Author Archives: daniel

Safari for Windows

Apple announces a version of the Safari web browser for Windows. A public beta is already available. Jobs claims it’s twice as fast as IE. Hmm.

A lot of Windows users certainly have and use iTunes, but is that because they’re locked-in by their iPod, or because they actually like it more than Windows Media Player or WinAmp or the many alternatives? My problem with it is it actively breaks some of the Windows interface standards, and tries to pretend you’re using a Mac. Will Safari do the same? Judging from the video demo, yes.

And what syncing software will ship with the iPhone? Will it be something that tries to encroach on the contacts and calendar territory of Outlook/Outlook Express, perhaps?

PS. Perhaps iTunes users will not have a choice but to install Safari, just like they’re forced into installing QuickTime now: Mary Jo Foley notes: “Jobs said that Apple plans to use iTunes as a distribution vehicle for Safari for Windows. He noted that there are a million downloads of iTunes a day, with 500 million of those going to Windows machines.”

PS. Midday. Joel Spolsky rips into it: “…it takes an insane amount of time to launch: 57 seconds… By comparison, Firefox takes about 3 seconds and Internet Explorer takes about 2.”

Is the (original) Xbox dead?

It’s amazing to see how quickly (original) Xbox games have disappeared. There’s still some on the shelves, but their space has shrunk markedly to make space for other platforms, and there’s nothing in most advertising — it’s all gone onto the Xbox 360.

Contrast that to the Playstation, where PS2 games are still being promoted along their PS3 companions, and even the newer games are still being developed and released for the PS2. Which reflects the massive install-base of the PS2 against the Xbox, I suppose. In fact, you can still buy a PS2 in the shops.

I have an old Xbox… I’m not ready to upgrade yet. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I rarely have time for it, but I’m still enjoying PGR2 and Halo. Will I still be able to find games on the shelves in six months’ time? Probably. Twelve months? Who knows. You can still buy GBA games new.

When I bought my Xbox a few years ago, I pondered that buying it was actually a good way to fight back against the dominance of Microsoft, because they lose so much money on them. Turns out Microsoft reckoned they lost US$4 billion on the venture.

Influential games

Henry Lowood curator at the Stanford University History of Science and Technology collections has named the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar, Star Raiders, Zork, Tetris, Sim City, Super Mario Bros 3, Civilization, Doom, Warcraft and Sensible World Of Soccer. And I can understand why he’s gone for the most influential, rather than the most popular.

Pacman didn’t make the grade, but the new Pacman Championship edition for XBox 360 has just come out (available via XBox Live). And it appears to be a re-design (not just a graphical revamp) that attempts to bring new gameplay in, while not trying to break the fundamentals of the game (like the 80s and 90s Pacman sequel games did, trying to make the field 3D, or turning it into a platform game). Pictures. Review from Joystiq.

Paper and the metric system

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about ISO paper sizes (such as A4), which is used worldwide. Well, except in North America. Maybe one day they’ll catch up. Maybe not. The article talks about the resultant difficulties of exchanging documents between North America and The Rest Of The World, and also notes the different hole punch standards.

It’s related to the uptake of metric, of course. So how many countries are resisting going to metric? According to this FAQ a survey some time ago concluded not many: Liberia, Burma, and the USA.

Mind you others, like the UK, haven’t totally switched, and still use imperial for things like distances.

eBay ratings

The problem I have with eBay feedback is the positive ones are usually so over the top. “A1++++++++++++++ great ebayer!!!!!” is really too much when usually it just means the person in question sent the parcel/money on time, and answered emails. I prefer to put a little more actual information in the feedback I leave.

Games, games, games

GTA R18+The Age reports that the ACMI Games Lab in Melbourne will be hosting the Game On exhibition of video game history, which has already been seen in London, Chicago and San Jose. Should be a nice followup to the Melbourne House/Beam Software exhibit they had recently.

Speaking of games, ArsTechnica continues its series on writing in games (eg plots and backstories, rather than code).

Meanwhile in Australia there’s more campaigning for the OFLC to be allowed to give games an R 18+ rating (rather than having to refuse them classification), to bring games ratings into line with movies.

Though interestingly, a catalogue from discount chain KMart that arrived during the week reckoned Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories is rated R — it’s actually MA15+.

The out-of-control Inbox

I’m one of those people whose Inbox slowly gets out of control. Here’s a good article on dealing with it: How to crank through your Gmail. (via Scoble) Of course, the trick for me is finding the time to do the initial cleanup.

I’ve actually almost managed it on my work Inbox. I got it to the stage where there is usually less than a screenful of emails. Virtually everything else goes into a folder called Inbox Archive, which is my Outlook equivalent of GMail’s archive. Of course, if I leave it unchecked for a day or two, the Inbox fills up again.

Got to keep at it constantly.

The easy way to record any audio playback in Windows

People jump through all sorts of hoops trying to record audio direct from the source, which is particularly tricky when it’s a WMA or Real streaming cast.

But it’s actually dead simple to do this, at least for short periods: (Instructions for Windows XP)

Windows XP volume control1. Double-click on the Volume Control speaker in the taskbar. The full Volume Control will open up, with lots of different levels.

2. Click Options / Properties. Then in Adjust Volume For, choose Recording. Then make sure either Mono Mix or Stereo Mix are turned on. (Obviously Mono is sufficient for streaming of AM radio stations, for instance.) Then click OK.

3. The recording levels will then be displayed. Click on Select for the Mono or Stereo Mix option you’re going to use, and adjust the volume to something sensible. This will tell Windows which of the many “inputs” you wish to record audio from.

4. Leave the recording levels visible, and go and open Sound Recorder, as well as whatever sound source you want. When you click Record in Sound Recorder, you should find it successfully records whatever sounds are outputting from the computer at the time. Adjust the volume level to suit.

As many know, Sound Recorder will only record up to 60 seconds at a time. So it’s not perfect, but it is built-in to Windows, so everybody has it, so it’s a good quick’n’dirty solution for short recordings.

I’d assume that other recording tools that can record for longer periods would also use the Volume Control applet to choose which input they’re taking. At least I hope so.

Snippets of interest

Jon Galloway on how to avoid RSI by ditching the mouse, with particular attention to web browsing, which is one of the hardest things to do with just a keyboard.

(My particular pet hate is that even Alt-D to get to the address bar can get disabled when a web page has Flash on it.)

Telstra Sensis and NineMSN have clubbed together with mylocal.com.au to try and fight off the onslaught from Google (who have data from truelocal.com.au).

Long Zheng has a great piece on the next steps for GUI environments, pointing out that, really, they haven’t changed all that much over the years.

Speeding up torrents

Call me slow, but it took me until the weekend to work out why my torrents were running so slowly. (You know, all those Linux distros I keep downloading. Yeah.) Almost always stuck at about 15-20kbps — if that. Sometimes markedly slower.

Having read about problems with the original firmware, I got to the point of flashing my WRT54G router with the very nifty DD-WRT, which is so amazingly cool that I can’t believe some people took the time to develop it for free. Enthusiasm for innovating is a wonderful thing. But that didn’t fix it.

I switched from ABC (“Another BitTorrent Client”) to uTorrent. Which gave me nifty features like scheduling that will help me avoid burning up my peak hours (7am to midnight) traffic quota. (Came perilously close last month to being “shaped” down to dialup speed. Eek!) But that didn’t fix the torrent speed.

Finally I resorted to fiddling with my speed limits in uTorrent. Changed the upload speed from unlimited down to 20kbps and suddenly the download I was on jumped to 35kbps. Brought the upload down to 15kbps and the download leapt again to 60-70kbps. Eureka!

Dropping the upload to 10 didn’t really affect it further. And by that point I was happy with the speed, so I left it at 15.

See, I’d been going with the principle that it was good to uncap your uploads, to share everything around. What I’ve now learnt is that it’s a good idea to cap them while downloading, and set no limit for once the download has finished. And with the scheduler in uTorrent, you can also tweak things so that most of your downloads happen in off-peak periods at night, but uploads can keep on pumping all the time. (With appropiate caution if you use an ISP that charges for uploads; happy to say mine doesn’t.)

Why don’t they explain this stuff when you start? I guess there’s a bunch of complex stuff to explain to beginners. Mind you, if I’d actually read the documentation, that might have helped.

There’s some other things you can do to optimise Torrents, including patching and fiddling with the Windows XP TCP configuration and lots of other tweaking.