Andrew's Blog

So I installed Bioshock via steam and its working well on my MBP. Im able to play with everything on full, I just had to take the resolution down two notches from the 1440x900. Not to bad so far. :)

Hi, just thought Id let you all know that Bioshock runs fine on a Macbook Pro Core Duo (2ghz) with 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 256MB RAM. So far the game is running with the textures on high in 1024x768 without any problems and a good framerate in my quick tests. I played around 15-20 minutes in the game without any problems. Unfortunately its getting late here so I didnt want to play around with it for too long today but tomorrow hopefully I will find time to try it in higher resolutions and will post back here to let you know how I get a long.

So like many of you I installed the Bioshock demo today to give the game a try to see what all of the fuss was about :) The installation went smoothly but when I tried to run the game, I got an error something along the lines of; Error: The Side-by-Side configuration information in "c:\games\Bioshock" contains errors. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem Reinstalling the game didnt fix my problem and neither did alternative drivers for my graphics card. I did some research and the issue seems to be derived from a problem with VC++ files either not matching or being included in the program. The solution that worked for me was to run windows update and install the latest windows updates and .NET updates, then reboot. After the reboot Bioshock started and ran fine, no issues with videos or game play. Hope this helps someone else. UPDATE: Sorry neglected to mention that this is o...

So I've been playing with iPhoto a bit more over the past couple of days but the one thing that I'd like to do I haven't been able to and thats manually sort photos within an event. The problem is that when you double-click the event to access the photos it contains and then go to the view -> arrange by -> menu option, the option to sort manually is greyed out. I've tried this on various events and libraries with the same results on them all. A quick search on the internet revealed that I'm not the only person having this problem and although a workaround exists on the Apple discussion forums, its just that a workaround, so lets hope that Apple fixes it soon. One good point that I have came across though and perhaps this is something that was generally known and only I missed it, is that keywords seem to be unique to the library, which is great news for me as I tend to break our photos into libraries such as holidays, family events and so on. Which means that...

Just thought Id post something I just found out when playing with iPhoto 08 just now. If you drag your mouse cursor slowly across the icons displayed in event you (or events as iPhoto calls them) the icon changes from the first picture in the event to show you the next and so on, so basically by dragging slowly across the entirety of the icon you can see all of the pictures that the event is comprised of. Quite useful :)

I received my iLife 08 and iWork 08 discs today and thought I'd post up a few comments here about the installation. iLife 08 First of all I installed iLife 08, this doesnt require a serial number and once you start the installation will automatically replace the previous version of iLife on your computer. Therefore there is no need to manually uninstall it and this way all of your settings, iphoto library and so on are carried across into the new applications. The one exception is the old version of iMovie which is copied into a separate folder. Also be aware that your iphoto library will be updated to be compatible with the new version so if you plan to go back at some stage you may want to make a backup of your current library before installing the new version of iLife. So far I've only launched the individual apps to make sure that they work but otherwise havent really played with them. After installation I ran software update and there was an update for iphoto already avail...

I was bitten by the Desktop Tower Defense bug, if you dont know what it is, its a flash game where the purpose is to prevent critters getting from one side of your desktop to the other by building a maze or series of defenses composed of different types of cannons. Every time you kill critters you get gold which can be used to upgrade the existing defenses or build new ones. It might sound a little strange but its well worth checking out and giving it a try for yourselves. Try it first on the easy level just to get the hang of it and then switch up to medium for a bit more of a challenge. Ive managed to get through medium without losing a life and around 6000 points, so Ive decided to give hard a try but Im not having much luck so far :) Anyone already playing this?

Dockables are some small single purpose apps that you can drag into your dock. They perform actions such as putting your computer to sleep, activating the screensaver, shutting the computer down and so on, all with one click. Definitely worth checking out, so click here :)

I just recently caught onto the Soprano's - talk about coming late to the party :) But for anyone else who hasnt seen it yet its definitely worth watching.

So the latest versions of the iApps are out, namely iLife 08 and iWork 08. I have to say that so far they dont look too bad based on what Ive read so far on the net. Ive already ordered my copies from the Apple store in the UK. This brings to mind something that doesnt quite make sense for me though, Ive never understood why the Apple store here in the Czech Republic takes 3-5 weeks to get new software after release. It would be nice if Apple arranged for shipments to be made in advance of announcements but even so, I wouldnt expect it to take more than a week if they shipped after the announcement. A minor gripe at the end of the day but still frustrating. Hopefully my copies will arrive on Monday, although most of the torrent sites have links up already. Actually Apple is officially offering a downloadable demo from its site www.apple.com/iwork thats good for 30 days, though Ive seen some posts on the net stating that if you remove a certain .pref file the 30 day count resets itself....

My father-in-law has a small problem with his Powerbook, it doesn't run Microsoft Money and as a lot of people in the Mac community will tell you, most people coming over from Windows use Money. Anyway I thought I would help him out by installing an emulator for him, so I looked around (unfortunately being on a powerpc it immediately ruled out Parallels or VMWare) and came across iemulator, which I thought used to be free but is now commercial and Q (Quemu) , which is freeware. I bet you can guess which one I went for right? :) Installing Q wasn't a problem, it was a simple case of drag and drop and presents a control panel a little similar to VMWare. I set up a new virtual machine, chose Win2K as the operating system, purely so it wouldnt need as many resources as XP does and would hopefully be useable and started the installation with a Win2k SP3 disc that I have. The installation was slow - it took around 2.5 hours which surprised me, of course I expected it to be slow but i...

I was looking for a way to download multiple files over night and came across a few program while I was searching but Speed Download was the one I finally settled on that suited me the best. Its not free, which initially gave me reservations but after trying out the demo for a day I ended up buying it. It basically does what it says on the tin and adds downloads to a list that you can set up to download in whatever order you like, when you like and so on. The links can be captured when you click on them in a browser or from a text file or you can had them yourself either by typing or cut and paste. Its also got growl support so youll know when something has finished or started. I'm still playing with it but so far Im quite happy with it. After I've used it for a few more days I'll post an update here.