XSet is the personal website of Rob Dudley, a 29 year old software and web developer who lives in the Channel Islands...
// February 28th, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
Seriously, I swore an oath when I bought my powerbook that I wouldn’t become a Mac vs Windows type but some of this list is just gigglesome
Check out the Kernel, Audio, Direct X 10, New Built in Apps and Aero Glass sections.
Now tell me I’m wrong?
PS. You want the best bit?
I’ve been enjoying this for 12 months now and Vista isn’t slated for release until 2007.
Go figure.
// February 28th, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
N. A collection of thoughts squished together into a single post as the passing of time has produced too many to create separate posts.
Been a busy couple of days with 3 projects in full swing, a load of fun stuff on the go and general weekend madness to contend with:
On a completely unrelated note I saw the new Honda Hornet last night … basic summary – I want one!!! Although not quite as much as I want one of these.
Laters
// February 23rd, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
One of those personality thingies that, despite my best efforts to be truthful, gets me completely wrong.
What’s interesting about this one is the method of entering your information. Uses some novel collection mechanisms to make a pretty dull quiz a bit more interesting.
// February 21st, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
It’s been a while since I last saw a “turn your computer’s day to day stats into music / noise” program. Indeed the last one was more than a little flaky and ran on Windows 95 …
Sound of Traffic is a funky little app that records the traffic on each port on your network card and turns it into noise. The results can be interesting … but not very.
// February 21st, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
Markiss has started his year’s worth of competitions and the first round (a return of Stair Dismount) has just finished.
I came 4th out of 7 players so not too bad considering. I’ll need to pick up the pace though if I’m going to be in with a chance of winning!
Oh and I didn’t submit my best score:
// February 21st, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
My eldest cousin is getting married in May. It’s been in planning for almost 2 years but the official invites arrived a couple of days ago. Never normally one for all the chintz that goes with this kind of occasion I think this is a lovely invite.
// February 20th, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
Listable.com has a new list (funny that) of loads of open source / freeware apps for Windows.
Some of them will be well known but there are a couple of gems lurking in there and the list is still growing so it’s one to keep an eye on.
// February 20th, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
I’ve been taking some time to try and find more games which I can play on the Mac. Having found a couple of really great ones (that happen to be cross platform!) I thought I’d share:
From the mind that brought you stair dismount comes this fantastically addictive (and incredibly difficult) action puzzler. You simply use the mouse to bounce your little guy round the levels being careful not to smack into too many walls / ceilings.
If any of you have played Introversion Software’s uplink then you’ll know that they have a reputation for designing games based on concept rather than flashy graphics. In Darwinia they’ve combined both into a corking game that plays like a mix of tron, cannon fodder and syndicate wars. You have to help Dr Sepulveda rid his virtual theme-park of a nasty virus and repair various parts of the park as you go. The graphics are a gorgeous blend of retro 3d styling and modern OpenGL technology. They’ve also added a cracking gesture based interface ala Black and White and packaged the whole thing up into a game that looks so good you could just leave it running at parties.
Go and grab the demo to see what I mean. Also keep an eye out for the next offering from this leading british development house – Defcon!
This only gets a .5 as it’s still in alpha but the PC version of the modern Mac rendition of Elite should take pride of place in any retrogamer’s collection. Again blending modern GFX tech with old school stylings Oolite includes all of the classic Elite game-play as well as adding a host of new features and missions. It takes forever to get started but it’s a great way to while away those spare hours.
So that’s my lot for the time being. Any of you lot got any recommendations for “out of the box” games?
// February 16th, 2006 // No Comments » // Personal
Not as relevent to me now as it was but back in the days of MegaComp unpaid overtime used to be a regular occurance:
The TUC has launched a website designed to tackle the UK’s unpaid overtime culture. It says that over five million people in the UK are contributing £23bn in free time to their employers each year.
Using the unpaid overtime calculator is quite scary! According to them I was owed an additional £4k a year. Of course I appreciate that working long hours may have other, non-fiscal rewards (such as getting a project in ahead of deadline) but even so – that’s a lot of cash!
(Source: PCPro – TUC turns to the Web to battle ‘unpaid overtime culture’)
