So it sounds like Parallels 3.0 will come close to doing what the new version of Mac OS/X is rumored to do as far as supporting running Windows apps natively (or at least, very close to it). It has snapshots (a la vmware), support for OpenGL and DirectX (wh00t! gaming!) and "SmartSelect", which lets you open any file from either windows or mac operating systems.
Interesting to see what this brings.
Neat article with some trivia about why Mr. Rogers was awesome that I'll bet you didn't know. Course, it also reveals he was a bit of a nutter as well :)
More information on Mr. Rogers over at wikipedia.
Well, title says it all... Fedora 7 released. Here are some details from the article.
Fedora 7 features the latest versions of many popular open-source software programs, including GNOME 2.18, KDE 3.5.6, Xorg 7.2, and version 2.6.21 of the Linux kernel, with integrated KVM virtualization support. The version of Xorg 7.2 included in Fedora 7 features extensive support for display hot-plugging, a much-anticipated feature that will hopefully eliminate the need for frustrating Xorg configuration tweaking typically required for multiple monitor configurations and projector support.
Interesting article on theories and rumors about what Leopard's most top, Top Secret is.
Let's imagine that Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said he didn't want to show Leopard's Top Secret stuff at last year's WWDC. He wasn't merely having fun at Microsoft's expense knowing full well how close Vista was coming to the look (but not feel) of OS X. He was quite serious at playing his cards not just close to his vest, but playing a bet-the-house, put-up or shut-up game of poker.
Read linked article for the full deal....
Some good stuff on ways to write more comprehensible code.
For you photographers out there check out PopPhotos Landscape Cheat Sheet.
Cool stuff from Steve Jobs from Engaget about the iPhone, Apple in general, and stuff that we'll find out more about at WWDC in a few days.
Princess Leia slave girl convention pics. My brain just exploded.
Now this is supercool! Via slashdot (discussion) comes a Windows firewall squeezes on a USB key. The "windows" part of is is a bit of a misnomer though, it's actually a firewall running linux as the core and a bunch of security applications on top of it, but currently it only works when plugged into a Windows host.
It sounds like the system grabs network traffic as it comes into the windows host, does the happy-happy firewalling stuff, then passes things back to the host. Linux and Mac drivers are planned.
Check the screenshots midway through the article too, very sexy graphs!
Hmm.... firewall on a small host, I wonder where I've heard of those before? :) If anyone remembers the cool project the dot-com I was part of that created the firecard, we did something similar, or at least, kinda similar. At the time we used RJ45 jacks (like Yoggie Systems' previous version) and we were on a PCI card instead of a USB key. OK, maybe not that similar then....
Lifehacker pointed to 15 Best Diet Tips Ever. Interesting stuff for us out of shape geeks.
Whenever you feel like eating, look for physical signs of hunger, suggests Michelle May, MD, author of Am I Hungry?"Hunger is your body’s way of telling you that you need fuel, so when a craving doesn’t come from hunger, eating will never satisfy it," she says.
For some reason the hardest one (for me) and the most obvious is left for absolute last, the "be active" one.
The hits just keep rolling in with this new Crysis Technology Movie from fileshack (and probably others as well).
Update: Ugh, sorry guys, mostly it's an ad for Intel/Nvidia/Vista.... couple of bits of new footage and environments, but way more marketspeak. Speaking of which, am I missing something with the Vista game explorer? This seemed to be a big part of the "Crysis and vista" marketspeak, and yet it seems like it's a place to click on an icon to start a game, much like the folder with all the shortcuts to start my games that I have on my desktop? Guess if you don't care about box art or parental controls it's not all that interesting.
Nice list of 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity via lifehack.org.
Cool map of the federation of planets via Digg.
Not the best quality, but the 6th Transformers Commerical makes its way online. Man I can't wait for this movie!!!
Now these Multi Display Mac Setups have given me a serious woody. 1x30" and 2x23"?!?! I could deal with that easily enough I think :)
Lifehacker has a cool post of the Coolest Workspace Contest, with some nifty results.
Those of you who drink the kool-aid, or do only on your employers time, might be interested to see the New Features in Windows Server 2008. Self-healing NTFS, Address space randomization, SMB2 filesystem (reason for this I heard on one of the TWIT podcasts was "to f*ck with Samba"), virtualization (oooh! that could be interesting) and Server core, a GUI-less system (hows that going to work I wonder.... hey, Microsoft is stealing all Linux's ideas! where's the innovation!?!?).
Like I said, an interesting read to see what's around the corner. The interesting question for the Linux camp is a) does linux have equivalents to these features and b) does it need them?
Some more Mac PC Spoofs, with the crosshairs on the Mac this time, depicting Macs as rude, lazy stoner losers who can't get the girl. Funny, kinda.
There is a teaser for Star Wars Clone Wars available. Looks pretty good IMHO, a nice mix of cartoony-ness and realism done in 3D models. Check it out! According to wikipedia, the series is expected to debut in 2008 :(
Ahhh..... back in 1998 3dfx was king and GLIDE was it's queen (and crowning achievement). A quick trip back to the games back in the day :)
More for me than anyone, here's reviews of Five FM transmitters for iPods and personal players.
Upside-Down-Ternet has some great recipes for screwing with people stealing your wireless (or anyone else for that matter!)
Great gallery of frozen object, pictures taken of bullets doing various things shot at 1/50,000 of a second and thereabouts.
Supercool surf video (no bikinis, sorry) off of youtube...... wow, this guy had one hell of a ride!
Why has no one told me about this before! Using fboweb.com you can do live flight tracking with google earth. I'm not sure how 100% "live" it is, cause the planes don't move for me, but it's super cool (and it is supposed to be live I'm told). It'll also make your computer scream a bit if you load a large airport like LAX.
I know sites have gone through issues of barrier to entry on websites, but this is ridiculous. The site for I Know Who Killed Me requires not only your zip code, first and last name, and birthdate to enter a site. The "site" you're entring is a movie trailer of sorts in the form of a lame fake video blog (I'm soooo glad this sort of viral marketing has caught on....). Seriously, there is no good reason for this. The site requires a valid zip code (no postal codes allowed!) and you have to be 18 to "sign up" (even though you don't submit an email address anywhere).
Course, I suppose if you're interested in a Lindsay Lohan movie you probably deserve it. The only reason I was at it was for research purposes as apparently she gets naked on film.
On movie film that is. On purpose. And not doing coke.
Via digg is a good article which compares Theatrical Cuts vs Director’s Cuts, and is a good look at what changed, and what (if anything) was better/different/worse in the two cuts. Includes such classics as Leon, Brazil, and Apocalypse Now.
Great South Park Mac vs. PC parody. Hilarious :)
Best Scenes of All Time. Says it all, sit back and enjoy.
Man, Top Gear is cool. So for a crash test they decided not to show you the test footage but instead, well, see if the new Renault Megane (a british car) handles crashes in real world situations. So in this video they put a guy in a car and crash it at 30mph... no special precautions, helmet, anything. Super cool, and hell, I'd buy a Megane if it was available in Canada right now. Nothing like putting your money where your mouth is where safety is concerned :) I'd hate to be the guy making that call to Renault about the car they sent over (not to be crashed) :)
For all you photo buffs out there, LightZone released version 3.0.. looks funky and cool, I'll be checking this out tonight when I get home.
Random cuteness after downtime (someone snipped a fiber optic cable)... cuteoverload has a great video of mother cat and bunny babies. Only minor chewing involved :)
The 20 Funniest Computer Geek Humor Bits of All Time, including classics like "The Internet Help Desk", "Troops", and other great ones. Ah, the memories.....
Found somewhere, a video of the last 10 seconds of everyStar Trek: TNG episode. Over 6 minutes, I watched about a minute before getting bored, but it's still interesting to watch.
This is cool... I use Lightroom for my photography organization and asset management, and have wondered if it'd be possible to give it a view on the web. Well, nothing for Lightroom yet, but PHPture does just this for Aperture (sadly still Mac only). Looks pretty cool. Anyone know if anyone is working on this for Lightroom?
I heard about AutoRate: iTunes rating done right and wish I had a mac to run it on. Basically it lets you auto-rate (imagine that) your iTunes library and bases it on play frequency, skips and a funky formula. It avoids the need to rate things by hand and is apparently pretty accurate.
Anyone got a spare mac for me? :)
Stars Wars: Where Are They Now? shows pics of the actors from Star Wars, well, then and now. Kinda neat to see how folks have changed. Wow, Harrison was young!
Does anyone really give a shit about Duke Nukem Forever Images anymore? Last image was a posed duke toy, this one is obviously artwork. Course, at this point, with DNF haven been given vaporware awards up the wazzoo for the last 10 years or so, is it remotely relevant anymore? Think Daikatana but instead of three years of development, it's been 10 years but there's still no game. At what point do you as the development company realize that you're never going to get your money back, and will probably be even worse off because when (if) the game is finally released it'll just be an embarrassment.
So if you're one of the three people who a) reads this blog and b) doesn't know that StarCraft II has been announced, well, hey, Starcraft 2 has been announced. Hit the main site for trailer, gameplay video, screenshots, and all that fun stuff. Franky I watched the trailer and thought it was very cool (great 3D rendering) and the gameplay video and though "meh". But then again, I'm a FPS guy not an RTS guy, so Starcraft really isn't my thing anyway... but for those of you whose thing it is, go nuts!
Forever Geek threw up the Extended Fantastic Four clip that aired last night after Heroes' Season Finale. Anyone else a little disappointed with the Heroes finale? I thought it was kinda.... well, a big build up and then a pretty lame end. Also what happened to "we're not going to drag this out season after season" and then suck you right into season 2. Grrr...
There is a Bionic Woman Sneak Preview up on YouTube. Looks potenialy like a cool fall diversion. Looks like JWZ found a full version.
One Year of Stock Photography! is a really interesting review from someone's adventures selling images to various micro and regular stock agencies.
Widefox is a version of firefox optimized for widescreen use.
Microsoft's virtual personal assistant demo is definately interesting, but I'd be interested to see how it works in real life. I get pissed off enough calling my phone / internet / etc providers support line and having to go through multiple layers of menus to speak to someone, I really have no desire to do that directly, especially if I'm calling about something that falls outside the scope of what the virtual assistant can do. That said, we'll see when it actually is out there and being used.
flickrvision is pretty cool, a mashup with google earth / maps (in a browser) showing new Flickr photo posts. There is the 3d view and the classic view.
Transformers Movie Update: Sector Seven Video Gives Nod To Dinobots, Insecticons, Lazerbeak And Generation One Bumblebee. My fav is the original bumblebee :)
El Reg has an article on Windows Vista's file deletion problems, mostly related to the inordinate amount of time taken for what should be simple file operations, moving / deleting / copying files around. I see this all the time and it's a immensely painful experience when it takes 15 seconds to delete a 100kb file on a dual core 2.40Ghz machine with 2G of RAM.
To prove the point, one user found the problem went away when he ran an XP Pro Virtual Machine that was running on top of Vista. Mysteriously, it took him about eight seconds to delete the 23GB of files he wanted to get rid of. Using Vista on the same machine took him more than 25 minutes.
Interesting reading if you're using Vista and wondering if you're the only one having these issues, or if you're thinking of switching.
Oh. My. God. This new Transformers trailer looks super-double-plus-awesome. Transformers fighting, lots of transformers, no lips on Optimus Prime.... looked all good (except for the one part where there was a transformer skating down the highway, but we'll see when it is released on July 4 :)
Nice article Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? which explores some of the misconceptions about the much beloved Vim and some of the cool stuff you can do with it.
Saw yesterday on Shacknews that there was a New Team Fortress 2 Movie. Looks .... well, I do like the facial animation, the cartoonyness... well, we'll see I guess. If you don't have a fileshack account, or want a quick and dirty view of it, check out this page with the video embedded.
Very cool.... Miguel has announced that Paint.NET 3.0 for Mono is Now Public. Paint.NET is (for those who don't know) a fairly feature complete and complex, free .Net based paint program. Think a supercharged version of MS Paint that doesn't suck. Not quite photoshop, but pretty much all you need for most "normal" use. Homepage is here.
Saw today over on Jon Patch that Flight Simulator X Service Pack 1 was released.
Rediscovering the Button Element has been going around since yesterday, but I finally got around to looking through it today, but it does show how to make some sexy cross platform HTML buttons.
Title says it all, funny article, The Chinese Tattoo Prankette is amusing. Here's a sample:
So I launch into the questions: what made her decide on a Chinese symbol, who was the artist, were they Chinese, everything except what the symbol stood for. She stammers through the answers, which boil down to no real reason for the Chinese, no real interest in Asian culture or language, just got the tat from some white American dude in a shop in Sayerville. Then she launches into an explanation of what it means: inner peace or some nonsense.
Great find on Digg.... .The Essential Guide to Piracy. Not only about, but a semi-howto as well.
If it’s a digital file, you can pirate it. But the sake of my fingers and your eyes, I’m going to stick to the top three pirated filetypes: music, movies, and software. This is a guide on how to pirate properly with specific applications.
[...]
As you probably guessed, piracy is illegal. Getting caught can land you some serious fines or even jail-time depending on the offense. Those of you in college should probably stay the hell away from piracy. I personally know about three people who have been caught downloading via Bit Torrent or P2P. The only safe way to pirate is to not do it at all.
While I would never pirate anything, (honest! no, really! hey, why are you laughin?!), I do understand both sides of the coin. How many say, Photoshop experts are there out there that started out by spending $600 and then learned the ins and outs of the software? A few I'm sure, but I'm also going to guess that a lot of the PS users started with a pirated copy of PS 5 or 6 that they found on some warez site or BBS and thought it was nifty keen, then kept at it and are now buying it legally. Ditto with a host of other software packages out there, with a questioning glance over to some of the larger software/OS makers who at one time made their stuff very easy to pirate and also very popular. I'm not sayin' the two are related, I'm just sayin'....
I'm glad that they included Usenet in there too, that great bastion of diverse pornography. alt.binaries.nazi.lesbian.midgets anyone?
Anyway, so yea, good read, go to it.
From the "scary and cool at the same time" department here is Zunker Bot, a control panel for the zombie bot hoards that we get to clean off our friends and families windows computers. Nicely designed...... for eeeeeeeevil.
A nice video compilation of Star Wars mistakes (some quite obscure). Looks great for trivia night at the nerd party :)
Well, model rocket launching anyway. I'm glad to see the Austin Scouts' model rocket launching record on video, however I do want to ask, are they running out of world records? I mean, when did 'number of bottle rockets launched within 5 seconds' become something to aspire to? And is there a sub-record where it's withing 10 seconds, or 2? I guess people found that beating the "real" records (time to ascend everest, that sort of thing, were really hard to beat and just started making stuff up. I personally plan to enter the nose goblin flicking world record, I'm pretty sure I'll be the winner (and only entrant), assuring me a place in the sun for at least one year.
Side note, I'm not sure how they chose ads to go before (and after) these videos, but seeing a horribly depressing ad about surviving rape is not what I want to see before a video of boy scouts launching model rockets.
Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails..., in the vein of "Hi, I'm a mac". Quite funny.
Cool, Forever Geek (you rock dude) sends off that NBC Orders up Second “Heroes” Series. The second series will be only 6 episodes and entitled "Heroes: Origins". Cool!
Interesting reading for the webheads out there is 14 rules for fast web pages:
Steve Souders of Yahoo's "Exceptional Performance Team" gave an insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues. Unfortunately I didn't get to see it in person but the Web 2.0 talks have just been put up and the ppt is fascinating and absolutely a must-read for anyone involved in web products.
Tweako notes that Ubuntu Unleashed (Free eBook) is out there.
For you odd folks who like that KDE thing, you'll be happy to know that KDE 4.0-alpha1 Released: "Knut" has been released. Highlights are a new visual look, all sorts of cool stuff in the background, new default apps (dolphin for a file manager for example), composite enabled for eyecandy goodness, and much more. Probably still horribly unstable, and it sounds like it's still far from finished, however, I'm happy to see it being released and plan to check this out ASAP! :)
For those of you running Kubuntu, here are the upgrade instructions.
Lifehack.org has 15 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever. Some that I've never seen before, like shift-space will pageup!
O'Reilly has a link to a good deal on a CF card, 16GB CF Card for $159. Of course, putting 16G of images on a CF card is a dangerous thing to do (all your eggs in a basket anyone?), it's still a great deal.
Forgetfoo has a great video on Photoshop Weight Loss, or rather, the power of digital editing. Wow.
A nice collection of long movie takes. I probably wouldn't have bothered to look at this page, much less post it if I hadn't noticed (and raved to everyone I talked about it with) the super-long takes in Children of Men.
This is kinda cool, Superman Returns(TM): Stop! Press! Game lets you play Jimmy Olsen and get a good picture of superman flying by.
Yet another New Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Movie. Haven't seen it yet, hope it's good.
Update: Not new, this is the high res quicktime version of the last posts movie.
A very inventive use for a spoon, syringe, mirror, and lighter... making pancakes!
Wh00t to forevergeek for finding a New Transformers Clip.
The next hot and upcoming game, "Spore" has been pushed back to 2008. Bummer, that's one of the three games I was actually looking forward to this year :(
Thanks to Wim pointing me to a couple of blog posts from Simon Crosby from XenSource. First is VMware tests Xen Performance: Embarrassing, where benchmarks are referenced but can't be revealed due to the licensing agreements, second is The Performance News You've Been Waiting For, in which the benchmarks are revealed!
How Lightsabers Work. Old yet good!
A lightsaber blade can deflect blaster bolts. In most cases you will want to deflect the bolts back at the person who shot them at you in the first place, but it is also possible to deflect ...
Cool, a 9 minute preview of Ratatouille is available from Apple. Ratatouille is the new movie from Pixar about a French rat who dreams of being a chef, but is hindered by his heritage, mainly that is, by being a rat.
Right on the heels of how to detect image fakery comes a great page of creative photos (some might even call them faked :)
Hilarious.... you "Lost" fans can now enjoy Found. Not sure if the entire thing is just to disseminate the HD-DVD key or not, but it's still pretty funny.
Who says innovation is dead, WikipediaFS, allows you to view and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files. This uses FUSE, the userspace filesystem under Linux. Found via wired.
So a sub-sub-sub-sub release Enlightenment update was released today (0.16.8.7). Sadly Enlightenment E17 is still not released, though you can run it if you do a bit of hacking around.
Personally I think that while E17 was the shiznit back in the day (transparent eterms! OMG!), however now it's really not all that relevant. Projects like Beryl and Compiz have far eclipsed the functionality that enlightenment gave us, and as cool as the new E17 stuff sounds (resolution independance, hardware acceleration, running on any device (like a cellphone)), if it's never released and available as a finished product (or as finished as any open source gets), how good is that? Duke-Nukem' ForE17 anyone?
That said, there are still people hacking away, which is great to hear.
Whoot, another Crysis gameplay movie.... looks sweet, though seems to be sped up a lot, not sure if that's showing the power of the 'nanosuit' or just a bug in the embedded video. Either way, it's another little glimpse into the game for those waiting for it like me.
Cool video interview with gameplay shown. Looks pretty dang sweet! Please please id and Splash Damage release it soon!
Seems like the latest patches for KVM (the linux Kernel Virtual Machine module) has Improved KVM Performance.
"The happy theme of today's kvm is the significant performance improvements, brought to you by a growing team of developers. I've clocked kbuild at within 25% of native. This release also introduces support for 32-bit Windows Vista."
No all I need is a VT compatible CPU in my linux box to play with this stuff!
Kitten performing shiatsu massage. Pure video cuteness.
This is cool, famous director and actor Kevin Smith asks Who wants to come to my birthday party? If you're in the New Jersey area, or want to go there, you have a great opportunity. Anyone want to spot me the cash to head down there from Vancouver? :)
The 25 Most Exquisitely Sad Songs in the Whole World (with the songs there to listen to), as chosen by some random website. Bonus is that you get the casualty count for each one :)
50 New Transformers Photos via Digg. Nothing immensely amazing, but good to check out. Who is the girl, whohohoo hotness!
Shacknews has a couple of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Screenshots, and in the comments someone posted a link to screenshots from the closed beta! Looks shexy!
Debbie has a good take on the People Magazine "No makeup" issue. When I first heard about this I thought it was an interesting idea, but the chances of getting anything resembling a "real" person in the magazine is pretty minimal :)
Ars has a Pidgin 2.0 review online. Pidgin (how the heck do you pronounce that?) is the newly rebranded version of GAIM, which had to change it's name for legal reasons (AOL are bastards apparently). This is a multi-im client a-la Trillian, except it's cross platform.
Ever wonder what happens when you plug the video-out port on your video card to the video-in port on your capture card? Well, now you do. Fairly predictable, but still amusing for a few seconds anyway.
Well, the Optimus Keyboard Got a Price Tag of $1500. Ugh. Didn't part of the original hype include a "it'll be expensive, but no more than that of a good cell phone"? Didn't realize they were including the hollywood diamond encrusted versions!
For the two or three of you who does not know what I am talking about, the Optimus concept computer keyboard has a small OLED display in every single key, allowing the user to customize to whatever program or alphabet he is using.
It'd be interesting to compare the pre-and post promises. The images in the linked article look like the original renderings, whereas I thought that the actual keyboard was now with keys all the same size and only black and white. Anyone know or have time to dig that up?
Of coruse, we all know that It Doesn’t Pay To Be “The Computer Guy”, finally someone's enumerated them from 1 to 10 (or actually, 10 to 1).
The computer guy never hears anyone tell him, “I just want to let you know … everything is working fine!”
Good to know where they put the porn they steal off your systems.... apparently you shouldn't trust geek squad. Sadly one more example of a good idea gone bad due to marketing and not paying people enough :(
Another Mac/PC parody... Hi, I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC.
