Abstracting hardware: obsolescence obsolete (with OnLive)

March 25th, 2009 • 1 comment
Tags: cloud, cloud computing, digital distribution, Gaming, mac, OnLive, pc, pc games, pc gaming, Windows

Most everyone has heard the news of OnLive, the new cloud-based computer gaming platform. I’m not here to regurgitate that for you. Instead, I intend to give it some context.

Cloud computing is all the rage right now. With netbooks growing in popularity, all sorts of Internet-based services are popping up to make the experience of owning a netbook more rich. OnLive applies this model to PC gaming while broadening its appeal way beyond the netbook crowd. Where an app like Google Documents might outsource a little processor load and some data storage, OnLive’s system will send all of the intense load to your CPU and graphics card associated with PC gaming to a monstrous computer hundreds of miles away. The benefits are clear. While existing web apps have sold themselves to the typical PC user on convenience (e.g. the ability to access documents anywhere), this is the only service I can think of that has a chance to sell itself by saving gamers significant money on the hardware that is typically necessary to run these intensive games… not to mention the dedication to keep up with frequent upgrades just to maintain the performance status-quo. An entry-level gaming PC is going to cost around $800. This system enables a $300 netbook to do the same thing by relegating every task associated with the game other than actual display of the resulting video stream.

There are also implications here for the established modes of game distribution. In my most recent post, I discussed a possibility for a new model of game distribution that does away with the physical product altogether, but that proposition did not suggest any fundamental shifts in the way gaming works—only the way they are distributed. Digital distribution platforms have gained significant popularity over the past year. OnLive’s distribution model is digital, but it seems to be something of a hybrid between GameTap and Steam. I honestly don’t understand the model entirely, but Steve Perlman claimed in an interview there will be tiers of service which suggests a subscription model while the interface’s options for either buying or renting any given title suggests a more traditional model of paying per title. This is serious competition on either front. Steam will have difficulty as games that are available for both services will have significantly lower requirements through OnLive. Subscription services like GameTap typically serve so-called “casual” gamers better and contain few if any new release hardcore games. OnLive is coming into this with major partnerships with huge publishers (and committments for simultaneous release with retail) to give it some more muscle.

For the numerous advantages, this service already has a few small disadvantages I can see. First, the max resolution being quoted right now is 720p which is a bit behind the times. I understand there are now Internet bandwidth considerations as the resolution increases, and I’m sure that is the reason for this choice. It doesn’t make it any better for gamers that crave high fidelity experience with their PC gaming and are accustomed to running 1920×1200 or higher resolutions on their PCs. Second, with any digital distribution model comes concerns about consumer issues. As with other similar platforms, many consumers will likely not be comfortable with the license they are actually purchasing. Every software purchase is merely a license whether or not you receive a physical product, but, frankly, it is much easier for software publishers to enforce unreasonable demands in a license while they still control the software. If I have a disc, I can always resell it whereas a digital software purchase may be impossible to transfer.

For all my excitement, I am sceptical. It sounds much to good to be true. The only way we’ll know (before an actual launch, that is) is by getting in on the beta which should start this summer. If OnLive launches at an attractive price, good performance, and reasonable licensing agreements, this may be the Trojan horse that brings PC gaming back to the forefront.

How to resize your Boot Camp partition without reinstalling Windows

February 18th, 2009 • 10 comments
Tags: Boot Camp, Carbon Copy Cloner, mac, repartition, WinClone, Windows

If you’re a hardcore gamer, using Boot Camp to run Windows on your Mac is a fact of life. If you enjoy the MacOS, you’ll probably find yourself devoting as little of your hard disk as possible to your Windows partition. As you accumulate more games, you’re bound to hit capacity on your Windows partition. Your next step is to restore your disk to a single partition, recreate your Windows partition, and reinstall both Windows and all your games. That is certainly no fun… especially if your games have to be redownloaded from Steam or a similar service.

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.

iLife ’09 ships tomorrow

January 26th, 2009 •
Tags: Apple, garageband, ilife, iphoto, mac, Software

The Apple blogosphere has erupted with the news iLife ’09 will ship out to stores tomorrow. I have to admit I’m a little excited for the facial recognition in iPhoto. I think the change with the most potential is the addition of music lessons to GarageBand. I wish I were excited for it, but I realize I have neither the time, the patience, nor the inclination to sit down and learn an instrument. Sigh…

Jets’n'Guns Gold promo pricing

January 23rd, 2009 •
Tags: Apple, deals, games, mac, Software

Today’s MacUpdate Promo deal is the critically acclaimed shooter Jets’n'Guns Gold. The game is normally $30, but today it can be yours for $10! Mac gamers and shooter fans rejoice. If you happen to be both a Mac user and a shooter fan, you are probably already in some kind of shock coma due to rapture.

Eversave insures you won’t lose your work

January 22nd, 2009 •
Tags: Apple, eversave, mac, Software, utility

Eversave is not a mega-church as you may have guessed. Cult of Mac has caught wind of a cool Mac application which will periodically save open documents automatically. It sounds like a pretty cool idea. I have heard a million horror stories about how people lost 20 hours of work because they hit the surge protector’s power button with their foot. It’s really discouraging to have to start over. I personally have been saved numerous times by Gmail’s autosave feature. Thanks to this app, your documents will be saved whether or not your other applications have an auto-save feature.

Automatically add lyrics for your iTunes tracks (for Mac)

January 21st, 2009 • 7 comments
Tags: Audio only, howto, itunes, lyrics, mac, music, tutorial

Reposted from me.raddevon.com.

I don’t have a lot of music in iTunes, but a lot of the music I have is not the easiest to automate lyrics downloads. There are a number of one-step automated solutions, but unless your collection is limited to Justin Timberlake, The Beatles, and Madonna, you may have trouble getting lyrics for all your songs. Even this method is imperfect, but it finds the most of anything I have tried.

First, you will need to make a stop by Doug’s AppleScripts. There are two scripts we need for this process: No Lyrics to Playlist and Needle Drop. The former is fairly self-explanatory; it makes a playlist of every track in your library without lyric information. The latter allows you to specify a number of seconds to play of each track in a given playlist. After invoking Needle Drop, it will load up and play each song in your playlist for the time you specify.

There is one more piece of software needed to complete the process: TunesTEXT. This is a dashboard widget that finds lyrics for the currently playing iTunes track and adds them to your library.

Now, we can put the pieces together. Install the dashboard widget by double-clicking on it. The scripts have to be installed manually. Unzip the downloads and drag the scripts into (your home folder)/Library/iTunes/Scripts/. Once everything is installed, start your iTunes. If iTunes is already open, you will have to close and re-open it so that it will pick up the new scripts.

Once iTunes has started, you should see the scripts you just installed in a menu on the menu bar that looks like an unfurled scroll . Switch to the music section of your library. Click the scroll and choose “No Lyrics to Playlist.” This script will take a minute to comb through your tracks to find those that have no lyrics. Now, you may have to clean this list a bit. If you have podcasts, they will also be included in the list. Sort the list by Genre and delete any tracks that you don’t want lyrics for (e.g. books, comedy, classical, podcasts).

Now, you should have a playlist with only the songs you want to search lyrics for. We can use Needle Drop to play just enough of each track so that TunesTEXT has time to find lyrics. I found that, on my connection, five seconds was plenty of time for the lyrics to be found. You may have to experiment to find the perfect balance. Especially if you have lots of music, you want to choose the shortest playtimes that are enough to find lyrics to reduce the time the search will take.

While still in the No Lyrics playlist, click the scroll and select the Needle Drop script. You will see a dialog box where you can enter the playtime for each track. Enter the time you determined was ideal for your setup (or just try five seconds—it worked for me!). Now, the tracks will begin to play, the lyrics will be searched and added by TunesTEXT, and all will be right with the world. Enjoy!