Best iPhone Games – mrbass.org/iphone

Currently I’m using Snow Leopard 10.6 on my Mac mini, iMac and Mac Book Pro so all the following software works with that. Obviously I use other software but these would be the first I’d replace if I wanted to wipe my Mac.

Mac OS X Freeware / Donationware

Menu Meters displays memory usage, bandwidth activity, cpu % usage, disk usage in the menu bar. Prefer it to using Activity Monitor.

SmcFanControl (free) shows you tempetaure of CPU and fan rpms in the menu bar.

Namely type first letter or two letters to launch apps. I don’t need nor want bloated QuickSilver.

Hidden Files widget toggles showing hidden files such as .DS_Store .Trashes .Spotlight-V100.

Name Mangler advanced batch file renamer

GrandPerspective displays graphical map of hard drive and you can locate huge files you may have forgotten about.

VLC (VideoLan) to play xvid, divx movies as QuickTime can’t do it. FliptoMac to play wmv files in VLC.

Virtualbox by Sun Microsystems, run windows or linux in a virtual environment…no need to pay $80 for Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

Cost $ Mac OS X software

Unison $25 use for newsgroups along with freeware MacParDeluxe.

Transmit $30 ftp client, dual pane interface and can choose multiple external editors within Transmit. Why does the freeware cyberduck have ability to throttle bandwidth but not transmit? sigh oh sigh.

Little Snitch $30 outgoing firewall.  I actually bought a family license for this one.  Worry about spyware?  No, well then skip, but any advanced user should definitely check into this one you’d be shocked how many legit apps always want to E.T. phone home.

SizeRox $10 batch image resizer and file name renamer.  Can watermark.  Still no freeware like irfanview on windows so this is probably the best and most reasonably priced I could find.

Pixelmator $60 is probably best cheap Photoshop clone on Mac. If use a pen tablet to draw with check out ArtRage $25.

Only have two tips.

-  In Preview settings under PDF tab set initial document scale to 200%.  Opening PDF displays full width of screen and can actually read it without having to zoom in every single time.

- Save power by disabling screensaver and instead if you need to leave your computer on to download stuff, process video etc. just turn off the screen(s).  System Preferences | Expose | Active Screen Corners (top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right) select Put Display to Sleep and move mouse top left of screen for instance to turn off / blank your monitor(s).

Been playing last two days this nice free game called Elements the Game.  Most collectible card games are free but want you to pony up money for this or that.  In this case they accept donations but it really is free.  Tons of work though to progress through the game but having a blast doing it.  It is played in flash elementsthegame.com and put in a username and password and go through the tutorial.  I still haven’t played a real opponent yet and probably won’t for awhile till I learn most of the cards and build my deck a tad bit better and get at least a few rares. It has the following elements:  Entropy, Death, Gravity, Earth, Life, Fire, Water, Light, Air, Time, Darkness, Aether and to summon a card you’ll need to generate the respective elemental cost. Both players start with 100 health points and first to kill wins. You purchase new cards with money you win from winning or by selling existing cards. To give you an overview of the cards available and some FAQs check out Elements the Game wiki. BTW, any flash game is tons better when played fullscreen so here is the Elementsthegame fullscreen link to do that.

Blue Moon is a card game by Reiner Kniza from 2004 and it isn’t collectible per se just had tons of expansions.  Currently playing free Mac client (also a PC version too) which allows you to play against an AI only and seeing if I can get into it or not.

Mac version has all expansions except the latest expansion Buka which PC version does have.  To switch between expansions just click on your leadership or AI’s leadership card prior to starting the game.

To learn how to play just print out the Blue Moon 2 page quick reference PDF by universalhead. In brief, to win you try to get 3 dragons on your side. On your turn you play leadership card, may retreat (giving one dragon to opponent), play character card, may play booster or support card, announce power either Fire or Earth, refresh hand, end turn.

Was reading through the Ultimate Werewolf PDF rolechart and the roles I want to try out next time are:
Diseased – If the Werewolves eat you, they skip feeding the following night.
Prince – Survive a lynching and reveal your role.
Spellcaster – At night, indicate a player who must not speak the following day.
Cursed – You are a Villager until attacked by Werewolves, at which time you become a Werewolf.

Last night couldn’t fall asleep. So instead of going downstairs and cranking up the home theater system downstairs and risking waking up my wife, I looked into iphone apps that stream movie and tv shows (btw, my favorite keeping track of tv shows iphone app is TV Shows) so I could watch a flick in bed on my ipod touch.  Best one I found was Air Video $3.  I initially played with the demo as the only limitation it has is it displays three random movies in selected directory but you can hit refresh repeatedly to locate one your looking for.  Air Video is awesome as it transcodes xvid video files on my NAS on the fly with my iMac dual core 2.66GHz as the transcoding server. No you can’t do .iso or video_ts but can do just about anything else xvid, divx, mkv, avi, etc.  It takes 10 seconds for it to start playing while it prepares by transcoding  and buffering.

I like to set Quality to about 75% which looks fantastic.  You can lower that if your on a 3G connection instead of a wifi.  Love to change the Target Resolution and adjust the zoom slider.  Got to decide how much your willing to crop off (don’t do too much) and trying to get some nice fill screen by increasing the height of the video. Seek to any point in the video and it’ll start playing in 10 seconds. Does not stream itunes videos purchases as that is DRM protected.

Only a few months ago got an xbox 360 and was under the assumption you had to hack it to stream video like I do with my old xboxes with xbmc.  Found out that’s not the case. Got my Readynas NV (NAS) to serve as the server by enabling UPnP in Discovery Services and in Streaming Services enabled ReadyDLNA. After a quick xbox live update to play xvid and divx files I could play them.  Doesn’t do .iso or video_ts folders sigh.  But big deal if it plays my standard def files which my original xboxes already do.  I want to play 720p and 1080p files that’s the whole point.  Most that I get are .mkv format and xbox 360 doesn’t play 5.1 audio unless it’s .wmv format.

So after reading through bunch of stuff and some solutions which were mostly for windows like mk2vob and gotsent. I honestly don’t miss being a moderator on doom9.org – those were the days.  I installed on my iMac the ps3 media server (works for xbox 360 too) which transcodes on the fly like Air Video does for iphone streaming.  However, it stuttered every now and then even though I’m on a 100% gigabit ethernet connection.  Best I could do was pause the movie, couldn’t fast forward, skip forward and not even resume. Fail!

So best solution I came up with is mkvtools $5 for mac and it works awesome.  Drag the mkv file and it’ll list the video and audio tracks.  Check the ones you want.  Choose MP4 conversion, device choose xbox 360, video choose Pass Thru (which means it’s not touching your video), audio choose aac which converts 5.1 AC3 audio into 2 channel audio which xbox 360 will play, press Convert.  Wait a few of  minutes (about 5 mins per 1GB) and voila it outputs somexbox360_720p.mp4 video which is playable on xbox 360 from my NAS.  All it does is demuxes (extracts video and audio tracks from mk4 file) and converts AC3 audio file to 2 channel and remuxes (puts together into new mp4 file) the original video file and new audio file. mkvtools is totally functional just had 5 second nag screen on start and can’t batch queue up video files.