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Beat poet digs Macs
New York Times columnist John Markoff recently interviewed Beat-era poet Gary Snyder, who usually writes about the American wilderness. Markoff found that the 79 year-old Snyder, who confesses to writing his poetry on "whatever was at hand," is an avid and devoted Mac user. According to Markoff, Snyder wasn't aware of the upcoming announcement of an Apple book replacement, as he lives in the California back country and apparently doesn't have the interruption of broadband noise to bother him. Snyder rarely uses a mobile phone and is quoted by Markoff as considering texting "abhorrent." But he waxes poetic when he uses his Mac. Snyder noted about his Mac, "I like the storage space it has," he said, "and I like the ability to have back files accessible to me wherever I go." Those weren't the only words he had to say about the Mac. In a short, previously unpublished poem titled "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh," the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology" describes why he says that personal computers feel like sentient beings. Fans of poetry and Macs can read the poem by visiting the title link in the previous paragraph. It's crazy, daddy-o!
Plain Sight is all about robot killing and points
Developer Beatnik Games just announced their latest project that's set for release to the PC and onto the Xbox Live Arcade sometime in Q1 2009 and it's a robot rich, violent and bombtastic project called Plain Sight. And, wouldn't you know, it was developed using XNA. Joy! In Plain Sight, you control a robot who starts out with one point. Seeing that "one point is rubbish", your goal is to kill other robots to increase your points. The more points you acquire, the bigger, stronger and more powerful you become. But you'll have to bank your points and to do that you have to detonate yourself. If you kill other robots in your detonation, your multiplyer increases. Once exploded, repeat the process. Check out a few screenshots below and a rather delicious Plain Sight trailer after the break.%Gallery-31413%
OTA music files squeezed down 10x, thanks to Beatnik
MP3 is all well and good, but some music fans crave better compression these days -- especially when doing over-the-air music transfers. Beatnik says it has a solution that would allow music transfers over 2.5G networks by compressing content up to 10 times as much as the MP3 format. This would possibly give operators the ability to service more customers while using older networks, opening up an new, untapped market. We've gotta ask: are people using older 2.5G networks really in the hunt for music downloads? Yeah, smaller compression would be good and all -- and Beatnik thinks so too -- but we tend to shy away from visions that encourage extending usage of the crazy-slow GPRS and EDGE networks around the world.[Via Phone Scoop]
Optimized Firefox 2.0 for G4, G5, and Intel Macs
Whenever there is a new release of Firefox I anxiously await Neil Lee's optimized version. Neil aims to please, and he just announced on his blog that he has whipped up optimized versions of Firefox 2.0 for G4, G5, and Intel Macs. Please keep in mind that this optimized version can't use the Firefox icon, or the Firefox name. You'll see a variant of the icon to the right, and the app will identify itself as BonEcho. Why? As Neil explains the name and icon are for official builds only, and this ain't official, baby.One of the nice touches in these builds are the Aqua form widgets, but there is a version with the Firefox default widgets if that's your cup 'o tea. Anyway, get to downloading and thanks, Neil!
