changing tabs in a program like firefox Some experimentation reveals that it's alt-apple-cursor left and alt-apple-cursor right. I can't find this exposed in the UI anywhere - which is the kind of nonsense that makes me avoid Firefox.
In Safari, it's apple-shift-[ and apple-shift-] - which you can discover by looking in the 'window' menu.
If you use Adium for your IM, look in the 'general' tab of its prefs - they let you choose between four different sets of tab-switching shortcuts.
Why do you need to close your programs when you're done with them? Most apps use no resources when they have no windows open, and will get swapped out to disc. When you need them, they can be swapped back into physical memory faster than they can be loaded.
And try setting the minimize effect to 'scale' instead of completely turning it off via Tinkertool or whatnot.
I haven't done anything like that to my site. I just wrote clean, minimal HTML with proper mark-up. And I end up in the top ten results for searches for properties I've done art for.
No keyword stuffing, no social link buttons, no SEO bullshit. Just clean code and quality content on a regular basis.
I got no problem banning it either. I'd really like to see less of this kind of adolescent wallowing in ultraviolence made in the first place. I'd prefer that it be through developers saying 'hey, this is too far' and axing stuff like this before it gets to the point where 50-100 people have worked on it for 18 months, and the financial fate of the studio rides on it being released, and it does seem that this is becoming the case.
When I call it 'violence porn' I don't mean that it's got OMG SEX! in it; I mean that it's pornography of violence: lingering on it, encouraging it, made for no other reason than to glorify this taboo act, and usually to do so in the most tawdry way possible.
What on earth makes you think that's why I'm squicked by Manhunt 2?
Man, I'm all for more sex in games. I'd love to see sex in all popular entertainment be shown as explicitly as violence are. You can fling innards around like doubloons at Mardi Gras and get an R/MA, but show one naked cunt or cock and have people fuck and it's X/AO. And it gets ghettoized into this incredibly stupid, impersonal sex.
"Wow! Look at this cool way I can kill someone!" is an incredibly adolescent urge, no matter how many man-hours went into getting the shaders tweaked so the blood soaks into the walls juuuuust right.
Honestly, I watched my boyfriend playing the Bioshock demo and found that to be blood porn, too. I was almost physically sick as he bludgeoned his way through the first few rooms with a wrench.
Why are all the "AAA" titles all about lovingly-rendered ways to kill? I used to like video games but they're really just falling down a hole of being by and for the self-hating, world-hating teenage boy.
From everything I've heard about Manhunt 2 it's not an adult game. The focus on GORE! and NASTY KILLING! is very adolescent. It sounds like something designed by an angsty, hate-filled teenage boy who's going to have a teacher see his notebook and be afraid he's going to be another Columbine killer any day now.
All this gory, blood-soaked shit gets called "adult" but it's not. It's adolescents wallowing in mindless excess.
"Man, I'm bummed. I got this pretty hot new laptop for three hundred bucks but it didn't come with Windows, and I don't have a copy of it anywhere."
"Oh? Hmm, I've got the disc right here in my drawer. Hold on, I'll burn you a copy." *takes out a CD with 'Windows XP' and a serial number scribbled on it in marker*
and doesn't seem to provide a "why" or who this might be useful to
Um, anyone who wants to have the entire English version of Wikipedia on their local machine, for those times when they're away from the net?
People who "would love to have Wikipedia on their laptop, since this would allow them to instantly check for things they want regardless of their location (business trips, hotels, etc). Others simply don't have an Internet connection - or they don't want to dial up one every time they need to check something." (from TFA)
Hell, I could have used this just the other day, when I was in a cafe and wanted to look something up, but didn't want to pay $7 into their wireless gateway for the privilege. I think I might try and adapt his process to work on OSX! Point the web browser at my own machine and search.
Writing your own game is hard. Writing your own game while you're figuring out how to use the platform is harder.
Getting an emulator up and running requires a lot of things to be solved: dealing with the filesystem to load ROMs, getting things to run on a regular schedule, updating the screen, taking input and using it, talking to the audio hardware... by using a pre-existing emulator that you know works, or something like Doom, you can concentrate on these sorts of tasks with an end result that's actually a decent-sized project, instead of a tiny little toy app that bounces your coder-art logo around the screen and goes 'thrummmmmm'.
Since OSX, the Mac is almost as responsive as the Amiga used to be, in my experience.
apple-tab (plus apple-` once you've brought up the task flipper) mostly does what amiga-m,n did: flips through your running apps. Once 10.5 comes out you'll have multiple desktops, so you could run some apps on their own desktop, for a similar experience to the Amiga's 'screens'.
And I find that Exposé solves the window-sorting problem. If you use a lot of console windows it might not be for you, but I find it pretty easy to hit (fn-)f9 and locate the window I want. Or you could use a screen corner as the trigger, for a no-keyboard experience: whip the mouse until you hit the lower left corner (or whichever one you choose), then click on the huge target of a window. Or if you're feeling geeky you could probably use Quicksilver to wire a mouse gesture to activating Exposé...
Switch to a Wacom tablet. I tossed my mouse something like six years ago now; the growing twinges of wrist and finger pain from using the mouse completely vanished.
If you have a huge multi-screen setup there may be some problems, and they suck for playing first person shooters. I only have one screen, and don't care for that genre of game, so there's been no trouble.
You can splurge on a huge one, but I do great with the tiniest size available - and I'm an artist!
It's happened before; check out the history of medieval Venice. It was pretty common and accepted to go about some of your business wearing a mask, especially if you were doing something you didn't want your public face associated with.
And yeah, the Church did eventually outlaw masking there.
We already may have multiple identities for online life - how tightly associated is "Camel Coat Joe" with your RL particulars or whatever professional web presence you may have? Why not have more faces to wear as offline life gets more and more online?
Besides, it'd make daily life prettier and more fantastic, which I don't think is a bad side effect!
"Shockwave" is the brand name for a Director project packaged for the web. Macromedia pretty much got built on the success of Director back in the days of CD-ROMs being new and cool.
When they bought Flash, they merged its browser plugin with the one for Director stuff. So the Shockwave plugin became the Shockwave-and-Flash plugin. Except they always left out the "and" part.
Nah, not Singapore. He wants tagging, and Singapore has absolutely no search functionality. Except for the ugly hack I wrote for searching that nobody else has been able to get working, that I know of.
(I love Singapore and use it for my own site - but it ain't what the original post is looking for.)
So what's play? Do you draw? Do you write? Do you play an instrument? Do you sculpt? Do you sew? Do you dance? Poetry? Painting?
What else do you do?
Hell, what else do you do with computers besides your IT duties? Do you fool around writing games for fun? Do you play with processing video? Muck about with audio?
Do you solder weird devices?
Would you like to do any of these things? Or something not on this list?
Start doing them more; take some of that vacation time you probably haven't used. Do them. Take some classes in them. Study the masters in whatever field you're into. Give yourself a few years to reawaken whatever skills you might have let atrophy, and hone them into something that might make you money.
What did you like to do when you were a little child, besides 'maintain information technology systems'? What did you dream of doing the first time you really understood what you could make these machines do? I bet you've barely done any of it in your career. Go do it. Push back at your job to make more room to do it.
Don't buy that HDTV and home theatre system, don't buy that new car, start saving a little. Put some money into supporting some experimenting, and less time selling yourself to a job that gives you the blahs. You'll probably end up making less money as you start out, maybe less money overall if you switch to something really artsy.
You should probably go devour stuff like "What Color Is Your Parachute". And other stuff on choosing a career.
But just try adjusting the text size! Especially since Flyspeck 3 continues to be impossibly hip among far too many "designers".
Never mind the additional performance hit of having to run an entire home-made UI in bytecode versus nicely predictable system widgets compiled to native code. Or breaking cut-and-paste pretty much entirely.
Really? Last I checked there was a plugin hack that would export the templates to a bunch of flat files, or back - but it still required you to go tickle a page in the admin interface. It looks like the main package hasn't been updated since then, either. What plugins are you using to do this feat?
maybe I can seriously consider using txp for the back-end of the next version of my own site, instead of my personal fork of Singapore and including LJ in one page.
Textpattern is a royal pain to develop your templates on, though, as the only way to do it is to cut-and-paste them into a text form. Last I looked (earlier this year) there was still no way to have them live in a file while you do a tight tweak-reload cycle.
And TXP is not really a package you can use by just throwing some CSS on the default templates, either.
(I want to love TXP, really - it's got a lot of things it does right, and its back end is gorgeous - but it's just a huge pain to build a template for if you're used to running a virtual domain and doing an edit-in-Textmate/reload-in-Safari cycle.)
I had a legal copy - so I got to read the novella packaged in the box!
The story, according to that, was that you were a guy who was being hassled by a minor demon. She was making you have constant nightmares in an attempt to drive you crazy. Eventually your tiredness resulted in some accident that ended you up on an operating table, where you slipped into deep, disturbing anaesthetic-induced nightmares...
This sort of also explains the final screen, which I only got to by using the cheat code. IIRC you had to escape the cotton candy machine, then walk halfway into the funhouse mirror, and tap out 'SOS' in Morse code on the Help key. Your life display would change to an infinity, and you could hit some key (probably Help) to skip screens.
Beautiful and strange game, not actually much fun to play except for the lure of seeing what surreal, disturbing imagery would show up next.
Slashdot Mirror
changing tabs in a program like firefox
Some experimentation reveals that it's alt-apple-cursor left and alt-apple-cursor right. I can't find this exposed in the UI anywhere - which is the kind of nonsense that makes me avoid Firefox.
In Safari, it's apple-shift-[ and apple-shift-] - which you can discover by looking in the 'window' menu.
If you use Adium for your IM, look in the 'general' tab of its prefs - they let you choose between four different sets of tab-switching shortcuts.
Why do you need to close your programs when you're done with them? Most apps use no resources when they have no windows open, and will get swapped out to disc. When you need them, they can be swapped back into physical memory faster than they can be loaded.
And try setting the minimize effect to 'scale' instead of completely turning it off via Tinkertool or whatnot.
I haven't done anything like that to my site. I just wrote clean, minimal HTML with proper mark-up. And I end up in the top ten results for searches for properties I've done art for.
No keyword stuffing, no social link buttons, no SEO bullshit. Just clean code and quality content on a regular basis.
And what about the related debate - the humanity (and marriagability) of robots who used to be people? That one's coming too.
I got no problem banning it either. I'd really like to see less of this kind of adolescent wallowing in ultraviolence made in the first place. I'd prefer that it be through developers saying 'hey, this is too far' and axing stuff like this before it gets to the point where 50-100 people have worked on it for 18 months, and the financial fate of the studio rides on it being released, and it does seem that this is becoming the case.
When I call it 'violence porn' I don't mean that it's got OMG SEX! in it; I mean that it's pornography of violence: lingering on it, encouraging it, made for no other reason than to glorify this taboo act, and usually to do so in the most tawdry way possible.
What on earth makes you think that's why I'm squicked by Manhunt 2?
Man, I'm all for more sex in games. I'd love to see sex in all popular entertainment be shown as explicitly as violence are. You can fling innards around like doubloons at Mardi Gras and get an R/MA, but show one naked cunt or cock and have people fuck and it's X/AO. And it gets ghettoized into this incredibly stupid, impersonal sex.
"Wow! Look at this cool way I can kill someone!" is an incredibly adolescent urge, no matter how many man-hours went into getting the shaders tweaked so the blood soaks into the walls juuuuust right.
Honestly, I watched my boyfriend playing the Bioshock demo and found that to be blood porn, too. I was almost physically sick as he bludgeoned his way through the first few rooms with a wrench.
Why are all the "AAA" titles all about lovingly-rendered ways to kill? I used to like video games but they're really just falling down a hole of being by and for the self-hating, world-hating teenage boy.
From everything I've heard about Manhunt 2 it's not an adult game. The focus on GORE! and NASTY KILLING! is very adolescent. It sounds like something designed by an angsty, hate-filled teenage boy who's going to have a teacher see his notebook and be afraid he's going to be another Columbine killer any day now.
All this gory, blood-soaked shit gets called "adult" but it's not. It's adolescents wallowing in mindless excess.
"So what's up, Joe?"
"Man, I'm bummed. I got this pretty hot new laptop for three hundred bucks but it didn't come with Windows, and I don't have a copy of it anywhere."
"Oh? Hmm, I've got the disc right here in my drawer. Hold on, I'll burn you a copy." *takes out a CD with 'Windows XP' and a serial number scribbled on it in marker*
and doesn't seem to provide a "why" or who this might be useful to
Um, anyone who wants to have the entire English version of Wikipedia on their local machine, for those times when they're away from the net?
People who "would love to have Wikipedia on their laptop, since this would allow them to instantly check for things they want regardless of their location (business trips, hotels, etc). Others simply don't have an Internet connection - or they don't want to dial up one every time they need to check something." (from TFA)
Hell, I could have used this just the other day, when I was in a cafe and wanted to look something up, but didn't want to pay $7 into their wireless gateway for the privilege. I think I might try and adapt his process to work on OSX! Point the web browser at my own machine and search.
Writing your own game is hard. Writing your own game while you're figuring out how to use the platform is harder.
Getting an emulator up and running requires a lot of things to be solved: dealing with the filesystem to load ROMs, getting things to run on a regular schedule, updating the screen, taking input and using it, talking to the audio hardware... by using a pre-existing emulator that you know works, or something like Doom, you can concentrate on these sorts of tasks with an end result that's actually a decent-sized project, instead of a tiny little toy app that bounces your coder-art logo around the screen and goes 'thrummmmmm'.
Since OSX, the Mac is almost as responsive as the Amiga used to be, in my experience.
apple-tab (plus apple-` once you've brought up the task flipper) mostly does what amiga-m,n did: flips through your running apps. Once 10.5 comes out you'll have multiple desktops, so you could run some apps on their own desktop, for a similar experience to the Amiga's 'screens'.
And I find that Exposé solves the window-sorting problem. If you use a lot of console windows it might not be for you, but I find it pretty easy to hit (fn-)f9 and locate the window I want. Or you could use a screen corner as the trigger, for a no-keyboard experience: whip the mouse until you hit the lower left corner (or whichever one you choose), then click on the huge target of a window. Or if you're feeling geeky you could probably use Quicksilver to wire a mouse gesture to activating Exposé...
Sadly this quality does not extend to the program one uses to create it. The editor is prone to trashing your source files every so often.
Haiku from BeOS
Multitasking, no delay
Open source vic'try
How you choose to read "BeOS" is a major syllable count factor. (oddly enough while I say "gee-oss" and "bee-oss", I say "oh ess eks".)
Switch to a Wacom tablet. I tossed my mouse something like six years ago now; the growing twinges of wrist and finger pain from using the mouse completely vanished.
If you have a huge multi-screen setup there may be some problems, and they suck for playing first person shooters. I only have one screen, and don't care for that genre of game, so there's been no trouble.
You can splurge on a huge one, but I do great with the tiniest size available - and I'm an artist!
-2 obvious meta'humor'
It's happened before; check out the history of medieval Venice. It was pretty common and accepted to go about some of your business wearing a mask, especially if you were doing something you didn't want your public face associated with.
And yeah, the Church did eventually outlaw masking there.
We already may have multiple identities for online life - how tightly associated is "Camel Coat Joe" with your RL particulars or whatever professional web presence you may have? Why not have more faces to wear as offline life gets more and more online?
Besides, it'd make daily life prettier and more fantastic, which I don't think is a bad side effect!
Virtual lawn mowing actually made for a pretty entertaining game.
"Shockwave" is the brand name for a Director project packaged for the web. Macromedia pretty much got built on the success of Director back in the days of CD-ROMs being new and cool.
When they bought Flash, they merged its browser plugin with the one for Director stuff. So the Shockwave plugin became the Shockwave-and-Flash plugin. Except they always left out the "and" part.
Nah, not Singapore. He wants tagging, and Singapore has absolutely no search functionality. Except for the ugly hack I wrote for searching that nobody else has been able to get working, that I know of.
(I love Singapore and use it for my own site - but it ain't what the original post is looking for.)
Yes! All that randomly placed red text slowed me way down. It's like comic book dialogue with the emphasis placed even more randomly.
I have also wired myself to read quickly for years; I probably do somewhat parallellize the processing of the sentences.
So what's play? Do you draw? Do you write? Do you play an instrument? Do you sculpt? Do you sew? Do you dance? Poetry? Painting?
What else do you do?
Hell, what else do you do with computers besides your IT duties? Do you fool around writing games for fun? Do you play with processing video? Muck about with audio?
Do you solder weird devices?
Would you like to do any of these things? Or something not on this list?
Start doing them more; take some of that vacation time you probably haven't used. Do them. Take some classes in them. Study the masters in whatever field you're into. Give yourself a few years to reawaken whatever skills you might have let atrophy, and hone them into something that might make you money.
What did you like to do when you were a little child, besides 'maintain information technology systems'? What did you dream of doing the first time you really understood what you could make these machines do? I bet you've barely done any of it in your career. Go do it. Push back at your job to make more room to do it.
Don't buy that HDTV and home theatre system, don't buy that new car, start saving a little. Put some money into supporting some experimenting, and less time selling yourself to a job that gives you the blahs. You'll probably end up making less money as you start out, maybe less money overall if you switch to something really artsy.
You should probably go devour stuff like "What Color Is Your Parachute". And other stuff on choosing a career.
But just try adjusting the text size! Especially since Flyspeck 3 continues to be impossibly hip among far too many "designers".
Never mind the additional performance hit of having to run an entire home-made UI in bytecode versus nicely predictable system widgets compiled to native code. Or breaking cut-and-paste pretty much entirely.
Really? Last I checked there was a plugin hack that would export the templates to a bunch of flat files, or back - but it still required you to go tickle a page in the admin interface. It looks like the main package hasn't been updated since then, either. What plugins are you using to do this feat?
maybe I can seriously consider using txp for the back-end of the next version of my own site, instead of my personal fork of Singapore and including LJ in one page.
Textpattern is a royal pain to develop your templates on, though, as the only way to do it is to cut-and-paste them into a text form. Last I looked (earlier this year) there was still no way to have them live in a file while you do a tight tweak-reload cycle.
And TXP is not really a package you can use by just throwing some CSS on the default templates, either.
(I want to love TXP, really - it's got a lot of things it does right, and its back end is gorgeous - but it's just a huge pain to build a template for if you're used to running a virtual domain and doing an edit-in-Textmate/reload-in-Safari cycle.)
I had a legal copy - so I got to read the novella packaged in the box!
The story, according to that, was that you were a guy who was being hassled by a minor demon. She was making you have constant nightmares in an attempt to drive you crazy. Eventually your tiredness resulted in some accident that ended you up on an operating table, where you slipped into deep, disturbing anaesthetic-induced nightmares...
This sort of also explains the final screen, which I only got to by using the cheat code. IIRC you had to escape the cotton candy machine, then walk halfway into the funhouse mirror, and tap out 'SOS' in Morse code on the Help key. Your life display would change to an infinity, and you could hit some key (probably Help) to skip screens.
Beautiful and strange game, not actually much fun to play except for the lure of seeing what surreal, disturbing imagery would show up next.