I’ve been an “on-again, off-again” WoW player since the WoW beta. In the beginning I played the game on my G4 eMac with an NVidia 7200 video card. It ran OK with all the detail turned down. I then bought myself a MacBook Core Duo, and on that machine, WoW played WELL with the detail turned down, and OK will the detail at it’s medium settings. I recently upgraded the OS on the MacBook to Leopard, and installed World of Warcraft after a long hiatus. After an entire day of downloading all the WoW patches I needed to catch up on, I began playing the game. My first reaction was WOW. (No pun intended.) You see, some serious OpenGL tweaks have been made to both WoW, and to the newest version of the Mac OS, Leopard. Now, WoW runs WELL with all the graphics settings at their default (medium) levels. Now, to uber-gamers, this post will sound awfully unimpressive; but what you have to realize is that the graphic card in a MacBook is not a very impressive one, especially in gaming circles. I’m quite impressed that with software tweaks alone, Apple and Blizzard have made it possible for WoW to run quite well on an Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics card that shares system memory. The improvement is enough for me to enjoy WoW a lot more than I used to, and because of that – I’ve renewed my WoW subscription.
Plane and Treadmill Controversy
An experiment to be shown on an upcoming episode of MythBusters is causing some internet geek controversy, and getting some of my CarolinaNissans.com brethrens’ panties in a bunch.
The experiment asks the question, if a plane were sitting on a runway that was a treadmill, and the treadmill was brought up to speed, would the plane be able to take off? (Well, actually that’s an over-simplification.)
Check out THIS link.
Apple TV – A Failure?
A friend of mine, Justin, sent me the following articles about the Apple TV…
…and here’s my response to them.
I read the articles, but what they are complaining about isn’t what I want an Apple TV for. I want to rip all my DVDs to my computer, and play them via the Apple TV to my HD TV. It also allows me to view my iPhoto library on my TV, and play my music library in the living room, on my 5.1 surround sound system. It seems that ArsTechnica and Popular Mechanics are complaining about lack of content. I don’t want to buy content over the internet for my Apple TV. I own and buy a lot of media. I want to rip it to my Apple TV. Sure, being able to buy HD media on the Apple store would be really cool, but the lack thereof doesn’t make it a crappy device. That being said, I think Apple’s sales projections were flawed. There just isn’t the market yet for the Apple TV in the scale that they wanted. At this point in time, it’s a geek’s toy, not an “every man” appliance. In time Apple will get content for the Apple TV. In fact, when the Apple TV was released, Apple was in talks with the studios to get content. Unfortunately, a lot of the deals fell through. (Hell, the writer’s strike is going on right now because of the movie industry’s greed in regard to online content.) Eventually you’ll be able to get movies and TV from iTunes in HD formats. When that happens, the Apple TV will be desired a lot more than it is now to the “every man.” I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
SpeedLoader Tremolo – I Didn’t Believe It
Several months ago, I purchased 2 Floyd Rose Discovery guitars with Floyd Rose’s newSpeedloader locking tremolo. The first thing you’ll notice about the guitars is that they have no tuning pegs. The tuners are eliminated because the strings are precisely cut to length and pre-stretched so that tuning the guitar doesn’t require any winding. (ie: around a tuner peg.)
While I bought these guitars for their tuning stability and ease of string changes, deep down in my techie soul I didn’t really believe the Floyd Rose marketing-speak claiming that string changes can be done in only a few minutes. My Discovery DST-1 was in serious need of a string change, so today I went to Sam Ash , bought a pack of SpeedLoader strings, and embarked on my first journey through a SpeedLoader string change.
Let me just say, WOW. Changing strings IS as easy as Floyd Rose claims. No tools are needed. No winding is required. You simply unclip the string at the tremolo end, and remove the other end from the nut. To put a string on, you simply reverse the procedure. It took me about 5 minutes to do all the strings. Floyd Rose has really made a great tremolo. It has all the advantages of the Original Floyd Rose tremolo in regard to tuning stability, but none of the restringing headaches. I’ve got to say that I’m really impressed.
The only drawback to the SpeedLoader system is that it uses proprietary strings. Guitar Center doesn’t carry them, but to my amazement, Sam Ash does, and at a good price. So props to Sam Ash for not abandoning us SpeedLoader users.
Movie Review – Eragon
Eragon = Star Wars
Like, for reals. Not for play play. It’s like totally Star Wars. Like, scene for scene almost. Just replace Eragon with Luke Skywalker, Jeremy Iron’s character with ObiWan, and just about every other character and plot device with its Star Wars counter part, and you get Star Wars with a Dragon! That’s like… lame!
1 out of 5 stars
(I don’t know why I wanted to write this like an illiterate teenager wrote it. Maybe it has something to do with the author of Eragon.)
High Fidelity at Ruckus Pizza this Friday!
My band, High Fidelity will be playing Ruckus Pizza this Friday at 10:30! Come out and have some fun!
Under-appreciated Guitar : Floyd Rose Discovery Series
I own 2 of the Speedloader Tremolo versions of this guitar, and got each of them on clearance for $150 because they just never became popular. I believe them to be the best Made in China guitars you can buy.
How the Human Brain Reads Words
“Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the human mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
Neato.