Me and my Mac

The never ending story…

So recently on a clients computer i found this great game, or so i was told by a colleague.
Since it was freeware we copied it and now i’m hooked. I started a new game that day and am still playing that very same game. We’re over 6 weeks past and i’ve been playing regularly with a 2-4 hour per day average.

Amazing isn’t it? Which game you ask? Transport Tycoon Deluxe. What? yea a 14 year old game. And it rocks!! It’s one of those gems that just won’t bore as there is always something to do, expand or improve. New business opportunities are common and it’s just fun to toy with trains, planes, boats and vehicles and their infrastructure.

Here is just a minor screenshot from what i’ve built over the past weeks. It’s a somewhat complex set of tracks around a train station. Over 20 trains race in, out and through it every couple of minutes going to more than 10 surrounding stations delivering goods to a factory there, or just bringing coal for the cities or passengers, mail, steel, livestock or grain to and from the various stations. To accommodate the city growth i’ve built bus stops all over the bigger cities from which people can easily move to and from a lot of places. Just to give you a slight idea.

The most fun about this game is that it just never stops. As noted above there is always something to do. With games like Sim City, the map gets full after a while. Or it just gets boring once you’ve got all things set up. All games have limitations and so does Transport tycoon ofcourse, but the map for one is so immensely huge that even on a medium sized map i’ve been busy for 6 weeks. Imagine if the map was 4 times larger how small a portion i would use. I think if i would cram everything into a corner i would use one quarter of the map now! Another great thing is the diversity, scattered over the map are autonomous towns and many many industries of all kinds. And your task is to make money of that. So you can deliver over 20 types or materials/goods to various industries or set up a supply chain to a city. Say, iron ore to a steel mill which produces goods from that which you can then deliver to a city. The city grows because of that and thus eventually will need a bus system, or connections to another city and so on.

So! Get it, play it… Get addicted!

Syncopation! iTunes synchronization for the rest of us…

A few days ago i stumbled over the really awesome and simple app Syncopation from the ever so simple Sonzea. A developer who got fed up with synchronizing his iTunes by hand and took matters into his own hands.

The result: Syncopation.

Syncopation can sync up to 5 computers iTunes libraries automatically, manually, auto deletion and many more options and thus keep them the same. This is something i was looking for for freakin’ ages!

After a few initial hick-ups with files not being copied and stuff i managed to get it all working.
Basically what i did wrong, i think, was to merge 2 existing libraries that should be one thing from the start.

So i simply deleted one (after making a backup) and synched from scratch. Which worked much much better and solved most of my issues. One song kept bugging me, but that has been gone now too for some reason.

Support is clear, fast and easy going. So i didn’t mind at all to fork over the 20something euros.

And you should too if you have multiple macs with libraries that should be the same :)!

So it seems spam defeated my countermeasure :(

The plugin i used has been defeated and let’s through a whole bunch of spam.

The internet is doomed, and so is mankind! Akismet is upon you! Grr!

Making good and speedy use of the OSX Dictionary

Now i need to look up things in the dictionary, and after killing it in spotlight this seemed a lengthy routine.

However it is easily fixable.

Open dictionary and go into it’s preferences.

Now go to a website, doesn’t matter which one and right click on a word:

Click that option and voila:

In-screen Dictionary results.
This works for many many OSX apps and is very handy

Events 1.5.5

Bugfix release and some minor changes that should improve the stability and performance of the plugin overall.

Changes:
[change] default sorting in manage events is now descending
[fix] Sidebar now uses the right setting for language links
[fix] Events can be added again (broke in 1.5.4)
[fix] Supposed theme bug fixed (precaution) on the management dashboard
[change] Universal output builder for lists (saves lots of code)

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.1.5.5.zip

2008 Wrecklist!

All the things that are computer/electronics related in random order and broke this year.
Everything on the list is/was owned by me and either needed to be repaired or thrown away. Most things i had to throw away and replace.

It seems this year so far is quite disastrous if not crap for my electronics, computer gear mostly.
I cannot recall so many things broke the year before… In fact, i doubt anything broke that year. Aside for some minor things.

The actual list of wrecked stuff:

• iPod touch - due to a short in the headphones.
• Lacie Edmini Ethernet disk - Broke twice actually, once due to a broken partition table.
• Macbook pro - on 4 different occasions: Superdrive, Sound I/O board, Memory and Topcase.
• 160GB Harddisk - Bad blocks.
• Netgear 8 port switch - Power adapter blew up the internal power thingy.
• 320GB Harddisk - Ruined drive heads.
• DSL Modem - Faulty firmware.
• Logitech MX1000 mouse - Fell of a table.
• AMD3000+ CPU - High pitched noise, resulted in unstable systems.
• AMD1500+ and Mainboard - CPU just died, condensators blew due to heating on the mainboard.
• 17″ Fan - Started leaking oil and the motor jammed.
• PC Powersupply 350W - Unstable DC output.
• Sony Ericsson W850I Cellphone - Bad signal all the time or no signal at all.
• Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboard - Non responsive keys.
• Stereo headset - Earpiece fell off.
• Blade saw - Broke whilst attempting to cut a beam.
• Macbook Pro battery - Just in time for warranty, would no longer charge.
• ATI Radeon 1650 512MB VGA - Just died with no explanation.

Let’s hope not too much breaks in the remainder of this year.

Events 1.5.4

A small bugfix update. Fixing 2 bugs.

When editing an event the ending month is now shown correctly and the All-day events have nothing to worry about times anymore.

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/events/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-events.1.5.4.zip

Crippling Spotlight, yay!

For weeks i’ve been annoyed with me looking up something in Spotlight, expecting the thing to find what i want and pressing enter in a split second only to find me ending up in a dictionary.

It seems Spotlight deems it necessary to look in the dictionary, wikipedia and more of such things also for programs. And give that higher priority than actually finding an App or file.

No more i say!

defaults write com.apple.spotlight DictionaryLookupEnabled NO

Solves all that. And damn Spotlight is faster too! yay!

Ofcourse for this to take effect Spotlight has to be restarted. Done by either restarting your mac or killing the Spotlight process.

Later i found this options is also available in the amazing prefpane secrets from Blacktree.

Which makes things even easier.

Where is WordPress heading? Idiocy to the max!

The devs have some weird ideas lately. And to be honest, while they do a great job, i like Wordpress less and less ever since 2.5 was introduced. Too much automation going on in there. Bah

What the hell is up with autosaving and revisions of posts. Not a bad feature per se, but make it optional please! It clogs up the database making it expand exponentially if you leave the browser open for a while.

And which idiot thought up that plugins should be automatically updated. But didn’t think about the problems it would bring. Many plugins are poorly written. Even more plugins require database additions from time to time. And NO plugin i ever seen has had a proper upgrade script or routine. It has to be done by hand. So, a few months ago when i released Events nearly every week and it required a bunch of new fields for storing that stuff. An automatic update would have been disasterous. As some of my users found out. Obviously because the database didn’t get updated. It had to be done manually. And as many of us know. Adding fields to a database is harder than uploading a few damn files. So while we’re at it. Just upload them your self and use the upgrade instructions the plugin maker provides. It’s makes your life just less annoying.

Another thing. Why can’t Wordpress show proper errors. Sometimes i encounter a plugin that won’t activate. Sometimes i screw up and break my own plugin. All fine. But with the error “A fatal error occured” i don’t know where to look. Give me the original PHP error dammit. And no WP_DEBUG does not work. I tried that and it made apache cry and me frustrated because it generated so much errors i couldn’t even find my own anymore. So no… Just provide proper errors.

Why is the Richtext editor still acting up. It has been around for years. It has been used by millions and still it’s stripped down, broken and useless for anything else than dumb typing of text. most plugins break because of it stripping out tags and stuff. We cannot add forms, we cannot add tables or anything else that requires more than bold or italic text formatting. It sucks!

Why the assumption that we need Windows Livewriter support. Make it optional! I don’t even use Windows. Why include a link to use Turbo on every dashboard page. What is Turbo anyway. Useless, no one uses Google Gears. I much rather have that option in Settings > Misc where i don’t see it.

Blah!

All in all Wordpress isn’t that bad. Truth be told… I still enjoy using Wordpress, most of the time. But some things just piss me off. Especially if they do not work right or make no sense. It’s becoming a fool proof system, which for me, a sort-off nerd, is crazy. I like some things to be done manually, i like to be in control of my own website. It’s getting less and less of that. Even at the point that i need to write plugins to disable the new automated stuff and hack things out to make it work as i like it. Yuk.

This would make the iPhone even better…

Allow me to download parts of maps and store them for offline usage. Say i want to go some place and need directions, it would be nice to save that map, showing the route. View it offline, en route. Especially for me, since i have no “real” internet on my phone when i’m out of Wifi’s grasp.

Another nice thing would be to share contact information. So why not allow me to tab a button “share” when viewing a persons information and picking one of 2 options “email” or “sms” from the menu that would slide up from the bottom. And send a vCard to someone by mail and a textformatted SMS to someone requiring that information.

Obviously MobileMail should allow importing of vCards to make it really work.