Do you own a Wii? Do you own a Wiimote? Are you a really geeky person that needs to see the latest in future gaming technology using today’s tech? I’d suggest watching this…
Johnny Chug Lee has somehow managed to destroy everyone else’s normal thought patterns, bent time and space, and probably had a Happy Meal for breakfast, by making a damn realistic 3D effect with a Wiimote and some safety glasses.
It’s probably unrealistic for anything to be released in the short term that takes advantage of this idea, but I would absolutely love to see this used in the future. Imagine, a decent Time Crisis game where you have to actually duck or hide around a pillar. Metal Gear Solid with you peeking around the corner in first person view. Tetris with damn realistic blocks.
This might sound a bit strange, but I’ve registered mIRC. That in itself is weird, although it really shouldn’t be.
mIRC, to the uninitiated, is a fantastic Internet Relay Chat client that has been around since 1995. A fairly simple client with the flexibility for it to be used/misused with vast amounts of scripting, it is still holding it’s own against the now usual Instant Messaging systems such as MSN and Yahoo IM. An absolutely fantastic program that has proved itself over many years as pretty much an essential tool for net enthusiasts around the world.
As I reopened my usual mIRC window to join the usual suspects in the usual communities I hang out in, I saw the usual “You’ve used this for 30 days” registration nag message you get when you run the program, and began to wonder how long I had really been using it for. I mean, most shareware programs are limited in terms of how long they last for, or how much they allow you to do in them. mIRC allows you full access despite asking for a registration, even after the 30 days are up. No stopping you from chatting, no changing your nickname to something useless, not even an over the top nag screen that takes up the entire window. I’ve used the same unregistered installation of mIRC for years, and I think it’s more than earned my registration fee to it. So, I did.
After years of service, I’m now a registered user of mIRC. Fundamentally nothing has changed, except that I feel a little bit better, that I’ve done a “Good Thing”.
So, I’m watching the latest episode of Diggnation, and halfway through they talk about the Safari browser for Windows. More specifically, this button…
…Guh? It’s an option that when activated does not add anything to the history, cache or anything, keeping whatever happens in that session from that point onwards “Private”. “Off The Record Browsing” if you will. Great for online banking and other applications where you don’t want your loved ones to see where you’ve been online.
And yes, it’s practically tailor-made for “adult” material viewing.
So. You’re writing away on the perfect blog post in your friendly neighborhood browser window, and suddenly the internet connection dies on you just before you hit submit. You get the Page Can’t Be Displayed error, and so you quickly hit the Back icon to revive your work. Sadly, in quite a few cases, it isn’t there. What could you have done to prevent such a tragedy.
On my Mac, I use something called “ecto“, which is a bit of blogging software that allows you to lay out the post, to put pictures where you want them, and generally prepare the post offline before posting it on the big wide internet world. Sure, you could edit the blog posts in Microsoft Word or Open Office, and quite frankly for the whole “writing” bit they would be better, but ecto does more than that.
Within ecto, aside from allowing you to write posts, it gives you all the options you need that are in your Wordpress control panel. Tagging, Categories, Time Delayed Posts and so on. You can even see a list of the most recent blog posts on the site, edit them within ecto, and then republish them with minor edits.
And as for you multiple blog managing people, you would probably like it for it’s ability to switch between blogs and blog systems with ease. For example, I can very easily edit Blatantly Random and then switch to the Stick of Wrong Dev-Blog, then switch back to BR, with no problems at all.
If you do a lot of blogging, I would highly recommend ecto. It works on both the Mac and the PC, and there’s even a 50% discount on a copy if you buy both versions at the same time. At the moment it’s in version 2, but soon enough there will be version 3, which promises some big changes if this one doesn’t quite tick all your boxes.
