Randoms

The question of “which Mac?” has been resolved. In the first instance we’re going to pick up a cheap Macbook, because the old Dell laptop is kinda crappy. My partner can use it for classes, we can use it when traveling, and should my employment circumstances change such that I’d be needing to work both out of the office and occasionally away from home, well, it’d suffice.

Later on I’ll take another look at a Mac Pro, though, as a kick-arse desktop+server-replacement combo.

Fixed the Toppy, which has been giving us trouble pretty much since the ABC renamed to ABC1/ABC2. Nice to finally have that sorted, really just required sitting down and stuffing about with it for a bit. The next step is to chuck on an autoexpiry addon that’ll do things like “delete 7:30 Report older than 48 hours”.

I’ve gotten fairly bored with Warcrack. Don’t have time for the end-game content, so it’s all just more of the same. We’ve renewed our City of Heroes subscriptions to play around with that for a bit, shall have to see how it goes. We’ve spent some time playing today (both sides) and have been enjoying it.

Am considering the merits of cancelling my WoW account until the next expansion comes out. Will give it a few weeks and see how I feel about it.

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Tags: Games, Mac, Random by matt
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Newish toys

The latest addiction here is AudioSurf. Great fun, but I am a little cautious about making an unqualified recommendation because it seems to be a bit buggy.

The general drift, if you haven’t already heard of it, is that it creates a track from a music file, and then you drive along it doing a colour-match puzzle. Tracks and tiles (”cars”) are calculated from the music. So if you put on something like Joni Mitchell’s River you’re in for a smooth ride, but the Beasts of Bourbon’s Ten Wheels for Jesus is rather trickier.

Bugwise, we’ve so far come across one where minimizing crashes the game, and rather more frequently anything that needs QuickTime to decode doesn’t work from a network share.

Yesterday’s little experiment involved renting I Am Legend from iTunes. This works fine with store credit but you do have to tie the AppleTV to your US account — merely being authorised to play via your iTunes installation doesn’t suffice.

The movie itself was surprisingly good. I am always dubious about remakes, but this was (a) quite different to The Omega Man — Neville is believable as a scientist, for a start — and (b) better than it too unless you’re after a 70’s Charlton Heston strutfest.

Will use the rental service again. The experience was pretty straightforward. If more content were captioned — and captions on AppleTV weren’t tiny — we’d probably buy/rent a lot, but as-is it’ll do for cases where my partner is out of town and I want something to watch.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Tags: Games, appletv by matt
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