The earliest platforms were probably closed. If I am a university sitting on a computer that cost millions of dollars to build, I’m unlikely to allow just anyone to come through and run whatever software they please. Although they have arguably been around longer than open platforms, closed platforms have been mostly taken for granted up until the iTunes app store launched with tremendous success nearly overnight. Closed platforms allow for tighter controls on developers and crafting of a ore unified vision for the platform as a whole.

Windows has often been criticized for the litany of malicious software that has plagued it virtually since day one. Users of closed platforms most often do not have to worry about malicious software. Controls can be put in place to test software for any malicious intent. If something happens to sneak through to users, it will most likely be found and corrected in short order. This does not apply only to malicious software but has been useful to control content for creators of platform that want to portray a squeaky-clean image. This has been used recently by Apple in denying approval to developers of apps that defend the company’s taste in some way. Nintendo also utilized this to great effect by insuring that titles released on its consoles were more family-friendly than those available on competing platforms.

This is an example of a Tengen cartridge released for the NES without Nintendo licensing.

The closed approach to the software platform also leaves companies vulnerable to backlash from both developers and users. Apple has felt this very recently on multiple occasions from initially restricting the availability of the now venerable sub-genre of mobile flatulence noise generators to their recent denial of the Twitter app Tweetie for it’s display of a swear word as a popular tag on the social network. Backlashes often create an underground of users and developers that find new ways to circumvent the closed systems and open them up. Apple has recently been on the attack against iPhone “jailbreaking“—the act of removing the iPhone’s protection against installation of unauthorized software. Jailbroken phones have recently gotten their own “app store” which provides developers and users a marketplace to buy and sell apps that, for one reason or another, went unapproved by Apple. Nintendo suffered from this as well in the late 80′s when developer Tengen reverse-engineered the NES lock-out chip to allow their games to run on NES consoles without approval.

Closed platforms allow for the party maintaining the platform to profit directly from the sale of software. Apple has deemed a charge of 30% is sufficient for their services of providing developers the tools, platform, and marketplace necessary for iPhone development. Microsoft has announced a similar mobile app store  that charges developers a yearly fee on top of a percentage of the sales revenue for apps. Gaming console makers have been charging licensing fees to software developers for many years now. In fact, game console hardware manufacturers often sell their hardware at a loss in anticipation of future software licensing revenue.

Because of the accessibility of open platforms and the lack of a centralized marketplace (although there are closed platforms without centralized marketplaces as well), software developed on open platform can have trouble gaining traction. The openness means there is a potential for much more competition which can lead to most releases being virtually invisible. This can be mitigated with beefy marketing budgets but those undermine the open nature of the marketplace. It doesn’t matter that I can develop for a platform without jumping through hoops if I then have to spend a million dollars to sell any copies of my application.

Ideologically, I much prefer the model of open software platforms for one key reason: all closed platforms to a greater or lesser degree leave developers wondering whether a piece of software to which they have devoted significant time, effort, and possibly money will, in fact, make it through the approval process so that it may be profitable. Open platforms give developers the peace of mind knowing that only the market will decide their success or failure. Closed platforms have distinct advantages, but the freedom offered to all parties by an open platform is a hard thing to sacrifice to any end.

Adblock Plus- The web is a much different place than it was in the ’90s. At some point, companies realized they could advertise on the web. Now, web sites will sell their entire site design off to an advertiser and convert the whole site to an ad for a week or more. You’re going to see ads that try to get your attention by being disgusting. You’ll have animated flashing ads and ads that come up on top of content forcing you to watch before you read the site. It’s the one thing about the old web I really miss. I would almost be willing to go back to the days of the solid-grey backgrounds to dispense with the plethora of annoying ads I must put up with today. Luckily, thanks to a wonderful Firefox extension called Adblock Plus that will block 99% of all that crap, you can lose the ads and still keep your pretty backgrounds. The plugin automatically updates from a list of block rules that will cover most every ad you might see. You are also free to add your own custom rules to block ads the filters might have missed. Adblock Plus is the first extension covered for a reason: it is the biggest part of reclaiming your web surfing experience.

StumbleUpon- You’ve already loaded all your favorite sites into a feed reader like Google Reader, right? In that case, you may be looking for something to do when your feed reader is empty. StumbleUpon takes your interests and delivers a cool page related to one of them with every click of the Stumble button. My favorite metaphor to explain Stumble is that it is channel surfing for the web. Of course, it is far more intelligent than channel surfing. The StumbleUpon toolbar has a thumbs up and a thumbs down button. As you Stumble, you can rate pages using the buttons. This along with the interests you have selected determine which pages you will receive. It also includes a social networking aspect. You can add friends and recommend pages to them. Those pages will come up when they are stumbling. You can add any interesting page to StumbleUpon by clicking the thumbs up button. If a page has never been stumbled before, you will be prompted to provide some information in addition to a review. It’s a really fun way to discover more of the web.

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks)- Foxmarks has been a great way to keep bookmarks in sync across multiple computers. Link as many machines as you like to your account, and your bookmarks are always in sync on all the machines. Now, the name has changed to Xmarks and features have been added to allow users to discover new sites that may be of interest. The new features are intriguing, but the bookmark syncing alone is enough to recommend this extension to anyone who uses more than one computer. The bookmarks are available online through the web interface in case you can’t or don’t want to install the extension. You’ll never be able to get away from your bookmarks!

Delicious/Diigo- I’m covering these together because you probably only need one or the other. Both are social bookmarking sites that, like Xmarks, store links to your favorite web sites online but unlike Xmarks these services have focused on the social aspects from the beginning. Before the massive improvements made in Firefox bookmarks with the 3.0 update, I used Delicious (and it’s extension) exclusively for bookmark storage. Now, I use both. In fact, I’m currently using Firefox bookmarks, Delicious, and Diigo. Diigo is a more full-featured service but is sorely lacking in the most important part of social experiences: users. Delicious has plenty of users to make the service seem worthwhile. The extensions for the services are similar. Both let you view bookmarks stored at the site without having to navigate to the page. Both allow users to easily add sites from the browser. They also work well with Firefox’s built-in bookmarks with a setting that allows bookmarks to be duplicated in both places. Both are indispensable for users who want to share their bookmarks and find cool new sites.

Edit Middle 2 and Cybersearch- Now, the most obscure extensions covered here. These are not flashy but are very useful. Firefox 3 gave us the “Awesome Bar”—a toolbar that is significantly less stupid than its predecessors in every browser released up to that point including Firefox 2+. Now, anything you type in the location bar is searched against URLs and titles of pages in your bookmarks and history. You may notice that searches are halted if you edit letters in the middle of whatever you have typed. Edit Middle 2 fixes this strange behavior and allows search to persist even if you correct a mistake in the middle of your typing. Cybersearch allows the “Awesome Bar” to search one more source: Google. Fantastic additions to an already stellar feature.

Read It Later- You may often find yourself with stories in your feed that are going to require more time and attention than you have at the moment. Read It Later allows you to organize pages and stories such as these. It uses Firefox’s bookmarking but tags the bookmarks you create with it so that it can include them in your reading list—a list of pages you would like to read at some point. Once you have read the page, you can add it to the permanent bookmarks, add it to a number of social news and bookmarking service, or simply mark it as read removing it from your list and bookmarks. This extension also offers syncing of its bookmarks, but you won’t need that if you’re also running Xmarks. The coolest feature of Read It Later is that, upon installing it, your Google Reader will incorporate a Read It Later button next to each of your stories making it easy to mark stories from the RSS reader for later review.

Tab Mix Plus- Firefox tabs are an amazing feature the browser thrust into popularity years ago. The browser’s native implementation improves with each release, but there are still some missing features. That can all be remedied with the Tab Mix Plus extension. You will now have a range of tab options you probably never before considered but soon will be unable to live without. My favorite option is the ability to choose which tab receives focus after you close one. I prefer the opening tab since I usually want to continue surfing that page after diverging to one of the links on it.

Stop-or-Reload Button- Here’s another small and simple extension that is really worth quite a lot. You may soon find that toolbar real estate is a premium in your newly tricked-out browser. This extension reclaims the space of one button which can be devoted to something more useful. How often do you need simultaneous access to both the stop and reload buttons? (That was a rhetorical question. You never need that, of course.) You only need to stop while a page is actively loading. Otherwise, you will instead have access to the reload button.

Download Statusbar- If your travels on the ‘net end up netting you any new files on your computer, you are probably somewhat frustrated with the fact that Firefox wants to pop up a new window when you start a download. It’s annoying. More annoying still is the fact that I have to switch between two windows to track my downloads while continuing to surf. The Download Statusbar puts your downloads at the bottom of the current window in a clean little bar above the status bar. When you aren’t downloading, it goes away. It’s much more elegant than Firefox’s default download manager.

Customization tips

You may find your interface a bit bloated if you install all of these and keep their default settings. You may customize the interface by right-clicking on an empty spot on the Firefox toolbar (try between the location bar and the search bar).

From this menu, you may disable toolbars or click Customize to start rearranging toolbar buttons. I usually end up with all bars hidden except the navigation bar and the bookmark bar. If there are buttons from another bar I want to use, I click the customize option and drag those from their current bar to either the navigation bar or the bookmark bar. Then I hide the other bar to save space. If you’re a Windows user, you can drag your bookmark toolbar to the top of the window next to the menu bar (You know the one. File, Edit, etcetera.) then hide the dedicated bookmark toolbar. Of course, if you’re a Mac user and don’t use the bookmark toolbar, you can just hide it without losing anything. This will save even more space. The key here is to get as much functionality into the smallest space possible to leave the most room for the actual browsing!

I hope you enjoy these tips. These extensions have really made the significant time I spend in my browser much more enjoyable and productive. If you’d like to recommend an extension or a tip for other web junkies like yourself, just drop us a comment!

Games

Cheapassgamer.com- Maybe you want to save $5 or $10 on a game that’s launching soon. Maybe you want to find a heavy discount on a game that’s been out for a few months. Maybe you want the details on an upcoming game clearance at a retail chain. Cheapy D and the forum folks at CAG will hunt down the craziest deals and provide you with all the details. This site has been around for a while, and I don’t think they ever really miss. If there’s a deal, check out these forums and you will find it.

CheapCollegeGamers- Another forum for gaming deals. I only discovered this one recently. My favorite thing about it: the RSS feed is updated more frequently than that of Cheapassgamer and hits more of the deals where CAG only includes maybe one stellar deal per week. This feed has multiple deals every day. A great candidate for your Google Reader.

Half.com- eBay bought this site a few years ago. Almost yearly, eBay announces the site will be shut down, but the users just aren’t having it. So, the site survives. It is a marketplace for games, movies, books, and music. It’s sorta like eBay, but everything is Buy-it-now. All the auction foreplay is dispensed with. One really nice feature is the pre-order feature (now called Match My Price). Go to an item page, click Match My Price, and enter your desired price. When a seller lists an item, they will see they can sell it immediately for your requested price. If they choose to do so, it’s over. The item is yours and they are paid. You can set expiration for your pre-order for as little as two weeks, and you will receive e-mail updates to remind you that the pre-order is active. You can also manually cancel it at any time.

Gadgets and Gear

Woot- I’ve covered this one before, but this article cannot pass without mentioning it. Woot will give you one daily deal on a product. Most products are geek-friendly although there is the occasional golf club or espresso machine.

Slickdeals.net- The site has deals on all types of items, but much of what is posted is tech related. The RSS feed is great, but I find the deals are sometimes expired by the time they hit my reader. I guess if you really want to be thorough, you will have to keep the site open and spam refresh.

[H]ard|Forum- These are the forums of an excellent computer hardware site HardOCP. Check out the Hot Deals and the For Sale/Trade forums for nice prices on computer hardware and gadgets. You may find some gaming stuff here too. I actually came away with a 3DO console for practically nothing.

I know there are many more sites I may have missed. That’s where you come in! Post in the comments your favorite deals sites or even techniques for getting great prices on your geek gear. You may see an episode of the podcast in the coming weeks with some advanced online shopping techniques that will completely automate the process of finding deals online! Subscribe to the site feed or the podcast (iTunes) to stay informed.

He uses only software and hardware included with his Macbook to record his tunes and distributes them online via rifflet.com. If you have a Macbook, you can follow his exact procedure to record and distribute your tracks. If you have a PC, he suggests the free and open-source audio recording program Audacity. This can really be done with any kind of computer along with a microphone… even if it’s a cheap one! Like I said, the goal is not to build a home studio but to quickly and economically digitize your music and get it heard.

Colin also recorded a screencast showing his recording and uploading process to make things even easier on you.

Be sure to check out Colin’s other tracks on rifflet. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of his music to see updates in your feed reader when he posts a new song. If you need further information or have questions, you can e-mail him @ appletofu [at] gmail [dot] com.

Download the podcast

• Quicktime HD
• Quicktime Standard
• iPod
• MP3 (audio only)

Links

• rifflet.com
• Colin’s rifflet page
• Audacity

I’m really liking the app thus far, but I do question the utility of it. The one feature I gain over managing my queue at the site is offline access. I can make changes to my queue, and they are updated to the site the next time I have an active connection. Frankly, I don’t often find myself using the computer without Internet access, but there is something to be said for the convenience of a quick, desktop app to accomplish a task that would otherwise be done in a somewhat slower web app that I will first have to actually load in my web browser. I’m going to give it a few weeks and see how (and if) this app makes sense for me. I suggest you try it too!

This method will allow you to resize your partition, and, with just a little extra work, restore everything back to it’s former state after having created your new and larger Windows partition. You’ll need some software and (possibly) some hardware to get started. Download and install both WinClone and Carbon Copy Cloner. Both of these applications are free. Have a Windows XP CD at hand (just in case). You may also need an external hard drive for one of two reasons: First, you will need enough free space to store an image of your entire Windows partition. If you have that much space on your drive already, you won’t need the external drive for that purpose. Second, you may need to repartition your entire hard drive and restore even your Mac partition from an external drive in case the MacOS is unable to recreate your Windows partition after merging the old partition back into your Mac partition (This happened to me just the last time I resized so it is not infrequent.). If you end up needing a drive for this reason and don’t have one, you may have to do without a Windows partition until you can procure a drive. If you’re OK with this, feel free to start the process without an external hard drive (assuming you have adequate free space to image the Windows partition). If you run into both issues, you may need two drives to get you through. If you’re looking to buy a drive, I like the Western Digital Passports as a nice portable external drive (500GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB).

Once you have the software installed and the necessary hardware at hand, you’re ready to begin.

Fire up WinClone and point it toward your existing Windows partition. You can tell you have the correct partition by the “Total size” field in the program.

Image the partition to a location on your Mac partition (if you have the space) or on your external drive. This will take a little while.

Once you have the image, go into your Boot Camp Assistant in /Applications/Utilities/’

Click “Continue” from the first screen. Next, select “Create or remove a Windows partition” and click “Continue” again. Now, it will tell you that your drive will be restored to a single Mac-formatted partition. Don’t get scared because we have an image of everything in the Windows partition that will be deleted. You won’t lose data (or savegames .

Once the restore is complete, relaunch the Boot Camp Assistant. This time you want to create a Windows partiton. Size it however you like. Start the creation process. This is where the steps will fork a bit. If it is able to create the partition, you’re in luck because you’re almost done. Just relaunch WinClone, click the “Restore” tab, click “Select image,” and find the Windows image you created earlier. Once the restore is complete, boot into Windows. It will run ScanDisk. This is normal so don’t panic. Once this is complete, you should be booted into Windows with everything you had previously… except with the addition of an extra chunk of hard disk capacity!

If Boot Camp Assistant fails to recreate the Windows partition, you’re in for a few more hours of work. First, connect your external drive. If you had to put the image of your Windows partition on an external drive, you will need a separate one for this backup.

We need to make sure it is formatted properly to be bootable on your Mac. Run Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities/. Select your external drive (the drive not the partition) from the left-hand pane. Select the “Partition” tab on the right. Under “Volume Scheme:” select “1 Partition.” Click the “Options” button at the bottom.

If your drive is a PC-formatted drive, the “Master Boot Record” option will probably be selected. Select “GUID Partition Table” instead. This is the magic setting that makes a drive bootable on an Intel Mac. This is very important later on as this drive will not only be your backup of your entire Mac drive but the OS you will boot to in order to format and restore to your internal drive. Click the “OK” button.

Now click the “Apply” button to start the format process. Once this is complete, start up Carbon Copy Cloner.

Select your Mac partition as the source disk. The destination will be your external hard drive. Click the “Clone” button to start the process. Depending on how much data you have, this may take a while. You should probably fire up the Xbox 360 or maybe a movie or something. Maybe you could go out to eat!

Now that we have your entire drive backed up, we need to boot to the backup so we can reformat the original drive. Leave your external drive connected. Restart your Mac and hold down the “Option” key after you hear the chime. You should see your external drive among the other connected bootable drives. Click on the external drive.

The OS should boot and look just like it would if you had booted from the internal drive. Fire up Disk Utility again (/Applications/Utilities/). This time, select your internal drive from the left-hand pane. Click the “Erase” tab. Make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click the “Erase…” button. Click “Erase” in the dialog box to confim. This shouldn’t take long. Once the drive is erased, start Carbon Copy Cloner again.

This time around, the source disk is your external drive; the target is your internal drive. Click clone. This will take about as long as the initial clone.

Once the clone is completed, restart the Mac. Hold “Option” after the chime and boot to the internal drive. Now, boot to your internal drive. Start the Boot Camp Assistant (/Applications/Utilities/) and create a Windows partition. If you want your XP partition formatted NTFS, you’ll need to insert your XP disc and allow the computer to start the installer. You need only let the Windows installer format your partition. There’s no need to proceed with the install. If you just want to use the FAT32 file system created by default by Boot Camp, you can skip this step.

Boot back into MacOS. The rest of the steps are the same as the steps following a successful re-creation of the Windows partition. I will copy and paste them below for your convenience. Relaunch WinClone, click the “Restore” tab, click “Select image,” and find the Windows image you created earlier. Once the restore is complete, boot into Windows. It will run ScanDisk. This is normal so don’t panic. Once this is complete, you should be booted into Windows with everything you had previously… except with the addition of an extra chunk of hard disk capacity!

If you had to take this fork, it was a long road, but you’re here at the end. Congratulations! Now, get to installing some more games (or productivity apps if you must).

I realize there are programs to do this automatically for you, but those cost money. If you’ve just laid down $50 on that hot new game, you probably don’t have much more cash to buy a program to do something you may only ever do once or twice. This method, although convoluted, will get you there mostly for free. Do you have an easier method (or can you refine mine to make it better)? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Payback ($6.99)- Payback is a very true-to-the-original GTA clone. I’m sure many of you are only familiar with the GTA series since the third game in the series was released for PS2. This is a little different. This game is very similar to the first two GTA titles for PC (also for PSOne, I believe). The perspective is top-down. You go to phone booths, pickup missions, and complete them for points. Once you reach the point goal, you can move on to the next area. I have a couple of minor complaints. The light poles in the game do not come down even if you hit them with a tank… literally. Not only that, but they stop your vehicle immediately and completely upon impact. The cops in the game are very nonchalant. You can often steal another car in front of them, run over someone, or run into their cop car with your vehicle without raising their suspicions that you might be up to no good. In spite of this minor gripe, this game is definitely a steal. There is spoken dialog and a cool radio just like modern GTA games!

ExZeus ($5.99)- This game comes straight from Japanese arcades. The PS2 version was released only in Europe. The Dreamcast also saw a version at some point in time (probably on a continent on which I do not reside). This is a shoot ‘em up that puts the camera behind a giant mech which you move on the x and y axes using tilt control. Attacks are executed using a number of tapping gestures on the right side of the screen. Tapping the left side of the screen locks enemies for a homing-rocket attacks. It’s great fun and and very polished especially well under the $10 price point.

I Love Katamari ($7.99)- The Katamari series has held a special place in my heart since the original Katamari Damacy for PS2. This particular version was destroyed by critics upon release because of some major slowdown issues, but those were fixed shortly after with the first update. For anyone unfamiliar with the series, you play as the Prince who is sent to earth by his father, the King of the Cosmos, to roll around a giant sticky ball called a katamari and pick up objects. These objects range from paperclips and matchboxes to tables, people, and much larger objects still. While the katamari is small, it can only pick up small objects, but, as it gains mass, it can pick up much larger objects. There are a number of modes including the story mode in which the King asks you to roll up a specific object in each level and a mode which has you trying to stop rolling when your katamari reaches a given size. It is wacky, but it is simple addictive fun.

Rolando ($5.99)- Here we have a super-cute and complete platformer that uses the accelerometer to great effect. The graphics could probably be duplicated in Flash, but the tilt control upon which the game is built is uniquely its own. It also contains a level of polish that few Flash games ever achieve. Roll your Rolandos through each stage solving puzzles and overcoming obstacles to reach the exit. Some stages also have elements that you interact with directly by touch. Each Rolando has a unique personality which makes the game more endearing than most you will play on this platform. Start with the lite version and see if you like it.

SimCity ($7.99)- This is SimCity 3000 adapted for the iPhone. It is an excellent and complete version of the game. Amazing to me is that the game was not watered down for the mobile platform. This isn’t SimCity “Lite.” You’re out there zoning, placing roads and water lines, and talking with advisors just like its desktop counterpart. Maybe this experience could be reproduced in Flash, but it never has to my knowledge.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive. Nor am I trying to suggest that you should not buy simpler games on the platform; they certainly fill a need as well. However, as a hardcore gamer, there is a thirst in me that no quantity of puzzle and card games can ever quench. Lucky for me (and those like me), the iPhone offers a powerful gaming platform that developers (like those of the aforementioned titles) have really begun to exploit to the fullest. These are some of the finest examples of exactly what the iPhone is capable of in the mobile gaming space.

A Computer Repair Utility Kit You Can Run From a Thumb Drive

Once you have installed the extension, it places three or four (depending on your options) controls to the right of the “From” field in Gmail when composing a message. The first is a dropdown menu which allows you to select one of four different signatures. If you have multiple sending accounts setup in Gmail, you have four signature slots for each one. In other words, the signature I have named “Default” can be different when I am sending from my primary account versus sending from the account provided by my employer. This is very handy. For most of my accounts, I am posting my personal contact information as well as the raddevon.com logo linked to the site. For my work account, I have my name, work e-mail account, and work phone number. Once I change sending accounts, these signatures are automatically swapped.

The second button displayed activates the editor. The editor is where the action happens. The top box allows the user to enter the HTML to generate the desired signature. The bottom pane displays the preview. There is also a link above the editing box that sends the user to a page with some basic tips about building a signature.

The third button reinserts the signature in case there are problems. It is only visible once activated using the fourth button—Options. The options are minimal. You may choose whether to insert the signature above or below quoted text when sending a reply, provide alternative names for your four signatures, and display the “Reinsert” button.

The extension works wonderfully. I have noticed two quirks with my e-mail signatures, and I’m almost certain they are limitations within Gmail itself. First, the preview will show alternate link colors when your signature is styled as such with CSS. However, these are reverted back to default colors when the e-mail is actually sent. Second, I had included a Skype link to allow recipients to click my Skype username and call me directly. That link appears to be nerfed by Gmail when it reaches its recipient. I imagine Gmail limits the protocols of any links in e-mail to a list of “safe” protocols. Evidently, “skype:” is not among them.

If you’re not already an HTML guru, there are a few concepts you will want to keep in mind:

1. Line breaks in HTML are not as simple as pressing the “Enter” key. HTML ignores any white space beyond the first press of the space bar. Line breaks must be invoked by placing a <br /> in the desired location.
2. Images use this tag: <img src="http://path.to/image.jpg" />. Of course, you will have to insert your own path based on the image’s location. It can’t be on your hard drive. Otherwise, anyone without access to that drive (which describes most of your desired recipients) will not see it. Try a free image hosting service like ImageShack if you aren’t sure where to put your image.
3. Hyperlinks are made with <a href="http://path.to/page.html"> </a>. You may notice this tag has two sides. Anything between is linked to the path referenced by the “href” attribute. This can be plain text to link a word or words, or it can be an image tag to link that image.
4. If you want to use CSS in your signature, you can use it inline by adding a “style” attribute to whichever element you want to affect. If it’s an image, that would look something like this: <img src="http://path.to/image.jpg" style="insert CSS here" />. If you want to style a block of text, you can enclose it in a <div></div> tag with a style attribute like this: <div style="insert CSS here">Text to style</div>. There are other ways to add CSS as well, but this is the simplest.

This should get you going. Now, get out there and create a killer signature to make a big impression on your recipients. Plug your blog, give people a way to contact you, and pimp your expertise. Ready, set, GO!