Eagle and The Earth Amazing. Eagle looks as if it was cobbled together with a few rivets, tin foil and an Elastoplast
Cross-platform version of the classic game Thrust One of my favourite games; I broke the return key off my BBC Model B playing it
Mystery Creature Lurks in Central Maryland Looks like a Hyena crossed with a Whippet
The Evolution of Movie Robots Well movie robots may be evolving, but the films are getting worse
Quicktime Panorama of the Apollo Moon Landing One for the conspiracy theorists to scrutinise
xACT converts FLAC (lossless) compressed audio into AIFF or WAV format for burning onto CD Useful for those live Calexico tracks at archive.org
MP3 Blogs and wget Interesting usage of wget to regularly download MP3s from your favourite MP3 blogs
If you press the lozenge shaped Aqua button – the one that seems to do different things for different applications – on the top right of the BitTorrent client window, you can restrict the maximum upload speed to an arbitrary value. Useful if you want to stop BitTorrent from hogging your bandwidth, especially if you’ve got an HTTP server set up etc. Just thought I’d point that out as it’s not an obvious feature and understandably so; if every BitTorrent user restricted their upload speed, the software would suddenly become less useful. Hmm… maybe I should keep schtum.
Jobs and the new iPod on the cover of Newsweek Looks like Steve’s been the victim of an over-zealous Photoshop wiz
Bill Thompson’s written something worth reading for a change
Please excuse the lack of stylesheet. I logged onto to my Mac this morning to find that the root folder of helium-3 was strangely missing. I don’t remember deleting my website, unless I did it in my sleep.
Bush walks away when asked a sensitive question about Enron and Kenneth Lay (via Submit Response)
An excellent resource for information on Fink and Apple’s X11
The War of the Worlds book covers, 1898 to present (mine’s the 1975 Pan edition)
Quiet, Please: ‘the case for silence in the movies’ (via City of Sound)
The iPod Mini is to be launched in the UK on the 24th of July. Here’s me thinking that it had been launched in the UK ages ago, hence a number of fruitless ‘window shopping’ visits to John Lewis’.
Moore on filesharing of F9/11: No prob (read Lawrence Lessig’s reaction)
Jeremy Keith offers some interesting thoughts on Apple’s Dashboard and Microsoft’s XAML
Colin Powell does Disco (RealPlayer Video) (who needs satirical Flash animations when world leaders can ridicule themselves?)
Apple used to be the king of usability engineering; thinking deep about user behaviors, and making things just work right. This means anticipating needs, making things broadly applicable, and thinking ahead enough that things aren’t constantly changing version to version, because they work well for most people the first time. That’s not the new Apple way; which is quickly slapping marketing features on, that demo well, but aren’t highly usable (for many people).
The rest of this article isn’t much to write home about, but I think that paragraph is very true in relation to many elements of OS X.
Commodore, makers of home computing classics such as the Pet, the Vic 20 and the Amiga, have produced a range of MP3 players. With names like the mPet and the eVic, they’re clearly aimed at retro-loving 20/30 something geeks like me. Most of the models have mere megabytes of storage space, but the eVic has an iPod rivalling 20 Gigabytes of space.
The link is from Slashdot, so the Commodore site may be slow for a while
