MacDork :)

Snes9x is a Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator that lets you play Super NES games on your computer (Mac & PC). The emulator itself is legal, and if you own an original cartridge of the SNES game, then it’s apparently ok to have a copy of the program in a file on your computer, known as a ROM.

Snes9X has been around for ages, & I’ve toyed around w/ it for a grand total of about 15 minutes in the past. As entertaining as it was, there were always newer/different games to be had. My recent aquisition of the Macbook Mini (mbm) led me to reconsider Snes9X since the netbook isn’t powerful enough to play any modern games.

The first thing I realized was that the 10″ screen on netbooks is pretty well suited to playing 16bit SNES games. When I last tried SNES games on my other monitors, today’s monstrous resolutions make the blocky graphics start to look really ridiculous. They’re still as charming and innocent as you remember them, but it’s just not fair. After I smiled and laughed and tried out a few titles (Yoshi’s Island!), I immediately settled back into some Chrono Trigger. I’ve finished probably 30 hours of it on the DS, but my DS is currently on loan performing Animal Crossing duty for my woman, so I decided to start fresh.

After playing about an hour or so of Chrono Trigger, I realized I was hooked. The experience of playing SNES on the mbm is really satisfying! It’s a little tough playing twitch-based games on a qwerty keyboard, but the graphics, sound and emulation are perfect. Next up… a controller.

I just added Prowl Notifications to the blog (throttled, of course).

Awesome.

If you don’t know about dropbox yet, then go here and get a free (2GB) account.

Then, after you’ve got it set up and know a few things about it, get the beta here; it supports LAN syncing, which is what I’ve been after for a LONG, long time.

At one point, I had three people and 5 machines all trying to download the same 10 files that someone posted into a shared dropbox folder. As you can imagine, this took forever and was hugely inefficient. With LAN sync, the 10 files will download from the internet only once, and then the other machines will all update via the local network.

Sweet!

I was really pleased to find a few controls added to the audiobook (and podcast!) iPod controls in last night’s iPhone 3.0 update.

The small “30″ with the arrow moving in a circle takes you back 30 seconds; quite handy when you’ve missed something that was just said.

The “2x” is a speed toggle; clicking it multiple times will change between double, normal and half speed. Prior to this, you had to take a trip onto the Settings app to change it. Handy!

Lastly, you now get visual feedback when you scrub back and forth in a track. The way this works is hard to explain, but it works like this: if you grab the play head and start dragging it to the right, you move forward in the track. This is fine for relatively short tracks, like a five minute song, since each pixel only represents a few seconds on the scrub bar. On longer tracks (take a two hour podcast, for example), each pixel then represents a huge chunk of time and it becomes very difficult to skip back a few seconds (though the new 30-second skip alleviates that need!). Apple’s solution is for you to keep your finger on the screen, but to move it lower on the screen, completely off of the scrub bar; the lower on the screen you go, the finer the control you have! Fantastic! This used to work in past versions, but it wasn’t as well implemented, and had no UI.

I’m reading this article at ComputerWorld.com. So far, it’s a good history of what is the basis of so much amazing software

<3 :’)

Harmony PS3 Adapter next to an iPhone (Photo source: Engadget)

I just read on Engadget HD that Logitech’s finally releasing their official PS3/Harmony adapter!

Pretty much every device I care about in my house is controlled through my Harmony 890:  360, TVs, stereos, lights, my bedroom fan… with one exception.  The PS3’s Bluetooth remote was the stumbling block; the 890 speaks infrared and radio frequency, but not Bluetooth.

Once I get this thing ($60, available this month!), the PS3 will feel less like a gimmick/toy.  I suppose it’s a little unfair, since the 360 already controls fine w/ the Harmony, but watching HD-DVDs on that thing (w/ the optional drive that you had to buy seperately) always feels juvenile because of the 360’s intentionally youthful UI.  The PS3’s Cross Media Bar (XMB) shows a lot more restraint, maturity and elegance.  Even the startup routines and sounds on the PS3 are more refined, avoiding the 360’s playful and cliche’ “I’M EXTREME!” attitude.  Wrap it up with a sleek, jet black piano finish (don’t forget the quiet fans!) and you’ve got one secksie beast!

Let’s face it:  Bluray is still so new to most people that it’s a treat for me to share the new tech w/ them.  Showing off your man den is a long standing tradition.  Today, tech is a huge part of the man den.  When you have a universal remote that bends all of your commands into one button press, deftly turning on all of your different devices, dimming your lights to just the right level and switching everything into GO! mode… you look like a tool when you have to pick up a Dual Shock to press play.

TUAW’s running a story on how the boxee devs managed to get around hulu’s (feeble) attempt at blocking boxee from accessing hulu.

I was more than a little irritated at hulu at first about how they were going after boxee, especially since the ads were still being viewed, and there was really no difference between me watching content on my AppleTV vice a computer+browser, but Brian Brushwood made a GREAT point on TWiT this week: hulu’s not really trying to block boxee, they’re just doing the absolute minimum required to sate the content owners.

Their goal is to keep the content owners at bay just long enough to win the premium streaming content market. Once they win, they can go back to the bargaining table to renegotiate their contracts and start to really push for some of these restrictions to be lifted.

That said, it seems that boxee’s arrived at a solution that’s unbeatable. For hulu to block boxee, they’d have to cut off all of the firefox users, which is probably a significant share of their customers. Given that hulu’s not quite a household name, and that their primary audience are the web cognisanti, I’m willing to bet that their firefox numbers are higher than average.

Either way: cheers to boxee!

Macworld is running a story today about how Apple has changed the conditions of the latest iPhone OS 3.0 NDA to explicitly denounce jailbreaking.

Apple is taking a more aggressive stance against developers who create apps for “jailbroken” iPhones. According to a new report, the Cupertino-based company recently updated its “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement” – the agreement to which all iPhone developers are required to adhere — to explicitly disallow jailbreaking, assisting in jailbreaking, and developing and distributing jailbreak apps. The Ars Technica report says that while previous agreements forbade the creation of apps that violate privacy, facilitate crimes, or violate intellectual property laws, the new one restricts developers from jailbreaking their own phones.

This is complete bullshit. One of the greatest things about OS X is the inclusion of the developer’s tools, allowing you to completely build whatever app you want for yourself if what Apple offers doesn’t suit your needs. Yes, the learning curve is steep, but even if you don’t necessarily have the chops to crank out an app on your own, the ability is there, and the challenge is often taken up by other developers. I happen to buy a LOT of software for OS X, something I nearly never did when I was a pc user, so many years ago.

With this latest move, Apple isn’t actively denying the same functionality on the iPhone — you can download the iPhone dev tools just as easily as you can the Mac ones — but there’s a not-so-subtle difference in the iPhone world. Censorship. Apple controls what apps get put onto the iPhone app store.

My developer argument is purely academic, as I’ve never written an app for either of the platforms, but as a consumer, I’ve been using a lot of the jailbreak functionality in ways that do no harm to Apple. I use a shell program that I prefer over the other free ones on the app store, a calculator that supports RPN, and a backgrounding app that allows my shell to stay open when I need to check my mail (I’ve given up the Super Mario theme and Zelda sound sets I was using last week).

None of these pieces of functionality compete with Apple or take any revenue away from third parties. There are, admittedly, apps in Cydia that do, which brings us to the whole issue here.

Apple has a track record of not allowing apps on the app store that compete w/ them. I get it — it’s their system, they control what’s allowed to go on it. You might be thinking, “If you don’t like it, don’t use the product”. That’s not a bad point, but as a consumer, it’s also our responsibility to voice our displeasure (this counterpoint was made by someone on Buzz Out Loud when a discussion about some other company being heavy-handed came up)

Eff you Apple. Eff you up the a.

Source — Lifehacker.com

I have to admit, I was really skeptical, but the selection’s pretty compelling! Now if that text to speech option available, I think it’s be a must have!