Jaymz's Blog

So I just got my ass a shiny new Aluminium iMac in time for the great Macfag event that comes once every few years known as the OS upgrade time. While everyone’s writing about the fancy pants Time Machine, or the multiple desktops Spaces offers, or the fact that the Finder kinda sucks a little less than it used to in the past, I thought I’d share my favourite Leopard feature that I’ve come across so far.

So as we all know, Leopard has a new Finder navigation section for shared computers - be it Windows PCs, Macs or things that those smelly neckbeards love to post verbatim about. Sure enough, after jumping in to the Finder for the first time, it picked up my extensive home network (soon to be updated). Wondering what the icon was supposed to represent, I right clicked on the icon for Konata, my trusty fileserver of gargantuan proportions and chose “Get Info”.

Here’s what Leopard gave me.

Oh zing, Apple!

So, as I aluded to in my previous post, I am the proud owner of a recently purchased, shiny aluminum iMac.

Sidenote: I also got off my ass, and finished replacing Saber with Mahoro - a 3GHz Core 2 Duo system, with a new P35 chipset board and an 8800 Ultra which sure enough, it runs everything but the Crysis demo “like buttah” - but enough of that, lets get back on how the new Mac handles.

What can I say? I’m spoilt now. I don’t want to use my Macbook anymore, because it’s just not the same as the sexy, sexy 20″ beast residing on my desk. Yes, I’m a cheap bastard in that I opted for the midrange iMac model - the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, with the Radeon 2600 HD, with 256MB of VRAM, and the 320GB HD. Why? Because a). the base 24″ model has the same specs, only with a larger screen, and b). if I want a 24″ screen, I can always get one for it later as I have a DVI adapter for the mini-DVI port.

There’s been quite a few reports of horrible, horrible crashes and freezes with these new model iMacs, but I must have lucked out or something, or perhaps this issue doesn’t occur under Leopard, because I haven’t had any problems whatsoever for the week and a bit I’ve had it - and I’ve given it a hell of a workout. In fact, I couldn’t be happier with how it’s been so far. I’m sitting at work right now, after a two week leave, and I’m already getting withdrawal symptoms. If I could, I’d take it with me to work and use it as my work PC, but a certain group of individuals responsible for security would be opposed to that notion.

In regards to Leopard, depending on who you talk to, it’s either the greatest anything ever from Apple as usual, or it’s an overpriced service pack with a fresh coat of paint slapped on to make people think it’s entirely brand new. I’m somewhere inbetween. I’m not wowed by OS X’s headline features at all. Spaces is nice, but is somewhat too irregular and tends to forget my settings, making it a pain in the ass. I’m not using Time Machine yet, because I haven’t cleared off the 400GB backup drive - and by the sounds of things, I may want to invest in something a little larger as a backup drive, or wait for the next point release to see if I can, in fact, use an SMB share to save this crap onto. Aside from the third party HoloGit effect, that whole iChat/Photo Booth backdrop thing doesn’t work at all for me, because my lighting sucks downstairs, and I have committed the unforgivable sin of not contrasting against my background well enough. Mail’s new notes & todo system is pretty cool, but I’m still unsure I’ll ever put them to good use.

So, really.. Leopard for me is about the little things. Things here and there which are nicer than how they were in Tiger. That’s the kind-of more unified look, the addition of grammar checking with spelling in all Cocoa apps (although I keep having to enable the bastard in Adium’s text field), the better contrast between foreground and background windows, the ability to scroll in non focused windows with the mouse wheel, the Japanese-English plugin and Wikipedia plugin for Dictionary, etc, etc. People will argue ad infinauseum whether this is worth $158 or not, but I couldn’t give a flying shit about that argument because my iMac (kind of) came with Leopard anyways, and admittedly, that’s how most people get their OS upgrades. Because it’s a new computer with a fresh OS X install, I can’t say whether the upgrade process makes it run “like buttah”, or like ass-flavoured shitbiscuits. Leopard’s been good to me, but as always, YMMV. My recommendation is that if you own some kind of decent G5 or Intel based Mac, then buy, buy, buy. Anything less, well… it depends.

Unfortunately, now that my new Mac desktop is this kick ass, I’m going to have to get an equally kick ass portable Mac to accompany it. Yes, folks, I’m talking about one of “those”. Granted, due to the copious amounts of money recently spent on expensive all-in-one aluminum computers and Queen albums on iTunes, and the fact that f%#@ing Christmas is a bee’s penis away, any more copious money spending is going to have to wait until next year. There’s also the matter of a backup solution for Konata, now that animu size > total available storage on my backup NAS. I also have a powerful need to eat over the next few months, so this is all throwing a spanner into the works, so to speak.

There were days when I never thought I’d need a notebook. Now, my next plan is to not only get one, but replace a perfectly functional one with something hellishly expensive and rather outlandish. Funny how things work out.

The biggest problem with tech or platform communities nowadays is the whole community part of the equation. Take the Mac community, for example. OS X is a wonderful OS, and generally speaking, Apple makes great hardware. I’ve had zero issues with my original Mac mini, I love my new iMac to death, and I’d kill my grandmother for a Mac Pro, despite the iMac now sufficiently fulfilling all my Mac orientated needs.

The thing that kills me is that everytime I go out to seek a Mac orientated community, it’s almost 90% fanboys, chasing after trends and brandnames. Well, I don’t do brands - I do technology. This is why I can confidently say that Vista’s doing great as an operating system, despite spending most of my time on a Mac, and mostly running strictly XP on my big iron gaming system until recently. Despite my past issues with Ubuntu, I’m still of the opinion that Linux is one of the most versatile and powerful operating systems out there.

The problem is that all these OS’s have their problems, and not one of them is capable of fulfilling all my needs. XP has inherent security dramas, partly due to poor design but mostly due to being the largest target out there. Plus, XP has a bad habit of degrading performance over time, requiring me to reinstall every 6 months to keep things fresh. Vista’s ironed a lot of its teething issues out, but is still lacking in general performance and such for gaming in comparison to XP - plus the extra security and UAC bullshit is so downright obnoxious, that my first impulse is to disable it - which kind of defeats the whole purpose (and no, OS X isn’t anywhere near as obnoxious as Windows is in this field). Examining network settings was a simple process under XP. In Vista, it’s fish through a dozen fucking dialogs, UAC prompts, and wonderfully designed yet detracting Explorer windows for what a right click and a context menu selection would do.

In regards to the Mac side of things, OS X can’t play games and for an OS designed to be “media rich”, it sure sucks at the media side of things. Linux is a new flaw every day, when you run it as a desktop OS. You might have X11/Xorg graphic dramas one day.. networking will be borked the next.. Samba will irrevocably screw up another day.. you spend more time troubleshooting and fixing the OS’s shortcomings and configuration than actually using it. In a server role, where the only thing that gets installed are the distro supplier’s sanctioned updates, bug fixes, and security patches, then Linux is all manner of awesome. As a desktop? Fucking forget it.

All of this, of course, is strictly my opinion. Others have different opinions, and I can respect that. As a matter of fact, I envy those who can use Linux as a desktop and have no dramas. I envy those who run Vista and have no issues with gaming, and can put up with the UAC stuff and the one-step-forward-two-steps-back changes to the user interface. I envy those who are capable of playing back their perfectly legally acquired media under OS X, without having to use several different players to do so, and do it with one player that works well for them. Me, I’m just not there yet. The thing I’m getting at is that each OS has its flaws and benefits, and only those who refuse logic and common sense into their mindset would declare one OS to be entirely perfect, and another to be an absolute failure.

This all essentially comes from a difference of opinion that a learned colleague and I have over operating systems, platforms, and what have you. Unfortunately, he has a bad habit of hating the things I love, but it’s all cool, and I can respect his opinion, because I thought Simoun was a festering pile of shit whose only gimmick was snail-shaped gunships powered by lesbian kisses, and I’m sure our opinions on Aria would differ greatly, if I could go longer than 5 minutes before falling asleep. Yes.. this paragraph is dedicated to you, Negs.

But seriously. There’s an enormous community of Linux users.. Mac users.. and christ, even Windows fanboys have moved beyond Neowin’s forums, and making XP look like OS X 10.2, that have the problem of having to make their choice in platform superior over the other guy. It’s like a nerd form of waving their dicks around, only with the premise of being more refined (Ha!). The Windows community has become even snarkier nowadays - they even have entire armies of bloggers, like that worthless faggot, whose name escapes me, who has to resort to the same childish shit that some other worthless faggot pulled off at the 2007 WWDC.

Me? I’m all for this guys’ approach on the whole situation. What we need is a new community of what I like to call “multiplatformers”. The people who realise that despite personal preferences or leanings, that everything out there today reeks of failure and narrow-mindedness, and be done with it. It’s like religion, people. You’re all happy to continue enjoying your mythological beliefs if it makes the prospect of dying sound better to you. I’ll continue with my scientific view of the universe, thank you very much.. but hey - power to you for having something that provides meaning and purpose in your life. Just fucking keep it to yourself.

So I took the opportunity to update the site’s backend again over the weekend. While I was at it, I implemented a couple of new things. First of all, registration’s back but with a Captcha plugin now (but registration is still not required for comments, nor is the captcha system implemented for that - I fucking hate those things the same as anybody). I’ve also added Gravatar support, with the addition of giving non-Gravatar’d folk a randomized Fate / stay night avatar, instead.

I also started work on those forums I promised everyone, but unfortunately.. bbPress handles like a shopping cart with twisted wheels, so unless I can un-fuck bbPress to the point where it’s of some kind of use, or find some better forum solution that can integrate into Wordpress somehow, it’s not going to go anywhere.

So.. that, and playing through Jade Empire, is pretty much how I spent my weekend. How was yours?

So I seemed to have gotten away with it the last time against Geneon, so I figured I’d give Apple a shot this time. Basically, I decided to make a nifty little Boot Camp icon for my Vista partition on my 20″ iMac, after not finding anything suitable on teh intarwebs.

So after dicking around with Photoshop, and throwing the default Vista widescreen background onto the default iMac 20″ icon, I had so much fun that I decided to make a few other versions, such as the Saber imagery you see to the right.

I’ve made 512×512, 128×128, 32×32, and 16×16 versions for all your icon lovin’, so before the Apple legal team leap on me like Fox on an Aliens TC for Quake (kickin’ it oldschool), grab the following icons below:

iMac 20″ - Leopard edition
iMac 20″ - Vista edition
iMac 20″ - Saber & Rin edition
iMac 20″ - NegativeZero edition

The special NegativeZero edition is, of course, courtesy of PinkuBentoBox.

Feel free to make requests for a version of your particular Mac, and I’ll either tell you to get fucked, ignore your request, or actually go ahead and make it, depending on how generous I feel. This also depends on how long great leader hears of all this, and slaps me with a takedown notice. In any case, we’ll see what the future holds for us all.

Enjoy!

Following in the tradition of the most visited, and linked to article on this site (despite the fact that it’s kinda crufty and old, now), I’ve decided to discuss everyone’s favourite non-endorsed media formats under what is arguably my most used platform of choice, when I’m not gaming or at work - Mac OS X.

As I’ve stated in the past, the two biggest hurdles with OS X for me has been gaming, and media playback. I’d be happy to run everything else in Parallels, but playing games and watching rather large H.264 MKV’s is difficult enough for some PC’s, without adding the strain of emulated virtualization on top of things.

There’s also the issue with third party video cards, and the Mac Pro - which has stopped me from getting one, despite lusting after it ever since the initial announcement of the thing in 2006, but that’s a hardware issue - not a software one. Today, I talk about one of these software barriers kinda almost sorta being overcome in the media section, with Mohammad Haque’s latest SVN of MPlayer OSX, which now earns Jaymz’s official title of “Media player under OS X which sucks the least”.

So.. what makes MPlayer OSX so damned good, in light of more recent media playback developments, such as the Perian component for Quicktime, and the tried and true VLC? I like to summarize it as the good, the bad and the ugly.

• The Good - MPlayer OS X. Just fucking works. Ok, so you need to add a certain line to the extra parameters to make everything sweet, and also require X11 to be installed, but damnit.. I double click MKV’s from anywhere, and that’s what I get now.
• The Bad - Perian. Okay, so when it works, it can be just as good - but there’s a delay with subtitles, forcing you to immediately hit pause while Quicktime Player streams in the entire file, just so it can add pretty subtitles over it. Unfortunately, Quicktime still shits itself on certain MPEG4 videos, some audio tracks don’t work, or require strange shit like Xiph and the AC3 Filter which you have to Google for, and it’s biggest flaw of all? It’s still the Quicktime Player.
• The Ugly - VLC. Don’t go there, girlfriend. Crashing and seperate window-ism aside, the subtitle rendering speaks for itself - that is, when you can read it.

So, now that we have all that out of the way.. how do you go about making with the sweet, sweet, subtitled goodness? First of all, you’re going to need to knock a few requirements out of the road. If you haven’t got X11 installed, then do so now. You’ll find it under the extras of your Mac’s software discs, or if you upgraded to Leopard, you should be able to install it from that disc, too.

You then go to Mohammad Hague’s SVN builds, download the latest one (for me, this was the 29/Nov/07 build), and install like you would any other Mac OS X app. From here, you open up the App, go into the MPlayer OSX menu, select Preferences… and click on the Miscellaneous tab. Under the Advanced Settings: section, you add the following line to Additional Parameters:

• -ass -embeddedfonts -fontconfig

As a side tip, you may want to force subtitles to always on (at least, the first subtitle track), and instruct MKV files to load the Japanese language for your preferred choice of audio. To do this, you change the above line to:

• -ass -embeddedfonts -fontconfig -sid 0 -alang jpn

Okay, so those settings aren’t all that intuitive, but goddamnit - you only need to do this once, and it just works from thereon in. You should now find that when you double click on an MKV file in the Finder, it’ll work right off the bat. No waiting for the fucker to load in Perian, and no pausing the video while you set the subtitle and audio tracks each time because VLC is too fucking stupid to remember. To coin a phrase, It Just Goddamn Works™. Exactly what the Mac platform is all about, my friends.

Now only if we could do something about the gaming…