Aha! I recently installed an olden goldie on my G5: Duke Nukem 3D. That takes me back.
Thanks to ambitious freeware mavens like icculus.org, macologist and ScummVM we can now play plenty of older games on OS X and Linux, including Duke 3D, Monkey Island 1 + 2 and Unreal Tournament 99. It is really nice to see what one “ooh”ed and “aah”ed about almost a decade ago. Duke 3D really is so damn blocky it’s a wonder I ever thought it looked “real.” That shows what the mind can do to a fundamentally good idea.
Since last time i wrote, I bought and installed OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”, in Apple vernacular). It’s some slick shit, but I assume it will have some bugs ironed out in the next few months, making it slicker still. The biggest fly in the ointment is the fucking Finder: still the causer of the spinning Gay Pride ball. Its sluggy file copying is still there, its non-adjustable and frankly erratic “snappy grid” and strange network behaviour too. As icing on the cake, it seems to have a real fucking issue when it comes to “Bonjour” (nee Rendezvous) printers. What did they change? At any rate, some stuff is really impressive, especially where graphics are concerned. I recommend John Siracusa’s massive review, which is basically great, although very metadata-heavy. Heh!
(Just now listening to Devo by Warm Wires)
What else? Well, Apple just launched iTMS in Sweden. At about the same time, a Tiger-compatible Roxio Toast was released. Among the new featureas was the ability NOT to be able to burn DRM‘d AAC tunes sold via iTMS. This decision was made by Roxio after “discussions” with Apple. I have no doubt that Apple acted big biz and threatened Roxio in so many words. At any rate, this means you NEED iTunes to burn iTMS music. That also means you need to use CD-/DVD-R writers that iTunes can recognize. That is just bogus, Apple. Bite the hand that feeds you, morons. Personally, I feel that services like Warp’s Bleep.com (who offers LAME –alt-preset standard encoded MP3s sans DRM) and Audio Lunchbox (who lets you dl both ogg and mp3s) is a much better alternative. If not, there’s always jhymn. Or go buy vinyl, gramps.