Blog / Apple

Mythic Quest Thoughts

Everything that drives me crazy about the first two episodes of this TV show. I watched it to episode 5, but these are all the notes I took. I couldn’t go on, it was too stupid.

A bunch of awful people watching an awful trailer. Also Danny Pudi.

Continue reading »

iPhones and lizard brains

A friend in Tallahassee broke his iPhone and wanted me to talk him out of buying a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active. I failed, but he likes the phone. Here’s how he rationalizes his purchase.

I feel like with the money spent I am getting a new toy per se to play with, whereas the iPhone I kind of think of it like this, you have this pretty, reliable, and safe girlfriend that you know won’t let you down (iPhone), and then you meet this exotic stripper (Samsung) and your practical side says “stay with the reliable” but your lizard brain is telling you to go with the stripper, and you know it can cause you some heartbreak down the road but it might be worth it in the short term haha!

I love it.

Paranoia+

The squealing of the Internet over Google’s purchase of Nest baffles me. Sure it’s not exactly their mandate of organizing the world’s information, but I fail to see the pants-wetting terror of an advertising company having access to my most personal integer: the temperature of my living room. It looks like another attempt by Google to get its hands an excellent hardware manufacturer ala Motorola. Even in an apartment I desperately want a Nest thermostat and some of those Protect smoke detectors.

Continue reading »

Backup

Insurance won’t cover Hello Games office flood, dev says

Hello Games’ studio was flooded on Christmas Eve after a nearby river broke its bank, resulting in the loss of computers, furniture and personal items.

Backup. Then backup again. Then offsite backup. Then rotate offsite backup.

I wish some news article would mention if the Hello Games team was using offsite backup. It seems dangerous to store your game code on Dropbox or even in a private Github repository, but the physical world is equally happy to destroy your possessions.

Continue reading »

OpenEmu

Sorry, did I say having a Mac mini server was boring? I was wrong. Thanks to OpenEmu it’s fun and exciting! And fun. With a Wii Remote and a Mac you can use the most beautiful, smooth, and functional multiple emulator system on the planet.

So... beautiful...

Yeah, it looks like Plex and iTunes had a baby. But it’s a native Mac app and centralizes a dozen different classic systems. There’s fullscreen support and good performance and no lag! Even the preferences menu is a joy to behold. I’m overwhelmed.

Continue reading »

Mulling Mac mini

I’m trying to remember why I need this Mac mini.

I bought it last year to serve as a hub for classic games once it became clear that the Ouya was an underpowered laggy mess with awful emulation software. But it turns out the Mac’s controller lag is worse. Plus I failed to index my Wii Virtual Console library. Everything I want to play is already there and lag-free through a Classic Controller.

I could display photos… except my Apple TV already does that.

Continue reading »

iOS 7 adoption

Apple’s App Store Usage Numbers Suggest iOS 7 Adoption at 74 Percent

Remember those people who thought iOS 7 adoption would be slower than iOS 6’s last year because people would reject the new UI design? Didn’t happen.

Source: Daring Fireball

Tons of people are upgrading to iOS 7, that’s undeniable. It has a lot of great new features like Control Center and background app updating. It also features a hideous design that’s somewhere between Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Android’s Holo but without the polish of either. Not hard to go on Dribbble and find better iOS 7 designs.

What if people did reject the new design? How would we know?

Continue reading »

Marketing is a feature

Some things about the smartphone wars are objective. The Nexus 5 has a larger screen than the iPhone 5s, while the iPhone has a fingerprint sensor and the Nexus doesn’t. If those were the only two differences of the devices you’d choose which one is most important to you and that’d be the end of it.

Our digital computing world is hardly that binary (cough). Each type of phone has lots of features, some you can compare (processor, RAM, screen size) and others you can’t always line up (user experience, app quality, privacy). So we have endless debates about which phone is better because of which reasons. Android phones typically win on objective features and iPhones tend to win on the softer, subjective ones.

Why is Apple General Grievous?

Continue reading »

iPad Air

What surprises you about the iPad Air is how small it feels.

For the most part that’s intentional. The side bezels are smaller, the back is thinner, the batteries and screen are lighter. But the effect is to make the apparent size of the screen about 20% smaller. You marvel at the feel of the device in your hands, then wonder why they’re charging the same price for less pixels.

Except… oh, wait. Yeah.

In theory I still hate iOS 7 with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns, but after converting my iPhone to the new operating system I’m running out of steam. It’s still bad in many ways, but there are some thoughtful touches.

Continue reading »

Tags

History

  1. Using FFVIIHook on Steam Deck for Final Fantasy VII Remastered
  2. The Last Rug Pull
  3. Mythic Quest Thoughts
  4. My PGP Public Key
  1. Using OBS Studio and ffmpeg to Record Games for YouTube
  1. On Criticism
  2. Using Premium Verizon CDN to run React's BrowserRouter
  1. 307 Pages I Got Back, Part 5
  2. 307 Pages I Got Back, Part 4
  3. 307 Pages I Got Back, Part 3
  4. FFMPEG commands for audio/video mixing
  5. 307 Pages I Got Back, Part 2
  6. 307 Pages I Got Back, Part 1
  1. 372 Pages I Never Got Back
  2. Bandits. Simple as that.
  3. My Sixteen Games
  1. Configuring Samba 5 to share a folder with full write permissions to guest users
  2. Me Suffer Now
  3. Peace Among Worlds
  4. Halo: Installation 07
  5. From Zero to Hero of Time
  6. Remember to Forget
  7. That Next Next Next
  8. Pillars of Whateveritwas
  9. The Average Saiyan Warrior
  10. Bravely Diffident
  1. The Best Jurassic Park Sequel
  2. Hi, I'm HERO
  1. Blackout
  2. Landing gear deployed
  3. So Wildstar
  4. It's that very special time of year, Greendale
  5. iPhones and lizard brains
  6. From the context it is clear what you mean
  7. Do you still want to meet?
  8. Kill meeee
  9. Dark Souls II playthroughs
  10. The Amazing Spider-dope
  11. Final Archstone
  12. More Archstone
  13. Archstone
  14. Horror-ible
  15. Paranoia+
  16. Old Ben on the mountain
  17. Target blank
  18. Clan Centurio knows how to treat its hard working members
  19. Steam Machines
  20. We shall l'cie
  21. Cooling a Playstation 3
  22. Next gen resmolutions
  23. New Year's in Ivalice
  1. The commander is ashore
  2. Fantasies twelve and thirteen
  3. Into the Nexus
  4. Backup
  5. Collector's cretins
  6. The good olde days
  7. OpenEmu
  8. Mulling Mac mini
  9. Driving blind
  10. Hyrule Warriors
  11. Rosalina
  12. Elite: Dangerous
  13. Free play
  14. The Desolation of Smaug
  15. Fallout free
  16. iOS 7 adoption
  17. Xbox, did you see that?
  18. Goodbye, Stanley
  19. Wag the tail
  20. Gold coin for your thoughts?
  21. Beginning Bitcoin
  22. Final Fantasy VIII
  23. The Happy Room and the Stairs
  24. Stanley entered the door on the left
  25. Base secured. Standby for new orders.
  26. Single payer video game
  27. Storm in a teacup
  28. A trapped wolf will cut off its own leg
  29. Assassin's appendix
  30. The wheels on the bus
  31. Riding dirty
  32. Marketing is a feature
  33. Everything is permitted
  34. What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
  35. Day One
  36. Obsolete
  37. Xbox One hunting
  38. Uphill both ways
  39. Recabling fever
  40. Next gen jitters
  41. Thor: The Dark World
  42. Nintenbored
  43. I will see to it personally
  44. Reviewing the Playstation 4
  45. Node Foreeever
  46. Knockin' on Node's door
  47. Junk Jack X
  48. iPad Air
  49. World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor
  50. The fastest way
  51. Internet Explorer-tan
  52. Back to the city
  53. Apocalypse cancelled
  54. Captain Zack Power
  55. It's crime time!
  56. People are protesting low land values
  1. Take a girl for a ride
  2. For Tyria!
  3. Guild Wars 2 is a bad game
  4. Reformat syndrome
  5. At the Nexus of madness
  6. It is now safe to use approved electronic devices
  7. iPhone tremors
  8. A challenger appearz
  9. Surface-level compromises
  10. 7.85 inch... oh no
  11. Magical, revolutionary advertising
  12. Gamer Theater
  13. Deus Ex: Human Revolution reflections
  14. Thoughts on Apple TV
  15. Fixing Apache on Mountain Lion
  16. Insanely Twisted Shadow Remnant
  17. Dark Souls
  18. EYE on Exodus
  19. Zeemote
  20. The Rolling Dead
  21. Sparrow flies away
  22. Memo to Charles Schumer: Publishers are not books
  23. The Binding of Seacrest County
  24. Brave
  25. Consuming iPads
  26. Frequently Asked Questions
  27. AMAZING MAN OR MENACE?
  28. Twitter cracking down
  29. Synthetic meat
  30. How I use Facebook
  31. Sublime Text hits version 2
  32. I have to touch it!
  33. EA as underdog
  34. Yes, I would like to gno mor
  35. My format: guardian
  36. Bad. Ass.
  37. How I organize
  38. Summer beach parties are coming
  39. Weyland Science Mission Procedures and Precautions
  40. Setting up Mac for PHP and Ruby websites
  41. Is there any life in the Vita?
  42. Do. Or do not. There is a 30-day trial.
  1. Moving to Mac
  2. You know what's wrong with Skyrim these days?
  3. I didn't ask for these boss battles
  4. This holy place has been desecrated
  5. Jordan's Mod Guide: FreeSpace + FreeSpace 2
  6. Jordan's Mod Guide: Descent + Descent 2 Rebirth
  7. It's a good day to kill, your majesty!
  1. Flower review imagined as a conversation between Morpheus and Neo in The Matrix
  2. The inhabitants of the Gayzor mountains
  1. A better life, underground
  2. Monster Captain Fn'Gaaah
  3. For starters, I'm going to do something about those robots!