s early birthday present. She got an almost unwilling smile on her face, saying, “how dare our friends make my day like that!” Good job, guys 🙂
It was an odd feeling leaving work early on a Tuesday, This may be the first time in 5 years that I arrived home from a Tuesday session while the sun still shone. I’m gonna miss some of my co-workers; at least I know I’ll still get to catch up with VTSFFC and Starfleet folks from time to time.
Live-action After Dark desktop
You know you’re hopelessly geek when you catch yourself referring to a fish tank as “Nature’s screensaver.”
Yeah, sometimes I’m no fun.
Saw “The Matrix Reloaded” again last night. Like a lot of modern action movies, there’s parts of it I just can’t enjoy as much as the filmmakers intended me to.
In the Matrix trilogy, both the good guys and the bad go through a lot of bystanders. We do get a pious little speech from Morpheus in the first film discussing that some of the village may have to be burned down to save it, but I don’t think that improves the freedom fighters’ moral ground much. From the perspective of the ordinary, unknowing inhabitant of the Matrix, those from Zion would indeed seem like terrorists in a lot of their actions.
But the freeway scene is the bit that always gets me. True, most of the random destruction in that scene is caused by the “bad guys”, but it doesn’t make it much better for me. Live though one near-fatal car accident in real life, and one’s attention moves from the cool kung-fu move that Agent did off the hood of a car, to the poor driver who was just trying to get home from work and is now chunky salsa all over the road. Boom – the sequence is not fun for me anymore, and now I just want it over. 🙁
You know, the Machines seem disorganized and barely in control of their own creation in these movies. We saw in Mouse’s death how the Machines can hack the Matrix for their own use. Why not just make the small tweak [set ZION_VEHICLE_GAS to “0”] in that sequence? There’d be a lot less mass destruction, ghostly apparitions, and Agent possessions to explain away later.
Even better – don’t want to fight Morpheus and Trinity, who’ve gone through a lot of your Agents as it is? [set ZION_VEHICLE_FUEL_TYPE to “fighter aircraft fuel”] – as soon as a little of that hits the spark plugs, the KeyMaker and the Zion rebels won’t be a problem. Maybe the Machines just aren’t very creative on their own.
From something jdunson said
Matrix@Home – the screensaver where YOU are the OS!
Initial download free with signed slavery contract. Kung-fu package and cellphone plan sold separately. Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Monica Bellucci, and other expansions priced by customer pupil dilation.
If you would like information about adding “The One” option, please stay on the line and our agents will be with you shortly. Really.
Cleaning the attic of my brain
Two interesting tidbits of geek stuff crossed my desk this morning; first, there’s finally a really nice, configurable, Matrix code screensaver for Mac OS X. Too bad all my machines migrated to SETI@home some time ago. Second, it looks like the new AIM for Windows beta has early video chat support, and may soon be compatible with Apple’s iChat AV. That would be wonderful news, seeing as the video chat support in Yahoo! Messenger for OS X is… weak.
I’m now the navigator for kittykatya‘s pirate crew, yarrgh! I wonder if Tom Monaghan still has the letters of marque issued to the SS MacKeigh by the court of Riversmeet (I think)?
Christmas was very good, and in my case, spread over all of December. I got to see a lot of people who are important to me, and yes, I got a lot of neat stuff – to deny that I enjoy people giving me gifts would be hypocrisy of a high order. I know some people who feel that it’s better to spend the whole year being good to their fellow humans, rather than to concentrate it on a single season; I can’t argue with the sentiment, but I feel that we always need times of special celebration.
Still don’t know for sure what I’m doing New Year’s – we have several plans, but they all depend on things out of our control. I had hoped to finally meet subbes face-to-face this week, but I just don’t know right now.
