Sunday, May 31, 2015

Huge Props

So I was fuddling around the internet, looking for customizations for my Powerbook, and I happened across OnyX. This is a pretty nifty tool that you ought to check out if you own a Mac at all. I ordinarily wouldn't have mentioned them except for their website. It's pretty '2014 generic', but it loaded really fast, which is not at all normal for websites of this style. It also had every single download for Mac OSX, from 10.1 through 10.10, on the main download page. This is really awesome, and I would totally recommend heading over there to check them out.

>>Here<<

Friday, May 22, 2015

New Smaller Project...

I'm going to do a little research today on connecting my PS3 Dualshock controller to my PowerBook. Seems like a good idea, and it would make playing Wolfenstein 3D a little more bearable (Trackpad gaming sucks). I'll update this post when I do a little work on it.

==Update==
I remember when I tried this last year...the shady drivers, broken links and angry Mac-and-windows forum users. Dark times, these are. Dark Times.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Honoring the Majority

I'll often forget in my long binges on internet blogs that the United States is not the only country on the internet. So here's to all the other internetted nations out there. (And preemptive apologies for any bias or rude language that may appear here, I am only human, after all.)

Thursday, May 14, 2015

'New' Gear

When I say I get something new, I really mean that I've acquired or upgraded something old. I recently put a new Transcend 120 GB IDE/ATA Solid State Drive and a new 1 GB DDR SDRAM stick in my trusty powerbook. I must say, it's great. Boot times are way faster, and the extra 512 MB helps a ton. That being said, I've got to reconfigure all of my crap because I forgot to burn a backup disc while the old HDD was still in place. I am not taking it apart and putting it back together just for some crappy games, so I'll look for them later (I think I got most of them from Macintosh Garden anyway). The main thing I hate reinstalling is Tigerbrew. It's a great piece of software, but man is it a pain to reinstall. You've got to get Xcode, and for that you've got to get an Apple ID and a developer account (both are free). But you can't get any Xcode, you've got to use Xcode 2.5 (on Tiger anyway, idk about Leopard), and that's a pain to find. But once it's installed, all you have to do is install gcc and sometimes cmake and you're good to go. Other than you have to update it every time you go into the terminal, but hey, that's super easy with a 'brew update' and 'brew upgrade'. So that's what I'll be working on (again) this weekend.

PS: For whatever reason, my Airport Express card cannot connect to my wifi, so I have to do an Ethernet connection for the first system updates.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Coding on a TI

I found this nifty little tool hidden deep within my math class. The TI84 has a pretty big coding community surrounding it, mostly for games, but for other esoteric stuff as well like mp3 players and even a camera or web browser. There's a site that contains a lot of this stuff, it's pretty neat. I often use my TI for Tetris and minesweeper, but there's a keyboard available that I'd like to get to improve coding speeds and take notes with. Another hopeful project is I would like to get a hold on a couple (thousand) ESP8266's to possibly make the Calc access the internet, but that's for a much later date.

Nvidia Shield

Nvidia's Shield Portable has been mysteriously absent from the shelves of stores lately. I have found a few on eBay for $700 (!). I did a little research, and saw that Nvidia has filed some wireless certifications, so maybe (hopefully) they'll release a new one for sale this year.

source:
wccftech.com/nvidias-shield-2-lives-zauba-spotting/

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

VPN, VNC, or Remote Desktop?

I have been trying for the last few days to get all three of these running, but to no avail. My desktop has an unformatted, 1 tb HDD inside that I wanted to be able to access through my Powerbook G4 at school (for nefarious purposes muahahahah). I did my research and came up with the incorrect conclusion that a VPN would be best for me. I set it up, tried it at home, and it didn't work. I left it alone and tried at school, where it unsurprisingly didn't work. When I got home, I put the project on hold because I had a very large assignment due the next day, and didn't get around to actually researching the project until the next month, which gives you a great gauge of the speed of my projects. Anyway, the next time I pulled up some VPN info, I read that it just routes web traffic through my desktop. It isn't a way to access my files, which is what I actually wanted. One download later, I had the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac. Which didn't work, because mediafire sucks. I promptly acquired a legitimate version for OSX 10.4.11, and got to work. Using the Fing network scanner app, (free on iOS, idk about android) I looked up the IP for my desktop. It was missing. As it turns out, having the PC on in the first place helps a lot, as does enabling remote desktop from settings. After I had done these things, I was able to get right down to the simple buisness of crashing the client by opening up Floating Point on max graphics at millions of colors. 10/10 would test this way again. I reopened the RDC, this time rendering my desktop in 256 colors at minimum graphics, and not opening any games up like a true genius. It now works flawlessly on my 1.5 gHz Powerbook, I can't wait to try other games this weekend. I'll be trying all of the games in my steam library, except for Postal 2.

Sidenote, I may be getting a new SSD and RAM for the powerbook, so I'll post on that when it happens.