(via Engadget)

Mostly, I’ve moved over some adventure games from Legend Entertainment and Infocom, and the Pro Pinball series from Cunning Development. Timeshock and the Web both worked flawlessly, but Pro Pinball: Big Race USA needed a little tweaking. Specifically, the DOSBOX configuration needed to have the abstract volume name set and the amount of memory had to be raised. Here’s what the DOSBox Preferences.conf file looks like:


[cpu]
core=dynamic

[autoexec]
ABSTRACT Pro_Pinball_3


Now I have a free XBL Silver account which is free, but I don’t play enough multi-player games to justify $60/yr. for a Gold account. I do currently spend $8/mo. for Netflix streaming — now Microsoft wants me to pay for Gold access just to get at content I already pay for.

To be clear:
I paid for the Xbox 360.
I pay for Netflix.
I pay for my broadband connectivity.

So all I want is for Microsoft to let me use the app (that’s already on my Xbox) to use the things I’ve already paid for. For this they want $50 each and every year (subject to price increases).

Fail.

For the record you can buy a Roku as little as $50 (one-time purchase) and get more currently available apps.

I deleted the old installation using:

tlmgr uninstall

then downloaded the latest incarnation from http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html, then installed it.

I had to update the path in my .tcshrc to point to the new bin directory, and voila! Latest and greatest TeX install.

I then went ahead and ran the post installation steps from my previous post.

Not having had much experience with it, I chose to install Windows 7 (64-bit). In general, the experience has been really nice. The machine is snappy, and the operating system seems well designed and pretty simple to use. I do get annoyed from sometimes that Microsoft has changed long-standing Windows UI features/placement on a whim.

But one problem has plagued this system since I finished it: after going to sleep, it can take up to five minutes for the UI to become responsive. The screen would activate, the mouse would move the cursor, but attempting to use any part of the UI would just fail until the system decided to unfreeze a few minutes later. At which point all the pent up interface actions would suddenly start executing. I’ve been searching Google for a couple months for a solution to no avail — until yesterday. In a discussion of a sleep problem someone suggested turning off “taskbar auto-hide”. I couldn’t believe that would cause this particular problem, but after months with no progress I’m just desperate enough to try anything. Of course, the problem has vanished.

Further searching reveals many people with the same problem and that it’s been around since Windows 7 public beta. That means that Microsoft has had the opportunity to address this bug for almost 2 years. It’s somewhat appalling that they haven’t issued a fix considering there appears to many people who aren’t aware of the work around. Reports indicate that service pack 1, due later this year, will finally resolve the issue, but really Microsoft doesn’t earn anyone’s love or trust with this sort of lack of response to known issues.

What’s wrong with Windows? These days it is quite simply Microsoft’s treatment of it’s customers.

But the irony is that several of their joke products have gone on to become actual products sold through their site, and rather successfully at that. Here’s at least a few:

• Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom
• The ThinkGeek 8-bit Tie
• Personal Soundtrack Shirt
• USB Pet Rock
• Tauntaun Sleeping Bag
• Canned Unicorn Meat
• Space Monolith Action Figure
• My First Bacon – Talking Plush

Well, the latest product to make the jump from joke to sale aisle has just been announced at CES, the iCade (iPad arcade Cabinet). The iCade is a Bluetooth enabled arcade joystick with buttons, as well as iPad stand. It’s being built by ION Audio in conjunction with Thinkgeek, and they are working with Atari (and possibly unnamed others) to bring classic arcade games to the platform. So far, Atari has shown Asteroids as already working and ready for use with the device. The iCade is expected to ship for $99 ($50 less than the fake version), and will be available in two styles, the April Fool’s version available exclusively from Thinkgeek (pictured above) and a more generic one sold through various retailers (shown below).

And yes, I’m looking forward to owning one of these.

The real “aha!” moment came with the introduction of Air Display for the iPad. For the low cost of $10, my iPad becomes a second (or third) monitor for my Mac and PC. I had a chance to test out the viability of mobile programming while at DevHouseDC-1. I did a little iPhone programming using the combination of the Macbook Air and iPad. Most of the main action stayed on the Air, but Apple iOS docs and a iPhone test instance both ran wirelessly on the iPad as external monitor. The results were fantastic, since the iPad support portrait and landscape use (dynamically), it was the perfect screen for documentation pages. Weird side effect, Air Display supports touchscreen input on the iPad, so I was testing my app in the emulator using touch input. I didn’t even notice what I was doing at the time, until someone pointed it out. Pretty surreal moment realizing you’re running touchscreen emulation on a touchscreen.

The combination of my Macbook Air (2010), iPad, and Air Display gets me more resolution than a 15″ Macbook Pro (even with the high resolution screen), and reasonably close to the pixel count of a 17″ Macbook pro (2.08M pixels vs. 2.30M pixels). The additional benefits of choosing the orientation of the screen and touch input probably even make up for most of the difference there. The whole package even comes in lighter than a 15″ Macbook pro, and I have the flexibility to leave either part at home if I don’t plan on doing any coding. Overall, I can highly recommend this setup to anyone who wants to do Mac/iOS development on the road, and it’s worth considering for any mobile coder.

But the initial review of the Macintosh in Byte is great, partially because I didn’t see it at the time, and partially because it reminds me of how new the concepts that the Mac made popular were at the time. The author describes WYSIWYG, menus, the mouse, and the entire desktop metaphor. Finally, there are the quaint touches of a bygone era — using Sieve of Eratosthenes as a Benchmark, defining RAM and ROM, noting the high-resolution (512×342) display. The article gave me a chance to at once look back at the Mac as it was born, and Byte at it’s best.

I’ve had the great pleasure of doing everything from listening to the complete Beatles remastered CD collection to blowing up baddies through these puppies, and I’ve never heard the least bit of distortion and the clarity has been excellent. My biggest complaint is that these speakers have exposed the weakness of my USB stereo adapter. I’m probably going to end up investing in speaker stands and a new USB audio interface soon.

OK, it was the Esquire Augmented Reality give-away, and I only won one of the fifty webcams (Blue Microphones Eyeball 2.0), but it was a nice surprise to receive it in the mail. They were suppose to notify me back in January, but I never heard a word; it just arrived.

As far as getting spam, that particular contest didn’t increase my incidence of spam. Probably because at the time I was actually a subscriber to the print edition of Esquire. I do wonder if it helped my chances though…