Author Archive

OSX and mice: a real FFFFUUUU moment

For some reason, high polling and high dpi mice fail with OSX. The smoothing of the mouse is thrown out the window and replaced with this jagged/staggered movement – and has been an issue for a while. I recently bought a G9x and tried it on my mac, Logitech no longer makes the software for the mac (LLC). OSX also has native mouse acceleration which means that the normalised sensitivity that I’m used to with my shooters goes out the window and I’m missing a lot of shots.

Luckily there are ways to fix this. BetterTouchTools can be installed to fix those mouse acceleration issues, but also customise touchpad gestures within individual apps – but my favourite is in the Actions tab where you can replicate those delicious Windows7 snapping and resizing when you drag your windows to the sides. I love it, and it’s second nature for my resizing of windows. It’s also free! Download it from http://blog.boastr.net/

The second app I use is to redefine the buttons and deal with the sensitivity of the mouse – I use this over BTT because it customised way easier and just feels right. It’s called SteerMouse but it isn’t free. You can get it here http://plentycom.jp/. It doesn’t matter what mouse you plug in, SteerMouse just seems to support it. I don’t know why this isn’t the default in OSX with the whole tagline about “it just works”. But with SteerMouse, it just works.

So yeah, gaming has been better since installing those two apps. I guess you only really need the SteerMouse one, but BTT is a killer app for the windows snap. Now, I need to find a way to get Starcraft 2 to run at a higher FPS (currently on low settings and some places it lags a bit)…

2010
09/03
CATEGORY
Video Games
Write comment

Arcade Fire Music Clip

Do yourself a favour. Download Chrome. Close everything (if you have an old computer as it takes up resources). Open this link http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Enjoy.

I’m actually excited about this kind of technology and UX with music. I’ve always thought Arcade Fire were on the cutting edge with their clips but this blew me away. I’m also hoping this kind of technology is going to force other browsers to catch up, apparently it only works on Chrome well, people have tried on safari and it killed it. It is processor intensive, but I played it on my macbook and it ran fine. What a great user experience, everything about it was awesome. Lots of nostalgic value as well. I hope you guys get the same experience I did.

2010
08/31
CATEGORY
Life
Nostalgia
Write comment

revisiting the past: wave

Not too long ago, I attended the Google devfestau, a week of talking google technology. Wave was amongst one of those technologies. Since then, they announced that wave is no more. Here are the notes I wrote about wave on that day, which in restrospect – promised so many things (and writing a robot was cool too).

robots gadgets embed
embed api – anonymous embed – doesn’t need wave acc.
unawave – for projects: task tracking, milestones
wave – ‘live’ blogging/updates
salesforce chatter – salesforce CRM with twitter stream
robots are on any server on the web and use it on wave sandbox – rolling out soon APIS
robots can read and write attachment and media APIS
google wave federation protocol – open source angle of wave
there should be many wave providers there is no central server – get open specification and and proved complete data control (when u add a user then data leaves the server rack), allow user choice among wave provider
wave lite! – easy to build (apparently) dhanji prasana 2:45
you cannot write your own templates for wave
extension – bring ur functionality into wave via robots, gadgets
robot sits on the wave and responds
pushy gadget – pushes wave to blackberry , i think
tasky – robots as templating purpose, assign task etc are gadgets
syntaxy – highlight python code
monty – evalute python code
gadgets are iframes – share the wave
wave is textual, gadgets allow for visual
api change log robot
embed gadget into CMS, allows for collaboration within cms
gadgets API – 2 apis, strict gadgets api and there’s a wave api, together you get wave gadget
gadget api – xml (module), embed html inside
cool wave gadgets – animator
skimmy – emoticon gifs – wave, add robot, wave server sees it – json goes to wave, makes a new json, operation is method : document.modify, sends back to wave server and it goes back to client
blips – root self parent child (or siblings, all)
WAVE AND THE ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENT
wave – get stuff done with groups of people
copy template for meetings etc
email notifications
tracking releases
robot in wave -> use it and bam, changes the look of the wave
robot must be registered on wave api!!!!!
wave sandbox – just talks within the wave – first one that came out (only public server that that point)
wave preview – public user instance – logging with gmail service
sandbox for debugging
wave ROBOTS!
robots can automate shit – the ppt slideshow example
import text robot code – onWaveletSelfAdded (only import attachment once) – attachment API
proxingFor = event.getBundle().getProxingFor();       overloading the robot to act as many robots
gadget viewers
attachmenthook = this gadget knows how to use attachments
pasting form into blogging platform (google wave blog – google wave lists button)
wave this widget for wordpress
before the #
wavesandbox.com/??ll=debug
?gadget_cache=0
private state etc
robotty.register_handler(events.BlipSubmitted, OnBlipSubmitted)
robotty.register_handler(events.DocumentChanged, OnBlipSubmitted)

2010
08/24
CATEGORY
Google
TAGS

1 comment

Busy city

Yeah, been pretty busy. Started university again, working on final project (“capstone subject”) and eLearning. Both are pretty interesting,  I’m enjoying project mainly because it’s the project that I pitched and I’m learning a lot of some languages and technologies I would otherwise not have bothered with.

I’m trying to upkeep with 3 blogs (this, project and elearning) as well as doing uni work, so it’s been busy city/struggle street for a while at least.

eLearning

project

2010
08/22
CATEGORY
Life
Write comment

iTunes Equaliser

So I’ve been playing around with the EQ settings on iTunes, trying to get ‘the sound’. My library is all mp3s and no FLACS, and I’m using the standard headphone port on the MAC with Alessandro’s MS-1 (my library is primarily Rock/Metal). After going online to see what optimal settings people are doing, I have found some settings in which the sound is quite good. It’s too hard to use the slider controls in iTunes (aesthetically nice but hard to use) so using apple script you can write one to values in which you control.

tell application “iTunes”
set the current EQ preset to EQ preset “Manual”
tell EQ preset “Manual”
set band 1 to -3
set band 2 to 0
set band 3 to 3
set band 4 to 1
set band 5 to 0
set band 6 to -1
set band 7 to 1
set band 8 to 3
set band 9 to 6
set band 10 to 5
set preamp to 0
end tell
end tell

These are the settings I have, you can change them to whatever values you want, just open the apple script editor and paste that in and run. Easy.

itunesEQ.scpt

2010
08/11
CATEGORY
Tweaks
TAGS


Write comment

Google Sites: Adding a Contact Form

Creating a contact form is easy in Google sites, it doesn’t require any knowledge of GET/POST requests and messing around with php and forms.
So let’s begin! Go into Google Documents. Lets create the form, Go to ‘Create New > Form’. It’s really straight forward here, you have a few options at the top. (Yours might look a bit different as I am doing this within a Google App environment)
Allow users to edit responses; you probably don’t want that.
Requires Google Account sign-in to view the form; the person filling in the form requires to be logged into a Google account
Automatically collect respondent’s Google Account  username; If you would like to know who sent the form, check this option, otherwise the sender of the form will be anonymous.
You can give the form a name, and some text/info that will help people fill it out.
In the beige box is where you can create questions. Put something in the Question Title and Help Text is required. There’s a few options for Question Type:
  • Text, Paragraph Text, Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Choose from a list, Scale, Grid
  • Text; one line of text.
  • Paragraph Text; many lines of text
  • Multiple Choice; choose one out of many choices (and add ‘Other’)
  • Checkboxes; choose many out of many choices (and add ‘Other)
  • Choose from a list; drop down box of choices, simliar to multiple choice (however no ‘Other’)
  • Scale; on a scale on 1-10, how awesome is my site? :)
  • Grid; make a table/array of your choosing.
You can also make this a required question to be answered. It’s good to get data from a form, so check this unless you don’t necessarily need data from that question. Once you have finished, click ‘Save’ on the top right. Your form is completed.

What the form does is create a dynamic spreadsheet that fills with data that users have filled in the form. Lets have a look at the spreadsheet, it’s also useful if you would like to be notified when a user submits a form as you need to set that option up here. To set up the notifications; click the down arrow next to ‘Share’ on the top right, and go to ‘Set notification rules’. It can be a bit tricky to find, but it should come up with this.
Lets make it so this form will email me when someone submits something on the form. I would do this by checking the ‘Any changes are made’ and ‘Email – right away’. ‘Save’.
Note: You can go back and edit your form by going to the ‘Form(x) > Edit Form’ on the spreadsheets bar. The x is the number of responses, so it’s normal to see 0 in there if you’ve just created the form. By default, this form is ‘Accepting Responses’ which you can turn off if you no longer want to accept responses.
Now, we want to insert this into our google site! Lets load up our google site now (with the assumption you can make page edits)!
So on your page, edit the page and insert. You can do this by click the ‘Edit page’ on the top right, then click ‘Insert > Spreadsheet Form’, then find the name of your form which you just created. It’s that easy.
Enjoy your form!
2010
08/06
CATEGORY
Tweaks
TAGS



Write comment

Leaked Soundwave 2011

2010
08/04
CATEGORY
Life
TAGS
1 comment

Rooting Telstra’s HTC Desire and adding Froyo 2.2

From what I heard about rooting android phones, it seemed way complicated and messy. This was the time before Unrevoked – people were required to make ‘gold’ cards from SD, then flash their bootloaders, get roms, install roms, and it seemed rather complex.

Unrevoked makes the rooting process a one click affair. Using the mac app (download it here), I connected my Desire via USB in USB debugging mode, clicked the .app and waited for about 10 minutes. The phone becomes rooted that easy. It will also install a new bootloader in which you can then put custom ROMS onto your Desire. The most painful thing for me was that Telstra really wants to drill it’s logo and branding everywhere, and getting rid of those stupid apps was the most important thing (along with Apps2SD :) ). So I decided to go with a Nexus build of Froyo, the first one I chose was ahmgsk_froyo.

A few things happened. I didn’t really read much about the process, I think I was a little too excited to bother. But I should have, because I thought I totally bricked my phone. Turns out you need to wipe your data and cache as the ROM was stuck on the Nexus load screen (which looks damn cool) and I was wondering what was going on. To further familiarise myself with the service, I then proceeded to load Defrost’s Nexus Froyo build, which was really new and thought if I was going to get a ROM, might as well get the lastest. So I put that on, finding out you can back up your data using the unrevoked bootloader under nandroid. My advice is to backup everything using that  nandroid option in the bootloader, in case you fuck up :)

So I’m pretty happy with Froyo, and further customisations available to me. It does feel a little faster, but I do miss some of the Sense UI stuff especially the camera app which is better than the stock Nexus. There’s rumours that the new Desire Froyo + Sense UI will be out in Europe this weekend for unbranded phones, which I can get my hands on for a reflash. The Nexus ROM does have some cool features, I like the Gmail client with Froyo, and the Gtalk will sync conversations and replies made from another client (my desktop for example) so my conversations are no longer fragmented. This is probably the best feature for me. There’s also Chrome to Phone, figuring out how to use that, not really sure what it does. But the best thing is,  having a rooted phone means more apps because there’s more control over your phone. eg: Titanium backup, and finally a screenshot app. Here’s what my phone looks like now.

You will also need to change some of the settings to get HSDPA to work on your phone. It’s an easy process that you have to do in the Settingss > Wireless and Network > Mobile Network > Access Points – all the Telstra settings can be found on Whirlpool here.

I would suggest you give it a try if you are thinking about it, the chances for bricking are low if you stick with unrevoked and the defrost ROM, it’s really a 2 click process!

2010
08/04
CATEGORY
Android
Tweaks
TAGS









Write comment

Starcraft 2

Starcraft, the name conjures memories of my teenage years. I remember everyday coming back from school I’d jump on and have a ‘quick’ game of Starcraft. This ‘quick’ game then turned to hours. And this was all back in the day, using 56k to connect do battle.net and play games often with lag – but I didn’t care – because the game was so immersive. I loved that game, it was really something beyond it’s years, and many people agreed that it was very worthy of being game of the year, perhaps RTS game of the decade.  It dethroned Westwood/EA Games (or whatever they are called now) and soon Blizzard was synonymous with RTS – amongst the titles of  Warcraft. While games came and left through my life, I would have spent a good chunk of 7 or 8 years playing Starcraft on Battle.net – I shudder to think what else I could have done during this time.

So it’s no surprise that I would jump straight onto the new game as soon as I could. Starcraft 2. It’s good. I’ve mostly jumped onto the online mode and played a few games with friends – a system which seems a little backwards with this new iteration of Battle.net. Gone are the days of IRC styled channels in which you would join to talk and meet people, a chaotic lobby filled with people coming in a out. Instead the interface requires you to actually know people to join them to your friends contacts, which means either allowing facebook integration so you can add friends, or giving out your username/number which is generated when you create your character. After a match, you’re unable to /w a random player you where with, or reorganise a game with them. It’s a very different model and I’m not sure I like this so much, but then again this could be one of the counters in place to stop boosting. I still miss the irc-esque system, I had this hangout channel; #legit and spent my time there from the Diablo days and always played with the same circle of people whom of which I don’t know of anymore – the curse of aging and moving on with life.

Everything else is perfect.  The gameplay, the graphics, the single player, the matchmaking (which is probably the best feature) and the listing of games (no longer do UMS maps have a million map list as all games are instanced from one map name and only the map name appears on your list). This is probably going to be game of the year, not only because of the hype but it really is a polished game with the Blizzard seal of perfection. What’s even more surprising is that once I’ve connected my Battle.net account with my Facebook, it will detect other people with the game to add them to friends – I’m finding that a lot of my friends are super-secretive about their Starcraft playing.

The game is only 69 dollars, and you will definitely get 69 dollars out of it. I think I’ll be playing this years after release especially awaiting the two next expansions which will add new strategic and game-play elements.

2010
08/01
CATEGORY
Video Games
TAGS


Write comment

Google Sites: setting an icon

Custom icons on a goggle site is possible. Point your browser to http://www.genfavicon.com/, upload a picture and select the 64×64 size (this is supported by google sites). Pick out your favourite part of the picture, then download the ico file.

Now you will need to upload the .ico file into sites. Load up the site, go to ‘More Actions > Manage site > Attachments‘ and upload it there. If there is an existing favicon.ico then you will need to write over it. Once you have uploaded and save, refresh the page and bam; it should be there with your new favourite icon!
You can also use photoshop to do it, create a 64×64 image, and download the save as ico plug-in from telegraphics.
2010
07/29
CATEGORY
Tweaks
TAGS

Write comment
Pages: 1 2 Next