Wait a moment..i’ve just rebooted my brain..it takes a minute to warm up..ah yes that was what I was going to say..
This week has seen my 25th birthday come and, all to quickly, go.
Not that I really bother about my birthdays. Of course i’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy receiving presents, but I don’t like asking for any thing, I always feel better giving presents than receiving them: something about ‘owing’ something to someone..
Needless to say my birthday arrived and, while it really was a minor concern thanks to some gruelling coursework, I had a nice meal with Falling’s family and got some really cool presents. Her parents got me a Topman voucher to feed my non-existent fashion sense, her sister got me a Game voucher to tease me with the tasty selection of games I’ve been wanting to try, and Falling got me an iTunes voucher (you can never have enough music!) and tickets to see Alanis Morrisette in concert in June – cool or what?? My parents and my brother also sent me some money so i’m itching to go shopping!! Oh and my flatmate rather unexpectedly got me a really cool T-shirt;-)
But the main concern of this week really has been the coursework. We were to design an adventure game for the Nintendo DS that could only have 3 levels, 5 player items and upto 3 NPCs. It was actually really challenging as i’ve never really played traditional adventure games before (Zork, Monkey Island, Myst) but I did A LOT of research over the past few months trying out all these classics and trying to come up with an idea for this game.
In the end I went with a point and click, Myst-style adventure set aboard a sinking ship during WW1. If that sounds exciting, in reality I don’t think the game I envisioned really is, however I put a lot of effort into the storyline so here’s hoping I get points for that! Despite having months to do this, with other coursework and just life in general, the time seemed to commit seppuku and it was a real push to finish on time. Ultimately I handed it in with seconds to spare and I didn’t get a chance to include everything I wanted to. My classmate Habboi has a bit of a rivalry thing with me (totally one-sided;-) ) concerning coursework marks so I reckon he’s easily won this round. I really, really just hope my attempt is passable.
Coursework 2 though should be a lot better. While I found CW1 challenging because of the restrictions and my own self-enforced restrictions (trying to do a ‘traditional’ adventure game rather than an action-adventure like Zelda), the brief in CW2 is to create a 2D game in Director showing what we’ve learned in classes (collision, affinity, movement, npc’s, states etc). It’s really open-ended so I have quite a few ideas for what I want to do. The important thing is not to let myself get too carried away as i’ll probably spend the time trying to get something to work that is simply beyond my reach at the moment. We only have slightly less than 3 weeks to finish it (as well as the stuff for my other classes) so it’ll be tough. But I reckon I can pull it off thanks to more all-nighters and a constant stream of coffee=)
I haven’t tried out many Mac applications of late except to mention that the combination of Handbrake – Jubler – Submerge is a formidable team when it comes to subtitling. So far i’ve successfully ripped,subtitled and merged both ‘Brick’ and ‘Flight of the Navigator’. I’m not sure what the legality issues are here but since I own the original dvds and it’s for my own personal use I reckon it’s okay under the “Fair Use” Act.
Also worth mentioning is Adium. I mentioned Adium back in September last year when I was raving about all the cool things on my Mac. It’s basically a chat program like MSN Messenger but because the Mac version of Messenger is absolute garbage (thanks Microsoft) I started using the little Duck instead. Well now the Duck is no more! Adium has improved (slightly faster opening for MSN accounts) and has a lot of nice features I won’t really go into, but the main area worth mentioning is appearance. I’ve changed the duck icon to one of Totoro from My Neighbour Totoro. It looks quite good and has different animations for online/offline/signing on etc. I’ve also customized the contacts panel to a neat black theme (contacts rather hastily cut out for privacy reasons):
On the subject of appearance customisation, I downloaded FlyaKiteOSX as recommended by a review on LifeHacker. Basically it’s a suite of applications and tweaks to make Windows look and (sort of) act like a Mac. Included is StarDock (or atleast something similar) that I’ve used before (back in the days when I was pining for a Mac!) which puts a similar dock on your desktop. It’s not quite the same as the Mac version but it does the job.
HOWEVER, StarDock aside (which I’ve never had any problems with), FlyaKiteOSX does more than it says on the tin. I should have read the reviews on LifeHacker itself before installing but suffice to say it turns out the program not only changes a lot of system files to make the tweaks possible (always a bit risky), it also puts a keylogger on your system – how nice!
I actually went back to LifeHacker to get the link so that I could write a favourable post about FlyaKiteOSX, only to read some of the horror stories in the reviews. Needless to say I immediately set about removing the software which, on the surface went quite smoothly but a scan for spyware (and several Windows errors) did in fact reveal a keylogger. Amusingly, a so called ‘developer’ of the software vehemently defends it on LifeHacker insisting that there is no spyware bundled with it.
Sympathy For The Devil rating: Use at your Peril! The moral for today is, if you want Windows to look like a Mac, get a Mac.
