I am simply a cheapskate, and I hate to spend money on things that I know that I won’t use very long. Computer games are one of those things, so in the late hours of the night I scour the web for open source games. I’ve found two that are noteworthy and work on Windows and Mac OS X alike.

First we have Armagetron Advanced, a Tron-like cycle game that lets you duke it out against computer or human players. Simple and playable for hours, this game is just plain addictive. It’s almost reminiscent of the old arcade games that you would spend all your tokens on, then crawl around on the gum-covered floor to find two more, at wich point you would race back to the machine, only to find that another child is in the process of losing the $5 that his parents gave him. An interesting aspect of Armagetron is its cameras. You can adjust the camera to be a first person view, which allows you to watch a light-wall come racing towrd you at 150mph and then turn at the very last second to avoid certain doom. The feeling of motion in first person is so realistic, it’s replaced my “falling” dreams with “Light-wall racing toward me” dreams.  The game allows full Internet and LAN gameplay, something few games of the open source variety do. The beta allows you to insert a link to a .M3U playlist, after which it plays the playlist in-game (MP3 files only).…
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After being blamed for a rise in theft, an increase in noise-induced deafness, and the lowering of what is considered high-end media (link), the iPod is today being blamed for the fall of Great Britain, France, Canada, the United States, Italy, and other western nations, whose governments fell yesterday evening.

Details are scarce at this time, but according to extremely reliable news reports, western civilization began to unravel around 3 PM Pacific Daylight Time. The culprit is allegedly iPod owners who don’t give a damn about whether there is a Western Civilization, so long as the latest Fall Out Boy single makes its way onto their iPod. Also, several governments fell after blowing their entire treasuries on the latest iPod, which features a telepathic interface (you think it, iPod plays it).

“Despite causing the fall of modern Western culture and sending us back 300 years, this is certainly a win-win scenario for Apple,” analyst A.P. Rulfulse of research firm Lawson, Mayer, Aldridge, and Owens LLC told Deep Thought. “Once again, Apple leads the way. Apple’s products are truly innovative, and as we have seen, a huge commercial success. Never before has a single product taken down an entire society.”

It is hard to tell what the fall of Western Civilization will mean in the long run, but rumors have surfaced that Steve Jobs plans to declare himself Global Emperor for Life at a press event scheduled for this coming Tuesday. Also expected is an announcement that Apple is planning to return…
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It’s 4:15 PM Central time and I’m fuming at Apple. Right now, Apple has a software policy that is the lamest policy I have ever witnessed in my twenty-four years of computing.

I own a G5 Mac, which has a PowerPC processor. I own Final Cut Studio. Last year, Apple updated Final Cut Studio to be Universal, which means it runs on both Intel-based Macs and PowerPC-based Macs. They didn’t add any new features to the software, they just made it compatible with Intel Macs. They offered this update for $49. I didn’t buy it because I run the software on a PowerPC Mac, so I have no need to spend $49 to get the same exact feature set for a different processor.

Today I received Motion project files from a client. When I tried to open the project, I got a message saying that I can’t open the project because it was created with a newer version of Motion. I have version 2.0.1 and the project was created in 2.1. What’s this? Motion 2.1 is the same exact application except it runs on Intel-based Macs. Why can’t I open Motion 2.1 files?

So I go look for the Motion 2.1 updater from Apple’s site figuring that I’ll download it and update my Motion. There’s no mention of it in the Downloads section. I then look for the upgrade pricing from 2.0.1 to 2.1. There is none. I call Apple and I’m told (and this is the kicker) that I have…
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Software is the lifeblood of every computer. Without software, all you have is a bunch of silicon and metal that’s not good for much at all. Of course, most computers come with some software already installed, the operating system, and this can be good enough for some people who simply want to browse the Internet and read email. But for those who use their computers productively, software applications open up new worlds of functionality.

The Mac platform is rich with software. One can purchase, download, and install a wide range of software, from simple TextEdit replacements to the $1299 Final Cut Studio. The majority of the software produced is shareware or freeware, and here there are some real gems that can make anyone’s life a little easier. Today, I’d like to share some free applications that I find immensely useful. These applications in particular are useful for web and print designers, and should come in handy for anyone making a living pushing pixels or transforming type.

iPick

Another staple of design, and in many ways an even more important one, is color. Color has so many uses and applications in design that I’m not even going to attempt to describe them all; suffice it to say, designers need to choose the right colors for the right purposes. There are many ways to do this, from playing with hex codes in an HTML document to launching Photoshop and using its color picker, but isn’t there a better way?

Choose a main color…
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Editor’s note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on March 4th.  He agreed to republish it here at our request.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.

There seem to be two conflicting arguments about the marketshare of the Mac. The first is of rapidly increasing number of users, the 50% of Mac buyers being new to the Mac, the transition to Intel and the iPod halo effect. This must mean a huge increase in market share of the Mac and lots of figures show this. However, there are also many other figures showing only minute increases in market share, just a fraction of a percent. One thing is certain though, the market share of the Mac is increasing. The only question is, how much? Well I’ve been doing some research and I can tell you that it’s a lot, and it’s all gained from Microsoft.

Source

So what’s my source for this? Net Applications. It collects data from 1000s of sites on the Internet to work out various trends such as browser share, OS share etc. But this is just one source. How is it significant? Why not take more sources? And probably the biggest question: How can it show the Mac having over 6% market share when most stats show it having a 2% market share? Well, I obviously need to back up my choice of source before I give you the figures.

The reason for choosing…
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