Buying a new Mac/PC, advice?

[Wrestlevania]

I felt kinda lost in the game. Lost and without direction.

That's because you're in Tim's World now, and it took me a little while to get my head into Tim's World. But the music and characters made for excellent lube and so I've not regretted pushing that little bit harder to fully get in there.

As it were.

I've still not finished it, mind. But it is bloody fantastic all the same.

[Wormsie]

But sometimes...

What I felt odd, as well, was that Tim Schafer has often talked about how important it was that you should guide people through the game so you have to give them a strong motivation for all their actions. But I didn't feel that motivation, I felt like there were things I wanted to do that I found fun, but that the game wanted me to do something completely different (what it was was sometimes unclear and quite random as well) and just draged me away from everything fun. Like a frustrated parent in a toyshop.

And at the same time lost and without direction... Hmm. Is there a contradiction here? I felt lost because what the game wanted me to do wasn't what I wanted to do.

[Oath]

I somewhat agree. There were times when I felt the game sort of told me to go on and do things I didn't really want to, like going over to the island. I wanted to spend more time around camp, which of course I could but with a lessened reward. Of course, if we'd have stayed at camp the story wouldn't have moved on very much, but I just felt it was slightly premature.

[Wormsie]

I got the MacBook!

Everything's gone well so far, and I've noticed that a lot of things that are different on Macs are very enjoyable. The only problem is shareware software, but then again, so much of the software made nowadays is open source that it's less and less of a problem. Besides, these days I'd hve the money, or rather, the methods of payment, for shareware...

[Marek]

http://www.opensourcemac.org/

[Wrestlevania]

http://www.opensourcemac.org/

Adium is a very good instant messaging client I'm told. Inkscape is also a promising piece of vector art/illustration software.

[Marek]

Yes Adium is great. VLC is also a must-have.

[Wormsie]

Inkscape and VLC I know from Linux already. Inkscape sucks on Windows, though.

Adium and Colloquy I've already installed, and both are great. But thanks for the site, it will come in handy. *reads* Ooooo...

One nagging problem I have with the Mac. I know most CD players tend to make an awful noise with some CDs, even while most play just fine and quietly. The Mac seems to be no exception. But I was really expecting something better.

1) Do you have a similar problem with CDs on your MacBook?

2) The noise it makes is because of the higher speed that CDs are read as opposed to DVDs. Now, I'm going to rip most of my audio CDs and there's no problem with DVDs, but sometimes you do want to put a data (or audio) CD into your CD drive. Is there a program/setting for slowing down the CD so that instead of it being read at the ridiculous speed of 48x, it would be read at, say, 16x?

In an unrelated note, what the FUCK has happened to ScummVM? For some fucking reason, perhaps because they can add them, in The Curse of Monkey Island there's lots of unnecessary subtitles. And the first screen, "choose between easy and hard", was practically ruined by this.

[elmuerte]

Inkscape and VLC I know from Linux already. Inkscape sucks on Windows, though.

really? is it so much better on linux/macosx? I thought it was the same application/

[Wormsie]

It is a lot better, because in the Linux version the dialogs aren't hidden every time you want to focus on the main window. I found that really tedious always. And of course, being GTK-based, it suits the Linux environtment better, sort of blends in.

[elmuerte]

well.. linux is not GTK, and GTK is not linux..

but yeah... GTK apps suffer annoying window focus issues on Windows.

[BigJKO]

1) Do you have a similar problem with CDs on your MacBook?

2) The noise it makes is because of the higher speed that CDs are read as opposed to DVDs. Now, I'm going to rip most of my audio CDs and there's no problem with DVDs, but sometimes you do want to put a data (or audio) CD into your CD drive. Is there a program/setting for slowing down the CD so that instead of it being read at the ridiculous speed of 48x, it would be read at, say, 16x?

1) Yes!

2) Let me know if you find one..

And thanks a lot for that link, Marek! Have been frantically looking for a competent HTML editor.

[Erkki]

It seems the OS itself is becoming less and less important as many of the apps we use everyday are cross platform, and platforms like Eclipse or Netbeans RCP making cross-platform developement even easier.

I'm using dual boot Ubuntu / Windows XP and recently just got the same Firefox and Thunderbird profiles working on both OS-es (they're on a shared FAT32 partition). Pretty cool.

[toblix]

I'm using dual boot Ubuntu / Windows XP and recently just got the same Firefox and Thunderbird profiles working on both OS-es (they're on a shared FAT32 partition). Pretty cool.

That is pretty cool. It sounds very hackish, though. There should be a standard way of exchanging data between different platforms on the same computer. Maybe Microsoft c--

Never mind.