Archive for category Appley
Alt MAC
Posted by Tom in Appley, Games people will never play..., gnomes of gaming on May 7, 2010
So STEAM finally comes to MAC next week while I don’t plan on loading it right away on my Mac, I thought I would share a tidbit of the improvements coming with the Mac version of STEAM. Please note that this is aimed at the Mac gamer set… so if you aren’t a gamer you probably won’t get these. If you’ve ever used Mac you will get them all.
Team Fortress 2
When engineers build turrets in the Mac version of Team Fortress 2, the turrets will cost twice as much (in metal) as the Windows equivalent. However, the turrets will be curvy and shiny, and emit a pleasant noise as they shoot the enemy down.
The Heavy’s chain gun will be lighter and smaller, and of course curvier and shinier. It will weigh merely 1.8 pounds and fold up nicely to ultra-thin dimensions, allowing the Heavy to move quickly at all times. It will keep track of the Heavy’s appointments and phone numbers with a stylish, yet elegantly functional, interface. However, it will only shoot rubber bullets.
And my current favorite…
Left 4 Dead
All custom maps in the Mac version of Left 4 Dead will have to be approved by Apple, which will reject any maps that feature nudity, suggestive content, political satire or zombies.
Two more main characters will be added: a balding, schlubby-looking guy in a suit, and a young dude with tousled hair and a semi-beard whom you will immediately want to shoot. However, you should not shoot the tousled guy, because teamwork is important to winning the game — and because it’s a lot more satisfying to see him dragged to his death by a tongue zombie.
Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/05/alt-text-valve-apple/#ixzz0nHqReIup
Windows 7… Mac… And you… Part 2
Posted by Tom in Appley, General Carnage and Bloodshed, Not doing things the easy way, Observations that no one else cares about on January 21, 2010
So the Bootcamp Windows 7 install on the Macbook Pro (MBP) has been not nearly as nice as the original XP install in 2007. Research has turned up that the machine I have (at just under 3 years old) is right at the cut off for 64bit Win7 compatibility and if I were one rev newer I wouldn’t be having nearly these problems. So with that in mind, my experiences are far from typical. However in the hope to save some other poor soul who has the same model MBP as I (and this is my way of documentation in case I have to do all of this crap again) i present to you now part 2 of the MBP/Win7 saga.
After getting the ISO built the next trick is to install the OS which isn’t so hard you just kick bootcamp in MAC OS to start the windows installer and a reboot later your off and running. Where I had issues was after the first reboot I kept getting a hung install on the “completing installation” screen. The trick here is to have nothing but the power cord plugged into the computer and don’t touch the damn thing… If you see the three little dots (…) stop moving for more then 5 minutes… Start over with the install and do it again. I had to do it three times, I can’t tell you why it does it just that it does.
The good news is once the install completes and you start filling out all of the stuff to finally setup windows most all of the networking stuff is going right out of the gate. So now you have to install the bootcamp drivers for Windows 7 (bootcamp 3.1)… and here is where more fun starts.. you have to start with the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers on the MAC OS 10.6 DVD, but if your using the Santa Rosa Mac and a 64 bit install of Windows they 3.0 bootcamp drivers won’t work…. easiest way to get around that is to follow the instructions here…. http://blog.andersonshatch.com/2009/01/11/windows-7-x64-on-a-macbook-pro-guide/ And in case you can’t follow directions like me, you need to right click and run as administrator on the cmd.exe not the setup.exe on the DVD.
So after that… you now can load all of the updates to Windows
And hopefully be on your happy trails…
Windows 7… Mac… and You!
Posted by Tom in Appley, General Carnage and Bloodshed, Not doing things the easy way, Observations that no one else cares about on January 20, 2010
So if you haven’t been keeping up on the Apple Blogs, bootcamp finally supports Winders 7!
I decided to jump in head first into this fun little adventure this evening…. and things…. well things didn’t go as well as I thought they could have gone… and there are more then a few landmines.
So here is the setup…. I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.2 on a Mid 2007 Mac Book Pro (2.4 GHZ Santa Rosa) bootcamped with Windows XP 32 Bit (20GB Partition)
If you read all of the docs from Apple they tell you to boot into Windows and do the upgrade from there… and just like a real Windows XP to 7 upgrade you have to do a “Custom/Advanced” upgrade to make the jump.
So I reboot the Mac and when I reboot I boot off of the DVD drive and select the Windows 7 x64 DVD and hit enter… I’m then presented with a option
“1.
2.
Select CD-Rom Boot Type:_”
OH and just to make it real interesting my keyboard doesn’t work… nor does my USB keyboard.
I do what any logical IT person would do… I reboot 4 or 5 more times… all with the same result.
So when your a IT guy and you have these issues there is really only one thing left to do… GOOGLE THAT SHIT!’
A couple of other folks have run into this same problem…
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/servervirtualization/thread/a8ae28ed-daf8-4e47-a356-84fb57cf9016/
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=467704
The basic cruxt is that there is a format mis-match between this MBP and a file in the EFI boot folder on the disk… A bit more googling and following links the best method to fix the file problem in the EFI folder is to extract the DVD to a ISO file and then reburn it to a new disk.
And the easiest way to do that is here…
http://sergiomcfly.blogspot.com/2008/04/select-cd-rom-boot-type-when-installing.html
At this point you have a burnable disk and should be able to proceed with the upgrade.
Stupid Mac…
Cold Cats and Hamsters on Wheels…
Posted by Tom in Appley, General Carnage and Bloodshed, Linkage, Seriously?!, TreoRiffic on September 2, 2009
So as is becoming tradition a new update OS X has come out and I have upgraded at the absolute earliest moment possible. And as is tradition I am having one problem that no one else on the internet seems to be having… My DivX movies have no sound! It’s only in QuickTimeX but it’s still damn annoying. Other then that the hype is true… I got space back on my hard drive (and not just because of how the OS reports the space the install footprint is smaller), things do move faster (not much but enough to be noticeable), and it’s totally worth the $30.
Biggest difference… when I’m running VMware my MAC does not instantly kick into overdrive with the fans.
The gym continues… and I seem to be making incremental progress. Treadmill time at 15 minutes is officially “No Problem” at what for me is almost a full run. That is the biggest difference I have noticed, other little things like increasing weight and reps on machines and free weights so that provides a increased amount of motivation to keep with it. That and I bought a new toy that really makes life nice. I picked up a Moto S9 Stereo Bluetooth headset. Which in combination with the Budda Phone makes for a good combination of running, lifting, and biking. And the S9 works on any phone that has A2DP capabilities so pretty much anything that has any sort media capabilities that has come out in the last two years that isn’t named “iPhone” toss in Pandora and damn this is better then a iPod. Hell it’s better the the mythical iShit!
Pandora however is a whole other ball of wax. It seems that my favorite Pandora station seems to really like David Gilmour which is ok by me since it meets all of my requirements for “good music” but every 5th song is a bit much.
Finally!
Posted by Tom in Appley, Not doing things the easy way, TreoRiffic on July 8, 2009
So there is finally a App for the Blackberry that I can use to upload photo’s and blog posts to my wordpress type blog instead of relying on the old Blogger blog… SWEET!!!
Of course if I had a iPhone I would have had this functionality a year ago… I guess that’s the price I pay for having a Blackberry on a real network.
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