2 little pieces of awesome software.

Posted on April 28th, 2006 by phiber811, under Publicity, Tools, main.

I’m going to take a moment, and plug, as the title says, 2 little pieces of awesome software. Or rather, donationware. But before we get to the meat and potatoes, our author of the moment is Christoph Sinai. 22 years old, going to school in germany. He’s currently got a web presence at coconut-flavour.com

Our boy Christoph decided to learn cocoa, and coded several apps that he’s been continuously refining. The two that I want to mention are coconutBattery, and coconutWiFi.

CoconutBattery is a handy tool (and widget! for checking your battery’s capacity, number of charges, and so on. Its supremely handy for determining if your battery has gone south. Of note, Christoph has updated the app to Universal Binary status, and has produced a MacBook Pro update too. click
here to go to the coconutBattery page on his site.

Next on the list is coconutWiFi. This program is pretty simple, and pretty slick. It puts a little Apple style kandy button in your menu bar. The button represents the wireless networks in your range. Red means you’ve got nothing in range. Yellow means that you’ve got nothing but encrypted networks in range. Green means you’ve got something wide open. When you click on the status button, a menu drops down, and shows you all the networks, along with their status, and what type of security they may have.

Upon download, I installed the little app on my MacBook, and checked it out. My first thought was, “Genius!” Its all the base info you need, at a glance. As Christoph’s website says, a great little app for when you’re on the go, and dont know whats available. click
here to go to the coconutWifi page on his site.

Please note that these applications are donationware. No money is required. Now, let me smack the half of you who instantly thought “Score! Freebie!” The author put a lot of time and continuing effort into these apps, and they’re really damned good. He’s generous enough to share, and to not require payment. therefore, you should be generous, and drop some bank into his paypal account. He’ll appreciate the money, the respect, and knowing his software is well liked. You, of course, will get to appreciate his apps, and their continued development.

Now, get thee to coconut-flavour.com!

No Comments

Somewhat off topic, but still.

Posted on April 27th, 2006 by phiber811, under John, Publicity.

While MYM is primarily dedicated to Mac Modding, and showing off our stuff, I dont see any reason why I cant break out the soap box once in a while, and plug something thats kinda related, if only a little.

On June 22nd (a thursday), there will be one hell of a show. One of our local alternative venues, Nation is closing due to urban renewal in SouthEast DC, to make way for the new baseball stadium. With that in mind, the promoters are going out of their way to book some amazing final events. The thursday night event, Alchemy (www.alchemy-dc.com) has booked a show I’ll hate myself if I miss. The lineup features Front Line Assembly, Stromkern, and DJ? Acucrack. For those of you who listen to electronic and industrial music, you dont want to miss it.

For years, electronic band have been using computers to program a lot of their music. In many cases, these bands have used Mac’s. Its now entirely common to see guys on stage with keyboards, trigger pads, and a powerbook, shaking the foundations of a venue. Its always impressive to say the least.

While I cant definitively say that any of these bands are currently using macs, they’re still knee deep in technology. For that reason alone, we should support them. Course, I’m a huge Front Line Assembly fan, so I’ll be there regardless of what platform they’re using.

If you’re local to DC, or feel like making the drive, check Alchemy’s website, get the info, and make it out to support good bands as DC says goodbye to a great venue!

No Comments

More News About The NecroMac.

Posted on April 25th, 2006 by phiber811, under John, Modding News.

I havent posted a ton about the NecroMac, and I apologize. I should have written about it a lot sooner. Finally, let me show off the NecroMac.

The NecroMac started out as a Blue & White G3 tower running at 350MHz. It then became a G4/700MHz, courtesy of Sonnet Technologies. Suffice it to say, its one fast Blue!

This piece was originally done as an entry in to MacMod.com’s 2005 Great Mod Challenge. The unit was coated in linen paper, the paper was basted in lemon juice, and then cured with a heat gun. Once dry, Evan spent hours with a nib pen, and acrylic inks, freehand drawing all of the glyphs and runes on the sides of the machine. Once finished, John detailed the entire machine with Auto-Air’s transparent black paint, and an iWata airbrush. As shown in the photos, the result was impressive.

Despite not winning any awards in the Great Mod Challenge, the piece was very well received by the MacMod community (Thanks Guys!). With their support, the machine then made the trip to MacWorld San Francisco in January, ’06 and was on display at the FastMac.com booth, with several other MacMod pieces. Most recently, the machine was requested for an upcoming article in MacWorld Magazine. Despite not winning the initial contest, the Necro’s popularity has pleased and surprised us from day one!

For more pictures of the NecroMac, please click here!

No Comments

Whats in a name?

Posted on April 25th, 2006 by phiber811, under Service Rants.

For the love of butter! Learn the name of what you own, and call it that. Granted, MacBook Pro does suck. (We call it the Powerbook Evolution), but if I hear another person call the Mac Mini, the Mini Mac, I’m liable to start crushing skulls. Nobody calls it the Mustang Ford. I’ve cant recall someone calling them Dog Hots either. You speak incorrectly, and people assume you’re less intelligent. Its that simple.

While I’m on the subject, Apple is the company, Macintosh is the product. You did NOT call Mac. You called Apple. You did not call MacCare. You spoke to either AppleCare Customer Support, or Apple Customer Relations.

Pay attention!

1 Comment

The end of the neglect.

Posted on April 25th, 2006 by phiber811, under John, main.

I’ll admit it. No denying it. MYM has been languishing for a while. I’ve been a bad website parent, and I need to rectify it. So, here’s the start of that. Please pardon the fact that we’re a small scale disaster at the moment.

Let me say right off that RapidWeaver is a great shareware app. I’ve found infinite uses for it and still love it to this day. However, it led to updating and changing MYM being more of a bother than not. So, I started thinking about it. What do people want to get out of this place, and what do I want to do with it/get out of it. I realized that the primaries are people wanting to see our mods, and us wanting to easily say what we want to say. Secondaries might be publicizing bits and pieces of intresting stuff, putting up more service rants, for those who want to read, and making it way easier for evan to post his stuff too. All of this pointed to a move away from RW, and towards something installed on the server (I call it Nicodemus), that would be much more post friendly.

Now, my personal blog site is a wordpress environment, and so is one of my other sites. WordPress allows for commenting, and lots of customization. So, we’re gonna see how this pans out. If something better comes along, rest assured, I’ll investigate. But in the mean time, I’m going to try and flow all the data together here.

Feel free to comment where it fancies you. However, if comment spam becomes a problem, I will disable commenting without so much as a second thought. Just so it gets said, you understand.

Anyway, back to work. More clean up and building out as free time permits!

No Comments