My new friends at MacBU dropped me a note to remind me that there are two new Microsoft downloads available for those of us who use real computers. They are both betas, but both are worth grabbing as they address specifically vexing issues that are really annoying in the current products.
First up is the all-new 2.0 release of Remote Desktop Connection. This one addresses a lot of problems that always prevented RDC from being anywhere near as cool and/or usable as Citrix. Most notably you can now have multiple sessions open with a single client – and as an added bonus, cut and paste now work right. If you use RDC at all, get this now.
Also popping into the beta lineup is the re-release of the “Open XML” converter for Office 2007 files. “Open XML” is the new file format that Micrrosoft is pimping … the name is actually pretty funny, since the format is neither “open” nor actual “XML” but we never said that the Redmond guys didn’t have a sense of humour. There isn’t much different here except that this cures the one big flaw with the original converter – namely, that it didn’t work.
As noted, these are both betas, so don’t blame me if they crash your hard drive or back up your toilet. And as always, the MacBU team rules.
Confession time: I am addicted to this hard-to-find magazine called Games. You almost never ever ever see it on newsstands, and junkies like me are mostly subscribers … if you have the bug, you don’t want to be taking a chance on missing an issue. Games follows the same format each month – a couple of feature articles on gaming in general, some news bits, reviews of the latest board and video games, maybe a contest or two … and the actual meat of each edition, a hefty centre section of pencil puzzles. Crosswords, acrostics, rebuses, cryptograms, you name it. Some of these are the run-of-the-mill things that you see in the diversionary section of your daily newspaper, and some – most, actually – are interesting and engaging things that are either too obscure or too new to show up in a mainstream publication. An example that you may have heard of is “Sudoku” which first showed up in the March 2002 issue (i just happen to have it right here) as an example of what Japanese commuters were doing to amuse themselves each morning.
Odd fact: According to the introductory article in this issue, Sudoku was actually created by an American but the publishers of the magazine he worked for decided that it was too “abstract” for the average reader on this side of the pond. Who knew?
Anyway. This post is not actually about Sudoku, it is about another puzzler called (among other things) “Picross” – a sort of a logic puzzle where you fill in a blank grid according to numbered clues and end up with a picture. These little gems were also introduced to North America in Games, back in 1994 – once again as an example of what Japanese puzzlers were slaving over on the morning trains and busses. They range from simple to startlingly elaborate, and are strangely addictive and satisfying to solve. The larger and more detailed ones are also fiendishly difficult to create, since you have to have both a recognizable picture and a set of clues that can only lead to one possible solution. I absolutely love the damn things.
Which, finally, and in a seriously roundabout way, brings us to the point of this post. There have been numerous sites to offer on-line Picross puzzles, and some of them have been more than passable, but there is a new one up that has a couple of things that separate it from the crowd. One, there is a progression of tutorial puzzles in the “feature puzzles” section that will allow you to get up to speed on the things if you have never seen them before. And two, the web site is formatted for the Wii’s web browser, so you can sit on your couch and play with your Wiimote. Yes, you can also play them on your regular computer web browser – just be aware that the sizing and formatting of the display might seem a little odd. There are also tons of user-submitted puzzles (of varying quality) and a “puzzle of the day” which is usually pretty good.
Get Over You by The Undertones. Way back in the day, this was the song that made me want to be in a band. Everything that was good and righteous about punk rock and pop music is wrapped up in one wonderful little package of guitar, drums, and warbling teen angst. There are a number of Undertones songs that meet this criteria but this one is, well, perfect.
Please note that this dates from the era prior to Feargal Sharkey completely sucking.
Apple seeded yet another new build of Leopard to developers this weekend, and – while it is not yet labeled as a “release candidate” – it is pretty damn close to what we will be getting when the thing hits the stores this fall. After two days of playing with it I can tell you that pretty much everything that is new in this release is cosmetic in nature (with one big exception, which we will get to momentarily). To wit:
The “3D dock” now has even more “depth” due to a new “zebra crossing” style separator
Finder windows can now show the path to any highlighted icon as a permanent feature
The menu bar icons now match the menu bar itself (whew!)
The “System Preferences” icon now just coincidentally happens to look like the one on the iPhone
You might be saying “big deal” at this point, and I would mostly agree (although i do have to admit that the menu bar thing was really bugging me). But the real gift in this build is that Talk Google support is once again built in to iChat. A lot of people wondered why the fancy new iChat that they gave us at WWDC didn’t have Talk Google support, and there were some serious grumblings about it. Crisis averted.
Once in a while an item comes along on a Monday morning that just makes your whole week. This is one of those items. According to the folks at Sony the piss-poor sales of the PS3 are a good thing, because (as noted previously in These Very Pages) they lose so much money on each console sold.
You might need to stop for a moment here and let that sink in.
Now, I am not an investor in the corporate entity known as Sony. But if I was, well, I have to think that the strategy of “building a product that loses staggering amounts of money on each unit built and then hoping that we don’t sell very many so we can minimize our losses” wouldn’t be the kind of thing that would make me very happy. Just saying.
So I got this spiffy invite to attend this evening’s Rock Band media launch bash – sadly, I am not in L.A. this week, so I won’t be attending. I do know a couple of cats who will be there tonight, however, so we should have full details on all the dripping goodness in the morning. In the meantime, take a close look at the invite, especially the dizzying array of logos at the bottom:
Unless my eyes are totally failing me, there does not seem to be anything that looks like a PS3 logo. This could mean one of two things: Either it is nothing more than an innocent oversight, or Harmonix has dropped PS3 support like a wet load of dog shit. My money is on the latter – sales of the PS3 are still completely sucky, and developing for the PS3 costs a boatload of money. This is a combination that does not lend itself towards any sort of visible return on investment. Sony needs Rock Band a lot more than Rock Band needs Sony. In fact, Rock Band might not need Sony at all. Stay tuned.
Clones by Alice Cooper. If it’s not on your ‘pod, it should be. Just make sure you get the proper Flush The Fashion version, not that dreadful remix from Mascara & Monsters. Bah.
TubeSock seems to be a favourite of the types of antisocial weirdoes that visit this page. Thus it is my solemn duty to do two things:
1: Inform you that TubeSock has just been updated to 2.0.2. This adds the ability to rip just the audio from a YouTube clip for older or non-video iPods. All video iPods are of course fully supported, and now you can rip YouTube stuff directly to a PSP as well.
Let’s just say that you have come into possession of an iPhone and you live outside of the wireless coverage area of AT&T. Perhaps you live in another country and have a demo unit in hand, or bought one on the grey market, or whatever. If you are handy with a hex editor you can still activate the phone via iTunes, and have it ready to take whatever SIM cards you might have lying around.
You need to have the latest version of iTunes installed – version 7.3 – for any version of Windoze that is Win2K or newer (Windoze running under Parallels or VMWare will work just fine). Once you have your iTunes updated, spark up your favourite hex editor and make these entries at the specified locations:
Offset 0257074: 28
Offset 0257013: 33C9B1
Offset 2048912: 33C0C3
Then add this entry to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts :
127.0.0.1 albert.apple.com
This combination works to “short circuit” the built-in iTunes connections to AT&T and force the system to look for a wireless activation server at your local host.
Finally, download and run the Phone Activation Server (source code is here if you want to see how it works) and run it. If your Windoze install does not have the .net 2.0 framework installed you have to grab it here. Then, with your phone plugged in and powered off, select the activation routine in iTunes.
Your iPhone will now magically spring to life, will full iPod and WiFi functions active and running. It will also be ready to take any grey-market unbound SIM card you might have lying around and work just fine on any EDGE or GSM network. The only thing that will be missing is the visual call ID, and I think you can probably live without that for now.
Everyone and their dog has already linked to this but I do not care. There is so much meat in this footage that I feel a burning need to post it here. If you are pondering the basics of the gameplay, it appears that the instruments are arranged as guitar – drums – bass from left to right across the game screen. At the top you will see the vocal cues that are taken directly from Karaoke Revolution Party – which is a good thing, since the singing mechanics in KRP are essentially perfect.
As for the rest of it, well, I will let you draw your own conclusions of awesomeness. Enjoy.
Gene was kind enough to pass along a link to the complete set list of the Guitar Hero – Rocks the 80s. It looks like a pretty good representation – if you watched MuchMusic or MTV during that august decade, you saw videos for pretty much every one of these songs. There are no big surprises in the final set list aside from Limozeen’s big hit “Because, It’s Midnite” … but getting both The Vapors and The Go-gos is a pretty sweet little bonus. Set your alarm clocks for July 17th, dig out your rugger pants, and get ready to rock!
NOTE FOR YOUNGER READERS: They really did used to play videos on MTV … 24 hours a day! Really!
