June, 2007

I got [Disco](http://www.discoapp.com/) as part of the [macheist](http://macheist.com/) end bundle. I like it for its simplicity. Anyway, the other day it bugged out while burning an audio cd…

Not sure what caused it but it seemed to lose its window texture. Letting it go and restarting after the burn finished seemed to fix the problem… weird.

*NOTE: Cool text added with Skitch

I got my invite to the [Skitch](http://plasq.com/skitch) beta last week.
First impressions:

* The UI is refreshing. Although non-standard, it is [plasq](http://plasq.com/) goodness, much like [ComicLife](http://plasq.com/comiclife/) was when it was released.
* Very responsive
* Extremely fun to use
* Very useful for anyone who posts images to any kind of online environment

I’ll play with it some more over the coming weeks, but at this stage it looks definitely like an app that I would pay money for and use quite often.

You can check out my ’skitches’ at [http://myskitch.com/brettbrooks/](http://myskitch.com/brettbrooks/)

Last week I bit the bullet and ordered an iMac. I’ve been following the latest iMac update rumours for some time now, the ones reporting that a new iMac will be released with a brand new enclosure and what-not. After numerous rumour deadlines came and went I got sick of waiting and decided to just jump right in and order it.

I’ve been using a PC as my desktop computer for what seems ages. Always having a mac laptop was good enough for me to work and develop on and the PC allowed me to play whatever games I wanted and have access to other PC related software. In recent years though I’ve found that I’ve been using my PC less and less for actual programs, and mainly just for games, a bit silly really.

So, after all these years, I’m moving back to the world of Apple desktop computers. I’m looking forward to it, and looking forward to having less to do with windows.

The model I ordered is as follows:

* 24inch iMac
* 3gig ram
* 750gig hard drive
* NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB video card

Should run fairly decently.

Currently ETA is sometime next week *hopefully*, so in the meantime I’ve been busy cleaning off my old PC. Sorting out all the documents and stuff I have on it ready to transfer it over to the iMac.

Can’t wait for it to arrive, although the 24inch widescreen is going to look huge compared to the screen I have sitting on the table now.

I’ve been working on an app that has a few NSComboBoxes. I wanted the NSComboBoxes to work as expected, allowing the user to choose an item from the drop down list or enter a new item directly into the text field. I ran into a few problems using bindings in this situation and found that just setting the bindings up in interface builder was not enough as it didn’t seem to automatically add any new items typed in to the associated NSArrayController.

(more…)

I bought a Zelda walkthrough book the other week at [EB](http://www.ebgames.com.au/). It’s for the Wii version of [Twilight Princess](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Twilight_Princess) so I figured it would be interesting to read. I had played up to the third dungeon in Twilight Princess, but found out from the book that I had missed a LOT of stuff. Not just a small thing here and there, but large sections and new moves and stuff. I thought I was progressing pretty well, but I guess not.

Traditionally I’ve always thought of walkthrough guides as cheating, but I guess it comes down to how exactly you use the book / guide. I decided to delete my current game and start over again, but this time before leaving a particular level / zone, I’ll check the book to make sure I haven’t missed anything. I figure this isn’t really cheating because I’m playing the game myself, but just making sure I don’t waste time having to come back for bits I miss. In the long run I think it’s going to save me some time.

My Wii hasn’t seen much play time recently. Melanie logs on to the ‘Wii Vote’ channel every few days and does the votes and enters a question. We haven’t yet had one of our submitted questions used, but I figure there must be thousands and thousands of questions submitted.

I started Playing [Ultimate Alliance](http://www.marvelultimatealliance.com/) again, this time actually doing the proper moves and not just swinging the controls around and hoping for the best. It actually makes the game a lot better.

There hasn’t really been any new releases for the Wii that have taken my fancy. [Mortal Kombat Armageddon](http://mkarmageddon.com/) looks interesting, but I’ll wait and see. I’ve been tempted to get a mod chip for my Wii, but I’m really not game enough to pull my Wii apart and solder it in.

It’s still a fun device though and I’m not really bored of the games I have yet.

I’ve always had a small interest in radio controlled cars. Last one I had was a Tandy one that got broken one day and we could never find parts to fix it. I started reading up on them again recently and was quite amazed at how advanced they are now. You can get nitro fuel based cars, with small little fuel motors in them, 2wd or 4wd, disc brakes and more.
I went and checked out a local hobby shop here in Rocky ([Ultra Hobbies](http://ultrahobbies.com.au/store/)), and found that they actually sell them with quite a good range of ready to run (RTR) cars and numerous spare parts.

I asked the guy behind the counter when the local RC club meets and he gave me the dates for the next meeting. I remember going to watch both the off-road and on-road cars before but somewhere along the line I forgot about it. Anyway, I might go check it out the next time they meet.

There seems to be 3 main classes of cars. On-Road, which is pretty self explanatory, Off-Road “buggies” and Off-Road “Truggies”. The main difference between “buggies” and “truggies” seems to be the look of the car. “Buggies” tend to have smaller wheels at the front, and are lower to the ground. “Truggies” seem to be a mutation of the old style “Monster Trucks” + “Buggy”, being lower to the ground then a monster truck but higher then a buggy.

The “truggy” seems to be a lot more fun as it can pretty much go anywhere due to the extra height and it also has the speed of a traditional “buggy”.

Most of the guys run [Jammin' X1CRT trucks](http://www.jamminproducts.com/x1crt.htm) and I’ve done a bit of reading about them. A base ready to run system costs around $850 AUD, which seems to include everything you need to get up and racing. This model car seems to have a pretty big following so there are a wide selection of spare parts and also upgrade pieces.

A quick youtube search brings up some good [results](http://youtube.com/results?search_query=x1crt&search=Search) and shows how well the little cars run on all sorts of surfaces.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll end up getting one or not. I’ll probably go to a few race meetings and see if my interest remains. I think it might be something fun to do that is out of the house and away from the computer.

I’ve spoken about [Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/) in the past ([1](http://www.geeklane.com/blog/2006/12/17/indispensable-mac-apps/),[2](http://www.geeklane.com/blog/2006/12/04/adium-i-want-to-like-you/)), both times I have both praised and also bagged it due to an [annoying bug](http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/1583) involving multiple group chat conversations. Basically, If you had multiple group chat conversations going, all the text would get displayed in the first conversations window. This of course made it almost impossible to have multiple group conversations.

Thankfully, via a [comment](http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5776832&postID=1812221075554604629&isPopup=true) I left on the main adium blog, one of the lead developers – Evan Schoenberg took a quick look at the bug and whacked together a quick fix. Apparently it was rather basic and was caused by group conversations all using the same group chat ID and not unique ID’s. Anyway, as of Adium 1.04, the multiple group chat bug is fixed!

The seemingly simple fix actually motivated me to download the source code and take a look at it. I wouldn’t mind trying to fix some other bugs or maybe make some features better.

Evan’s quote in the comments of the bug say it all really:

>>Sigh. We really need someone interested in Adium development who actually uses MSN. This took about 30 minutes to create what I believe is a fix, and it has been a major flaw in our MSN implementation for 2 years.

The adium source code is huge, way bigger then any other source / project I’ve ever been involved in. I have a feeling it’s going to take some time to figure out how it all works.

So yeah, I now use Adium for my MSN messaging needs. It beats the pants off the clunky default MSN messenger app.