The Mac Resistance

Achieve with Bane

2009-07-02T11:05:00.000-05:00

Thunderstorm

2009-02-16T23:03:00.002-06:00

AppleJack is Back!

2008-09-01T07:27:00.003-05:00

AppleJack 1.5 has just been released, and now it's finally Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Compatible. This is such a wonderfully handy little tool. I've already done a deep clean of all three of my active Macs.

Deals at the OWC

2008-08-30T17:13:00.003-05:00

Other World Computing is having some clearance specials, and one that caught my eye was an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station 802.11 b/g (UFO) for $50. You can never have too many of these things. I already grabbed one, so it's ok if I let the cat out of the bag.

They also have a couple El Gato items that if I had any use for, I'd be all over. The Turbo.264 stick and an El Gato EyeTV 250 plus. I have an EyeTV EZ hooked to my Mac Mini hooked to my HDTV. It's fantastic, but it's also all that I need so I don't really have any excuse to spend money even though I'd love to have these toys.

Hopefully somebody will see this and go and grab them. Good gadgets need good homes.

Final PvP piece.

2008-08-23T20:42:00.003-05:00

I finally got the PvP shield. It's the only piece (so far) that's from the areana 2 set. The rest is areana 1. Someday, I'll get bored enough to grind out a new set, but for now I'm actually pretty happy with Moofe's gear.

Moofe's Armory

Friday Twitter Feed - August 22, 2008

2008-08-22T08:41:00.003-05:00

Hands down, my favorite tweet, today...

"When one has grown tired of loudly singing The Proclaimers' "500 Miles" in a Groundskeeper Willie voice, one has grown tired of life itself. - Andy Ihnatko 07:11:51

Eye of the Storm

2008-08-19T23:55:00.003-05:00

I'm not a fan of non-Alterac Valley Battlegrounds, but tonight I was in one that was just lovely. Not only did we win, but we just decimated wave after wave of Alliance that tried to storm the node we were defending. You'll notice by the scores that I wasn't the only Elemental Shaman there and that we lead the damage totals (and heals, I think). I love to PvP in BGs, but am often disappointed by PUGs. This EotS group was great, though. We watched each others' backs, and just plowed the allies.

Please, not Leonard Nimoy, again...

2008-07-26T21:19:00.003-05:00

My son is a huge Star Trek fan. I liked Next Generation and Enterprise, but my son just drinks up all things Trek, including Voyager, DS9 and the original TV series. He watches episodes that our DVR records off satellite, and he reads Memory Alpha and Beta and he even watches fan vids on YouTube.

Well, today he somehow found the old video of Leonard Nimoy singing "Bilbo Baggins." (He actually told me that he thought that Leonard Nimoy was a great singer.) At the moment he's stomping around the kitchen singing it at the top of his lungs.

I've got to find a distraction for that boy, and fast.

15 Great Games That Are Playable On Low-End PCs (Especially Blizzard Games)

2008-07-26T20:54:00.002-05:00

This article on Digg made me slap my forehead in dismay. Of course I could install some old games on our old 800MHz PIII and I happen to have a couple of the ones on the list (I'm not including WoW - if my 1GHz G4 PowerBook can barely run it, it's too much for my PC. Hell, it even only runs middling-well on my dual 1.8GHz G5 with a 256MB RADEON X800).

So I went ahead and installed Warcraft III and discovered there was an unexpected - but in hindsight perfectly predictable - secondary effect: My son wanted to play.

He's 9 and he's played a little WoW in the past, but mostly it's just riding or running around the world of Azeroth with my characters. He did start his own pally, but the gameplay is still a little involved for him to really get into. Too many spells and abilities to learn and remember. He just wants to explore and be entertained.

Well, Warcraft III is actually a lot more his speed, it turns out. So far he's doing as well as you'd expect a 9 year old to do, and he does have the odd distinction of already knowing quite a bit of the lore from he and I talking about WoW (I'm a warcraft lore junkie - I actually have ready a few of the novels and have a few more that are just waiting for an opportunity to be picked up). We were watching the cenematic at the beginning of the human campaign and he was ecstatic to see the Lordaeron throne room. He immediately recognized it from the ruins above the Undercity.

I don't know if really turning him onto computer games at this age is a good idea or not, but I'm glad to see him so excited.

read more | digg story

The Ladders Commercial

2008-07-24T21:51:00.002-05:00

I hate this commercial. The humanist and the populist in me just hisses with anger every time it comes on.

Dammit!

2008-07-24T12:52:00.004-05:00

I keep trying, and trying to stop using Windows on my old PC, but so far I've not found a Linux up to the task.

I inherited an old 800MHz PIII when my aunt passed away, and I set it up in the living room for my son to use to browse his Star Trek Wikis. I originally put Windows 2000 on it, but twice, now, Win2K has just randomly died and stopped booting. So twice I've tried to leave it completely behind and instead install Xubuntu. Or even Kubuntu or Ubuntu. Xubuntu naturally performs the best, but it's still dog-slow and frustratingly unresponsive when Win2K was pretty spry. Then add to the fact that FireFox hangs every 15 minutes, or so, and I've just about had it. I've never met a flavor of Windows I've cared much for, but so far the infrequent re-installs of Win2K are actually easier to deal with than the constant opening of a terminal in order to kill a hung process. Ideologically, I love Linux. But unfortunately my pragmatism is quickly overshadowing my ideals.

Now, of course, if I could get a copy of OS X running on it... Hell, even 10.3 or 10.2 would make me happy. But alas...

Off and on but never given it up.

2008-07-16T21:29:00.005-05:00

This post over at the Least I Could Do forums had me chuckling.

I've been an Apple partisan since 1994. I graduated from high school in '93, but my high-school was still using PETs and C64s. My first exposure to what I consider a modern PC was that fall when I started at the local community college and taking basic computer labs. These labs covered the ins and outs of Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Office.

I loved it. It made immediate sense to me. Then, a few weeks later, I was in the college library, and I found this tiny room in the back - almost a closet - that had four computers in it. Three of them were Macintoshes. Two IIfx's (yeah, really) and a Quadra 700. All running System 7. Something about those little machines seriously appealed to me. I found myself migrating back to that room all that semester. Eventually I met up with the other mac-users who told me that there were more macs on campus in the Art Department.

Next semester I took Art. I can't draw to save my life, but I took art. I also used a student discount to buy my own mac at the beginning of that semester: A blazing fast PowerMac 6100/60. I was cutting edge. Hard core. I played countless hours of Marathon on that machine (yes, I knew Bungie back when they only made games for Macintosh).

I ended up befriending the art teacher and also discovering the intricacies of the Macintosh operating system. The school had a few hundred PCs and about 30 macs (aside from the 3 in the library there were six in the art dept. and a couple dozen on the desks of the college staff). The PCs guys didn't want to deign to troubleshoot macs, so I ended up working part-time for the school doing mac support.

I was in heaven. Mac support is 1% hardware issues like foot-snagged, unplugged cables or third party drivers and 99% user support. Basically somebody would need help figuring out how to do something and my job was to figure it out and show them how.

This went on for a few years, and eventually I switched colleges and also bought my first laptop: A PowerBook 1400

Around 1998, though, I was starting to fall out of love with the Mac OS 9. I'd bought the BeOS betas and had toyed with some of the ever-maturing Linux distros for PowerPC. The only thing thing that the Mac had going for it was superior processors (PowerPC) and the professional software I was rapidly becoming reliant on (mostly Macromedia and Adobe titles).

Then Apple announced their acquisition of NeXT and I decided that NeXTSTEP looked worth waiting for.

I loved OS X from the start. I started running OS X full-time, on all my machines at version 10.0.2 and never looked back (by this time I had acquired a G4 Cube to add to the menagerie).

I had another dilemma a few years later, though, when I wanted to start gaming more. I'd been buying what mac-titles were available but it was impossible not to look with envy at the Windows world where games were released sometimes for years before they got ported to mac, if at all. But productivity, reliability and longevity were too important, and the release of EQ for mac sealed the deal. In it I had a never-ending game and it was on my OS of choice.

I have still caved from time to time to the itch to try something new and have put various Linux distros on my PowerBook G4 and the old Dell I have in the front room (it usually runs Win2000 so my boy can run his Star Trek Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual). But I always end up coming back to OS X because I like things to just work and I find OS X far, far more intuitive than any version of Windows I've encountered - and I've encountered them all.

Now, I'm on the edge of buying my first Intel Mac Pro and retiring my G5 workstation to it's new position as NAS for my house. At that point I'll actually buy a copy of Windows to install on boot camp in case I come across a game that I just have to play. Since I now mostly play Blizzard and iPhone games, though, that's probably going to be pretty rare, indeed.

Radio II

2008-07-14T11:01:00.001-05:00

Last.fm just released an iPhone application. Beautiful.

A brief, personal history of radio.

2008-07-12T14:00:00.004-05:00

Like everybody else, radio has been a constant presence in my life. As a small kid in the 1970s, my father always listened to Country or Christian music because Rock 'N Roll was the devil's music (I'm not kidding, folks). Which was fortunate because those literally where the two stations available where we lived in Northern Arkansas: the Country station and the Christian station.

After a childhood of not really connecting to music, I ended up going to a catholic boarding school for my first two years of high-school (early 90's). The student body literally sampled every region in North America and sometimes even further afield, and they all brought amazingly diverse collections of music with them. Suddenly I was finally hearing not only music, but music that picked me up and carried me away. Epiphany. Music has been vital to me, ever since.

Radio, however, continued to frustrate me. Even if you find a station with a good format, you're constantly being barraged with ads. CDs weren't much better because you were limited to one album at a time, and by however many jewel boxes you were able to carry. The introduction of the iPod was a godsend because I was able to rip all my CDs to MP3 and basically fake my own radio station/jukebox. Except for one factor: new music. A music library will go stale unless periodically seeded with fresh material.

In the last couple of years, I've even found answers for that. last.fm and Pandora. Their only drawback? That I had to use them while sitting at a computer - which is not how I listen to music. I listen to music on my iPod (now iPhone).

Well, now we've completely broken down every barrier - Pandora is an iPhone 2.0 app, and it works over AT&T's EDGE (no 3G where I live and won't be for probably ages). I just took the kids out to lunch and drove through the rural country side listening to completely new and fantastic and high-fidelity music with Pandora over the EDGE network. Suddenly I have the world's best radio station literally everywhere I go.

I'm so excited.

Resistance is Futile

2008-07-05T12:19:00.005-05:00

I had a little fun with my boy, today. I have a CoreDuo mac mini hooked to our HDTV so we can watch podcasts and iTunes movies. He was in the front room while my daughter was watching a movie so I decided to have a little fun.

He figured out it was me fairly quickly, but for a few moments there he thought the computer was talking to him.

(In case you're wondering what a doodle pad is. And, yes, I know it's supposed to be "you're". BASH doesn't like the apostrophe, though, so I had to use a homonym.)

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind

2008-07-04T15:11:00.001-05:00

The more I learn about the human animal, the more amazed I am.

Bumper Sticker

2008-07-03T22:20:00.006-05:00

My MoveOn.org Barack Obama bumper sticker arrived, today! Now the question is whether I actually dare put this on my truck. I live in the NorthWest corner of Arkansas, and between Wal-Mart HQ and all the racist organizations and Christian Fundamentalist sects that have compounds, out here, it's almost a guarantee there will be somebody who'll try to damage the truck or me over it. 10 years ago I'd say, "bring it on," but now if I travel I have both my kids with me. Not only do they need a not-injured father, I don't want them near any ruckus.

ScreenFlow and ScreenSharing

2008-06-29T22:49:00.009-05:00

I wanted to make a little Screen Cast about discovering how to make .vncloc files for quick screen sharing access, and in the process I found ScreenFlow. $100 is a lot of cash for an app, but this is pro-level screen casting software. I could have manually done it by using Snapz (which I already own), but Snaps cost something like $75 anyway. For a bit more you can have some amazing features in ScreenFlow.

Anyway, here's my little screen cast.

(Postscript: I ended up redoing it in Snapz Pro X.)

Mmmm... that's geeky!

2008-06-24T15:59:00.003-05:00

This is exactly the type of geekiness I most enjoy (and probably that I myself often display about my passions of choice). This guy draws, draws well, and is very knowledgeable about his tools and tips to work and maintain those tools. From auto mechanics to graphic artists, I really can appreciate this level of competence and joy in one's work.

(A twitter post from Dave Kellet led me to this video.)

Newer Technology USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter

2008-06-12T08:10:00.004-05:00

This has to be one of the best purchases I've made in a long, long time.

Newer Technology USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter

I have two defunct macs sitting in a closet along with two defunct FireWire Hard Drives for a total of 7 IDE hard drives floating around, unused. My running macs are all SATA, though, so I had no way of utilizing all these drives. The inventory ended up being a 20GB, 2x40GB, 3x80GB and a 200GB. Plus an IDE SuperDrive (DVD R/W).

What I didn't consider is that there was still recoverable data on almost all of them. One of the 80s is dead, but so far the rest are mounting up fine and I'm finding all sorts of lost treasure on them. A couple of years ago, when I was migrating my data from my old G4 to the G5, about a third of my music library got corrupted, and I never found out until after the G4 was no longer functioning. All the files were MP4s that I'd ripped from my own CD collection, and I was able to re-rip some of it, but it turned out that when I sold my Miata, I left a 40 CD case in the car that had my absolute favorites. So I still had jewel cases for all these fantastic albums, but no longer had the disks and therefore no way to get those songs back into my library.

Well, last night I found a 4 year old back up of the G4 on one of the drives that had all the missing music on it. I stayed up way too late listening to Soul Coughing and Nine Inch Nails and Violent Femmes songs I hadn't heard in years.

And I've just now plugged in the last 80GB drive only to discover some old Final Cut movies I made of the kids a few years back and an iDVD build I'd made for sending out to grandparents and relatives. I'd assumed they were also lost forever.

I've always been a big fan of Other World Computing for their FireWire drives, but this adapter is fantastic. It's worth way more than the $30 they're charging.

Post Script:

One of these is the old startup drive for the G4 and I found a ton of installed games on it - Jedi Knight, Jedi Academy, Halo, Elite Force, Elite Force II, Neverwinter Nights, Myth III, Quake, Quake 3, WoW (version 1.10!) and even a 10GB full install of EverQuest for Mac.

That last is very tempting. EQ can't hold a candle to WoW, technologically, but there's something about the world of Norrath and it's various environs that totally captured me when I played it. I have memories about places in EQ and even dreams about them as if they were places I'd really experienced. I had many gripes about the game, but I also loved it dearly. Of course, one of my main gripes was that this was the Macintosh version of EQ and the server (Al'Kabor) was mac-only. That made it a small player base of mac elitists. I love Macs and won't use anything else, but I'm not the biggest fan of old-style mac users. It's gotten better in recent years as the growth in market share has diversified the user base, but back in the old days mac users were a pretty monolithic crowd. Either artists or teachers and almost all with a superiority complex that drove me crazy. I had some great friends in EQ, but most of them were from the small niche of tech-savvy mac people where I was. Sadly most of them had PCs, too, and I lost quite a few over time to EQII or Eve before WoW came along and solved just about every problem I had with MacEQ.

I still dream of it, though, from time to time...

Why did we find Nemo, again?

2008-06-04T15:10:00.003-05:00

Over the years, my kids have loved the various Pixar movies. Unfortunately, since my son is typically in charge of the kids DVDs, we've lost not a few. A couple of days ago, I re-purchased some DVDs we'd owned, before, but no longer had: Bugs Life, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. My son just put Nemo on and now I'm remembering why I never enjoyed this movie much. I'd been a widower for less than a year when we got the DVD, and I remember now how much it shocked and hurt me to see the Marlin character have to lose his loving spouse and have to struggle on and raise his kid as best he could, alone. Ugh. It still twists me up, inside. Six years out from the accident, now, and I'm doing pretty alright, but also I just don't think about it much.

This movie makes me think about it.

Today's Ctl+Alt+Del Comic

2008-06-02T15:51:00.005-05:00

First, read the comic in question, then come back and see if I make any sense:

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20080602

My first reaction was, “Does he have kids? A wife? Has he been through this?” I have, and it’s something I almost never talk about. My third child (a little boy we’d already named) was on the cusp of the third trimester when my wife was in a car accident. I lost them both. The joy of my two older children made me feel the loss of this almost-little-boy so strongly because I already knew what I was losing. It’s scary how much you love your kids, and I knew I’d never get to know him and love him. Just mourn for the life he never got to have.

It took me almost three years before I was done grieving for them, and it’s now close to six since the accident and I’m only writing about it because it’s upsetting to see people (even fictional characters) in this situation. At first, I thought that Tim Buckley (the creator of CTL+ALT+DEL) must just be tossing this in for drama and not have any real experience with it from his own life. How could he? If you’ve been through it, blithely tossing it into your gaming webcomic to “stress test” (his words) his characters’ relationship is just not something you’d do.

Except he says he has been through this (though, he manages to sound extremely ego-centric and self-aggrandizing and oddly flippant when he does talk about it).

“Some many years ago, long before I started the comic, I was in a relationship and we suffered a miscarriage. Now, this relationship was toxic to begin with and doomed to fail regardless, so that the miscarriage was the straw that broke the camel's back came as no surprise. It was a pregnancy neither of us wanted in the first place, so the event didn't effect me nearly as much as it would, say, a couple who was trying for a child. Still, I saw the emotions it can bring up first hand, and I saw how it could truly hurt someone.”

Someone. Just not him, obviously. I’m sure somebody could write about this in a meaningful and profound way, but, again, just not him.

I already don’t read this comic. I tried, years ago, when I first encountered it, but it’s always been too vapid and shallow and almost too masturbatory (his real audience is himself - other readers are just incidental). I saw a twitter about it, this morning, or it would’ve gone completely under my radar. So I’m not trying to start controversy or shame the writer or cost him readers (I don’t think his typical readers would understand either, to be honest). I’m just saddened by the associations this particular comic dredged up, and and disappointed that Buckley’s not deep enough to truly grasp the emotional depth of his current subject matter.

Rules & Bylaws Committee

2008-05-31T12:49:00.007-05:00

3:45 PM: I've been watching the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee all day, today. I'm a bit of a civics geek (like my hero, Rachel Maddow) and it's been exciting to watch the process unfold.

Personally, I'm an Obama partisan (though I would vote for Hillary if it were between her and McCain) so it's been tough to watch obvious Clinton partisans like Harold Ickes keep shoving their oar in when the Obama people are talking.

I'm still watching it, but they're still on lunch break. I hope they can put this to bed, today.

Oral is Normal

2008-05-29T09:30:00.003-05:00

I saw this article on Digg, today, and it essentially says that today's teens, when they fool around, aren't just having plain ol' vanilla vaginal sex, they're also having oral sex, as well.

To that I say, "Good."

To me that's a sign that teenagers are much more knowledgeable about sex than we who grew up in prior generations. They know more and if they're doing more diverse activities, they're probably enjoying it more, too. All to the good.

There's no point in arguing about whether or not they SHOULD have sex - the fact is they do or they will no matter how we adults feel about it. So our jobs (as their parents, relatives, or friends) is to make sure they're educated and able to assess and reduce the risk involved with being sexually active - and it certainly doesn't hurt that their knowledge makes them enjoy and appreciate their sexuality more than we did.

When I was a teenager having sex with other teenagers, it was, on the whole, pretty bad sex. I had pretty bad sex with my first couple of lovers when I was in college, too, but this time there was a big difference. This time my lovers weren't blushing virgins who didn't know any better. They were equipped with the knowledge of what to expect and what they liked. And sadly I still knew very little. So I studied. Partly through the Sinclair Institute's fantastic Better Sex Video Series, and partly hands-on, but I studied and learned. Eventually I not only had the knowledge of what I liked and what my lovers would likely enjoy, but how to mitigate the risks of being sexually active. All these things that were never taught or talked about when I was a teenager though I was in dire need of it.

At least it looks like today's teens aren't as bad off as I was (despite those abominable "abstinence-only" sex ed policies). "Good," I say. Maybe this generation will be less messed up than those that preceded it.

read more | digg story

Crier

2008-05-28T19:23:00.004-05:00

I've always been an emotional guy. I remember the first time I cried at a movie was when I saw Disney's "The Fox and the Hound" when I was about 7 years old. I don't recall much about the movie, but I do remember I cried buckets because they couldn't be friends, anymore. Books, TV, Movies - hell, even sappy commercials. Any touching story had the potential to make me weepy. My wife was the same way. I remember more than once we'd be watching TV together and something emotional would happen, and we'd look at each other at the same time with tears in our eyes. Sometimes we'd laugh because we were such saps, sometimes we'd just snuggle closer and continue watching. (Side note: That's one of the things I miss most - she and I were so in sync on so many levels.)

So I've always been a weepy guy. Then my wife died and I went into a long, two-and-a-half year grieving period where I cried a lot. Sad tears, angry tears, tears of resignation - her death turned me inside-out, emotionally. Grief ends, though, and in time I came back to my senses and my personality started to re-emerge. Except now I'm even weepier. My eyes well up with tears at the drop of a hat, now. Commercials about graduation or mother's day, small emotional moments in movies and TV shows, even relatively un-empathetic characters have my full empathy, now. It feels ten times stronger than it used to be.

I don't usually mind it, though. I think empathy is one of the more valuable characteristics a person can have and the reason I react so strongly is because I feel so strongly. Powerful emotions have their attraction, even negative ones. It's not that I only cry at sad things, either. Pride, anger, joy - if it's strong enough, it'll bring tears to my eyes. So the fact that I get weepy doesn't bother me, but sometimes I wonder exactly how much and how often? It seems like a lot, but is it really? So I've started a Cry Diary. A blog where I keep track of my tears and what caused them. It might give me an idea if I have a very poetic soul or I'm just a huge pussy.

www.macresistance.com/crydiary