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"'…consciousness enables us to make conjectures in which someone called “I” can be seen in a hypothetical situation or a story; and from that flows the ability to make judgements, plans, decisions. In short, consciousness takes the vastness of the physical world, whose coordinates of time and space we cannot really grasp, and gives us a model, a working version – a simplified, toy version if you prefer – in which we can more usefully and successfully operate.’" Seeing the "I" in the world, as a way of making things understandable.
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"HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select single application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more." Nifty.
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Transmit 4 is looking really good; Transmit Disk, especially.
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Blimey. Spotify want to own social music – linking out to Facebook and creating a more public Spotify profile – but, more to the point, they also want to own music playing, by making your own library available inside the Spotify app… and even offering wireless sync of your own music.
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"In a sense, it is. However, Ashley Davis, a blogger over at Destructoid, put a post up last week specifically on the Pac-Man ghosts and why they got the names that they did. In short, though it might seem like Blinky, Pinky, Inky and the Clyde-Sue-Tim hivemind hover around dot-filled mazes in the exact same way, they don’t. In fact, the way they move is explained by their nicknames." This is brilliant.
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"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.
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"Some people love this kind of aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love. This is rubbish… There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information." Phil talks about some problems he's been trying to solve with dashboard displays.
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"A magnificent, huge orca-like beast, swimming calmly through the vast ocean beneath my smoke-belching craft. She was a beauty. And she instantly became my Moby Dick. “I’m coming back for you”, I thought. Big Shirl is a reason to reach level 80. I have no doubt the grind will get to me before too long, or that the thought of repeatedly running the same dungeons or battlegrounds come level 80 will turn me off all over again… In these early days though, before everyone in it knows everything, it’s an explorer’s paradise. That’s why I play MMOs." A nice, thoughtful article from a first look at WotLK from Alec Meer
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"Wow. Ever get the feeling you've been thrown for a loop? I did just that, when I worked out that GSW commenter and erudite game blogger, PixelVixen707, appears to be not just a smart game blogger, but a fictitious front for some kind of damn weird ARG/online story." Down the rabbit hole we go, again.
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"SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people… This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer. I love the pivot."
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"At the start it seemed reasonable to think that Mirror's Edge could stand entirely on the merits of its brilliant core concept, and not need to include extraneous and negligibly attractive features to appeal to as many people as possible. But, no, this is the video game business." This is the stuff that's scaring me most about Mirror's Edge.
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"…in recent years, [the stage has] moved away from those practices. Today, we better understand the importance of offering kids the very best we can do. They are no different from the rest of us. They respond positively to quality, and they quickly grow bored and restless with mediocrity… We might consider a similar approach to video games. If we want our kids – heck, if we want all of us – to enjoy quality games, we must pay attention to and promote those games that deliver quality."
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From Duncan Harris; postcards from post-apocalyptic DC.
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Course notes from Stanford's Cocoa programming course.
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You're a little robot. You're also indestructible. Use bombs to bounce yourself around the level, but don't run out. Lovely little flash game.
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In which an entertaining man plays a hacked, super-hard Super Mario map, swears at his TV a lot, and still manages to be pretty good at it. It's a nice illustration of the problem-solving process, and it's rather funny. "This is worse than Panic At The Disco. This is worse than Ann Coulter."
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"The No Game is a party game with only one real rule."
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This looks like it could be interesting/fun; if anything, worth watching as a slightly more attractive option for lifestreaming…
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"Sequel Pro is the perfect tool for working with database-driven websites and applications." Leopard-only MySQL management application; forked out of the long-neglected CocoaMySQL.
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I need to think on this more; there's a lot of meat in it, and some interesting commentary, but suggesting that "the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting things" I find somewhat insulting. I'm frustrated because it feels like Blow is pushing for people to find the "correct" interpretation, rather than any valid criticism they can back up. Still, there's also some excellent stuff in here, but it's the first thing he's said that's rubbed me the wrong way a little (and I'm not just talking about the 'bullshit' comment).
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"I don't begrudge Blow an attempt at addressing important historical events, but the weight of the atomic age seems too much to address with a few lines of text that feel incongruous with the rest of the production." This is, I think, a worthwhile point. I'll be returning to the whole "atomic bomb" question in a blogpost soon, I hope.
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"Given that Valve is being forced to charge for the update, they wanted to ensure that 360 owners were getting their money's worth." Such a shame they have to charge for it – but still, more TF2 on 360, and that's a good thing from my perspective.
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A nice simple explanation of what using Git is really like.
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"What the hell is wrong with me? There are a lot of ways to win at Civilization Revolution that do not involve taking a happy, peaceful city and reducing it to a smoldering gravesite filled with radioactive trinitite." Clive Thompson on a case of Walter Mitty syndrome.
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"Keldon Jones has published an artificial intelligence opponent for the game Blue Moon with an user interface written with GTK+ toolkit. This is a native Mac OS 10.5 version of the game written with Cocoa, so there's no need to install X11 and GTK+ libraries. It runs straight out of the box (on Leopard)." Heck yes.
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"This is a write-up of my diploma project in interaction design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project is entitled ‘Adventures in Urban Computing’ and this weblog post contains a brief project description and a pdf of the diploma report." Well worth a read, and beautifully presented. I need to chew over this more.
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"It's a shame to me that a game with Braid's narrative, artistic, and aesthetic aspirations is inaccessible to so many people hungry for exactly those things." Yes. Much as I adore it, Braid can be awful hard at times. A smart game for smart gamers, alas.
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"A popular misconception about agile is that it doesn’t allow for plans. This isn’t true. Agile focuses on the activity of planning rather than focusing on a fixed plan."
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"The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3d scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis…" Awesome.
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"OmniDiskSweeper is a utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks."
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"Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner." Interesting-looking prototyping/wireframing tool.
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"The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 7 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational." Sounds fantastic.
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"What do we sing about, when we sing about the body?" Lovely infographic, ever-so mildly NSFW. Hint: hip-hop talks a lot about bottom.
uptime
13 August 2006
I haven’t rebooted my computer in a long while.
It all happened when I started preparing for ETech, and became irrationally concerned that my elderly Powerbook might never turn on again. So I kept it up constantly, for a few months.
Then I had loads of stuff after that “up”, floating around, and it was taking ages to process. So I didn’t reboot.
Then it was Reboot, and again, I didn’t reboot in case it wouldn’t come back and I lost my work.
I think the paranoia had set in.
Anyhow, GeekTool sits on the bottom of my screen, telling me all about my uptime. I looked just now, and it said
13:24 up 212 days, 3:32, 5 users, load averages: 1.50 1.61 1.35
5 users? Not sure what that’s all about. Anyhow… 212 days is a long while. I think we need a spring clean. Time to restart.
Memo to self
19 March 2006
Memo to self: bash profile is in /etc/profile. Not anywhere else, they don’t work. No idea why. But next time you need to alter your $PATH – it’s there.
So that was weird
13 January 2006
I upgraded iTunes from 4.7 to 6.02. It was on 4.7.1 (first with podcasting) until the reformat, and today, I wondered where my podcasts were, and realised that plain old 4.7 can’t handle them.
So I upgraded. Then it decided to copy everything to my iPod again. Except it forgot a few albums I’d very recently ripped. Weird – hope it hasn’t lost random things throughout my collection. Bizarre. I’m re-ripping Lloyd Cole and Roots Manuva right now.
Fixing the “iChat instantly quits on launch” problem
11 January 2006
So, you may or may not remember that I was afflicted with this pain in the neck of a problem: namely, you launch iChat, it loads for a second, and then dies immediately. In trying to solve it, I funted my computer, and needed to reinstall.
Last night, my computer ran out of battery (at the 51% mark, no less – let’s hope this battery holds out), and didn’t sleep, so I gave it a hard reset and thought nothing more.
This morning, I realise I haven’t relaunched iChat – so I do – and it dies immediately. “Bugger,” I think, “this is the same problem as before”. It’s also the same problem my girlfriend’s iBook has.
Then, thanks to this helpful Apple Discussions post, I solved it. The issue is between the iChat in 10.4.3 and my Netgear DG834 wireless router – namely, the implentation of UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) in the Netgear box. My router, incidentally, is on firmware 3.0.something – the latest.
To get iChat working again: log into the router, scroll down the left hand menu and choose the UPnP menu. Then: untick the “enable UPnP” box, click Apply; re-enable it, click Apply.
iChat now works. Bizarre, but fortunately solved. It’s also apparently fixed in 10.4.4, released yesterday, but I’m not upgrading just yet due to being bitten on 10.4.3.