Muppethouse

Move over Bacon

Rotation

Originally uploaded by ryanmshea.

There are people out there that put away their 12 sided dice just long enough to perform benchmarks on disparate computing platforms. They test floating point operations, 3d gaming frame-rates, and if they’re feeing particularly pragmatic, office productivity metrics. One thing they’ve never quite been able to measure well is FUN.

I know there are plenty of people out there that punch their time card, sit at a desk for eight hours, then go home – never caring in the least whether they enjoyed their computing time. Not me, I actually like working on computers that do fun things. If my computer took three times as long to open an Excel spreadsheet, had half the Quake 4 frame-rates, but I never yelled at it in frustration and smiled every once in a while at its coolness – my friends, that would be the computer for me (disclaimer – I don’t use Office Productivity applications or play 3d games).

OS X has had a corner on the market for fun computing for quite a while. The lack of spyware and viruses is just a bonus. Now, my happy dual G5 has taken a back seat in the fun department to my wonderfully beautiful Linux desktop. Thanks to my new hero David Reveman over at Novell, the next generation of Linux desktops will be chock full of eye candy – or as many would say “useless eye candy”. Those that say that of course find no utility in fun… they also roll 12-sided die, shower infrequently, and the closest they’ve been to a woman is watching reruns of the Golden Girls.

I’ve got virtual desktops that are finally usable. I’ve got kick-ass ways to switch between applications, both with a cool alt-tab function and with the Expose’-done-right knockoff feature. Lets not forget the true transparencies and crazy zoom accessabilty feature. Thanks to all these features (and wobbly jello windows) I can interact with my computing environment in a much more organic way. I love it. Get Ubuntu, use it, become one with it.

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Front Row

A couple weeks ago Apple released new iMac G5s, and along with it a new piece of software called Front Row. Although mac enthusiasts have been clamoring for media center software for some time, the announcement did not excite many. Nobody wants to shell out $1,299 – $1,699 just to be able to watch downloaded TV, listen to iTunes music, and view their iPhoto galleries on a G5 screen. This simplified interface needs to be available on your TV.

Predictably, the software was pulled off of the iMac and made to run on machines it was for which it was not intended. To my delightment, this hacked version became available on bittorrent last night. Without the remote control which is included with the iMac G5, the functionality of Front Row was somewhat limited. I had to use the escape and arrow keys to move around the menus, but it was still nice to see the interface and play around with the movie trailers.

After mostly moving over to Stacey’s place, I had been without dual monitors until I hooked up my G5 to her TV. We had been kicking off movies with the ol’ double click until tonight.

Tonight, I found over on the Salling Clicker forum a nice little script that lets me use my cell phone to control Front Row… exactly what I was looking for. Even though I had pretty similar interface with my XBox, this is a really nice touch.

Posted in Apple, Dorkness, Movies | 1 Comment »

Stupid Mouse

So I thought about what the Apple one-button mouse could be good for. It’s rather useless when it comes to mousing, seeing as how it provides no way to right-click and lacks the scroll wheel function. I figured it could have other uses though. How about as a tea candle holder?

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