Murlock Phone Holder
Check out my iPhone holder :) This cute murlock was a gift from my woman. He makes a great phone holder. Also pictured: my Macbook Mini.
Super NES on my Macbook Mini
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.
Macbook Mini (aka mbm)
My Mac Mini’s dying :(
It started w/ the wifi acting erratically and now I have no sound (in nor out). This Mini’s been an amazing workhorse for my modest needs, and the cheap price for such a beautiful, elegant (modestly-powered) workstation was exactly what I needed.
Sensing that the end is nigh, I decided it was time for a replacement machine. I wanted a rugged, tote-able OS X machine to carry with me to & from work, but Apple’s portables start at $1k. My reliance on Omnifocus meant that my choice was limited to a Mac-based OS. Omnifocus has become an essential tool in managing the tasks in my life, but trying to enter large amounts of data into the phone-based version was just too frustrating. I’ll save that for another post. My quest became to find the cheapest portable mac possible
Enter the Macbook Mini.
Yuusou’s praised his Dell Mini 10v for months, explaining to me just how simple it is to hack Snow Leopard onto it. When I found one for just a hair above $200, I knew I had to give it a try. Following the guide post at Gizmodo and sluething around on forums at MyDellMini.com uncovered some really straight forward instructions. After about 3 hours of install time, I can happily report that Snow Leopard runs really really well on one of the Dell netbooks.
One word of caution if you choose to go this route — don’t get a Mini10. It has to be the 10v. The hardware inside the 10 is different and won’t work (as of this writing).
WordPress Prowl notification
I just added Prowl Notifications to the blog (throttled, of course).
Awesome.
Dropbox beta adds LAN sync!
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!
MacDork