Leopard was finally made available for pre-order today. Ten days until launch. I’m pretty excited I have stayed away from the rumor sites and their screenshots on purpose. Nothing can ruin it for me now! Time to fetch that bottle of wine?

Are you getting leopard on release day? What features are you upgrading for?

The demo for what I would consider the most anticipated game of the year is now available for download. It’s a short one, just so you know. Still, wow. It has all the game play elements that made the second one so good. In fact, it feels a bit like the second game but in a more modern setting. The graphics are awesome too. And for the first time, I don’t hate the addition of night vision goggles in a game. I actually like the night vision mode so much I wish there was more of it in the demo.

So if you have a Windows-running machine, go grab the demo now.

Oh, and this was posted with the ecto3 beta. Yes, ecto3 is out of alpha and into beta. If that has kept you from trying it out earlier, now might be a good time.

I was talking to a friend earlier about Apples decision to lock out any 3rd party apps from the iPhone. Now, if you think about it, it all makes sense. Because like Steve said back when it was released: “we don’t want our phone to take down the entire AT&T network”. Would you want that? Would you? Didn’t think so.

So here is my pledge: please people, stop using 3rd party software on your computers. Serious. I would hate it if you took down the whole internet. A single phone network, no harm done, but THINK ABOUT TEH INTARNETS!

And with all the fancy web 2.0 stuff happening, it’s not like you couldn’t just use web apps instead. So ditch that old MS Office for Google Docs, and swap out Quicken for Mint. If only YOU would listen to me, then at least this blog might stay online a few days longer. The end is near!

Sometimes I wonder if anything would have been different if iTunes offered tv shows for download over here. My bet is that I would indeed have bought a few shows every now and then, at least for the time being since I don’t have cable access. Tv shows, unfortunately, have gone the way of digital music. As soon as the networks realize that people might pay for it, that’s what they want. And then comes greed. And they just don’t stop. NBC left Apple, Apple then decided to kick them out, and for some reason they just decided to still put out a couple of brand new shows on iTunes (Chuck being one that I will personally follow).

Now since we don’t have a single service for downloading tv shows in Norway (from several networks), the networks are pretty much left to do the job themselves. The way they attack this is VERY different however…

The biggest network, NRK, decided to put pretty much everything online, everything that they produced or co-produced anyway. And it’s all free. It is in streaming Windows Media format however.

The second biggest network, TV2, decided to get greedy. And unlike the iTunes Store, you don’t pay per show. You pay a subscription, just like you do for your cable. $6 / week, $17 / month or $161 / year. Again, it’s all streaming Windows Media. So no possibility to download it, or play it on any other device. The network has 5 channels right now, but far from everything is available online. No movies. And no global tv shows, except for 24 which is crippled with DRM so that it doesn’t even work on the Mac. The feeds are straight from the ordinary broadcasts, so even if you pay extra, you still get the commercial breaks. A pretty lame service overall I have to say.

But then there are the select few who simply decide to go the exact opposite way for whatever reason. TV3 is a fairly small channel, part of the Viasat satellite network. They only have about 10 shows online, all of which are self produced. They also use Windows Media. BUT: there is no DRM. It is 100% free. And, the download is progressive, not streaming. What this means is that once the entire clip has loaded, you can save it to disk and play it back whenever you want. Or convert it for playback on your iPod. The quality is decent, a 45 minute show were just over 600 MB. 45 minutes you say? What a weird length! Yes, they actually CUT OUT the commercial breaks before putting it online. And did I mention it is completely free? I have no idea how, or why, but I love it! Way to go!

Update: seems that TV2 also in fact does progressive streaming, so that at least with Flip4Mac, it is easy to save the show to disk.

(Amazon MP3 Purchases are limited to U.S. customers)

So there you have it. Great new service from Amazon. No I didn’t really expect to be able to purchase any music from them. But you have to wonder: why not, when I can legally purchase a physical CD from them?

I thought it was about time I recommended some more software. And given that there are so many lists out there with “10 apps you must have!”, I decided to recommend 10 apps that might not be on all of these existing lists. You won’t find Transmit here. And neither will you find Disco. I hope you will find at least one that you will give a try though. These are all apps that I keep around. Some I run 24/7, others I only use every once in a while.

	AppFresh AppFresh will search for updates for all your installed software, and even download it for you. It’s still in beta, but so far it seems to do a pretty good job.
	DeskShade Crowded desktop? I know mine is with its nearly 600 files and folders. DeskShade hides all that clutter, letting you enjoy nothing but a clean desktop. How? By overlaying the desktop picture on top of the icons. Yes, no files will be moved.
	Desktoptopia And while you are at it, how about a nice new desktop picture? Desktoptopia changes your wallpaper at a set interval, and downloads new ones from the world wide web. Only the best of the best pictures will be included in the database, so none of that crap you find on your average wallpaper site.
	Disk Speed Bench X Ever had the feeling that one of your disks might not give you advertised speed? Disk Speed Bench X will not only be great for showing off that new internal SATA disk, but is also great for comparing speeds on an external disk if you have more than one interface (USB2 and FW for instance). And if you have a feeling your external disk is slower than it should be, you can find out if it in fact is.
	DVD Capture Apple’s pesky DVD Player software won’t let you grab a screenshot? Of course you could just use the awesome VLC player – or you could use DVD Capture.
	iNet Stream Archiver Still my favorite for recording web radio. Splits up into separate files and tags them.
	iScrobbler Menu bar extra that submits your iTunes tracks to last.fm.
	MPEG Streamclip Simple app for cropping and cutting up a video file and saving it to a number of various formats. As opposed to QuickTime Pro, MPEG Streamclip can work with MPEG video (duh).
	PdfMergeX Merge 2 or more pdf files into one.
	Startup Sound Remove that pesky orchestra that plays every time you boot your Mac.

I also thought it worth mentioning that Dreamhost is now celebrating 10 years of quality hosting. I have been with them for over two years now (this blog has been on their servers since March this year), and overall it has been a smooth ride. They have excellent customer support, and signing up now will give you a whopping 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of bandwidth for as little as $5.95 a month.

Note that I am not being paid to say this, I simply wanted to pass along an offer that in my opinion is pretty good. Plus, I have been with them long enough to hopefully have a valuable opinion on their service. Oh, and I get a little extra if you sign up with the link I provided. See, no hidden, sneaky stuff here

I am sure many of you podcast lovers out there already heard about the new weekly show from Revision3, Tekzilla. Starting this coming Friday. But if all you saw was the trailer included in the latest Diggnation / Infected episodes, you might still not know a lot about it.

I present you what I know based on this Wired article and this forum thread:

- weekly show
- 30 minute episodes
- hosts: Patrick Norton and Jessica Corbin (and more?)
- not live
- will replace InDigital
- same style as The Screensavers and DL.TV, aka. “your standard variety show, with how-to segments, call in questions, product reviews, and interviews”.

I’m guessing call in questions will be done via Jangl or Skype.
Given that it replaces InDigital, I’m guessing that Tekzilla will be just as much about gadgets as it will be about computers.
I’m so excited!!

There are many inventions and brands out there. Many of whom are strongly connected to its country of origin. Italy is famous for it’s many exotic cars, France for it’s many ugly cars and England for it’s novelty cars. English Russia bring up Russian products that at least I never knew were Russian. I know that Sweden contributed some of the the biggest store chains of the century, like IKEA and H&M though. For most inventions however, I guess I just always take it for granted it was invented by “some guy”. Surely a small country like Norway could not contribute anything of value?

I will list some of the more technological products and inventions I find to be of interest personally. If you have any to add to the list, please leave a comment. I will update the list whenever I come across something new.

Cheese Slicer
A most wonderful invention. Invented in 1925. Many Swedes also think that THEY invented it. Guess they just confused it for a wrench.

Luxo Lamp
I bet many of my readers have seen the Luxo Jr. short by Pixar (their very first!). The desk lamp playing with the ball. If you haven’t seen the short, than at least you have no doubt seen the lamp as part of the logo at the beginning of every Pixar movie.
The Luxo lamp is not a fictional lamp, in fact even the name is based in reality. The “Luxo L-1″, from the Luxo company, was introduced in 1937, and has since sold over 25 million units.

Tiki 100
A computer manufactured by Tiki Data, launched in 1984, aimed at the education sector. It was first known as the Kon-Tiki, but was renamed after a dispute over the name. This thing had polyphonic sound, 5¼ inch floppies, 64kB of RAM and it didn’t even run DOS (until later). It’s easy to understand exactly how far ahead of everything else the Mac was, when it was launched that very same year.

CSS
Would you believe that? CSS, the technology that no website can be without today, coming from Norway?
In 1994, Håkon Wium Lie proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets. He is currently the CTO of Opera Software, also a Norwegian company. He has also worked for the W3C, and in 2005 proposed the Acid2 test.

Object-Oriented Programming
Simula was a programming language developed in the 60s for making simulations. You might never have heard of Simula, but it introduced concepts like objects and classes, things that programmers today take for granted. As with CSS, we would be stuck in the stone age today if it wasn’t for Simula.

Think
smart isn’t the only company capable of building small and somewhat ugly electric cars. Norwegian Think deserves a place on the list too, if only for it’s bumpy history and number of owners. With roughly 1000 units sold, it is however the most successful car maker from Norway. America, you beat us though.

UPDATE October 6: The Paper Clip
Thanks to Annikken for pointing out the paper clip in the comments. Most Norwegians (and many outside of Norway too) seem to think the paper clip is Norwegian. Even I did, up until today. When I hit up Wikipedia, I realized this was not true however. Could be a good thing. After all, I think most of us are sick and tired of the paper clip by now.

Hit up the Wikipedia links for more info on any given invention.

(and yes, both Kristanna Loken and Matt Groening are part Norwegian)

This my friends, is Drew Imroth. CEO of Ubient Software. Makers of the most used OS in the world. Run by many a consumer computer, as well as ATMs. In the series The 4400 at least. There is something about this guy that is just so typical of the stereotype computer CEO. He reminds me of the guy from Antitrust (also a cool movie).

My point today however, is a part of the latest episode of this series. Basically a computer virus infects all machines running Drew Imroths OS. And when agents come to investigate, they ask if he has any ememies. He hands over a HUGE pile of paper, lists of everyone who has ever threatened him. And one agent says, after scanning the first page: “Steve Jobs on page one?”.

Don’t worry, I’ll keep my eyes open!

I’ve been a happy user of VMware Fusion and Vista for several months now, but it ain’t much for gaming, especially given that there is no DirectX support whatsoever. So I thought it might be time to give Boot Camp a try. How very wrong I was…

First off, I decided to play it safe and go with XP this time. I installed Boot Camp, and burned out a CD with all the Windows drivers. So far so good.

Then came the time to partition the drive…

First try: errors found. Time to run Disk Utility. I whipped up the first OS X CD I found (after a few years as an ADC member, you would be surprised how many I got). Wait, I can’t use this disk? Oh right, I need an Intel version now. Time to find the big box that my Mac came in. So I unload all the crap that sat on top of it, and finally managed to get the installation disks out. Booted from the first one, and ran Disk Utility. Volume Headers were repaired. Booted back into OS X.

Time to try again. No luck. Some files could not be moved, so the partition failed. Tried again a few times, with various partition sizes. No luck.

Decided to screw up my backup disk and try partitioning it. Finally – partitioned.

“Click restart to start Windows installation”. Click. Dock, menu bar, everything disappears. Except for the desktop. It just sits there. Now what? After 30 mins I decide to pull the plug. Silence. Plugging it back in, Windows installer actually loads after a while. Painfully watching a progress bar in all it’s DOS glory. Man, this thing really does my monitor justice!

Ok, time to reboot again and get the setup process started. Booting… booting… booting… DISK ERROR!?!? Time to pull that plug again. Repeat X20. OK, so I got a fubar installation. How do I get back to OS X? Shouldn’t holding down the mouse button on boot eject the CD? Well it didn’t. And space should allow you to select boot disk? Either I’m still stuck in the OS 9 way, or my mind is playing tricks with me. Some Googling revealed the magic key: option.

Phew, now I’m back. The backup disk is formatted and ready for new backup duties.

Apple: you did a terrible job, and I hope Leopard does it better.

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