Recently I had the opportunity to revisit an old classic, mostly because it gets released in a few days and i want to be caught up on the the story. Being a twelve year old game I though i would have issue getting it to run on anything. so a quick visit to battle.net store and a few dollars later and a digital download I was off playing.
Quickly remembering all the stategies I spent hours learning as a kid I quickly started to plow through the missions enjoying every minute of it. Its not often you can pick up a 12 year old game and dump 10 or so hours into it. I’m still trying to crush though all the missions but I’m almost finished with Starcraft and starting onto brood wars. With an incredibly deep story you quickly forget its 12 years old and all I seem to want to do is get to the next mission so I can see what happens next.
The one drawback to this game in age is the multi-player, the people still playing it haven’t stopped playing since it came out I just on the battle net. After a few quick matches of me getting slaughtered I quickly gave up. In the end I’ve totally enjoyed it as much as I would any ten dollar game and it was totally worth it, just remember to stick to single player get the story and get out. and only 5 short days until the sequel comes out.
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In a brief text message exchange my brother put it rather mildly, what is it with all the zombie games. Now not being much of a horror buff, it has kind of put me outta the loop when it comes to zombie, and I have ventured into a few more mild ones.
After burning a few hours on the game Zombieville, on my iPhone, I realize it could be a fairly addicting game, you can come at it from a few different ways, either you kill as many zombies as you can to upgrade all your weapons or you just run through trying to get to the highest level you can. My suggestion try it one way then the other, you quickly learn strategies to push them back and manage the mobs.
On a More G Rated level I recently downloaded Zombie Vs Plants for my Mac, now this game is published by the company that brings us so so addicting games as Bejeweled, PopCap, as soon as I saw the name I became slightly worried because I now what kind of time vampire PopCap games can become. Being a giant fan of tower defense games it was fairly easy to catch on, basically you have plants with all kinds of special abilities, by collecting sun you can “build” new plants to defend your house from the zombie attack. After spending a couple hours with this game, I have to say its is well worth the 20 bucks, just try it out they offer a 60 minute demo that will give you a good feel for the progression of the game.
For all those chomping at the bit for the new OS upgrade from Apple, please make sure to check compatibility with more frequently used Mac software. Here is a quick link to Adobe, the famous creators of Photoshop and the current owners of all things Macromedia (ie. flash, dreamweaver), to see what is going to be compatible and what may have some issues. It does look like the majority of CS4 Generation launch won’t have a problem but if your running CS3 read carefully before you take the plunge and upgrade.
Adobe Blog
I hope that anyone reading this blog is using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or any other web browser to surf the net. I have been a long time user of Firefox and have found it hard to switch to any other browser just because of the fact that Firefox has so many darn plug-in and third party support. Today I’d like to share a plug-in that gets much abuse on my systems.
Firebug is plug in that while is most useful in web development also comes in hand in everyday use. After the install is sits quietly in the bottom right hand corner waiting to be used. When you click the little guy it loads up a window at the bottom of the browser and basically takes apart all the different code and layers of css, and html. For web developers this is a great learning tool as it makes it easy to tear apart code and download scripts to learn from. Just recently I found a cool background effect on one of my favorite sites, Thinkgeek, and with firebug was able to pull it apart in a matter of a few seconds to figure out how the effect was created.
Now not everyone is as interested in code as I am and maybe they are just interested in finding out network performance on a specific page, Firebug also comes with a handy set of tools and keeps track of network ping information and other stats to help you optimize your internet experience, and breaks download speeds up file by file.
Firebug is basically a swiss army knife of tools for Firefox and is a great combination with most any web development software. And best of all its free, so try it out if you don’t like it your not out any cash and can quickly uninstall it from your Firefox browser.
Recently I have been listening too a few audiobooks on my iPhone, and after fighting with the software a bit I thought I would throw together a few tips and tricks to converting your CD Audiobooks to your iTunes Library. As I have been working on this project I noticed a few things, first I don’t think iTunes was built with Audiobook importing in mind or even the playback of them, and second the naming of your files is key to keeping them in order. But there are a few tools included in iTunes which should help you out.
Importing Quality
By default iTunes imports in a 256k range which is much to high for spoken word and will create some rather bloated files. Technically you can take the files down to 32k but I wouldn’t suggest it as it makes skipping around in the files rather cumbersome and you can get some pretty distorted intro music to your audiobooks. I generally import at 128k and haven’t had any problems and it makes the file size fairly manageable. To do this click the iTunes drop down and select preferences.
Once preference pane is open select “Import Settings” which should pop up another window in which you select settings drop down and change to either Spoken Podcast or High Quality either of which will give you much smaller files. Now I know there are some audio critics out there who prefer a different codex or think the settings are to high or to low but much is up to debate on how you like to experience your audiobook. My personal preference is to listen to it on my iPhone with a cheap pair of headphones.
In the following days I hope to explain about combining tracks to create a since chapter, the naming for the files and what fields should be filled in, in order to get a nice looking audiobook on your iPhone or any iPod product. and yes this is for a mac but the step should be very similar no matter what version of iTunes you are using.
I
t appears that Microsoft is finally porting their popular email client to Mac. While Apple users have enjoyed the common applications of Word and Excel on their Mac for quite some time now, their email client always felt a little light, but it appears as if Microsoft is going to change that in their 2010 Version of Office.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about this but fans of Outlook will be thrilled they will no longer have an excuse about moving over to the Mac platform. Also I see it as a big plus in the Corp world as many of their computers rely on Outlook for contact and calendar management.
As many people already know since Apple switched to the intel hardware the hardware inside of an Apple computer has become more closely akin to standard PC hardware. The major difference is a piece of software written to replace the standard BIOS of a Machine with a more modern boot loader called EFI. A company has recently found out a way to spoof the EFI and allow OS X to be run on Apple compatible hardware. EFI-X plugs directly into a USB header of a motherboard and allows your computer to boot directly into Mac OS or any other operating system. This device does run a little steep in price and with version 2.0 ready to come out you may want to wait a bit to get the upgrade or scoop up the version 1.1 at a discounted price.
Recently I have had the opportunity to work on a few websites and I was looking for applications for my mac to get this done, about a year ago I stumbled upon this software called Coda. I have always coded my sites is raw html versus using a tool such as Dreamweaver to layout the site. Basically Coda is a package of HTML goodness, it allows you to code and check you code as you go with a great preview window. Also it comes along with a CSS editor that makes creating CSS tags a breeze. After using for almost 2 weeks I’m not sure I have ever seen a better editor out there.
For just under a month I have been forcing myself to try yet another new search engine, Bing is Microsoft’s next attempt at taking over Googles search dominance. At first glance Bing feels very much like Google search but with a pretty background. As you search you start to realize maybe, just maybe Microsoft is trying to beat Google by trying to do something they have never tried in their previous 2 attempts at a search engine, by giving you more.
One of my favorite features in Google is the image search and Bing adds a few more options like the ability to filter by size from the left hand side. And when you searching for an item it gives you related searches in the left side.
Will it take market share from Google? Well only time will tell, but I think Microsoft has finally come up with a major contender for your searching needs. For myself even though the layout is very appealing I still feel like my search results are more refined in Google generally finding what I’m looking for in the first couple of links.
So google recently announced their long rumored OS, many thought it was the android platform used in many phones. But this news release soundly puts that to rest. Basically it will be a super light weight OS, it appears the main goal is to boot up instantly and allow user to check email and surf the web in seconds. From the blog post it really feels like this is mainly targeting the netbook crowd of people, which is probably a good thing I always feel bad for someone waiting for windows to boot off those tiny processors.
Recently I had the opportunity to revisit an old classic, mostly because it gets released in a few days and i want to be caught up on the the story. Being a twelve year old game I though i would have issue getting it to run on anything. so a quick visit to battle.net store and a few dollars later and a digital download I was off playing.
