If you're interested in old DOS games, the games I grew up with, running on the Mac you will want to look at Boxer. Boxer is a front-end to DOSBox that makes installing and running old DOS games a breeze! Many games before 1998 are available for free on sites like Abandonia; I had pretty good luck here. There really isn't any learning curve and most games run well without installing if you run into issues, nice that Boxer will ask if which file to run in those cases.
If you want to run old Windows games on the Mac and don't want to run a copy of Windows give WineBottler a try. It's a really nice front-end to Wine. I have had pretty good luck with Wine on Mac and Linux over the years so it's worth giving things a try. WineBottler will install your Windows program into a OS X app bundle so it's like running any other app on the Mac and it takes away some of the configuration know how making for pretty quick installations.
Windows and Linux users, you have front-ends to Wine and DOSBox as well so don't feel left out, just look around….
Been playing my favorite game of all time, Daggerfall, the precursor to Oblivion and Skyrim. It's still really fun even thought the graphics are dated. It was the most advanced back in the day. Get your free copy here: http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall
CrapCleaner for Mac!
Sunday, 29 January 2012
I've been using CrapCleaner (CCleaner) for years to clean Windows machines, now it's available for OS X. You can do most of these tasks manually, but having them all in one place is nice. CCleaner is 100% free.
I wouldn't worry about this unless they start forcing you to log onto these services in order to use the Internet. Facebook is an optional layer and isn't where I would go to get my news, it's where I get news about friends and acquaintances.
If you dislike this filtering simply don't log in to Google, or use Dogpile - also not logged in. They may still filter based on your country (ip address, etc.) so use a foreign search engine if you can read the language. Google can attempt to translate whole pages.
You can also use Tor , which picks an IP typically not from the US and anonymizes your session. You can also use Private browsing and cooky filtering in your browser to limit some other things....
I personally use news feeds from reputable sources and people (blogs) for all my informational needs; I haven't noticed it being filtered to cater to me, because I catered it! Twitter and Facebook are useless for news and it scares me that journalism is slowly dying to be replaced by a bunch of idiots with an opinion being taken as authority on day to day happenings. Don't get me wrong, it's a good place for opinions and discusions on current events and can even be a vehicle for reputable news sources, but it's not really a news tool!
Ultimately, everything you do can be tracked and compiled by your host regardless of the tools you use online to limit this "personalized" or "filtered" web. Everyone is capturing and storing info about you and the only way to stop that is to not use the web at all. Most of this is ad targeting for maximizing profit, but the police use it, the gov uses it, and I'm sure it's profiled for high level folks of interest so be smart with what you do and say on the Internet like you would in public if you worry about such things.
By the way, Rashomon is one of my favorite movies, not Ace Ventura. Toshirô Mifune rocks!
Calibre ebook software
Saturday, 17 December 2011
I absolutely love this free program for keeping my electronic books in order. It not only serves as a library, but you can also read, convert, rate, tag, upload to iPhone/Android devices (you name it) your ebooks! Bad ass, right? You can even search the major ebook store (free and not free) for new books! The developer has given a lot of free time to bring us this most useful tool so if you have a buck or two to give please do! They ask for nothing but donations for a piece of software that could easily sell for $29 to $59. Download Calibre for free; Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux:
Apple allowed too many other services into the mix, like Google, and now need to stand on their own and gain control over their empire. I imagine over time Apple will slowly remove the competition as their users adopt their services. I must admit, I like syncing between everything and I don't really care who has control; as long as you remember that all of your data will be flowing through some corporation's IT department from this point forward.
The second part of what iCloud is, in my opinion, is control over the content created in their apps. Pretty soon Apple can lock you out of the hard drive on all Mac products and hand you everything in a controlled iCloud environment, from the AppStore to iTunes....
