28 Nov
   Filed Under: Personal   

It took me a solid two days, but here I am reporting in from Jönköping, Sweden! I took a good amount of time to take a plethora of pictures, use my press access to get to hard-to-reach places, and select and edit photos to give you a nice impression of the crazy little universe that’s known as Dreamhack. If you didn’t read it in my last post: Dreamhack is the world’s biggest computer festival. Me and 12-15 thousand other geeks are here and try to make the best of it.

dhw09-1

Apart from file sharing and playing games, there’s opportunities to compete in the so-called ‘eSports’ ladders, sit in a tank of the Swedish army, try and win laptops, play pre-release games like RUSE, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft 2, and much more. In fact, there’s so much to do that you’d probably be fine without a computer, but over tenthousand gamers with their box on one of the tables in Dreamhack’s many halls beg to differ. Read on for a link to the flickr set, my trip here, and impressions of the venue floor.

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21 Nov
   Filed Under: Personal   

I wrote about The Reality last month, which was a large-ish LAN party where 700 people brought their computers to play games, share files and have a good time together. This month, however, I’m going to Dreamhack Winter in Sweden, the world’s largest LAN party. An expected 13 to 15.000 visitors will attend the party, supported by the world’s biggest and best network hardware.

dreamhack-winter-2009-1

Last year, Dreamhack used a 40Gbit internet connection and top of the line Cisco network hardware that allowed a throughput of 92 terabits per second. It’s also the home of ‘eSport’ championships and creative competitions.

dreamhack-winter-2009-2

All of this is made possible by Intel and Asus, who are sponsoring Duh-Events to bring the Belgian/Dutch qualifying Counter-Strike clan and a handful of press and enthusiasts to the event with a touring bus under the moniker ‘Pack4Dreamhack’. I am going as both – with a press pass in one hand and my Macbook Pro in the other, I’ll be reporting from Jönköping as the event progresses, wrapping up with an HD video like at WWDC this year. For realtime coverage of the craziness, it’s worth following me on twitter.

My tech-pack has been expanded and adjusted somewhat for this trip:

• Macbook Pro (17″) and Incase sleeve
• Koyono Built Laptop bag
• A PSP for the bus ride
• Steelseries Siberia headset with Griffin iMic
• My old iPhone & iPhone 3G
• Incase iPhone 3G battery
• Logitech G15 keyboard
• Razer Boomslang CE mouse
• Extra large black mouse pad
• Kensington Lock cable
• The usual array of power adaptors, chargers, and batteries
• Cat6E network cable
• Canon EOS XS SLR camera
• Canon SD960 camera
• and of course an extra Exploded Settings shirt!

I’m getting on the bus November 25th and will arrive at the Dreamhack venue in Jönköping the next morning. If you’re in the vicinity, let me know and we can meet up and have a drink together!

17 Nov
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Interface Design, Personal Work   

Perhaps you’re aware that you can connect to a Mac back home with Back to my Mac, a service offered by MobileMe. When I heard of this feature, I did some reading and set everything up right, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I think Back to my Mac is a really cool idea, but it could use some work. It could even tie very well into Apple’s possible new tablet-sized device.

MobileMeHome

Enter MobileMe Home. After entering your MobileMe credentials on your Airport or Time Capsule, your network becomes accessible when you’re away from home. No enabling settings in some tab in a preference pane or forgetting to put a file on your iDisk: you can connect back home from anywhere with the Finder on your laptop, with an iPhone app, and from public or other computers through the MobileMe web interface.

Webinterface

MobileMe Home’s web interface allows you access to your Mac’s files, use a web-based client to do simple screen sharing, stream a few songs or videos from your iTunes library, and locate, wake, sleep or shut down your Macs from anywhere. On any Mac or iPhone, you can connect to your network to do all of the above, and more, like connecting to a non-Mac server or device on the road.

Even better, since your laptop (and possibly tablet) get on the move, you can track its location thanks to Snow Leopard’s Core Location features.

Check out a larger size of my rough MobileMe Home mockups at Flickr by clicking the preview below:

Home-UI

MobileMe Home is not an official Apple product, nor do I know anything of planned features of MobileMe. You should consider this an idea, or perhaps even a dream, seeing how technically MobileMe Home would probably be incredibly hard to implement. I just wanted to share it with the world.

15 Nov
   Filed Under: Gaming, Goodies   

In this day and age, with a variety of handheld and TV-set bound consoles vying for the attention of the modern gamer, making a distinctly different and yet approachable game is a challenge worthy of a Nobel Prize. If there actually were such a thing, id Software‘s web-savvy Quake Live would be a worthy nominee.

quake-live

Quake Live is actually the (almost) 10-years old Quake 3 Arena with a lot of tweaks and adjustments. Not only have the graphics been improved: the overall gameplay has been balanced, and the entire game is launched through a website that also facilitates chatting and meeting friends, keeping tracks of your statistics, and finding servers to play on. It’s also entirely free. There’s no catch.

A Quake 3 / Quake Live icon is included in this post, so you can put it in your Dock when this all sounds appealing.
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