Well I guess that spam was even more relevant than I thought…it turns out there is yet another thing the archos has in common with netbooks: retrogaming abilities!
sideways over at the archosfans forums has been messing around with porting sdl apps to the archos. The first one he tried was an nes emulator called FCE Ultra.
It seems to work pretty well. The only major thing missing at this point is sound support. Never having had an nes, I’m not an expert on the games but there is a version of galaga which is quite enjoyable. Here are some pictures:
TinyXP has been around for a while but just recently came to my attention. It is a streamlined version of windows xp with a lot of the bloat removed. A lot of people seem to be using it to get new life out of their old computers. Another obvious use for it would seem to be for installation in a virtual machine, say on an osx netbook.
[time for the standard disclaimer: tinyxp presumably violates copyright law, however if you have a spare xp license, you could create tinyxp using nLite so I don't really see an issue here]
For some more info about tinyxp, this article is pretty good. TinyXP offers the following setup choices:
TinyXP With IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP With IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP Without IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP Without IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP BARE With IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP BARE With IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP BARE Without IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP BARE Without IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
TinyXP With Repair Option (Product Key Already Filled In)
The driverpacks are to bring xp up to date with support for modern hardware. The options relating to IE/OE/WMP are for whether you want Internet Explorer/Outlook Express/Windows Media Player installed or not. If you choose not to install IE, you get Firefox instead (what kind of os doesn’t come with a web browser, after all?). I opted for #8, the most minimal install type.
I’d been hearing good things about Sun’s free VirtualBox virtualization software on osx on the wind so it was the obvious choice for this project. I ended up installing version 2.2.0 because I thought it was the last version where turning off hardware virtualization (which the atom lacks) could be accomplished via a menu rather than editing an xml config file. It turns out I still had to edit the config file but things seem to be working well so I will just stick with this version.
VirtualBox is pretty impressive. Networking worked right out of the box. Installing the guest additions is highly recommended. With sharing enabled, you can have full access to files on the host system. But the single coolest feature of VB which is enabled by the guest additions is “Seamless Mode”. This allows app windows from the guest to appear in the host environment. It also sticks the windows taskbar at the bottom of the host screen. Here are a couple screenshots showing how it looks:
San Diego’s finest musical export continues to give the fans what they want. First, this news on their website:
We apologize for the lack of updates over the past year. John and I are extremely busy and find less time to keep up with these things. However, we are always making music!
The Stereotypes have been busy in the studio. At the moment we’re sifting through roughly 18 tracks to compile and sequence the next two releases. We are hoping to get these out before Spring.
You will also want to check out the Stereotypes Music Club on Facebook. I actually finally signed up on Facebook just to follow the Stereotypes! They have a quarterly singles club where they email you a new song every three months. The one that just went out is going to be on 9 it looks like. Looking forward to it!
Watched a couple of documentaries about apple/macintosh this weekend. I thought they were both kind of slight but I guess I would equivocally recommend one of them.
I’d assumed Welcome to Macintosh would be about the creation of the mac. Sadly, this was not the case. It is essentially about the history of apple from the beginning to the present. Most of those interviewed are not what one would think of as central figures to the story. The most recognizable characters are Andy Hertzfeld and Guy Kawasaki. However, interviews with ex-apple engineer Jim Reekes made this worth watching. Possessing a Lewis Black-like demeanour, he manages to cut through the bs surrounding apple and tells some very interesting stories (Reekes created the mac startup sound, for example).
Macheads, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the “cult of mac” and the company’s relationship with its users. Many of the same people are featured in this documentary with the addition of a host of rabid mac fans. But let’s face it, the bulk of them are just annoying. I did not find this one held my attention.
So, check out Welcome to Macintosh if you get a chance but frankly, you’d be better off watching Pirates of Silicon Valley or reading Insanely Great.
I mentioned that I was using the Vitae SL theme on my wind. I discovered there was a windowblinds port of Vitae. I am a big fan of windowblinds. Running windows without windowblinds constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in my book.
The download of the windowblinds skin included some extras including a toolbar for something called Styler. I noticed the screenshot for the skin featured a very Finder-like explorer window which was creating using Styler and FindeXer (get it?).
I followed this tutorial and was able to achieve a pretty mac-like look on xp:
I thought this video that Matt Mullenweg pointed out was really cool. Definitely more innovative than an oversized ipod touch and a nice counterpoint to my previous bumptop post.
I decided to take another whack at installing Snow Leopard yesterday. This time I ignored advice not to use Migration Assistant due to its flakiness. I figured it was worth a shot. I migrated everything except applications which I then just copied over manually. It seems to have worked pretty well.
I encountered an odd bug where for some reason growl was causing firefox not to focus when launched. Upgrading to firefox 3.6 resolved that. I was also happy to find that both liteicon and superdocker work just fine on SL so I was able to get the litho icons and dock background going again. Unfortunately, magnifique is a no go on SL so I needed to look elsewhere for menu bar and window theming.
Saw this post on cnet about the launch of BumpTop for the mac. There was already a windows version but I had never heard of this desktop replacement software before and it looked intriguing:
I decided to take the windows version for a spin and although the software is pretty interesting, I didn’t really feel it worked for me. First off, on my work pc, it was incompatible with the software that allows me to use my monitor in portrait mode. It also didn’t really get along with the Yahoo! widget engine which I run on that pc. Additionally, I simply don’t use my desktop as some random storage area. My desktops on both of my home computers are completely blank: no icons at all! I’m a little less anal about my work pc…I do allow program shortcuts to pile up there but nothing else really. I’m glad to see someone is thinking about other ways to approach the desktop and BumpTop may work really well for some folks, just not for me.
They have a quarterly singles club where they email you a new song every three months. The one that just went out is going to be on 9 it looks like. Looking forward to it! 
