SimCity for the iPhone

I'm a SimCity freak, and I have been since the Commodore 64 version hit in 1989, but I had no idea that EA had finally released a version for the iPhone. (thanks calebcherry).

First impressions? Good! I was actually a little skeptical until my first city started building, and bam, my old SimCity addiction kicked in.

The interface is not as clunky as one would expect considering the small screen size. The menus take advantage of the iPhone interface, and have iPhoneisms, so it jives nicely with the rest of the iPhone platform.

The music still has that same SimCity, "I'm watching re-runs of Beyond 2000" feel, which I quite enjoy. I haven't heard any tracks I recognize from previous SimCity games yet but I wouldn't doubt that they're in there.

Advisors aren't blocky sims, which I'll kind of miss. They're oddly "anime" looking as others have noted. I understand that choice though, why render 3D dudes to yell at you when a cartoon will do?

From a complexity standpoint it sits smack in the middle of the original SimCity and SimCity 3000. In fact it shares a lot of traits with SimCity 3000, and early screens of the iPhone version were dead ringers for the SC3000 interface. The game is not anywhere near as complex as SimCity 4 (of course), but it still has a satisfying number of knobs to tweak.

In summary, should you pick it up?

It's under $10.

It's got enough SimCity feel to satisfy.

I'd buy it even if I was just going to play it once waiting for a flight.

It won't replace SimCity 4, but you can play it while on the can, so, there's that...

This will certainly be one of the apps that eats up my battery life. Coming soon to this blog: a post about "poor battery life" on the iPod Touch! In no way related to my 8-hour road-planning stints.

Points of interest

SimCity at Wikipedia

SimCity for iPhone

Technorati Tags: apple, gaming, iphone, iPod

iBook Nostalgia: (and The Top 8 Stevenote Moments)

Via Guy Kawasaki's Twitter,

The Top 8 Stevenote Moments. ..which is a cool article,

But I want to take a moment to highlight the 1999 keynote where the Clamshell iBook is unveiled.



Usually there is some (*snicker*) amount of hyperbole in these keynotes, but during this segment I can't help but mostly agree with Steve Jobs on what made the Clamshell iBook so exciting at the time. It really was an amazing portable for someone who did a lot of rough traveling and the specs aren't exaggerated as exciting. Michelle, the author of the article linked above, may disagree. But as a long, long time owner of a blue and white Clamshell (that matched my Perl Cookbook, oh lord I'm a geek) I can safely say that I wasn't let down.

In fact I'd say the iBook and the Mac OS X Public Beta were two big helpers in my career path. It's possible one of the factors in my hire at Tucows was that I had the audacity to sport the "iPurse" at my interview.

Early chatter about OS X drove me to experiment with FreeBSD from a Linux user's perspective, which increased my knowledge of both exponentially, and having the iBook itself let me do it anywhere... which, you know, when you're in your early 20's is important because you're never home.

Time goes by of course and 9 years later you can't help but chuckle at the specs that were pretty hot upon release. I have an iPod Touch sitting on my desk that has a 400MHz Arm processor and 128MB of RAM, and it's smaller than a deck of cards.

Current laptops and notebooks are obviously much "better" at the present moment, but none of them have inspired me as much as the first generation iBook had. The missing element is charisma.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iBook, nostalgia

Reuserism: My "new" Thinkpad 600E and my 2009 experiment

About two months ago the hard-drive in my Powerbook finally died, after 3+ years of my constant abuse. It was a trooper. The post-recall battery has been dead for at least a year, so the hard-drive was the final straw.

I haven't gotten a replacement hard-drive for it yet because I managed to near-flawlessly re-create my environment using Time Machine. Restoring to an Intel based iMac.

So just in case you're wondering, you can take a Time Machine snapshot from a PowerPC Mac, and Time Machine will re-create it on an Intel Mac without much drama. The problems I did have were very trivial (some screen-savers didn't work anymore... but, er... now they do, somehow. Without any intervention from myself. MatrixGL for example). That's a major architecture jump, so I'm happy it went well and was really easy; +1 for Apple.

This still left me without a portable computer. Rather than go the easy route and get a new hard-drive for my Powerbook, I decided to refurbish an IBM Thinkpad 600E I had sitting in the junk pile. It needed a battery, a charger, a hard-drive and some sort of networking device.

This move was more about getting a portable that I didn't have to worry about as much, rather than trying to save money on refurbishing the Powerbook back to tip-top shape (which would cost about $200 or so). I was eyeballing a Netbook, but they are too small for me and they're still more than I wanted to spend for a laptop that I was going to bike around with on my back.

I picked up a power cord off of eBay for $5, and a Netgear 802.11N card for $20. I was already in possession of a 30GB laptop drive that I had pulled out of my Clamshell iBook. The most expensive part was the battery, which was $50 from a local reseller.

Once we were up and running, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 with encryption, and it works great.

So my portable is $75, with a pretty smooth encrypted operating system; not bad. I can ride around the city with that and not worry that if I take a tumble I'm out $2500. And I can take it to the Reference Library or a coffee shop without sweating that it'll take a walk on me. Actually in that scenario I'd be more upset about losing my bag.

The 2009 Experiment: Reuserism

Inspired by how well this refurbishing went, I am going to try and not buy anything new in 2009. I won't create more waste. I'll save some money. I'll add some additional value to an item that's already made and is most likely perfectly usable. Reuserism rather than consumerism. So as an avid Reuser, I will keep the Re-user economy alive and kicking during this carefully crafted "economic downturn".

Points of Interest

I used these instructions to disassemble my Powerbook. There are actually slight differences in my Powerbook compared to Stefan Horn's, seemingly. He posted this article in 2003, and my Powerbook was circa 2005, one of the last PowerPC books. Mostly screw placement. But it's about 80% accurate between the two models.

The Abide Sticker came from lebowskifest.com.. so that's one new thing. But it's not 2009 yet ;)

Technorati Tags: economy, environment, reuserism, thinkpad

woodgrainz macbook

Just saw this on Flickr. As you may know I am a fan of laptop stickers, so I think this is awesome.

woodgrainz macbook:

pennycakes posted a photo:

Follow these to Flickr for more..

Technorati Tags: apple, laptop, MacBook, stickers

Blogging from the iPod touch... again!

another test post? I'll delete it later (or not).

blogging from the ipod touch

No ground breaking feats of technological might here. Just thought I'd try out blogging from my wife's ipod touch. God I wish they had iPhones available in Canada...

Eww, I'm greasing it all up.

Halo 3: Rocket Deflected with a Grenade!

From Ownatron:






That... was pretty awesome.

Technorati Tags: gaming, Halo, video