Nov 16, 2007 · 2 minute read
News
In case you've been living under a rock – or simply don't care about mobile development – Google recently released a public preview of Android, a new platform for mobile devices built on top of a Linux kernel. You may have heard of it before as it turns out that Android is the thing everyone assumed to be the Google "gPhone". Well, they're not releasing a phone but with a ton of device makers on board to use Android (sounds like everyone except Apple, surprise, surprise) I don't think anyone is going to mind.
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Nov 9, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
The [eGames & Entertainment Expo][1] for 2007 is set to start next weekend at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. It sounds like it will be a decent weekend of gaming goodness so I'm quite keen to go. Any readers thinking of attending? [1]: http://www.egamesexpo.com.au/
Nov 8, 2007 · 2 minute read
Tips
Now that Leopard has been released a few people are commenting on the usability of Time Machine as a backup system for "ordinary people". As is usually the case, what Apple have done here is slap a GUI on functionality that Linux and UNIX systems have had for years. Naturally though, because Time Machine looks so pretty and is grabbing more headlines that the humble rsync, there are some efforts to bring a similar system to Linux.
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Nov 6, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
A guide to metric time. An interesting concept but I think an even better implementation will need to be worked out – "Anglo-Babylonian Time" is just far too ingrained into everyday life, even more so than measures of distance, temperature, etc (interestingly, many SI units inherently depend on the second as well).
Nov 5, 2007 · 4 minute read
Reviews
I recently discovered eXtplorer, which is a Javascript and PHP file manager. The system looks very impressive and the feature list sounds great for allowing less technical users to manage their own websites (rather than requiring an FTP program). However, from my admittedly brief examination of the software I found that many of the things simply didn't work or there were enough minor issues to make using it rather annoying. First of all, the default "file" mode is useless in practice for anything except viewing what files are in a directory.
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Oct 31, 2007 · 3 minute read
Reviews
A relatively short list of things that I've found in Civilization IV that tick me off. Colours Civilization colours are too similar. Especially if there are a couple civs next to other with varying shades of blue it's really hard to tell them apart. I guess in a game with 16 civs this is hard to get around but if there's only five then why are three of them blue? Camera The zoom level isn't saved with the saved games so I have to adjust it every time I resume one.
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Oct 31, 2007 · 4 minute read
Reviews
With my new computer one of the things I wanted to try was to see exactly how much functionality I could achieve on Windows using only freely available software. Having gotten most things like multimedia playback, word processing and other essentials out of the way I found I needed a decent replacement for Nero. After using ImgBurn for a while, which is workable but better suited for burning and ripping discs rather than building them, I stumbled upon [InfraRecorder]2 on Sourceforge.
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Oct 31, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
Ars Technica has a lengthy review of Mac OS X "Leopard".
Oct 31, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
Songbird, a music player with tight integration with the web, [has been released at version 0.3][1]. [1]: http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/2245
Oct 28, 2007 · 1 minute read
Asides
A Melbourne University PhD student has developed technology to make broadband internet up to 200 times faster without having to install expensive fibre optic cables. 250Mb/s ADSL would be nice.