Check this article out over at bit-tech.net:

There are some games that just shouldn’t be messed with. You know the ones - the kind that you play through with a visceral zeal. Maybe they got you into gaming. Maybe they happened to be found along the way. Whether they confounded you, challenged you, or made you cry “Mommy!”, some games just stick in the subconscious…and even as we look at our mighty 185W graphics cards and our quad-core CPUs, we dream of playing them again.

It makes for a good read and I’m pretty stoked that they picked out System Shock, Descent and TIE Fighter, some of my all-time favourite games. There’s a couple on there that I don’t agree with at all (Myth and Return to Zork especially) but overall it’s a good read and got me thinking about games I’d really like to see remade…

Beneath a Steel Sky
Well, any of the classic point-and-click adventures - especially those from LucasArts - would do me. Beneath a Steel Sky is pretty much my favourite of that genre though, and in fact I’ve been playing it again recently thanks to ScummVM. Keep everything the same, just give us super high-res graphics on a par with live animation. That’s doable now, right?

Magic Carpet
Seriously, this could be remade in no time at all. There needn’t be any changes to the gameplay as it was pretty much perfect, but modern multiplayer capabilities and a snazzy new graphics engine would make this a serious blast again.

Motocross Madness
This on LAN was absolutely piss-funny hilarious. Surely it’s about time it was revamped, given the recent popularity around Freestyle MotoX? Same gameplay, maybe a few more tricks (flips!), updated multiplayer support, and you’re away.

Likelihood of any of this happening? Pretty much nil :(

We’ve been talking about this for far too long now so it’s about time it was organised. Here’s what I’m thinking and what’s been discussed so far:

• A weekend around the end of January (2007). It’ll be Saturday night as some of us will have to travel back to Bolton for this.
• Venue TBC - obviously the Rawson isn’t possible any more :( Some ideas here would be great. Anyone friendly with any landlords that have a function room and would be up for a lock-in?
• Hardware restrictions. I’m thinking P5 (so nothing above Pentium MMX) with a Voodoo 2 (or two). DOSBox has been mentioned as an option, but I don’t think it’d be half as much fun.
• Games - Quake (1 and 2), Duke 3D, Moto Racer, Motorhead, Doom, Magic Carpet, and so on.

I’m pretty sure that between us we have enough spare old kit to help people out if they’re stuck. Let’s do this!

I’ve decided to flog my PowerMac as it’s basically just gathering dust at the minute. It’s an awesome machine so I’ll be sad to see it go really :(

Apple PowerMac G5
Dual 1.8GHz PowerPC G5
5GB PC3200 DDR RAM
ATI 9800XT 256MB Graphics Card
1 x 72GB WD Raptor 10K RPM SATA Harddisk
1 x 150GB Seagate 7.2K RPM SATA Harddisk
Pioneer Superdrive DVDRW
Built-in Wireless and Gbit Ethernet
Apple Keyboard and Mouse
Mint condition
Mac OSX 10.4

I’ve stuck it on eBay, so here’s a link to the listing. Next up will be the Powerbook, maybe in the New Year.

GNU/screen is one of those applications so immensely useful I seriously wonder how I’d function without it. This post isn’t a tutorial (see here for that), I’m just documenting a particular aspect of my configuration for personal reference as much as anything else.

I use alot of tabs in screen, usually on a per-host and per-task basis. It’s handy therefore to have a proper statusline informing me which host I’m on, or which task is current. As the former changes often I have a couple of bash functions that include the appropriate escape to set the name in screen:

# Set hostname in hardstatus line in screen
if [ "$TERM" == "screen" ]; then
function ssh() {
echo -n -e “\033k$1\033\134″
/usr/bin/ssh $@
echo -n -e “\033k`hostname -s`\033\134″
}

function telnet() {
echo -n -e “\033k$1\033\134″
/usr/bin/telnet $@
echo -n -e “\033k`hostname -s`\033\134″
}

# We’re on localhost
echo -e “\033k`hostname -s`\033\134″
fi

So here’s what it ends up looking like with a few different sessions on the go, with each of the screen names having been set depending on where I’ve ssh’d to. My actual .screenrc is here - there’s not much to it, and it’s mainly bits that have been pinched from elsewhere, such as the hardstatus formatting. One thing worth noting though is that the escape I use for screen is now ‘\’ as opposed to Ctrl-A, this saves a bit of typing on my behalf.

In my quest to return to using the (seemingly) anachronistic mailer that is mutt I’ve come across quite a few obstacles. The configuration outlined here is adequate with two exceptions: a) You’re not especially impatient and b) You have a stable, permanent Internet connection - otherwise no mail. I’m definitely impatient so it’s already bad enough living with (a), and considering I spend most of my time on a laptop which may or may not be online at any given moment you can see where using mutt as my primary MUA falls flat on its face.

So this means moving my mail store off my server and back to having it local, but again because I switch from machine to machine that idea presents various problems. Using POP everywhere is messy and would almost certainly mean that I’d lose the supposedly ’stateless’ advantage that using IMAP can provide, so I’d rather stick to the IMAP approach. One solution would be to replicate the IMAP store on my server locally, synchronising changes when they happen, and luckily there’s already a handy tool for doing exactly that - OfflineIMAP:

OfflineIMAP is a tool to simplify email reading. It allows you to read the same mailbox from multiple computers and ensures that your changes will be automatically reflected on all computers. You can use various mail clients to read a single box or read mail while offline with full synchronization when you reconnect.

OfflineIMAP is in darwinports so it’s easy to install and get up and running. One problem I did come across however is when synchronising emails with sizeable attachments, such as anything > 1MB in size. This seems to be a problem with some Darwin and Python specifics (so you shouldn’t see this problem on any platform other than OSX) that cause Python to choke with a memory error. I’ve come across a workaround which appears to do the trick, however. You need to edit:

/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/socket.py

and change the line that says:

recv_size = max(self._rbufsize, left)

To say:

recv_size = min(self._rbufsize, left)

Instead.

Another consideration is outbound mail and queueing should your relay host be unavailable. esmtp doesn’t provide any way of doing this, so I’ve switched to nbsmtp (the ‘No Brainer SMTP client’) which comes with a handy wrapper script called nbqueue which will queue outbound mails.

Aside from that mutt requires a little reconfiguration to switch back to local Maildir mailstores and then you’re away. Now mutt is nice and quick (as it’s reading from local Maildirs) and I can read and compose mails whilst offline. Easy! :)

Inspired by Fletch, here’s my list of top 10 11 applications that I wouldn’t really want to use OSX without.

• Quicksilver. Now this is something that really impacts how I use and work in OSX, what’s more there’s nothing like it for any other OS. Once you get your head round how to use it and what for (it’s so much more than just an application launcher) you’ll wonder how you could function in OSX without it.

  Check this out for example. I use the del.icio.us plugin so that I can quickly hit Apple-Space, type in a tag (such as ‘daily’), press ‘/’, and then quickly browse the list of sites tagged with that. I can select multiple entries with ‘,’ and then when I hit `Return’ they’re all opened up in individual tabs in Safari. Awesome.

• Growl. A notification system for OSX, it’s highly customizable and supported by an awful lot of applications. It tells me when I have new mail, when I receive a message via Adium when the client isn’t in the foreground, when my downloads in Safari have completed, when transfers in Transmit have finished, and so on.
• Adium. Or more accurately, Metal Adium. Decent all-round IM client that supports MSN, AIM, YahooIM, Jabber and also IRC if you really wanted to. I prefer the integrated look of Metal Adium.
• Newsfire. This looks and works like it could have been written by Apple. Simple, powerful, fast, and well thought out. Well worth a tenner of anyone’s money.
• mutt. I’ve given up on Apple’s Mail.app and have reverted back to mutt for all email stuff. It’s not without its flaws but it’s about the best there is, assuming you can live without a GUI ;)

  Here’s my current mutt configuration (with personalisations removed), and here’s what it looks like. It’s probably worth mentioning that mutt relies on a couple of other things like vim (obviously) and esmtp which I’ve written about before here.

• irssi. Probably the best IRC client there is. It doesn’t look like much, but it is.
• lftp. Easily my favourite application for all ftp / sftp / scp actions. lftp supports pretty much any protocol you can think of, as well as other niceties like session management, parallel transfers, mirroring, bookmarking, and so on.
• screen. GNU screen, I don’t think I could live without this on *any* platform. Here’s my .screenrc.
• Terminal.app. Should go without saying really considering some of the above….
• Safari. I tend to stick to Apple’s own web browser instead of using Firefox or Camino. It renders 99.99% of the sites I visit just fine, is speedy, consistent, and looks the part. It seems to chew a lot less RAM than Firefox as well.
• iTunes. Again, obvious ;)

There’s a few honourable mentions such as VirtueDesktops (will be obsolete once Leopard is released with Spaces), iPodrip (for retrieving songs back off my iPod), Firefox (still useful especially with the web developer plugin), OmniOutliner, and VLC but those are the main ones.