bartbrinkman.nl

TV Shows: excellent quality or otherwise entertaining

Bart Brinkman — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:30:38 +0000

In no particular order:

Burn Notice
24
Bones
House M.D.
The IT Crowd (UK)
The Office (US)
Alias (stopped)
Stargate Atlantis
Battlestar Galactica
Dexter
Top Gear (BBC)
Las Vegas (cancelled, stopped)
Life
Entourage
How I Met Your Mother
The Big Bang Theory

Games that should be on the iPhone

Bart Brinkman — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:34:04 +0000

After trying X-Plane 9 for the iPhone, I’m convinced that games where you fly around (a.k.a. flight simulations) should be ported en masse to the iPhone. A few games come to mind:

Terminal Velocity
Fury3
Hellbender
Descent 1/2/3?

Some sliders, some buttons (or just tap the screen) and the amazing tilt sensor should be enough to control these games.

Fury3:

Descent II:

Spore, iPhone 2.1, X-Plane 9

Bart Brinkman — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:08:24 +0000

EA Games just went Sony on customers, giving customers who bought the game a total of 3 installation attempts. You can get a fourth time (if you have a very good reason) by telephone. Note that this is a DRM restriction, so you’ll lose any hope to activate the game after they shut down their activation servers. EA does not like losing money, so don’t count on them running indefinitely.

Since Spore is now officially the most illegally downloaded game of all time, EA is going to try out something new with their next big title: Red Alert 3 will give you 5 installation attempts! Idiots.

Apple recently released iPhone OS 2.1, stating that it will fix most problems with the 3G. Well, it sure did. Battery life increased at least threefold, applications install in a snap, and any interface lag (Contacts and SMS) has simply just disappeared.

And there’s this new game out for the iPhone: X-Plane. Four aircraft, a small part of Switzerland (very small, unfortunately), throttle, flaps, gear and brakes, and a bit buggy. But it has a complete flight model, and controls (using the tilt sensor) are amazing.

Where does the M for Deep Sky Objects come from?

Bart Brinkman — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:08:57 +0000

For example, the Andromeda Galaxy (which happens to be on a ‘crash’ course with our galaxy, the Milky Way) is known also as M31, whereas the famous Orion Nebula is known as M42. These M classifications come from Messier, or Charles Messier, who lived from 1730 to 1817. He was a French astronomer who discovered some 110 deep space objects such as galaxies or nebulae. These objects are very interesting, because they can all be seen with binoculars or small telescopes.

Another classification, NGC, comes from New General Catalogue, which contains over 5,000 deep space objects. In this catalogue, M31 is known as NGC224.

Sources:

http://www.seds.org/messier/xtra/history/biograph.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_object

Geez, lucky us…

Bart Brinkman — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:28:38 +0000

Increase performance of HTC S730

Bart Brinkman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:46:07 +0000

I had this phone for a while now. It works quite well, but performance, memory and battery life is just poor. Partially this can be attributed to HTC’s poor support for it’s hardware (no drivers). But after disabling HTC default home application (which is basically a nice designed large digital clock with some extra features, such as a weather application), my battery life jumped from less than 2 days to about a week, and average free memory is now around 12-15 MB, instead of 2 to 6 MB. So, just activate one of Windows Mobile 6’s default home screens, or download a custom home screen (with not too much plug-ins, I guess).

Upcoming Xbox 360 titles

Bart Brinkman — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:00:53 +0000

I’m keeping a selection of (upcoming) Xbox 360 titles here that are probably worth checking out:

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Fallout 3
Gears of War 2
Alan Wake

Self reminder; register_globals!

Bart Brinkman — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:27:17 +0000

Or actually, do not register_globals! Seems to mix up the superglobals, such as $_POST, $_GET, $_COOKIE, $_SESSION, etc. Bascially, by adding some $_GET parameters (to the url), I could change values in the $_SESSION global. Bad. One of PHP’s biggest leaks. Turn it off by editing php.ini, adding a .htaccess with a php_flag, or add an ini_set to your scripts. It’s turned off by default on most web servers, but every once in a while I come across one that has it turned on for some really strange reason; resulting in weird, long, frustrating debug sessions.

Mass Effect

Bart Brinkman — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 11:30:18 +0000

Leopard flaws - the Dock

Bart Brinkman — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:49:56 +0000

Want that vertical 2D Dock in a horizontal version? Use the following Terminal command (copy & paste):

sudo defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -boolean YES;\ killall Dock

Change the YES in this command into NO to get the 3D ‘glassy’ Dock back. Now, I was happy with this for a short time, but the separator started to annoy me. Luckily, the separator (and most other artifacts on the Dock) are simply a bunch of .png’s in /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app (like all OS X applications a folder with an app extension). I edited the separatorstraight.png file (lucky guess) with my favorite image editor (which happens to be Photoshop), and made something like this:

Like it? Simply download separatorstraight.png and enter this in the terminal (from the directory you’ve downloaded the image to):

sudo cp separatorstraight.png \
/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/\ Contents/Resources/separatorstraight.png

Note that it might be wise to backup Dock.app. And obviously, follow these instructions at your own risk.