Support The Videogame History Museum!

If you’re reading this blog chances are you’ve picked up a controller or handheld at least a dozen times in your life to enjoy the fun and excitement that video games have to offer. While new video game consoles have mutli-core processors, 3D capabilities, and HD graphics and sound you can not even begin to appreciate these modern achievements of entertainment without looking back on how it all started.

Below is another a great video about this museum, this one aired on New York’s NY1 News channel. Take a look at this great video for an look at what a cool museum like this could offer:
NY1 Article on the Museum with Video (Flash format)
NY1 Videogame Museum Video (Direct QuickTime MP4 Video Link)

I think the idea of a museum dedicated the history of video games is a fantastic idea. I’ve been to a few museums which may have a computer or video game exhibit going on that has some cool things to offer, but having one open all the time that can constantly add and remove different items is amazing. I have met Joe Santulli who runs the Digital Press video game store in Clifton New Jersey. He’s a great guy and truly has a passion for video games old and new.

There is so much history behind the making of any game or console. Just look on Wikipedia and type in the name of any video game console or video game software. There are different variations, versions, canceled concepts, incomplete projects and other juicy details. A place where all of this information, artifacts, arcades, games, hardware, and promotional items can all be put on display and enjoyed by others is very exciting.

Here is a quote from the Videogame History Museum page to give you a bit more of information:

“The Videogame History Museum is the natural extension of the work started by John Hardie, Sean Kelly and Joe Santulli almost 25 years ago. Individually, each has always seen the importance of the videogame industry and took it upon himself to gather as much information and as many artifacts as possible. Collectively, they have amassed the most comprehensive collection of hardware, software, design documentation and memorabilia ever assembled.”

I will be donating to this cause as much as I can. And even though I may not be able to make it to the $10,000 pledge mark (although lifetime membership is very, very tempting) I know that every donation helps. So if you love video games and you want to preserve their important history in a museum for everyone to visit and enjoy, then you must help support this project. Even a pledge as little was $10 will help, and it gets you a free pass to the museum!! $25 or more gets you a cool limited edition pin, and $100 or more gets you a special limited edition t-shirt plus the previously mentioned pin & admission.

The Videogame History Museum @ KickStarter – only 14 days to go!! Don’t delay!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1760848975/the-videogame-history-museum

Tame the Lion: Put Mac OS X back to the way you like it!

So Apple’s new version of Mac OS X is out, version 10.7 nicknamed ‘Lion’. For the most part I really like it, Lion’s new features definitely out-weigh it’s flaws in my opinion. Before upgrading it’s wise to backup your data and make sure your apps are compatible, Microsoft Office 2008 and Quicken are two examples of apps that won’t work with Lion.

While Lion offers a lot of nice new features it tends to mess with the things that previous users of Mac OS X were used to. Some of them are little things that have been the same since Mac OS X’s earlier versions and were changed for one reason or another. Some of them may confuse a user who is upgrading or just make them plain unhappy that something is not as it once was. In this little blog post I’ll go over some of the changes that I’ve discovered in Lion and how to get them back to how you may prefer them. Most of them you can change back easily to how they acted before in Snow Leopard, but some are here to stay no matter what.

 

#1 Inverse Scrolling (Natural Scrolling): This is a feature that people either love, or they hate. Inverse scrolling (also called Natural Scrolling) mimics the iPhone’s scrolling habits, meaning if you move your scroll wheel or trackpad down, the page will scroll up. And if you move it up it’ll scroll down. Make sense? No? Don’t worry you can shut it off. This scrolling feature basically reverses everything we’ve been used to for the past 20 years. To shut this one off simply go into System Preferences and click on either ‘Mouse’ (if you’re using a mouse) or ‘Trackpad’ (if you’re using a trackpad). The first option is titled “Scroll direction: natural”, just uncheck the box next to it and you’re done! Thankfully Apple has given us a choice in the matter, we’re not so lucky for our next option…

#2 Monochrome Sidebar Icons: What is this 1992? Do I have a PowerBook Duo 230 with a greyscale screen? Is Apple afraid I’m going to hurt my eyes on all the color?! This is the same thing that happened to iTunes a few releases back. For whatever reason Apple thought it would be cool to ditch all of the color in the sidebar, and just replace it with plain old monocrhome buttons. Why did they do this? I honestly don’t have a clue. I think it’s actually quite stupid. Why on Earth would you want all of the icons and buttons to look like some gray blur?? The colors and shapes help us quickly find what we’re looking for. Purple is the Desktop, the Blue filmstrip is for Movies, the green arrow is for Downloads. It was very simple and easy to see.

But now what do we have? Even more buttons, but no color! Sure the shapes are still there, but the colors were a nice and easy way to help your eyes quickly look for something that was oh so familiar to you. They should have at least given us an option here. But sadly if you want to use Mac OS X Lion you’ll have to pretend that the sidebar is stuck in some monochrome display mode. I’m sure somebody can hack this and fix it, they did for iTunes. After all icons can be changed, but why fix it if it isn’t broken Apple?

 

#3 Dashboard (Widgets): Before the App Store was a twinkle in the eye of Mr. Jobs the Dashboard feature allowed users to quickly access mini-applications (called Widgets) to easily find out information like calendar events, weather conditions, stock quotes and more. This feature was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ and was touted as being a way to check quickly and then dismiss it just as easily. But in Lion Dashboard takes on a Spaces approach. Dashboard is accessed by swiping your multitouch pointing device to the right, which pushes in a big empty window with your widgets on them. Now for myself personally I have never tried to use Spaces, maybe one day I will, but for now I don’t so this seems very alien to me and I don’t like it. So can we change this back to the old way of showing things? Yes we can! All you have to go is once again open up ‘System Preferences’ click on ‘Mission Control’ and uncheck the box that reads ‘Show Dashboard as a space’. It’s just that easy, again I’m thankful that Apple has given us an option for this, as the new way may not work well for some people.

#4 Mail’s New View: Like many things in Lion they seem to be pulled directly from the iPhone or iPad. The inverse scrolling, the style of the scroll bars, and even the new Mail app. The new Mail app allows you to read Mail in a few new views, you can view a two-column or three-column view similar to how the iPad would display your email. Now this is a personal preference, but here’s how you can put Mail back to looking how it did in Snow Leopard. First off, if you want to see all of your inboxes click the ‘Show All’ button at the top left of your mail window. That’s simple enough, now you can see all of your folders and boxes.

Now to change the viewing format you want to use simply go to the Mail app, go to the Mail menu and select ‘Preferences’ [Or while in Mail simply do the following keyboard shortcut, Command (Apple Key) , (comma)]. Select the ‘Viewing’ tab up top and check the first checkbox titled ‘Use classic layout’. Here you also have some more options. But that checkbox will make you feel much more at home if you don’t care for the new layout.

#6 Restore Finder Window Details (Path Bar & Status Bar): After upgrading to Lion I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then I realized it, the Path bar and Status bar on my Finder windows was missing! Some of you may not even realize what these are or even car, but the Path bar is the bar at the bottom of a window that tells you it’s location and what folder it’s in. The status bar tells you how many items are in a folder and how much disk space is available as well.

While this is nothing essential for most users, I personally like to know the path of the folder I’m in and the disk space available on the window I have open. Apple turns this off by default, but we can quickly turn it back on. Simply open any Finder window, now go to the ‘View’ menu and select ‘Show Path Bar’, the other option ‘Show Status Bar’ is right below it. So there you go, everything is back to normal. Now doesn’t that feel better? 🙂

#5 Need a Lion Install DVD?: Apple sure loves it’s new App Store. It saves them from making discs and shipping them to their store, it saves the planet some green too so it’s all well and good. It’s a great way for them to distribute their new OS. If you’ve installed Lion by now you know it’s a download-only operating system. It weighs in at about 3.76 GB and thankfully easily fits onto a single-layer DVD-R. The days of looking for a dual-layer DVD disc to burn a Mac OS X Install disc onto are thankfully behind us! A DVD copy of Lion is handy for those who don’t want to re-download a nearly 4GB file everytime you need to install Lion or need to use it as a bootup disk to diagnose a problem with a computer, or even use it when you replace your hard drive. It’s also handy for those who do not have easy access to a high-speed internet connection or have to install Lion on multiple machines. Thankfully the Install Lion app is pretty simple and you can easily share it on a network to do help with installing on multiple Macs. Apple officially offers a Lion installable USB flash drive, but it’s $69. You can save a bit by doing this yourself, you can use a friend’s internet connection to download Lion for $29, buy a 8GB USB flash drive for $12 (4GB may be cutting it too close) and make your own bootable Lion USB installer! But that’s a whole other story…

To make a DVD of Lion simply find your ‘Install Mac OS X Lion.app’ and right-click it, select ‘Show Package Contents’ to expand what files are actually inside of this app. Now go to ‘Contents>SharedSupport’ and you’ll find a file named ‘InstallESD.dmg’ this is the Mac OS X Lion install disk image. To make a bootable DVD out of this open up Disk Utility (found under the Utilities folder of your Application folder). Drag the ‘InstallESD.dmg’ file from the Finder window to the bottom half of the sidebar on the Disk Utility window. Select the ‘InstallESD.dmg’ file from the sidebar in Disk Utility and click Burn, insert a regular ol’ blank 4.7GB DVD-R disc and you’re done! You can also make a Lion bootable USB drive or hard drive, but other places online have this covered.

So the new version of Mac OS X is here at last, hopefully the above tips will help you get things working the way you like them. I may add to this list if I come across anything else I find interesting. 🙂

-Steve

Why iCloud is making MobileMe users panic

When Apple introduced their iCloud service Steve Jobs started right away and said that MobileMe will be discontinued. He made a joke about how MobileMe was not their finest hour and the crowd agreed. After showing off some new apps and features the crowd seemed happy with iCloud. He didn’t once mention MobileMe or how their paid subscribers would be effected. Apple seemed to ignore the fact that people still have items on MobileMe. At this point silence was not the answer. Apple should have been clear to their subscribers, they didn’t have to do it publicly, but they could have sent us all an email explaining what to do and how to prepare for the switch.

But instead we got a vague message on their me.com page, this was later emailed to us with no additional info. It basically read that all subscriptions were extended 1 year and after that 1 year MobileMe will be shutdown in June of 2012. Apple tells us to stay tuned for more updates. They didn’t give us tips for downloading data, they didn’t say if iCloud would host files online, they didn’t say what we could do to transfer gallery pages, and they seemed to not even know what to tell us.  It seemed like a “move out and take your things with you” message posted on an apartment door. Now this was a service users paid for, I would expect a slightly better communication between the client and the company. This wasn’t a freebie operation that we knew would come to an end someday, this was a yearly subscription service for hosting data online. That’s what first got me upset. Apple didn’t’ seem to care to tell us what they planned to do, it was all very vague and unknown. Why not come out and confirm that everything will be deleted next year, don’t leave us guessing if iCloud will have a dedicated storage option in the future. Yes Apple is very secretive in nature, but this isn’t something they should have kept quiet about in my opinion. We’re just left to assume that come next year we better have everything saved offline. For years Apple has been pushing us to use MobileMe for iPhoto, iMovie and iWeb. Some features were originally only available to export to MobileMe, but later allowed alternative export options. Now Apple seems to be pushing us the other way.

Now I’ve been an iTools user since 2000 and a Dot Mac (.Mac) user since 2002 and I’m currently a MobileMe subscriber until Apple pulls the plug. So you can understand why I’m a bit upset and annoyed. I first stayed on since Apple owned my email address and I didn’t want to let it go, I should have just switched addresses then, but I didn’t. But when they gave us more web storage and iPhoto export options. I started hosting photos and creating my own sites. I started using almost all of the services I was paying for so I was getting the best bang from my buck. It was a nice service and had a few perks that at the time no other company was offering. I could sync bookmarks, keychains, calendars, address books, and tons of other information across my Apple laptop and desktop. Things worked pretty well for the most party and I started sharing photos, videos and sites online.

Over the years I have accumulated 7GB of online photo and video galleries alone, not counting any of the files or websites I have stored on my iDisk, I believe I have about half of my disk space used up. So that’s about 10-11GB of online data and 3GB of email storage – from my slightly over 20GB of space on the iDisk – I was credited a bit more space from Apple after one of their screw-ups in Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” where they deleted my whole iDisk via their buggy ‘Sync’ feature. But that’s another fun story for another time.

But back to the point, I have all this data that I’ve had access to edit, change and add-to whenever I wanted to. I could upload some more photos, send my family a link and have them take a look, etc. I could upload family home videos, send them a username / password and have them look at it knowing that nobody else will be able to see it.  It was useful and easy to do. iPhoto integrated well into it for photos and iMovie did as well for videos. Also there was an easy web interface I could use to edit or manage my galleries from anywhere – well except on the iPhone. What was nice as well was that Apple TV could log into my MobileMe account and let me see all of my photos and videos, straight from the internet. The storage-less Apple TV didn’t need me to leave a computer on all day just to view some photos once in a while. It was very nice and easy. Sure Apple TV never let you view hidden or passworded galleries, but it was good enough.

Yeah, MobileMe wasn’t perfect,  support and features seemed lacking at times, sometimes a lot. But it did do a good job when it tried, and it worked well most of the time. But now with the iCloud there’s no storage space or web hosting options available. No more iDisk, no more web sites, no more easy to manage web galleries. No migration plan, nothing. So a typical MobileMe user will have to figure out their own solution and download all of their personal data manually. Sounds like fun doesn’t it? Especially for something that was supposed to be easy to use and worry free.

Now you can maybe understand why I’m a bit upset and why a lot of MobileMe users are worried. Sure I can download everything (slowly) and buy a FlickrPro account for photos and videos. Sure I can start posting videos to YouTube, and sure I can use my own website hosting service for my files. But none of these options would be as simple or as easy to use with Mac OS X as MobileMe was. This just makes life more difficult when the whole reason I used the service was to make my digital life easier. I know iPhoto can ‘sync’ with MobileMe and download all of it’s content – but it’s not meant to export items easily, and so far when trying to download a 50 photo gallery it took ages to do so. And the iDisk when mounted in OS X normally will not give you access to the “_gallery” folder, this is where all of your Web Galleries are saved and where all their source files are. You have to fight with it just to get your data out of there! I’ll probably end up going to each photo gallery, setting it to public, clicking ‘Download All’ and hoping that the files it downloads are the original content and not just the compressed versions of the content that were posted as well.

I’m not upset that iCloud is kicking MobileMe to the curb, I’m happy to see some things that iCloud is offering. But I’m very upset and disappointed in the way Apple chose to handle the situation. Apple doesn’t seem to bother to tell their paying subscribers anything about the service they’re paying for and what will happen to it. They don’t even have the kindness to give us some information or tips about migrating our gigabytes of data off of MobileMe.

We have to fend for ourselves and figure it all out. Maybe when they finally fully launch their new service they may decide to throw us a bone and help us out. But as of now I’m not going to hold my breath. They have our data and there’s no clear exit plan to help us move it elsewhere. And that is why MobileMe users are panicking and worried, because Apple seems to just not care at all.

Tips on getting your data off MobileMe’s iDisk:

If you’re feeling lucky turn on iDisk Sync in Mac OS X. It’ll download mostly everything to your Mac from your iDisk. It will NOT however download your Gallery Photos & Videos. iPhoto can do some of this, but it’s export options for it aren’t the best, and it’s not clear if you’re getting the highest-quality files or just compressed versions made from your originally uploaded files.

For email you should be safe, Apple hasn’t said how much email space they’ll give you, but I have about 3GB currently, I’m not that worried about this one. If they want to compete with Google they won’t cap you on eMail storage.