forbetaorworse

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:09:50 -0500

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360.

Valve to Deliver Steam & Steam on the Mac

Thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for the link to the Wired story that includes a great quote from Dan Connors of Telltale Games:

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

I imagine a lot of other game developers are going to be saying the same thing.

(via erice)

I honestly don’t play games on my mac. Not because there aren’t that many of them, but because I’m not 17 anymore and I have shit to do when I’m at my computer. Portal changes that. I can’t think of any other game I would even play on my Mac. This is going to be amazing

#Piracy Friday: The DRM Effect

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:20:54 -0500

(click here for the full size image)

mrgan: I mean, where to start. 1. The new version of Microsoft...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:28:16 -0500

mrgan:

I mean, where to start.

1. The new version of Microsoft Visio - which, in case you’re not cursed with a sucky office job, is a very popular diagramming app - includes a rip-off of Panic’s Transmit truck.

2. They didn’t just copy the icon, of course - they first ran it through the world’s worst autotracer (check out that front grill!)

3. All the other icons in the app are of this “quality”.

4. Visio also includes a groundbreaking feedback feature called Send-A-Smile/Send-A-Frown. It is of similar quality as well.

(via Cabel)

HA!!(is all I have to say)

#Music Monday: iTunes Sprucing

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:36:41 -0500

I highly recommend these applications that I’ve been using for organizing my iTunes library.

CoverSutra

This is a pretty great way to get control over your iTunes library with your keyboard. You can rate songs, change songs, change playlist, search songs and even scrobble to Last.fm. Snoop around with the preferences to get your keyboard shortcuts where you want them.

Get Lyrical

Automagically add the lyrics into the meta data for each one of your iTunes tracks. (bonus: if you tap the screen on your iPhone while a song with lyrics in it is playing, it will display the lyrics over the cover art. Neat!)

Pro Tip: I’m still sorta lazy from the weekend so going to the developer websites for better descriptions would be in your best interest. CoverSutra does a lot more than what I covered here.

dear diary, ~50% of the time (yes, really) i use the generic snow leopard option to burn a disc, it fails during verification, creating more coasters and wasting my time. when i use iTunes or the Toast Titanium 10 Special Pirated Edition, everything is cool. what the hell, generic burn folder!

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:47:21 -0500

There are enough potential causes of this issue that I’d have to recommend just doing an archive install of your operating system. Sorry I can’t go much further than that. Also, sorry I missed this question for almost a week. I’ve been busy. I’ll try and get things going again today.

#WTF Wednesday iPad COLOCATION?!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:43:01 -0500

Go here to sign up! Seriously!

My Website Sounds Weird

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:57:04 -0500

My Website Sounds Weird:

Put in a URL and this website will translate whatever is the content into music.

#Flip 'The Man' the Bird Friday

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:12:36 -0500

(via LifeHacker)

Ripit - Simple DVD ripper for Mac

HandBrake - encode DVDs and VIDEO_TS folders to .mov,.mpeg etc.

TVShows.app - The ultimate TV torrent tool. Automagically download your favorite shows in the best quality available

Transmission - A solid Torrent app.

Vuze - a bulkier but useful torrent app. I use this to share my videos to my xbox over the network. Take that Micro$oft! I don’t need your crappy media center!

Any Questions? Let ‘er rip! (get it? cuz I’m talking about.. nevermind).

#Thirsty Thursday: Beer Geekery

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:50:26 -0500

Don’t Lose Your Head.

So our manufacturer calls this a pilsner, but our resident beer geek monkeys say this is a glass designed for the perfect Weizen beer, aka a wheat beer glass. That tapering at the top allows for focus of the aroma that you don’t get in your traditional pilsner glass. But, of course, the most important part of this glass is the embiggening that allows for expression of the head and capture of the carbonation

#Include Beer.

Our Microbrew glass will hold 12 ounces of fermented yeast and malted barley. Ironically, beer is not included in our include beer glass. Oh well.

(Both via ThinkGeek)

BEER BLOG!

While I’m on the subject of sweet delicious and satisfying booze, let me offer my somewhat biased recommendation for a beer blog. My good friend @JudithPrietht is a home brewer and started a blog called Beer Meets Girl a while back. Judy likes to gush and wax poetic (seriously the writing is pretty fantastic) about craft beers and hopefully soon we’ll get some insight into the makings of her very own brews. Follow her and give her the motivation to get to postin’!
(I hope she’s not mad that I put her on the spot like this. Sorry Judy!)

#Wicked Sweet Wednesday: Nerd Merit Badges make FourSquare...

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

#Wicked Sweet Wednesday:

Nerd Merit Badges make FourSquare badges even more awesome. Check in at this twitter account for updates on when they become available.

#Tip Tuesday: Add Weather to iCal

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:28:27 -0500

Awesome tip for such a craptastic morning here in Boston. I came in sick to work this morning and I’ll be honest- I have no real work to do so I’ll probably be queuing up some post for the week. Before I do that it seemed fitting to share a little tip to collect weather updates into iCal. Here’s the step by step:

First, go to Weather Underground and type in the city state or zip for the forecast you want in your iCal and hit Return.

In the resulting page, there’s a link towards the top right that says “Add to Favorites” which is right next to the “ICAL” and “RSS” buttons. Right click on the “ICAL” button and choose “Copy Link” (“Copy Link Location” if you’re in FireFox).

Next, open iCal and choose Calendar > Subscribe… from the menu bar.

Paste the link you copied into the “Calendar URL” field provided and hit Return.

Now, just rename the calendar “weather” or something and choose how often you’d like it to auto refresh. I set mine to every day. Once you’ve done that, click OK.

Now you should have a suscribed calendar that lists each day’s weather as an all day event. Double clicking the events will give you the full weather description and a link to the website. It should look a little like this:

The Millenium Falcon That Flies

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:26:08 -0500

The Millenium Falcon That Flies:

$50 FOR THIS THING?! THAT’S IT?!

My first #toy tuesday.

dear b, i heard a rumor (my anti-mac best friend told me) that evidence of cigarette smoking will void an iMac warrenty. should i start crying now? -not lisa kippon

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:14:00 -0500

EDIT: I stand corrected? Apparently THIS happened. I, however will honor these warranties until Apple’s independent providers and self service account techs are told that this is how it is. This is why you should support your local independent Apple service shops, guys.

i switched to mac quite a while ago, but i've always missed that BIOS screen at start up. what's the mac versions of BIOS? is there even a equivalent? how would i throw a BIOS screenie in during the 4 second mac boot screen? i could look it up but you probably know off the top of your head cuz u smaht!

-lisa kippon

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:55:28 -0500

I’m not sure I smell what you’re steppin’ in, but I’ll give you some hints.

If you are looking to change the boot logo on the start up screen (that grey Apple logo screen) you can use something called BootXChanger. They include a few logo replacements and some info on how to make your own. It’s VERY specific what type of images you can use.

If you’re looking for information on the boot process, there’s also useful info you can get by starting up the computer and holding the V key. That will put the computer in verbose mode. Try it out- you can turn verbose mode off using the same method.

Hopefully that answers your question. If not, maybe you can be a little more specific?

OPEN IN PREVIEW, DAMMIT!

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:02:02 -0500

I sort of hate reading PDF in my browser window. I just wish it would download the PDF and open it in Preview.app…

…what’s that you say? You think so too? Well let’s stop whining about it and use the Terminal like big boys and girls! Quit Safari and put this into a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES

There we go. Problem solved. If you ever want to go back to opening PDFs in Safari for some strange reason just change the YES to a NO.

My Tumblr Feature Proposal

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:47:52 -0500

Hey Tumblr, it’s me.

I really love you. I think thats obvious. You guys give me access to all the HTML and CSS I can handle and give beginners all the beautiful templates and ideas they can process. You truly established an awesome community of bloggers (and teenage hipster girls who have an inflated sense of relevance, but I’m ok with that. I mean, some people probably think that about me too). My dashboard is full of varying opinions and interests to reblog and agree or disagree with. Here’s the problem though: I can only do this with other tumblr users and tumblr doesn’t own the internet (yet).

So while there are a ton of great Tumblr blogs, there are also a lot of great non-Tumblr blogs that I subscribe to via RSS. I’ve read these blogs via NetNewsWire and recently started using Socialite as an RSS reader. I LOVE native apps and usually hate web apps, but I prefer your web app to my native RSS readers. You guys let me aggregate RSS feeds to my blog if I want to (I don’t want to), but here’s your missing feature and It is a killer feature:

Why can’t I use my Tumblr Dashboard to read RSS feeds of blogs that aren’t Tumblr blogs? If I could, I would then be able to reblog and comment on stories not posted on Tumblr. Can I has this?

dbreunig: Hunter S Thompson calls tech support....

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:23:40 -0500

dbreunig:

Hunter S Thompson calls tech support. Seriously.

Best thing all week. (via @joeljohnson, via margotdouaihy1)

It’s even funnier when you imagine Johnny Depp doing this in character while messing with wires.

A Possible Fix For Slow Mouse Tracking.

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:15:00 -0500

One thing I’ve always been annoyed by on Mac OS X and Apple mice is that I have to max out the tracking speed to get it to where I can even avoid getting carpal tunnel. I can’t figure out how people with 30” monitors deal with it this way.

A fix for this is once again hidden in the UNIX Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).

Open Terminal and type
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling number

where the word number denotes an actual number. The default maximum mouse speed is 3.0 so I would start with 4.0 or 5.0 to get a feel for the speed increase. To make sure the changes take effect, you probably will want to log out.

BE REALLY CAREFUL WITH THIS. If you set the sensitivity too high your mouse will become unusable.

This also works with the trackpad, which I don’t personally recommend futzing with at all, but for the sake of being your favorite mac helper I’ll give you the command anyways:

defaults write -g com.apple.trackpad.scaling number

The trackpad has a different default max speed of 1.5 so be sure you take that into account when changing the number value. I can’t say I’ve tried it, but I assume using the same number value for both the mouse and the trackpad would be unwise to say the least.

Hmmmm... Why don't guys call when they say they will? Why are tacos so delicious? What should I have for dinner? How are you not a dr who fan? Oh wait, you meant anything about computers? I got nothing.

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:35:00 -0500

-Because women love the mystery and the chase. You can disagree but it explains why guys who actually WOULD call are not on your radar.

-Because they have cheese and meat and tortillas and all sorts of wonderful spicy things in them.

- It’s easy not to like a show that COULD be good if it had any good acting or production value but doesn’t.

-Yes, I did.

-No, you don’t.

(This has been a nonsensical answer to a nonsensical question by forbetaorworse. This is why you don’t ask me about non computer related things. I’m an idiot.)

File Under: Things I signed up to be updated on and would like...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:46:00 -0500

File Under: Things I signed up to be updated on and would like to beta test.

I’ll be ridding myself of as much paper as possible on 2010…

Also: That is Adam Lisagor in this video that he made and is starring in. His blog is here, his iPhone app has an awesome video here and he often posts here. Funny guy.