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Archive for November, 2009
The iPhone Trench Run
2 years ago
by manfred
in iPod/iPhone
As a committed fan of the Star Wars franchise I was looking forward to the impending arrival of the Star Wars: Trench Run game for the iPhone. The game places the player in the pilot seat of an X-Wing and provides the challenge of blowing up assorted bits and pieces that said pilot would encounter in the trenches of the Death Star.
The graphics engine of the iPhone is suitably leveraged to produce stunning visuals and smooth animation. Great sound effects taken directly from the movie help wanna-be Red Squadron pilots get into the action. There are few controls to master: simply tilt the iPhone in the intended direction to steer the X-Wing. Large areas of the screen provide the necessary buttons for firing weapons and activating other functions. Various modes of play and difficulty levels are available.
The ultimate mission: carefully aim a torpedo into the exhaust port of the Death Star. Use the Force if you have to…
Star Wars: Trench Run costs USD 4.99 and is available in the iTunes App Store. A great game, not only for fanboys.
Leica M7 Hermes
2 years ago
by manfred
in Photography
Since I have a thing for orange I couldn’t skip mentioning this one. Leica has teamed up with Hermes to produce a very limited edition of its M7 rangefinder camera. Only 100 cameras will be manufactured, individually numbered with a distinct colour no pickpocket could miss. At the price, this is one piece of kit one would probably prefer to keep in a very, very safe place.
The M7 Hermes is likely to be priced at a cool USD 15000, making it a rather expensive point-and-shoot. It’s not a digital camera either, relying instead on the now archaic 35mm film rolls. It’s certainly a classic. And looks really cool!
Freshen those apps
Apple Software Update is adequate to keep your Mac humming along with the very latest official software that your Mac arrived with. But over the course of any time period it is unlikely that your Mac will be filled with only Apple software. Keeping up to date with a variety of applications downloaded from who-knows-where can be a challenge. That’s where AppFresh comes in. It takes on the task of creating an inventory of all the applications you’ve installed on Mac OS X, then goes out into the wide Interweb to determine whether a newer version of any of those applications is available.
The great thing about AppFresh is that it checks the status of your Mac at any point in time, so no persistent databases are created that may ignore a very new piece of software you may have installed. It’s also a free application, and as a bonus, developed by Germans. Has to work well then, right 
After it’s been installed, AppFresh checks what’s in the Applications folder and then goes out to check for updates to those applications.
A concise list of all updates found is displayed. Even better, clicking on an entry that links to an update causes that update to be downloaded and, at the user’s behest, automatically installed.
The automatic installation is a great feature, though I’ve turned it off for the following reason: certain updates require user intervention – entering a password, for example. In the case of the Drobo Dashboard, the Drobo needs to be ejected before an update can be applied. In this sense, AppFresh wrongly assumes the applicatin was updated properly. I’m assuming that no proper error codes are returned to indicate that the application update failed. Whatever the case, for a better overview and to possibly transfer updates to the Mini and the MacBook I simply have AppFresh download the latest updates to my Downloads folder from where I manually install them.
To show that this is not just about third-party applications, AppFresh also provides information on the latest Apple software updates and, of course, about itself. It’s a great utility that makes life a lot easier and makes worrying about finding all the necessary updates to applications a thing of the past. Further details for any software component are provided. Simply click on an application to see a description of the suggested upgrade and read comments posted by users.
Integration with i use this provides a backend from which the latest application updates are read and from where application ratings can be determined, based on user opinions. Registration on the i use this service is free and optional – not a bad service to have access to at all. It’s also available for Windows users.
For anyone who needs to maintain upgrades to various applications on the Mac, AppFresh is worth a look. Highly recommended.
Twitter spam
I join a long list of Twitter users whose accounts have been compromised. In the past few hours, I have seemingly been recommending a source of cool ringtones to all and sundry.
Pardon the intrusion…my password has been set to a more secure one and I trust that’ll be the end of that.
Brief tip: if you need ringtones, make your own
Canon EOS-1D Mark IV white paper
2 years ago
by manfred
in Photography
Canon has made a white paper available that details the new EOS-1D Mark IV camera. The Canon white papers are an interesting read and provide a lot of insight into the capabilities and operation of various digital SLR camera models.
Interestingly, the EOS-1D Mark IV does not have a full-frame sensor like the EOS-5D Mark II. Instead, the sensor has a cropping factor of 1.3. That’s an APS-H sensor, compared to the new EOS-7D‘s APS-C sensor with a nominal cropping factor of 1.6. Since the EOS-1D Mark IV features a very high burst rate, it will likely be used extensively for sports photography where a crop factor can assist in gaining some extra length out of a zoom lens.
Canon white papers are available here.
ScanSnap now Snow Leopard capable
The daily review of my RSS feeds indicated good news with regard to Snow Leopard support for the Fujitsu ScanSnap: a new driver has been made available and may be downloaded here for all models.The update was promised to be available by the end of November – an earlier release date is great news for those who have held off on the Snow Leopard upgrade to ensure their scanners will still function as intended.
I downloaded the update and did a final check for any new software updates for Leopard. With nothing new to install, I plugged the Snow Leopard Install DVD into the iMac‘s optical drive and allowed the upgrade to 10.6 proceed. As a check before the upgrade, the internal hard drive had about 409GB free space remaining. Less than one hour later, the iMac had rebooted twice and Snow Leopard had been successfully installed. About 40GB of disk space had been freed up during the upgrade and a cursory check indicated that most everything seemed to be working. I shutdown the ScanSnap Manager and installed the update: I’m happy to report that the direct scanning function with the Save to File option works as it did before on Leopard.
Last task: to apply the combo update 10.6.2.
Update: since I use the S300M and am not fussed about any of the OCR features provided by FineReader, I neglected to indicate that full OCR support is still not available on Snow Leopard. If you require this, check this link to be notified once FineReader has been readied for Snow Leopard.
94.7 Mountain Bike Challenge
Together with roughly 4000 other mountain bike enthusiasts, I’ll be joining the fray from tomorrow morning at 07:30.
If you’re there, good luck. 25km is more than enough for me, especially when I observe the flight path that will require quite a bit of pedaling. Uphill…
I trust the wine I had this afternoon, lack of a ride in the last 2 weeks and overall lack of fitness will stand me in good stead.
Lego Rock Band and Indy II
November will see the release of two new console titles from the Lego stable.
First off is the follow-up the Indiana Jones adventures in Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues. In this title, players will once again get to re-create adventures from all the movies, including the latest including the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Jones will visit South American jungles, Peruvian Ruins and many other places.
The second release I’m quite keen to get hold of is the Lego Rock Band game, bringing the fun of multi-user band members and the Lego universe together.
Until these titles are available locally in the next two or so weeks, why not build something related to Lego Rock Band? A tour bus might be a great idea…
Get the building instructions here (direct PDF link).
Don’t lose the keys
2 years ago
by manfred
in Moblogging
Where would they keep the spare key for this one, I wonder?
Posted via email from mhertenberger’s posterous
A stitch in time saves Ninite
One of the reasons I got my newly installed system ready for use in record time was partially due to the speedy installation of Windows 7 and also the fast copy of all my data back to the internal hard drive. But the real time to get a machine back to a usable state is spent installing all those small applications one needs on a day to day basis. Microsoft Office is standard fare, but MSN Messenger, Google Talk, iTunes, IrfanView and many others require a search and download of the latest version and then the installation.
Now, a very convenient solution is at hand: Ninite. Select the products to be installed from the extensive list and download the installer.
Then simply run it and wait for it to complete. Ninite seeks out the very latest versions of the selected applications, downloads and installs them without further ado.
It’s a huge time saver and a great idea. If there are any applications you can’t find in the list, the developers are quite happy to add them. Try Ninite when next you have a number of applications to install: it’ll save you a heap of time.
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