Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you furrowing your brows and sighing.
Running house fans before removing them from their packaging somewhat reduces their thermal dissipation efficiency.
Thank you.
For the first time in recent memory Twitter has actually gone ahead and released a new feature that for once isn't merely the destruction of a previous feature: so-called Twitter Lists. And I love them, even if they are mostly useless in their current form.
I've been using the Groups feature in the chocolate-sounding TweetDeck for a long time now to help me organise all the trillions of tweets I get every millisecond (or some fractional amount thereof) into geographic collections that make them easier to follow, so this Lists feature seemed to be the next logical step. I wonder if the TweetDeck team will create a group export or conversion feature?
I started creating some lists this morning with my typically longer-than-necessary names. I still need to create lists for people I'm a fan of (aka: will never follow me back!), as well as for friends in Europe, Canada and the US. Perhaps it could be "the-distant-friends?"
Part of the point of Twitter Lists is allowing others to see them and subscribe to them, so ideally you're supposed to make them interesting for other people. These lists would probably only be interesting to me, but it works :).
Of all the features Twitter could have rolled out, I think this one made a lot of sense. By having basic lists become such an integral part of the service it means no longer will we be tied to specific Twitter clients with our custom groups that in TweetDeck's case require separate login credentials. For example, I'm really looking forward to having lists in full screen glory in TweetDeck on my Mac, but because I prefer Birdfeed to TweetDeck on the iPhone I'm looking forward to one day having those same lists available on that too.
Two small things that worry me about this though: first, for a mildly obsessive compulsive person like myself who's addicted to tags and metadata (evidenced by my blog's tag archive) I can see this consuming so much of my life that I may slip into a void and never return. For example, those four lists above started as eight! Secondly, the same people who are so obsessed with the number of followers they have must now also artificually pump up and abuse a new popularity metric so they continue to be CoolTM.
I read a report somewhere that people of my generation tend to stay in contact with our parents far more than previous generations did. I'm not sure how much of that is societal or whether it's because it's just cheaper and easier to do now wherever we are, but I'd say it definitely holds true for us here.
I try to contact my dad at least twice a week on Skype because especially since my mum died we've become really close friends. He's still obviously an authority figure when it comes to certain whatnot, but for the most part I talk to him now the same way I talk to friends. We didn't break our longest running record yesterday afternoon on Skype, but 1 hour 54 minutes is still pretty damn impressive!
Sometimes a short train trip late at night through the Marias Pass train route in northern Montana with the 2001 era DirectX graphics and sky is just what I need to relax just before going to sleep.
I first got Train Simulator in 2002, it was the first game I tried on my desktop at the time, the first game I tried running with Boot Camp with my then-new MacBook Pro in early 2006 (Windows gaming on a MacBook Pro), and is still one of the reasons I keep a copy of Windows XP lying around for the 3D acceleration in software like VMware Fusion.
For someone who moved around so much as a kid and could never have huge trainsets, this was the closest I ever got, and I still find it fun :).
This post originally appeared on the Annexe.
X11 graphics performance with the provided additions has been HUGELY improved!
This post originally appeared on the Annexe.
When I finally got around to installing the new VMware Fusion 3.0 update I downloaded yesterday I expected to get a slight performance improvement for my FreeBSD guests, but not as much as I would have got had I been running a Windows guest. The VMware Mac team have made it clear in their advertising they consider Fusion to be a product to run Windows on your Mac, and while other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux are supported, they're not a priority. I'm really pleased and relieved to say I was wrong!
Aside from one minor glitch which I'll describe below, the improvements for FreeBSD guests under VMware Fusion 3.0 have been huge. Given I imagine the market for people running this OS in their product must be tiny I really appreciate them putting in this effort.
First of all, its faster. Not "OMG I Just Got A New Computer!" faster, but extracting archives such as a portsnap image and booting the machine in the first place takes less time.
The biggest usability change though is more seamless X11 integration. As you could with Windows guests (and perhaps Linux ones, not sure) before, you can capture and release control of your mouse pointer between the FreeBSD guest and Mac host as if the VM was just a regular Mac window. This means you don't need to enter a key combination to "break out" which makes it infinitely more usable.
The only one downside that still lingers from VMWare Fusion 2.x is the software's continued reliance on the compat6x port if you want to run the latest stable version of FreeBSD which is currently 7.2. There's probably an architectural reason why this is, but it'd be nice if I didn't need to install a compatibility layer and set of libraries for a legacy earlier version of my OS to get the Fusion Additions. That said, once this is installed the Additions perform flawlessly.
To sum up, the performance difference combined with the vastly improved and seamless experience with X11 means I can run FreeBSD in full screen on my MacBook Pro for my studies and general messing around without having to reboot my machine and use Boot Camp. I believe the term I'm looking for is: awesome!
Thank you VMware guys, you've made me a really happy camper :).
This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.
This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.
For all of you operating system enthusiasts, VMware Fusion 3.0 was just released for the Mac.
I bought a licence for Fusion 1.0 as soon as it came out in 2007 (Just bought VMWare Fusion) because at the time I was testing various different flavours of BSD and the later builds of Parallels Desktop weren't playing nicely with them. By contrast, despite being heavily advertised as a way to run Windows, Fusion also had additions for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
Given I got Fusion 2.0 as a free upgrade, being told I'd have to shell out AU$49.00 for 3.0 was a bit of a kick in the stomach, but if after using the trial for 30 days the performance is noticeably better I'll upgrade.
