On the weekend I visited Köln with Thomas and Ana and Claire, went to gamescom on Saturday and was shown a bit of the city by Kathrin on Sunday.
And so, on Saturday night there were moths chasing light, birds munching moths, all spinning round and around Kölner Dom. With the sound turned down low, it’s very pretty:
I recently bought the Emerald Night train from the LEGO Store here in Frankfurt, have set it up on my desk at work. I’ve also been reading The Three Musketeers…
In case it wasn’t immediately obvious, the train is (from engine to carriage) Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the dog is d’Artagnan himself. And the building in the background was the “exclusive” model I got at the aforementioned Store’s grand opening, is totally the Convent of Carmes Deschaux… Only with extra windows?
I’ve been reading about Snow Leopard the last few days and everything seems quite similar to Leopard, very little has changed that you can see. What follows are the few things I have noticed so far.
File sizes, hard drive sizes, SD Card sizes… Everything other than RAM itself is now defined in base 10 instead of base 2. So where before 1 Kilobyte was 1,024 bytes, in Snow Leopard 1 Kilobyte is 1,000 bytes. And this continues up the chain:
All of which means that now, when a hard drive says it’s “250GB”, it actually appears that way in the Finder and in Disk Utility, where before it used to be reported as ~232GB.
It’s strange and unusual but I’ll get used to it. The main thing to remember is that files other people give you will probably be “bigger” than they say, and files you give other people will probably be “smaller” than you say.
Movie file icons now have a Play button in the middle (if you have “Show icon preview” ticked in the Finder’s “View Options”). You can watch things straight in the icon itself, though the glossy swoosh might distract you. Said icons can now be scaled up to 512x512px.
When you rearrange icons using the “Arrange By” menu, they move into place with a smooth animation rather than instantly.
When you rearrange a window’s icons, rather than the “Arrange By” option staying as it was, it now changes to “None” and the window no longer uses your default settings if it did before.
The new Quicktime Player has far fewer options than version 7. There are no “A/V Controls” anymore, so the image and sound can’t be adjusted, nor is there the “Movie Properties” window, which allowed for individual track modification.
The controls appear in front of the video you want to watch, rather than below it, get in the way a lot and don’t fade away fast enough.
The Chapters implementation is even more distracting; where before you could choose a chapter from a pull-down menu, you now have to enter a special mode, which pauses the video.
Version 7 is included as an optional install on the Snow Leopard disc, is installed by default if you have QuickTime Pro already installed in Leopard, else you have to tick the box yourself.
And that’s about it. My MacBook is a 32-bit machine, so I won’t get any 64-bit related speed-ups, and my graphics card is too weak for OpenCL or H.264 hardware acceleration. It looks and feels just like Leopard, apart from the items mentioned above.
I’ve been slowly working away at the current content, tweaking it how I like, planning ways I want the site to work.
I’m not going to have a month-based archive as it appears now, am simply going to have the ten most recent entries appearing at the top of the front page and then the full archive listed below that, title and date only, which will be links to the full text.
There will be no “page” structure as such (/page/2, /page/3 etc.), no explicit “archive”, just one front page, the “about” page, and then the search results, which will list the title, date and first paragraph.
Comments were enabled by default but I don’t want other people writing on my website, so I removed the ability to add new ones. I may also remove the current ones but need to work out how to merge any important information with the entries themselves.
And then finally, after all that, then I’ll look at the font face, colours and layout I want to use.
The visual theme will come last.
UPDATE, 21st February 2010: I would also replace the few videos I currently have hosted on YouTube with self-hosted SublimeVideo content. And the possibility of a maximum-width optimised for a certain 768x1024px resolution, for obvious reasons…
I had a quiet birthday this year; Kitty came over bearing pie, we munched it up with the aid of my flatmate and then there was Carcassonne. Here are some photos:
It was one delicious pie.
Similar to how I did a while ago, I recently played the DS version of Mario Kart rather a lot in order to find out a very important thing; can the score go higher than 999?
Here is what things looked like after 99 races:
And after the 100th:
The numbers ticked up but then capped, no possibility of ever reaching 1000. Oh well.
Courtesy of The Brothers Brick.