Just drifting off to sleep on Boxing Day night, listening to Fabio and GrooveRider on Radio 1. Great Drum & Bass. Grooverider mentions that he has just got a G5. He calls it the Rolls-Royce of computers - he also mentioned that it used to take him about a month to make a tune. Now it takes just over a day.
Nice.
I’ve been having problems with sending mail when in a certain location. I’ve just figured out why - The ISP that is used there is Freeserve and they force all traffic on port 25 (SMTP - Outbound Mail) through their own mail servers.
This, to me, is very irritating - all my mail accounts use authenticated SMTP servers outside Freeserve. When I try to send a message my mail client (Mail.app) quite reasonably tries to connect to smtp.mac.com - and as far as it is concerned has done - it gets back an SMTP server response, but not from the server it asked for!
Widebook:~ diggory$ telnet smtp.mac.com 25
Trying 17.250.248.48…
Connected to smtp.mac.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 tmailb1.svr.pol.co.uk ESMTP Exim 4.14 Sun, 14 Dec 2003 16:50:47 +0000
EHLO
250-tmailb1.svr.pol.co.uk Hello modem-249.arbok.dialup.pol.co.uk [217.135.16.249]
250-SIZE 104857600
250-PIPELINING
250 HELP
QUIT
221 tmailb1.svr.pol.co.uk closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
This leads to problems - Mail tries to authenticate itself to the SMTP server, as is required for the server that it is expecting - but whoops! Freeserve’s SMTP servers don’t support Authentication so the whole operation goes tits-up.
Grrr… I’ve managed to hack around it by using a new bogus mail account that uses freeserve’s unauthenticated server - but I’ll still get one error every time I try to send email from there.
Mucking around with the way my IP traffic works is not a good way to endear me as a customer to an ISP.
I saw a short clip of the new “Peter Pan” film on Jonathan Ross’s Chat show on Friday Night (he had Richard Briers on - who plays Smee.)
I noticed something in the clip that made me think that the film might be quite good - Attention to detail.
As anyone in the street can tell you Hook is an old-Etonian - and in the new film Hook sports rather a large Tattoo on his left arm - of the School Crest!
Floreat Etona!
The new Finder’s in Panther is a great improvement over Jaguar’s - but occasionally the “Network” item in the sidebar seems to have trouble discovering local servers.
When this happens using Command-K (Connect to Server) doesn’t help - -because the new “Connect To” dialog only contains favourite servers and a text-field for entering a specific address - the discovery part has been removed.
You can get round this by invoking the old Panther “Connect To” dialog via AppleScript.
open location (choose URL showing File servers with editable URL)
(via Mac OS X Hints)
Never fails to amuse - what happens when you record a screen that is showing what you are recording? Feedback:
For those of you who simply can’t wait for GT4
Available now here. There’s a movie too.
or maybe just a GT4 Memory card perhaps:
This article about phone UIs at The Register lead me to install Tracker with the “iPhone Jaguar” skin.
(actual tasks blurred for privacy.)
It’s quite cool - basically it’s a desktop for your P800/900 - which is a lot more flexible than the Favourites bar that usually sits at the top of the screen.
Of course being a Symbian app - it’s not free (20 Euros.) But it seems possibly worth it - I’ll use it for the trial period and see if it’s worth keeping.
I caved in last Friday and bough Mario Kart: Double Dash!! for the GameCube. Edge gave it a 5 out of 10. If you haven’t read Edge before - they have a harsh, but fair ratings system - they don’t give every game 8/10 like most gushing games mags.
It’s an accurate score - as long as you already know the other MK games. If you were twelve years old and had never played Mario Kart 64 it would be great. and it is a fun game - one I haven’t really taken full advantage of yet as I haven’t had the opportunity for a proper 4-way scrap so far. The multiplayer aspect has always been (to me at least) the most important part of Mario Karts - you get the most fun out of it when you are cursing your real-life opponents who are bearing down on you with an arsenal of red shells.
There are some clever tweaks to the game (the opportunity to carry two weapons for example) - but the missing parts outweigh them - it’s not fast enough, the tracks just don’t seem to have the flair of MK64 and I’m not a fan of the new kart handling.
It’s Mario Sunshine all over again: Technically improved - but lacking the coherence of the N64 version.
Now for the good news:
I needed some extra controllers for Mario Karts - so I got a couple. What I didn’t realise until I got to the counter was that one of them was a WaveBird wireless controller - bought it anyway and am very pleased with the result.
There are a few things I would change if I were in charge of version 2 though:
1 - Get rid of the AA Batteries - use a rechargeable one instead.
2 - Add a cord! Stay with me here - the cord would be unpluggable at the controller end and would allow recharging of the battery and continued play.
3 - Have an optional rumble. The current model has no rumble for battery life reasons. In tethered mode the rumble could be on - and when wireless the user could opt for rumble with a shorter battery life - It’s rechargeable.
4 - Use Bluetooth - then the controller could be used on other bluetooth devices.
I’m trying to get a handle on trackbacks - here goes.
Cool - I have now successfully tracked back to a post on Peeba’s Blog.
