I’ve been playing around with chocolate recently, making chocolate-covered oreos, graham crackers, etc. I’ve been using a Lego ice cube tray to make some, which has worked out well.
I wanted some more molds to play with, so I looked around, at a bunch of kitchen supply places, but… no luck. So I tried Amazon, and ordered a whole bunch for like $2-$3 each. They arrived yesterday, now I have all sorts of new shapes to try!
Another MacHeist bundle is out!
$39 for a bunch of Mac apps (which are normally like $20-$40 EACH).
As usual, only a few of the apps are ones I would use, but even then, still a good deal.
If there are 2 apps there that you’d use, it’s worth picking up.
25% of the sales go to charity.
http://www.macheist.com/bundle/u/59851/
Important to note:
if you are a developer, if you download the beta of iPhoneOS 3.0, if you install it on your phone, you cannot go back to an earlier version of the OS!
This means you’d be stuck with 3.0 beta on your phone until the final 3.0 release comes out sometime this summer.
Also, if you download the 3.0 SDK, you can’t submit anything you develop with it to the app store until after the final 3.0 release this summer.
Important gotchas to keep in mind.
That said, I doubt I’ll be able to resist the temptation to try it out.
There’s an Apple announcement today, so of course the nerd world is all a-twitter.
Apple just announced the features of iPhoneOS 3.0.
To sum up:
* App paid expansion packs (i.e. Buy City Guide app, then buy a city pack for it)
* Push Notification (apps can get alerts when not running, like IM alerts for example)
* Peer-to-peer Bluetooth connection (for exchanging business cards, 2-player games, etc)
* Accessory communication (create custom accessories, like a glucose meter that talks to the iPhone via Bluetooth or dock connector)
* Turn-by-Turn navigation is no longer banned (expect to see GPS apps soon)
* Google Maps API (put Google maps in your app)
* Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo (copy and paste between apps)
* Landscape mode for standard apps (use bigger keyboard in Mail and Message)
* MMS (send photos and audio clips to other cellphones – no video tho)
* Voice Memos (record audio clips, you could do this before with 3rd party apps, but now built-in)
* New Calendar file format support (support for standards used by google cal and others)
* Stock app features (now with news)
* Spotlight Search (search in standard apps, such as iPod or Notes, plus global search)
* Stereo Bluetooth (for wireless headphones)
Available NOW as a beta for developers, later this summer for release.
Will be a free update for iPhone owners, $10 update for iPod Touch owners.
I’m excited, lots of good stuff in there, and other minor stuff not mentioned.
Betcha the servers will be bogged down when I try and get it tonight. =)
Last night I started playing “Retro Game Challenge” for the DS.
It’s sort of a… 1980s childhood gaming simulator.
It does a good job of capturing the essence of gaming in the 80s – flipping through gaming magazines, talking about cheat codes, and playing the latest game while a friend cheers you on (his mom even comments every now and then “are you kids still playing that game?” from the next room).
The way it works is fairly straightforward – your friend gets a new game, and you have 4 successively harder challenges to complete in the game. Once you complete the challenges, the next game is unlocked. Your friend also gets gaming magazines in the mail, which you can flip through for tips and cheat codes for the games.
The games are not actually retro games, but invented games that are representative of the types of NES games of the era. I’m only on the third game, but so far they are enjoyable. The first game is a Galaga-like game with some nice touches to add depth, the second game is an odd elevator-action-eqsue platformer, and the game I’m on now is a racing game similar to RC Pro Am.
The game may seem somewhat restrictive, by only doling out games one at a time and making you unlock them, but that too hearkens back to the childhood days of NES gaming, where getting a new game was a big deal, that might involve weeks of saving (or begging). The challenges can also be… challenging, just like the games of the 80s were.
All in all, a good nostalgia kick. If you had an NES growing up, and have a DS now, give it a look.
$phrase[0] = “You so ugly…”;
$phrase[1] = “Your mama so fat…”;
$phrase[2] = “You so dumb…”;
What is it?
A disarray!
Sorry, bad programmer pun. Couldn’t help it.
I’ve been reading the manga series “Monster” – I’m about halfway through and it’s really good so far. Goes off on some seeming tangents sometimes, but then brings it back together.
Kinda “Boys-from-Brazil”-esque in certain respects – a brilliant neurosurgeon tries to hunt down a serial killer who was conditioned as a child to be a perfect killer.
Got a binaural beats app for my iPhone. Not sure if it works, exactly, but after listening to it for 3 or 4 hours, I definitely felt… something.
The theory behind binaural beats, in a nutshell, is that by using phased frequencies in your left and right ears, your brain’s frequency can be influenced.
I went to lunch after coding for the morning with binaural beats playing behind some new-age-y music, and going through the lunch line, things seemed a little… off. Hard to put my finger on, just that reality was a little disconnected feeling. After an hour or so the feeling faded. Who knows, maybe my head was just stuffed up from the cold I’ve had the last few days.
Warrants further investigation, anyway.
Got back into playing Mass Effect on the Xbox360 last night. I was playing it a while back but got distracted by something shiny, now I’m coming back to it.
It’s well-written, and very cinematic. And features some moral choices that are actual decisions… some games give you choices like “do you become an assassin or a bounty hunter?” but Mass Effect does it better, with some more subtle, or lose-lose choices. Like last night I was playing a level where two of my teammates are in different areas fighting off a lot of enemy forces. I could go provide help to one or the other, but the one I didn’t help would die.
Inventory management is Mass Effect, as in Fallout 3, is annoying. I guess Fallout 3 was more annoying since it had encumbrance rules, but in Mass Effect I’m constantly running out of room to hold things and have to melt them down for scrap. It wouldn’t be so bad if the interface wasn’t so clunky for it.
But overall, really fun. I’m about 24 hours in and feels like about halfway through.
Staples doesn’t get many holidays off (7 throughout the year) so I thought today was a workday. I looked through the internal memos yesterday, and there was no mention of it being a holiday.
Good thing I carpool, I was outside Carl’s house and he ran out to tell me to go home. =)
Bonus extended weekend!