The Daily Bits

October 31. I have always loved this day and still do. Last year I got my laughs by sending Creepy one of those screamer videos. His reaction was this:

Today we (Mike and I) were determined to have an impact of the same magnitude or bigger. Let me say… we succeeded. Basically what would happen is if you had over 1000 posts or were selected you got a nice little treat (or trick if you were on the receiving end). The treat would entail you being greeted with a nice scream a certain time interval after loading the page.

Apparently Creepy wet himself. See more reactions on this page.

All in all, WE win again. Just wait until next year

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Well yesterday when I got home I had two much desired packages waiting… Leopard and my battery. I havn’t installed the battery yet as I want to follow the battery calibration procedure. I have installed Leopard and it’s exactly what it was thought to be.

I havn’t had a chance to test out time machine yet as I don’t have a dedicated external hard drive that I can use. I’m not sure if I will get one or not seeing as I am away most of the time. Apple advertised Leopard as having “over 300 new features.” Most of the 300 are smallish type things. My favourite out of them all has to be the upgraded Finder (including coverflow and quick look).

MattVortex will have an article about Leopard in the November Informer which should be out sometime late tomorrow. Here are some pics to hold you over

This is what a Windows share originally appears as in Leopard. It’s a nice inside joke and all but it really should have been removed for RTM.

I updated the image to look like this via an article on digg.

Oh and a desktop shot:

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PS: MQ gave me this great gift.

Very creative and unusual weapons, the mostly guns and rifles. This is maybe some kind of gadget but those are very pimped weapons. Maybe and that could be the name dot those story, ” Pimped Weapons “.

I’d say the award goes to:

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read more | digg story

This weeks game is a rather hard game… The object is to trap the cat in the play area. For the record I have not completed it.

You can play it here.

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This week it’s a game recommended by Trekkie. Basically this is a flash version of Dominion Wars. You go around running freight runs and then if you run into a Dominion vessel try and destroy it. It’s not as as easy as it sounds. Trekkie actually completed it whereas I did not. Definitely something you want to try if you like the Dominion War.

You can play it here.

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The last one before Leopard comes next Friday…

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Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky “second Earth” circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

Off to the Moon -> Mars -> “Second Earth.” This is a truly amazing discovery, if the plan is to get to Mars by 2030 I am pretty sure we can do this by 2100 or sooner. We aren’t going to be going there at light speed seeing as it’s totally impossible. It would definately have to be done with a generational ship. Not an easy task… might as well practice with getting to the Moon and Mars first

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read more | digg story

Today I was doing some work on my MacBook Pro as usual. The battery got down to 30% (was using wifi, bright screen, etc…) and just died out without warning. When I got home I looked up the problem and it appears to be a battery issue. I phoned Apple customer support, I’m still in the 1 year of hardware warranty but the 90 days of complementary AppleCare has ended long ago.

After waiting about 15 minutes in line for a support rep I lasted about 2 minutes on the phone. Basically I was presented with 3 options:

• Buy the AppleCare extension which I’m sure Apple wants me to do. This would cost about $300 and extend my support for another 2 years. It would enable them to do the “software troubleshooting” and fix any hardware issues that come up.
• The next choice was to spend $69 to spend some time with this representative and go through some troubleshooting on my system. I’m assuming this would include checking battery health, cycles, and any strange settings. Then if this was leading to a hardware problem I could have the machine sent away to be fixed. This is not an option. This is my main computer and can not be without it for an extended period of time.
• The final option was to simply take a URL and troubleshoot the problem myself. This is of course the route that I took as I don’t want to pay $69 just to find out it’s not something hardware related.

After poking around Apple’s support site, macrumors, and Google I am pretty sure that it is a battery problem. The problems described in Apple’s battery exchange program such as shutting off when the battery is still measured to have a charge in it. The options at this point are to either buy my own battery ($159) or keep pressing on Apple support to replace it seeing as it does exhibit those symptoms.

I will be keeping this updated as this issue develops.

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Wow no posts this week… I guess it’s because I’ve been busy or there’s simply nothing worthy of being posted. Anyways Flashy Friday time.

This week it is a little exercise. You must spot the 5 differences between the two pictures. To do this simply click where you think something is different. The count will decrease as you get them right.

Play it here.

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Well for some of you Star Trek is utterly painful. I just want to illustrate here that it could have been much much worse on Star Trek Voyager. The story is that they originally had picked someone else to play the role of Captain Janeway. I can even say that watching Voyager with Captain Bujold would have been painful

She just seems too old, unpleasant, and simply does not have enough energy for the role. Here’s what the final version of Janeway turned out to be.

For those of you who do not want to watch Voyager, skip to 8:45.

Lets just say the executive producers made the right choice… I just wanted to show this to everyone since it’s something not commonly known.

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Somtimes it not as easy as one would think. For the better part of the afternoon I’ve been playing around with my raw footage from two weeks ago. Ideally I’d like something that serves as a reminder of what it took to get 99 farming, not something that will bore everyone to sleep. So far I’ve come up with “Raw Copy” which is unedited without transitions or music.

Since this one is purely raw, I won’t be making a high-res version available. I’ve seen many videos in my time, some good, some very bad. I want to be somewhere in the middle or near the good side I have an idea but I don’t want to elaborate any further.

The main problem I have is finding suitable music. I have a good selection of music accumulated over the past 10 years or so. Most of the music is slightly Star Trek related I also have a good selection which would be fine for a battle or for an aggressive skill. I’ve yet to find something suitable for Farming.

My search continues…

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This week is a puzzle rather than a straightforward game. Basically the idea is to make sure that each hexagon only has a certain number of hexagons around it. The first step is to take note of how many are allowed. If it says 1 then only 1 hexagon is allowed to touch the other hexagon. Levels get harder (of course) by limiting how many hexagons you can move.

Play it here.

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I’ve had the MacBook Pro for slightly over 6 months now. I can tell you that it is the best computer I have ever had. It’s just as fast as the day I got it and very reliable. You may remember I made this post about how there were a few things that bothered me. I’ll go through those now.

• System settings: Pretty much found where everything is and learnt the “control panel” back in April.
• Keyboard shortcuts: There’s still the odd occasion when I’ll press Win + D to hide my windows and see the desktop. But for most cases I find F11 ok.
• Office: This is the only PowerPC remnant on my system. I am waiting with eager anticipation for Office 2008. Beta is due sometime in January. I tried the new iWork but there’s just no comparison between it and Office. If I didn’t have to open up and be able to deliver Office documents I would definitely be using it. I know you can, but I just want it to work.
• CS3 came out and it works at a reduced standard for some things. Photoshop is decent, but Dreamweaver is a overloaded POS. The FTP doesn’t work sometimes which is really problematic. To top it off it really just feels like a port of a Windows application. To remedy this I will be using TextWrangler from Bare Bones software. It has built in FTP with a SFTP option which is good for when I’m at school or on an open network.
• Browser: Still using Firefox as the RSBandB forums don’t display properly in Safari.
• 2GB RAM has really paid off. I am able to run Windows/Linux in VMWare or Parallels without much of a decrease in general performance. Not that I need to run it all the time but it works.
• Screenshots: I have wrote two apple script screenshot applications. Basically all they do is use the built in screencapture unix program and send the output to a folder with an incremented file name. They get the job done but I was unable to add a date into the filename.

One thing that I wish I had Windows for was Messenger. It just is so much nicer on Windows. The mac version is about 2 versions behind the Windows one. It doesn’t even have support for audio clips. This was the first version where “emote stealing” was added (6.0). Adium never worked properly for me. It would drop messages and it was a paint to start group conversations. Not to say that MSN doesn’t have faults… it does.

Aside from MSN my mac experience has been great. I would highly advise anyone who wants a new computer to get one. In my mind if you just play Runescape, do school work, surf the web, and check email a mac is fine for you. This is the majority of the market out there.

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Took quite a while… works for the most part (few little things, not bugs, but annoyances).

Also thanks to MQ for this excellent sig.

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