Star Wars in ASCII via Terminal

If your Netflix hasn't yet arrived,
you "forgot" to pay the cable bill,
or you just don't want what you always have...

Then watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal.

Open Terminal and type...

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

then press Enter



Have a Happy Star Wars Holiday Everyone!

Unreal 3 Engine for iPhone!

Even if you're not a "gamer" this is great news for all users
as this shows the amount of power "under the hood" of the
new hand held computer/phones from Apple. Awesome!

The bad news is there is still no port of Unreal Tournament 3
for the Mac, yet, but it's coming, so I've read...



"Anandtech spent some time with Epic Games' Mark Rein last week and was shown a demo of the Unreal Engine 3 running on a 3rd Generation iPod Touch. The demo included a flythrough as well as a playable level from Unreal Tournament.

The Unreal Engine 3 is a modern 3D gaming engine
which powers games such as Bioshock, Gears of War
and Unreal Tournament 3.



The game engine requires OpenGL 2.0 so this will restrict the game to 3rd generation iPod Touches and iPhone 3GSs only. Epic is planning on making the engine available to licensees at some point, opening the door eventually to Unreal-powered iPhone games."

READ: Epic's Unreal Engine 3 Ported to iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS
by Arnold Kim, MacRumors.com


Click to enlarge photo

A comparison of Unreal Engine 1, 2 and 3's rendering capabilities using the Malcolm model from Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 3 side-by-side.
(Unreal Engine, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Gmail gets Merge in Contacts

Gmail Contacts is quickly becoming a highly portable,
enterprise level, contact management system!

"Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it's no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You've been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we've added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the "Find duplicates" button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don't want merged), and hit the "Merge" button.

If you've been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now's the time to do it. As we've written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks."

READ: One button to merge all duplicate contacts
by Dominik Marcinski, Software Engineer
posted on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 2:54 PM
on The Official Gmail Blog

Google Chrome for Mac!

Google has released it's Google Chrome web browser
for Mac OS X 10.5 or later (Intel only).

Fast start-up
Google Chrome launches in a snap.

Fast loading
Google Chrome loads web pages quickly.

Fast search
Search the web right from the address bar.

Learn about Google Chrome »

I'll be testing this as soon as I can...

VisualHub DISCONTINUED :(

I am sad to report that VisualHub has been DISCONTINUED!

If you have VisualHub or AudialHub, here are directions
on how to back them up for safe keeping:

READ: How to Back Up VisualHub and AudialHub
(iSquint is self-contained. just copy the app itself)

For anyone who has come to rely on it's excellent video conversion over the years the wait for the next app to replace it is over...

now use... ReduxEncoder 1.2.6 beta for Mac OS X 10.5
at The Blog of st373n

VLC Remote app for iPhone

"You already know that VLC is a highly portable multi-media player/server available for Mac, Windows, Linux, etc., capable of reading most audio and video formats (AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, WMV, ASF, FLV (Flash), MP3, MP4, OGG, AAC, FLAC, etc...) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols." VLC playback Features

FREE VLC media player 1.0.3

Download VLC (Mac OS X 10.5 (PowerPC), 19 MB)

Now there's a FREE VLC Remote Control app for iPhone.
I downloaded mine straight from the App Store app.
There's also a paid version of VLC Remote that's allows you
to browse and select files, and manage your playlist.
At only $2.99 it was well worth it!

READ: VLC Remote App Controls The Baddest Media Player Via iPhone
by John Mahoney, GIZMODO.com

ShareTool extends Bonjour over 'net

"Yazsoft’s ShareTool lets you securely share, over the Internet, all the services on a particular computer, as well as all the services that computer can reach on its local network.

...printing, screen sharing, iTunes Sharing, and iPhoto Sharing, as well as third-party services from sources as varied as Skype and BusyCal—if software advertises its services using Bonjour, ShareTool can make them available over the Internet."

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard

READ: ShareTool extends Bonjour over the 'net
by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld.com