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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 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.
Continue reading…

As you might have figured from my twitter updates, I spent the weekend at the locally hosted LAN party ‘the Reality’.

A LAN party is an event where a bunch of computer-loving geeks take their computers with them to play games and have fun together, which I certainly had. I made a little video to show what it looks like when over 730 people come together and go crazy. It’s HD – fullscreen playback is recommended!

While using Windows was a bit bumpy at times, the party was great and I’ve had a lot of fun.

Already looking forward to next year.

Generally, a Mac owner is expected to have a lot of Apple peripherals, like keyboards, mice, and even displays and display adapters. I’m no exception, which isn’t very strange, because I love the way most of them look and feel. Apple doesn’t offer everything you might need, though – full-size headphones, a great love of mine, are something that could use the nice design touches of Apple, but I had to look elsewhere for a fitting solution that also has an acceptable sound quality.

I set out for an affordable and quality headset. Design may be important, but since you typically wear the things, it’s best to do a selection based on technical merits. However, I found a set of ‘cans’ that qualify quite well in both departments. Read on for the full review of the Steelseries Siberia headphones. Also, read the last bit of the post for a shot at winning a free Siberia.
Continue reading…

Originally I’d printed a small series of my WWDC shirt while I was in San Francisco, but after almost a hundred comments on my blog, and almost a thousand combined emails, twitter replies, messages, and flickr comments, I had figured out that it might be a good idea to make my shirt available for sale.

Well, it’s taken me a while, but here it is in full American Apparel glory: the Exploded Settings tee. It ships in 2-3 days, and it’s handled, printed, and warmly packed and sent off by the awesome guys at BuyOlympia. They also do the shirts of well-known friends in the industry, such as Rands, the Iconfactory, and of course Panic.

If you want to be really awesome, get one. But, you can be even more awesome, and take a picture of you (or your girlfriend/boyfriend. Or you AND your girlfriend/boyfriend!) wearing it, and I’ll hook you up with an unreleased icon and wallpaper. Ohh, exciting! Of course you also get a free, non-returnable and virtual pat on the back.

People who won a shirt during the giveaway will be sent one as well. If you got a reduced price offer because you participated in the giveaway, just send me your paypal receipt and I’ll send you 4 dollars per shirt you’ve bought. Zing!

Why are you still here?