One SimCity per Child

It seems I haven’t been the only one raving about SimCity being great in every possible aspect; The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) initiative has gotten a generous donation by EA; the original (aka ‘Classic’, aka ‘1.0′) SimCity, for use on all these cheap laptops in developing countries. In another cool move;

the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”

I think this is a very good move from EA; although the game is dated, it’s still a very useful and educational game. It was quite inspiring for me in my younger years as well.

Naked Light preview.

Fellow designer Fernando Lins pointed out this link to a website that grabbed my attention.

Naked Light, as previewed, promises to be a fully resolution-independent image editor with all the powerful features a designer might need. I won’t be making my judgement until I have actually used the application (the public beta will be due in a day and 10 hours, at the moment of writing) but it seems promising, going from the website;

Naked light throws away antiquated concepts like pixels; layers; 8-bit color; and destructive, non-re-editable filters and operations. Instead, compositions in Naked light represent a sort of Platonic ideal—with infinite resolution, an astounding 590 quintillion colors, and perpetually re-editable nodes.

Hopefully, this will help alleviate the high hopes users had for a Photoshop replacement in Pixelmator, which apparently failed to deliver.

Apple opens up on Darwin 9.0.

Not so long after the release of Leopard, Apple has decided to hit us with the release of the source code of the kernel. The Darwin 9.0 sources are available for download (free ADC membership required) here.

Now there’s a thing we little know and love about Apple; an open-source rendering engine and kernel (and of coures, even more open-source projects slightly less significant than those).

iTunes 7.5 iPod sidebar battery indicators.

Very nice new feature of iTunes 7.5, which perhaps the new 1.1.2 iPhone update will also address;

I have always been a huge fan of Apple’s battery indicator art (no, this is not a joke, I find them genuinely impressive icons) and these ’sidebar-styled’ icons don’t deviate from the norm. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed to see this in the next update of the iPhone / iPod Touch. Via iLounge’s full writeup on new iTunes 7.5 features.

Graph your Airport Express / Extreme data throughput and more.

In an earlier post, I asked for your interest in a how-to on graphing several network statistics using MRTG, an open-source application that generates graphs using data pulled from SNMP. I used an Airport Extreme (802.11n, gigabit) for this, but it should work with Snow / Graphite Airport base stations and up (Express and Extreme). For other routers, your mileage may vary, and it may even not be possible, so I decided not to make a guide for anything else than Apple’s routers. If you want to have graphs in your desktop, updated in real time, as seen here, read on!

Continue reading Graph your Airport Express / Extreme data throughput and more….

id should hire (someone like) me.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a game that looks very promising. Appleinsider has a few screenshots of the Mac alpha up (is it a Mac alpha? Might just as well be a bunch of PC screenies, apart from this one), and of course I noticed one thing more than all the others;

Ouch. Mr. Carmack, let’s make a deal, okay?

Helvetica (Documentary) on TV.

The Serif reports that a shortened version of Helvetica, the eponymous documentary about the typeface, will be shown tonight. It will show on BBC 1 at 10.35 PM Greenwhich Mean Time. I haven’t seen it yet, but going from what I have heard, it’s very much worth watching.

iTunes 7.5 and Quicktime 7.3 released, iPhone firmware 1.1.2 photo gallery.

Quicktime and iTunes were just updated over at Apple.com. The upgrade’s new features aren’t revealed, but I am sure it will address some changes necessary for the iPhone 1.1.2 firmware.

T3 got their hands on an iPhone carrying the 1.1.2 firmware and posted a picture gallery; if the images are in any way reliable, there’s not a lot of changes apart from International language support. A bit of a bummer, if you ask me, if the update would echo in just a few extra keyboards and plug up some exploits.

UK iPhone to have International language support.

Via T3:

First off, there’s support for dozens of languages, so if you happen to be a fluent Cantonese speaker, the phone has all the relevant character sets so you can display your language properly.

There’s full support for French and German, with special keyboard lay-outs on the ready to tackle accented characters - perfectly understandable, of course, what with the phone heading for launch across the channel this month too.

This is very good news for people like me, who crave the iPod Touch’s “languages” button to switch autocompletion dictionaries to Dutch, German, or whatever you may need. I hope we’ll see a hack for this firmware soon.

My personal Comm Station.

I have been working on a few technical things over the course of the weekend; first meshing my home wireless network by letting two routers form a single network, and after I was done, setting up MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) for my Airport Extreme, which is the border gateway.

MRTG produces pretty graphs of networks statistics, and I integrated them into my Leopard desktop using a space station icon I am working on, a bit of Photoshopping and Geektool 2.1.2 (since the website is down, I’ll host it here for the interested). Geektool, in turn, is a preference pane that lets you show console output or images on your desktop, refreshed at a certain interval.

I’ll let the result speak for itself (click for larger version over at flickr);

If there’s any interest for it, I’m willing to write a nice how-to for setting all of this up easily. Drop a comment if you want to see such a post.