I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what Microsoft had in mind when they incorporated the ability to customize IE7 distributions. There’s Dell putting their little flashing logo’s in the toolbar instead of Microsoft’s… then there’s complete circumvention of Microsoft’s search engine & default homepage. Look here:
I’m conflicted, cheer or jeer?
The XBox 360 controller is really one of the best gamepad ever made for any console out there. The best part is it works on computers as well, where past efforts by various companies to produce a good gamepad has always fell short. You can’t fully realize the XBox 360 controller’s potential just yet on the PC though, as full support won’t arrive until Windows Vista. The current PC drivers can’t take advantage of all the buttons, and has trouble dealing with several of the input axis (getting analog stick & the paddle trigger to work, for example, is an exercise of frustration).
Of course, Microsoft isn’t offering a driver for the Mac. However, just as SteerMouse provides an excellent third party solution for enhancing your mouse on the Mac, there are third party driver for getting the XBox 360 controller to work on your Mac as well. Spotty game support is more of an issue, but I’d imagine most of us will just be playing emulator games with that controller anyway.
Take a look at the Mac driver for the XBox 360 controller here.
… I became an American citizen at last. As much as I should have been excited, my mood was rather nonchalant, preceded by weeks worth of anxiety, and followed only by a sense of relief. My journey to citizenship was not particularly painful, but it was anything but pleasant. The old immigration services department was extremely inefficient, insisted on pushing paperwork around the country rather than getting data computerized. The result of which was a long and tedious application, and re-application process which was repeated more than a few times in the past few years.
The most frustrating aspect was how much time it took just to confirm that my paperwork had yet again disappeared in the abyss of bureaucracy. At some point I suspected that a team of entrepreneurial gnomes snuck into the the INS office and stole paperwork on a nightly basis, a la South Park’s underpants gnomes. They would then transport those paperwork into their secret underground headquarter, where on one side of the cave, there would be a huge poster of their business development flowchart. One huge block with “Immigration application”, eventually leading into a bubble that says “Profit”; but the step in between would be filled with just a giant-sized question mark.
In a way, it would make more sense to shred a certain number of application per year by “accident” in order to extract more application fee out of the same people over and over again. After all, there are no repeat customers in the…
There was one very, very annoying issue that I’ve found with MacOS X. When you tab through fields, it will by default, always skip over drop-down selection menus. Since so many websites uses this as say, the credit card expiration date field, it is extremely annoying as we get close to the Christmas season.
Just doing a bit of digging though, I came across the solution. Turns out this is a behavior that wasn’t just browser specific, but applied across the entire OS. All you have to do is change the option of how your keyboard behaves. Tony Spencer has a blog post on how it’s done:
As a follow up to my post about Word 2007 file format incompatibilities, there are some very clever people that found out how you can extract the text out of these new file formats. Go to MacOSXHints to read more:
ZD’s emerging technology blog has a piece on some new research that combines the usage of lasers at different wavelength, allowing recording on multi-layer DVD technology and storing up to 1 terabyte of information per disc. Even more impressive is that the technology doesn’t require the use of those expensive & rare blue-ray diodes.
“The process involves shooting two different wavelengths of light onto the recording surface. The use of two lasers creates a very specific image that is sharper than what current techniques can render. Depending on the color (wavelength) of the light, information is written onto a disk. The information is highly compacted, so the disk isn’t much thicker. It’s like a typical DVD.”
But.. all is not good news.. how long before we’ll actually see this technology?
“But when will we able to use DVDs with a terabyte capacity? Not before several years. In fact, the researchers just received a $270,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its work.”
Yeah.. it’ll be a while.
According to Wired, Multiverse has signed a deal with Fox, securing the right to make a MMO based on Firefly. I’m holding cautious enthusiasm right now, since Multiverse has not to this date, produced any games on their own. Instead, Multiverse’s business plan so far has been providing the platform (some may say “game engine”, but there platform is a more appropriate phrase, because the background infrastructure is much more massive compared to say, a FPS game) for developers to make their own MMO’s. I’m a bit unclear if Multiverse is planning to make this themselves, or maybe they’re going to license it to one of the game developers currently using their platform.
Read more about the deal here (Wired).
As I’ve mentioned in the “Yes, I’m a ’switcher‘” post, I’m a very recent convert to the Mac. Although I can’t quite identify myself as a pure convert, since I’ve had plenty of experience with Mac since childhood, throughout college & professionally. I just haven’t owned a Mac at home for the past decade and a half.
There are a lot of fear in switching to a new platform. Although going from Windows to Mac really isn’t that hard, a bit of a learning curve is involved in acclimation to the slight differences in their UI. Honestly, Windows has always emulated Mac, and then Mac emulated some parts of Window, it’s really not that hard to get accustomed. What is a bigger problem though, is getting replacement software for what you’re used to in Windows.
Here’s the good news, there is a plethora of budget to free Mac software that can probably cover everything you do in Windows, and in many cases, do it even better.
Mail, Address & Calendar
Most people has seen plenty of iTunes, heard about iMovie and iDVD in the barrage of Apple TV ads. I’m surprised at how many people who don’t know about the other very useful, and powerful software that Mac comes with.
Mail (sometimes called Mail.app to not confuse it with… well, mail) is the default email program shipped with Mac. It does look extremely simple and straight forward at first, but it does have a good amount of hidden…
Wowhead is holding a contest & giving away 100 beta keys. Several people I know already have beta keys, but if you’re one of those who are still yearning for one, this might be a worthy contest. See more details at — Contest: The Biggest Helper.
News.com has the scoop here:
New Office file format could cause headaches
This makes me wonder, if OpenOffice (or its Mac cousin, NeoOffice) would have an easier time at opening the new file formats & types than the Mac or Windows’s previous version of Office. I’ve been using NeoOffice exclusively since switching over to the Mac. I’ve never personally required any of the advanced capabilities of Microsoft Office anyway.
As much as Microsoft champion the idea of backward compatibility (after all, that’s why it took so long to get us from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP, right?), it’s surprising to me that they would devise a format that causes so much backward compatibility issues.
