eggchen

So here Wii are… [a quote from my brother, 2006]

I am fortunate to have a brother whom loves gaming with a dedicated heart. He and one of his good friend went to line up at Futureshop (Canadian version of Circuit City) in the early morning of the launch day. It was to my amaze he and his friend actually got it! Each day I spent about 30 minutes on the Wii sports just playing for some simple swings; it was actually pretty good!

The hype was right, PS3 is the under dog where Wii trully shines. Being a technologist, even though I don’t have the PS3 console I still out right think Wii is the better winner for this holiday season. So, you ask, should I get a Wii? Why do you even ask, just get it!

Another question you may have is, why not the PS3? Isn’t power and functionality the most important aspect to consider? Well, there there, you power hunger bastards. This is how I measure a good technology. A good technology does not eat up your wallet, and certainly doesn’t take much out of your electricity bill. Also the fun factor is greater than cool factor. Sony kept boasting how much power the PS3 has and how big its e-penis is. I mean, if the console doesn’t bring that twitch of smile to your face it goes downhill from there. Imagine the following scenario.

You saved a thousand dollar (hard earning money), then you walked into the line up and await to get your PS3. You see the store open, a little bit of smile on your face. You handed them your 1000 dollar bill, smile becomes flattened. You bring the system home, set it up and find out you are too poor to own a 1080p high def TV, your smile is definitely bending more upside down now. Then you start playing, finding the games aren’t very innovative. Sure, it gives you better graphics and sound but the game play is still PS2. At this stage, no smile for you. Now consider the news where PS3 owner are having heat issue and receive Sony’s version of BSOD (blue screen of death) and bang, 1000 dollars down the drain and you said to yourself, “I wish I never bought this crap”.

There you have it, my little analysis of my purchasing decision. You think I’m biased, no, it’s just common sense. Perhaps if I got the PS3 for free then the smile may still be right side up!

This is one FTP client you must have if you are a Mac OS X user. It’s free and it’s easy to use, it even support Secure SSH.

Link: http://cyberduck.ch/

So on the Windows world we have utorrent or Azureus to do our bids in using the kick arse torrent technology. You know what I mean you leeching bastards, all those movies, music, and porn! Hey what do you know they have a good torrent client on the Mac world as well, this is one of the most popular one since it takes the least amount of resources on the system, no useless garbage user interface, it’s as simple as it gets!

Get your free copy of this program at the following link

Link: http://transmission.m0k.org/

Well, another Google service with Mac. This time it’s the Google Talk service. To use this service on Mac is also painlessly easy. Since Google Talk uses Jabber protocol (an open source chat protocol) which happens to be incorporated with iChat, you can use this service on Mac OS X.

Walk through and setup instruction you can find it in the following link. However, this service does not include the send file and record voice message like the features presented in the Google Talk client, but if you just want to chat this is good enough.

Link: http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24076

Sample

For those who uses Gmail on Windows, did you know you can integrate that with Apple Mail client as well?

Here is the how to, just follow the link then the instruction.  Easy as Pie!

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13275

This is another post for video codecs plug-ins. My previous post was about viewing DivX and XviD video files in natively installed QuickTime. This time we want to watch .wma and .wmv videos on Mac OS X, which ere exclusively for Windows Media Player. Well, again, we want to keep using native installed software, so we will use this plug-in instead of third party softwares.wmv. Even though it’ll install a WMV player it’ll still play natively on QuickTime.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx

When you get your fresh Mac out of the box you can’t really do everything right away, like the way they advertised on their commercials. I guess this goes the same for all PC users as well. When you want to view an AVI file that is encoded in DivX or Xvid on your Mac and you don’t want to use third party software like VLC or BSplayer, this little plug-in, Perian will do just the job you want with your natively installed QuickTime player.

QuickTime supported codecs:

• AVI and FLV
• 3ivX, DivX, Flash Screen Video, MS-MPEG4, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, and Xvid
• AVI supports: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3

Again, this is completely free!

Link: http://perian.cachefly.net/Perian_0.5.dmg
Creator: http://perian.org/

Instruction: Simply open up the dmg file and drag the content into your QuickTime component folder. Voila, you are done. You can now enjoy Divx and Xvid videos either on your QuickTime player or FrontRow!

Here is one nifty software that you may find useful. But for my particular setting on my workstation it’s the perfect software. Imgaine this, you have two computers (one being a Mac and one being a PC) and one set of good speakers. However you find you could only plug one computer into this good speaker set and left the other hanging. Well, you might thought of, “Hey, why don’t I just plug the PC into the microphone slot on the Mac and have the sound come out from there?” This is the exact tool for that. In Windows you could just tweak your Sound Properties to let the Mic Input on at all time so the sound will get through, but this software actually works well and no tweaking needed.

This also works with any sound device that’s plugged into the microphone jack. LineIn is completely free for you cheap bastards out there!

Here is what LineIn looks like.

Here is the latest version build:
Version: 2.0.2
Date: 01/20/06
Size: 1.2 MB
Operating Systems: OS X 10.3.9 - 10.4.8
Architecture: PowerPC, Intel

Link: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/freebies/download/LineIn.dmg