Safari > Firefox

When I got my Mac (a black macbook as I’ve previously mentioned) one of the first things I did was install Firefox. I was used to Firefox on my Windows box so I figured it was the better choice. As far as the Macintosh platform goes however, I’m not so sure if choosing Firefox over OS X’s default browser – Safari – is a wise decision. I originally used Firefox, then tried Camino (a version of Mozilla that’s been “Macified”) and now I’m back to using plain old Safari.

The reason for my switch to Safari is that comparatively, at least on my Mac, Safari is much faster than Firefox. It loads pages extremely quickly and even launches faster. This probably isn’t a huge deal for people running a beefier system than I have, but generally when I use my macbook I want to check something quickly so the faster the better. There is of course a downside to using Safari – many of the Google apps we all know and love still aren’t compatible with it. That means that if I want to jump into Google Docs I have to load up Firefox. I don’t use Docs all that much though, and Gmail and Google Reader both work in Safari, so that isn’t much of a conflict. And, of course, if I do need to use docs I still have Firefox sitting down there in my dock.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying that Safari is necessarily faster on the PC side of things. I tested out the Safari 3 Public Beta on Vista and I was unimpressed. It still seemed buggy and I didn’t notice a performance increase. Not only that but there are also a lot of documented security holes in Safari for Windows so I don’t really see a compelling reason to use it right now. Basically, if you’re on a PC stick with Firefox but if you’re using a Mac give Safari a shot. It’s not as flashy as Firefox and you might miss some of your favorite extensions, but if you’re just looking to quickly pop in a check your email I think Safari’s the better route to take.

Currently Listening To: Team Sleep – Ever
Currently Playing: Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta

The epic known as Halo 3.

Today Halo 3, the most anticipated game ever, hits store shelves. I’ll undoubtedly pick a copy up, if I can find one, because for some reason I didn’t preorder. I think I put too much focus on avoiding all Halo 3 news, so sometime last week (Thursday I believe) I realized “Holy damn, Halo 3 next week!” At that point it was too late to preorder a copy, so I’m going to take my chances on finding a walk-in copy. I’m sure I’ll be able to find one but I really have my heart set on the Limited Edition. I’m don’t know if I’ll find one of those in particular, so wish me luck!

To be honest I was not excited about this game until last weekend. I started seeing the Halo 3 commercials with the “Believe” tagline that are styled to be sort of post-Halo 3 documentary style videos. If you’ve ever watched a World War 2 documentary on the History Channel you’ll know what I’m talking about – veterans are interviewed about their experiences and are forced, whether they want to or not, to relive those memories. That’s the basic premise of the Believe campaign. There are three commercials total, and if you can catch them on Xbox Live with the supplementary “Making Of” video I think that’s the best way to see them.
I can’t “believe” (ba-dum, pshh) that I just recommended you seek out a commercial. It’s really good though, and unique. They could have gone the flashy route for advertisement, but I like the different path they took. The diorama commercial is especially stunning (and dare I say emotionally moving). This advert worked 100% on me, and now I anticipate Halo 3 with bated breath. Will it be the best game ever? Microsoft certainly wants us to think so – and as a result I sort of feel like I’m missing out by having not followed the hype for the past few months. If Halo 3 truly is the greatest game to date then I probably should have paid more attention, I mean I’m a gamer, right? I should be a part of this!

I have a normal group of people that I played the Halo 2 multiplayer with for months…maybe even years. I look forward to getting back together with that group both in the revamped multiplayer as well as the new 4-player co-op. Basically, if you’re a gamer, you should be playing Halo 3. It’s time to finish this fight at long last.

Currently Listening To: Beach Boys – Sloop John B (yes, oldschool..don’t hate!)
Currently Playing: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta, hopefully Halo 3

The obligatory Bioshock post.

I finished up Bioshock about a week ago but I feel I really should post about it. I don’t want to make a habit out of posting everytime I beat a new game because that would be extremely mundane for any readers I have I’m sure, but for Bioshock I have to make an exception. Bioshock was a game that I’d been passively anticipating since I first heard about it. I was a huge fan of both the System Shock and Deus Ex games, so I figured the next game from the same group couldn’t miss – and I was absolutely correct. Bioshock is the best game I’ve played since Half-Life 2, and that’s saying a lot since HL2 is my all-time favorite.

The game excels in many different areas, so I’ll just highlight a few of them. First off, it’s beautiful. Easily the best looking game I’ve played in my life (up to this point). That’s not to say that the graphics are just really really good (which they are) but the environments are so incredibly detailed that it’s easy to get lost just walking around exploring in the world of Rapture. The game, in case you don’t know, takes place in 1960 and all of the art design is art-deco. It’s a unique and fascinating setting that would be interesting on its own but did I mention you’re in an underwater city? Yeah, there’s that…

So the game looks unbelievably great, but graphics don’t make a game good. Bioshock’s gameplay is its next strong suit, it’s multi-faceted and designed to keep the player interested and excited throughout the 15+ hours it will take to beat. Bioshock’s a first person shooter on the surface, but it truly is a first person shooter/platformer/strategy/RPG game all rolled up into one. Sure there’s a great arsenal of guns, but there are also special powers called plasmids that are extremely numerous (I used about 20 when I played through but I know there are many more). The plasmids range from fire to telekinesis, and effectively make the environment a weapon. That means that the combat options are basically infinite. Should you use a gun to kill this enemy, or set them on fire? Maybe wait until they step in some water and shock them, or hack a sentry gun so it guns them down for you? Of course there’s also the ever popular melee wrench option as well. The combat is so varied that – even with multiple play throughs – you’ll never get bored.

Another honorable mention that should be noted is Bioshock’s rich crafting-like Invention system, wherein the player can use things they find in the environment to create new types of ammo or even design a plasmid or tonic to make their character strong. Like plasmids, there is a huge amount of tonics that enhance your physical ability, your hacking ability, or your offensive ability (among other things). The next neat gameplay element is the hacking system itself. Like I said you can use tonics to boost your hacking performance, but just being able to hack so many in-game items is almost a game in of itself. The hacking system is basically just an intricate mini-game that, if completed, gives you a successful hack. You can hack things like sentries, security cameras, and safes all with benefits to your character. For example, hacking a security camera will make it spot enemies and send out bots to kill them for you, hacking a sentry gun will make it target your enemies whenever they walk in front of it, and hacking a safe will give you access to the goodies held within.

The best part about bioshck though, is absolutely the story and everything that is found within. Without spoiling too much, your character is in a plane crash somewhere in the ocean and, while trying to save himself from the crash, stumbles upon a small island that has a bathosphere leading down to an underwater city-gone-bad called Rapture. The city was built in the ’30s and so traveling to Rapture is like traveling back in time. Just the thought of being transported back in time like that gives me chills. I really hate to spoil anything more but let’s just things in Rapture went downhill quickly, and the inhabitants are noticing some side effects from all of those plasmids they use. The man who created the city – Andrew Ryan – is battling another up and comer Fontaine, and you learn all about the struggle along the way. There are many twists and turns thoughout and, well, you just cannot miss this game. It’s a must play.

Currently Listening To: Dropkick Murphys – Far Away Coast
Currently Playing: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta, Halo 2

The new Buy Knives Online is live!

I was having dinner with my brother and sister in law for her Birthday when he mentioned that the new Buy Knives Online site is live. I posted previously about some work I did on it, so now that it’s live I’d really appreciate it if you’d check it out. The site has a ton of outdoors goods so if you know a hunter, fisherman, or even just someone who collects knives send them the URL and let me know what they think.

What I did for the new site was populate the product database with the 1000+ products that Buy Knives Online offers. It was a lot of work but I managed to finish it up in a week and I’m just glad I was able to contribute. The site is backed by an e-commerce package that I really like. It’s basically just a CMS tailored to e-commerce specifically, and it was easy to work with. I can only hope that the site is very successful and my brother gets a ton of business – he’s definitely worked hard enough to deserve it.

So like I said, if you have a spare moment, hit up the site and check some of the products out. The URL is http://www.buyknivesonline.com and it’s also in my link section to the right. Let’s see if we can’t bolster some traffic and start things off right. =)

Currently Listening To: Matisyahu – Time of Your Song
Currently Playing: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta, Call of Juarez, Battlefield 2142

A close call.

Last Friday I was watching a movie on my Xbox 360 while fiddling around on my Macbook when all of the sudden my neighborhood had a series of brownouts (where the power almost goes out, but not quite). As this happened my 360 shutoff and tried to restart, but couldn’t – flashing the dreaded red ring of death instead. I got up, turned the 360 off, turned it back on, and everything seemed fine.

A few minutes later, however, the same thing happened. Another brownout. My 360 failed, tried to restart, and threw up the red ring of death for the second time. This time I got up and just turned my 360 off and left it off, fearing that if I turned it back on and the power fluxed again it might cause permanent damage. Since it had restarted successfully before I didn’t really think about it after that; that is until I tried to play Bioshock. I continued my previously saved game and noticed right off the bat that something was wrong – the game would play fine for about 10 seconds and then stutter, freezing for 2 or 3 seconds. I tried restarting the 360 and even tried creating a new game, but the problem was persistent. I figured that was the end of my 360, the power outages earlier must have called its final swan song. So then the next morning I went ahead and tried it again, hoping (for some reason) that the problem might have resolved itself overnight. Unfortunately I once again saw the sporadic in-game freezing and figured it was time to start thinking about calling Microsoft.

Before I did that however, I tried a couple different games to see if they also had the problem. First I dropped in Call of Juarez (which I just recently received in the mail from Gamerang) and noticed that I wasn’t seeing any of the freezing like I did in Bioshock. Call of Juarez isn’t a very demanding game so I went ahead and put in Gears of War which I assumed would demand more out the 360’s hardware. However, as with Call of Juarez, I didn’t see the problem. Just to make sure I put Bioshock in one last time and saw that it was still freezing. I returned to my computer and tried to find the Microsoft site that lets you register your 360 and request service for it.

As I was looking for that particular link I happened across some forums where people were discussing that a recent Bioshock update was causing sporadic freezing in the game for them. The symptoms described were almost identical to the ones I was experiencing so I tried their suggested fix. What they said to do is to hold the left and right bumpers when the 360 starts up – before you get to the dashboard – and then again hold the left and right bumpers when you fire up Bioshock (until the red 2KGames logo appears). What this does is clear the hard drive’s cache and fixes the problem. It worked!

I had completely forgotten about the Bioshock update (which I now remember downloading) until I saw that forum thread. Now my 360 is working just as it should, running Bioshock better than ever. I’m sure those rolling brownouts didn’t exactly help my 360 but I was very happy to find out that the red rings they produced had nothing to do with the problem I was having later. I get to keep my Xbox 360 – for now.

Three operating systems, one machine.

I’ve been running 3 operating systems on my black Macbook for a while now, (yes, I paid the extra money for a black version of the Macbook) but just recently I installed a 100% working edition of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn via virtualization. Before getting this particular version of Ubuntu running I had an older 6.06 Dapper Drake installed via Parallels. It worked well enough but I figured it was just about time to upgrade since a lot of what I wanted to use Ubuntu for was making 6.06 seem very legacy.

Before I get too deep into that though, let me first give a brief explanation about what it means to run a virtual operating system and why it’s useful. OS virtualization is the process of running a complete operating system via software. This means that you can use your current hardware and software setup to support a second OS via emulation. You set up a separate hard drive image and all of your current hardware is taken over by this application to control the separate OS. In effect, it seems just like you installed whatever it is you’re running (in my case Ubuntu linux) directly on the hard drive and are running it natively, when in fact you’re running it on top of another system. This is useful for a few reasons. First, you don’t have to commit an entire machine to just one operating system. It’s great if you just want to try something out and don’t want to monkey around with dual booting. Second, it allows for easy management. For instance, if you were to get a virus on a virtualized version of Windows vista you wouldn’t have to worry about it infecting your system as a whole. All you’d have to do is delete the files that make up the virtual system from your hard drive and start over, simple as that.

So I set out to install Feisty Fawn on my Mac. My initial thought was to just go ahead and use Parallels just as I had for Dapper Drake. I ran into problems during the installation though, a well documented hang when Ubuntu starts to load system devices (the installer gets stuck trying to load the Intel processor ‘piix’ and must abort). I tried everything I could think of to get around this error but eventually I just decided to give in and try a different method.

The next thing I tried was downloading Q Emulator, a free piece of virtualization software for OS X. I hated the UI right off the bat though, and decided to axe that from my machine. Finally, I found a handy application called VirtualBox that runs exactly the same as Parallels and VMware and is also free. I read that a lot of people had success getting Feisty Fawn up and running so I went ahead and gave it a shot. The installation went fine, the only problem was the resolution of my Macbook. Ubuntu’s default resolutions only went as high as 1024×768 but because of the widescreen Macbook monitor (1280×800) I was getting black bars on both the right and left sides of the window when I was running Ubuntu in full-screen mode. This isn’t a huge problem, just an annoyance. I ran into the same problem with Parallels but in order to fix it with VirtualBox there were a few extra steps involved, including installing VirtualBox’s “Guest Applications.” Once I had that installed (as well as my particular resolution added to xorg.conf located in /etc/x11) everything was right as rain.

Now I’m writing this in WriteRoom for OS X while Synaptic is installing some applications in another minimized window for Ubuntu. It’s really cool to have every OS at the tip of your fingers. Though Ubuntu is the only virtual OS I’m running (OS X and Windows XP are both installed physically on the hard drive via bootcamp) it gets a lot of use. It’s really the best candidate for a virtual setup since the resources required to run Ubuntu are relatively low, allowing me to have OS X as well as its apps running at the same time as Ubuntu and its apps run without the system performance suffering. I’d definitely recommend giving OS emulation a try, especially because there are free tools out there like VirtualBox so you don’t have to spend money to test it out.

Apple’s “The Beat Goes On” Event

Well a little earlier today Apple’s music-centric event took place at Moscone West. The venue was about 2000 seats large which overshadowed Apple’s previous Mac event at Cupertino tenfold. There were a lot of announcements, almost all of which related to Apple’s music business, so I’d just like to recap real quickly.

Apple now has 4 products in their iPod line. They started by showing off a re-designed iPod Shuffle, which now has updated colors. Not very much to see there. Next they quickly moved on to the updated Nano which, much to my chagrin, is an exact copy of the version we saw in the previously leaked “Fat Nano” images. That’s kind of a bummer, especially considering the outrageous claims I made not too long ago as per my conspiracy theory. The Nano is surprisingly small, especially when you consider the width but I’m still pretty surprised with the design. Steve Jobs stated that Apple customers had been requesting a Nano that had a larger screen like the original iPod had, thus their decision to go with the new wide format. Along with the Nano, Steve showed off the new iPod interface which includes album and video previews, and is basically an all-over beautified version of the old UI. Not bad looking at all, though it seemed a little sluggish on the Nano hardware from what I read…probably due to the Nano’s limited processing capabilities. The 4 gig version of the Nano will cost $149 while the 8 gig nano will be $199.

Next he moved on to the iPod, which has now been renamed the iPod Classic (dun, dun, dun!). The Classic iPod now has a metal design and is thinner than previous versions. The most surprising thing about this revision is the capacity. It starts out at 80 gigs (which was the highest capacity you could get up until now) and goes to 160 gigs. That’s an amazing amount of space considering the Macbook I’m using to write this has a 160 gig hard drive and houses much more than music. The capacity will be nice for those who have a lot of video on their iPod though. This decision was kind of sketchy in my opinion. I don’t know how many people will really need 160 gigs worth of music – I think it might have been better for them to have smaller capacities and a cheaper price. The iPod Classic also has the updated interface that’s found in the Nano. The 80 gig version will cost $249 while the 160 gig version will be $349.

The really exciting announcement from the event was the introduction of the iPod Touch. Think of an iPhone, minus the phone. Its design is almost identical to that of the iPhone’s except a little thinner. Obviously you get all of the cool touch effects like flipping through coverflow, finger pinch to resize photos, and the touch keyboard. Very impressive, I must say. This is exactly what I’ve wanted ever since I realized that I had no way of getting my hands on an iPhone. It gets even better however – the iPod Touch is wifi enabled and includes Safari. That means you can browse the web just like you can on an iPhone, plus you’re able to access the built-in YouTube application. All of the websites built exclusively for the iPhone (like Facebook’s iPhone variant) also work for the iPod Touch, so you get to benefit from months of iPhone web-development right out of the gate. The battery life, according to Steve, is 22 hours for audio and 5 hours for video. He didn’t mention anything about how wifi use might eat up the battery, but let’s assume that will be a factor. The iPod Touch will come in 8 and 16 gig versions which are priced at $299 and $399 respectively. This is the one thing I’m not very happy about. Four-hundred dollars for a 16 gigabyte iPod seems pretty steep, especially since Steve also announced a price drop for the iPhone at this event which will bring it down to $399 as well. I wish it was a less expensive but I’m still pretty sure I’ll pick one up.

Along with the iPod Touch (I have to keep myself from calling it an iPhone, I’ve typed that incorrectly multiple times throughout this post) Apple announced new wifi capability for iTunes. This means that you can access the iTunes music store from the iPod Touch wirelessly to purchase music. Steve also announced a new partnership with Starbucks, who will now offer free wifi in their coffee shops for iTouch users to access the iTunes wireless store. You mean I can access an online store for free? Amazing. Obviously these two announcements only benefit people who use iTunes and drink Starbucks coffee – I don’t do either – but I’m sure someone out there is excited.

So that’s it…I’m sure I didn’t cover everything but you can find more at Engadget, Gizmodo, and many other sites.

Currently Listening To: Brad Sucks – Overreacting
Currently Playing: Bioshock, Battlefield 2142, Streets of Rage 2