June 30, 2007 by Santaduck.

If you are interested, I’m selling an 8GB Apple iPhone on eBay. I’m mainly mentioning it for anyone looking out for fraud, and is interested in a known seller from whom to purchase a unit.

Click here for auction. The auction lasts 1 day and will end on Sunday at 11:45am Pacific time.

BTW it was interesting to note that eBay instituted a wise set of iPhone selling restrictions. The gist of it is: 1) no Pre-sales; the seller must have an actual unit in hand. 2) The auction must be accompanied by a photo of the actual unique item. 3) The seller’s eBay account name must also be visible in this photo, along with the unit to be sold. It must be part of the scene (i.e. physically written), rather than Photoshopped in. 4) PayPal is the only method of payment for the iPhone.

Even still, there are risks for the sellers. Therefore most sellers are requiring buyers to list shipping addresses that are PayPal confirmed as being the same as the billing address of one of their credit cards. Whew. I noticed that the eBay staff was very proactive, and taking down auctions that did not comply; I’m sure they are trying to avoid any bad publicity, for which the potential does exist wiht this madly-hyped item. I also noticed that the earliest auction I saw was taken down or removed– before that happened, I saw it had an auction price of of $20,000.

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June 24, 2007 by Santaduck.

Browsing this article at the NY Times led to a bright “AHA” moment.

Video content on phones was controlled tightly by the cellular providers, much as the “Big 3″ networks controlled television long ago. As technology grows, consumers are able to get their content through new channels.

Jump to Apple’s YouTube-on-iPhone news. The new channel here is the iPhone’s use of WiFi, which broadens the ways users can get video content, even without the cellular network. And now for the AHA moment: it’s not just video… WiFi can do the calls too. What about Skype on an iPhone…

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June 17, 2007 by Santaduck.

This is a bit of old news, but the old Mac Install Kit for Kamek’s AW7 mod for Apocalypse Weekend singleplayer expansion for Postal 2: Share the Pain is now hosted here. Apparently our file hosting via Macologist has not been maintained, so I wanted to make it available again.

As a reminder this includes Mac INI files, and a launcher application for OS X.  You still need:
1) Kamek AW7 Mod zip download
2) Retail Apocalypse Weekend expansion
3) Retail Postal 2: Share the Pain (probably updated to the latest v1409.2).

No I haven’t kept up with Postal recently so I’m not sure what the status of the AW7 that is included in the ‘fudge pack’ version is.  In related news, the controversial ban-magnet Postal franchise is being updated, and Postal 3 will be out for Mac OS X. Read more at Macologist.

UPDATE: The new bundle includes the AW7 mod, which has been renamed “A Week In Paradise”, or AWP. I’m not sure if this Mac Install Kit will work with that, or if the Mac kit was included in the bundle. I’ll have to check with RWS one of these days and ask them.

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June 14, 2007 by Santaduck.

Tetris may be the best-known gaming export from the USSR, but before western exports of arcade games poured in after the fall of communism in 1991, there were indeed arcades in Russia. I was reading an interesting article in PC World about a new arcade museum in Moscow that is attempting to resurrect cold-war era cabinet arcade games from the 70s and 80s, from periscope sea battles, pinballs, and more. Check out the museum’s official site (named after their version of the quarter, the 15 kopek coin), and especially its exhibition page gallery, which stirs a nostalgia we never had in the west.

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June 13, 2007 by Santaduck.

The fallout for Safari’s uber-beta-ness is beginning. Many recent articles have centered on security vulnerabilities. I will for now assume these have a high priority within Apple and will be largely plugged. Usability issues are more problematic, and are the major blocks for adoption by the vast target userbase, who are not necessarily power-users, but more powerfully are creatures of habit.

Ryan Paul of arstechnica had a great read on Safari beta here. As for usability, I’ll cite two of his gems:

1) Safari’s window resizing is, like OS X, only by the bottom right corner only. Apple, don’t highlight the quirky limitations of your OS!

2) Moving through tabs is not adjustable, and is permanently mated to the idiosyncratic CTRL-SHIFT-] and CTRL-SHIFT-[. I really dislike this on OS X, and I dislike it in Windows Safari as well. Why not use the now-standard CTRL-TAB? At the very least, let the user set it.

Anyways, read Ryan Paul’s article, he has an incisive commentary on Safari’s stubbornly alien use of anti-aliasing technology as well.

And why is Safari on Windows now anyways, furthermore why is it such a barely-developed version, unlike OS X for Intel which was polished on launch because of years in development? For the record, my money’s on the hypothesis that the decision to port Safari was a recent one– actually the FULL measure of the decision was to sell Apple computer hardware with Windows pre-installed, but with Apple apps instead of bloatware. If true, the engineers in Cupertino are currently scurrying in secrecy to cobble together an iLife for Vista: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garageband.

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June 13, 2007 by Santaduck.

Well I downloaded Apple’s new Safari beta for Windows on my XP box, and first of all I’m happy it’s there. Second, note the “Bug” button on the navigation bar, it’s there for a reason. Safari for Windows is still Chock Full O’ Bugs. I’ve submitted 5 or 6 already, and I found them in my first 10 MINUTES of browing:

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