It is winter again and time has passed that quick and lazy me did not find the time nor the muse to update this blog.

Despite Nadine and me visiting Karins place on La Palma once more, I spent a couple of days in Neuruppin. Great site, nice people, bad weather.

On the technical side of life, I got an iPad and together with Simon and Julian – two friends I know from the BreakPoint and Mekka Symposium Parties – we started to work on our game again.

About 5 years ago, we started work on Wings of Fury clone for Mac.
It basically started off again when I met Simon on Skype while I was completly drunk on my annual birthday party. I had to wait till slow itunes had imported the music I wanted to play and so I sent him a short message saying something like: “We need to finish our game on iDevices”.

A few days later we had chat about switching the whole thing from 2D to 3D graphics and a the next weekend Simon presented us a basic version where you could fly around, drop bombs. At the beginning of December the three of us met at my place and worked for almost 3 days straigt and got quite far. The reactions of people we showed the game that far are all very positive. So despite the every year x-mas stress and parties going on I am struggling ditching my head into building 3D planes, probs and stuff for the game. A website will be up very soon too… so hang in there and remember the name “Pacific Showdown”.

Here’s a very early preview of the game – actually the state before our weekend.
Project Zero v03

I had the opportunity to go to New York to help setup Rucker Park, Harlem for the Nike Basketball World Expo. Off course I had to go and see the big apple. I almost spent the whole week at the production site and when the show finally started, I sneaked out walked the city and finally got my iPhone 4, yess! To be true: it is not really nice what Apple puts you through in order to get one of these. On saturday I finally had some spare time and so I went to the Apple store on broadway, not far from my hotel. I was told to that off course I could buy an iPhone 4, no contract needed – only problem: they don’t have any. But I should come back next day. “I wouldn’t come too late. 7.45 AM is almost too late”. The next day, when I got there at about 7.20 AM the line was already around the next street corner. Some guys seem to have stayed there from 6 in the morning. Honestly, I can’t imagine that Apple has a shortage of iPhones. They keep their stock in stores low on purpose. Never the less after three hours I got one – just to find out, that it had no contract, but an AT&T Simlock. Thanks to iPhone dev team and redsn0w I can use it anyway and symio makes me feel far less ripped off than those Telekom prices and their way of doing business in Germany.

Last week I was on holiday and the rotten Telekom screwed up the account data of the house we stayed in. So no internet, partly bad weather outside, no sim card from symio yet… it felt just like in the 80s, where computing was mostly a single-man-on-an-island-thingy. Earlier I figured that you can make your own ringtones by converting an audiofile to aac and rename the resulting .m4a into .m4r. No Sidplayer installed and no HVSC in sight, I was somehow stranded with my idea to convert some old SID tunes to play as ringtone. Luckily I had a trial version of Rolands Liegers great Power64 that has a sound recording function and with the complete collection of Digital Marketing disks I was ready to go. In the end it turned out to be far more work than anticipated, mainly because I had no audio edit software as well. Audacity was on my mind, when I cut the tunes with the pro version of Quicktimeplayer, but here at home I found out that either the older version nor the new beta seems to work on my Snow Leo. So don’t judge the looping cuts on the tones to hard, as I had no real tools at hand.

Next part about Apple that I hardly understand. Why only 30 seconds for a ringtone? Steve, think of all the women searching for their iphones in their stuffed handbags…. this takes more than 30 seconds and repeating a tone over and over again gets on everybodys nerve. Anyway, here are some tunes I found worthy to convert. Some of my favorites are missing (No Lightforce, sorry Thomas) but the 30 seconds barrier is hard to keep when you have no real editing tools and so I keep the gems for the next release.

SID Ringtone Pack 1 (download 7.6mb)

1. Alleykat
2. Armageddeon Man
3. Breakthru
4. Cracker Mix
5. Dexion CoOp Intro
6. Double Take
7. Formular 1 Simulator
8. Frankie goes to Hollywood
   

SID Ringtone Pack 2 (download 9.8mb)

1. Game Over
2. Helikopter Jagd
3. Holiday Morning
4. Hunchback
5. Masters of the Universe
6. Max Headroom
7. Mission A.D.
8. Mutants
9. New Stars
   

SID Ringtone Pack 3 (download 8.9mb)

1. Phantoms of the Asteroid
2. Science 451 Intro
3. Ski Dance
4. Star Paws
5. Taipan
6. The Human Race
7. The Last Ninja – Palace Gardens
8. Times of Lore
   

SID Jingle Pack (download 1.2mb)

1. Arkanoid Start
2. Rambo II
3. decrunch noise 1
4. decrunch noise 2

So now go and bother your room mate, peer or who’s just around you, with your all new/old C64 sounds. Have fun!

Finally! Yes, finally, I got a Mac Cube. I was at the release presentation in Germany, back in 2000 and ever since I wanted one.

Lately I imposed myself not to go after things I want to have, they have to come to me. Same goes for stuff that I miss. I am not searching for it, I just find it. Time doesn’t matter, the result is important. So I was really happy when Jockel offered me his G4 Cube for little money. I rang him up over a period of three weeks but he was always bussy.

This was last year, about the same time and we didn’t manage to arange a meeting. Yesterday it happened more or less suprisingly that I called him for another reason and now I have my little Cube. Damn, that thing is stylish to the last screw. Some little scratches along the way and someone has solderd some parts inside….(Hardwaretest fails with a logic board error, but the system is up and running with no problems)… looks like it has come a long way.

Last night, I swapped harddrive and and replaced the ATI Rage 128mb with a nvidea 32mb model, installed Tiger on it using Nadines Mac Book in FW Targemode and now everythign runs like a charme. I was thinking about using it as Fileserver – could replace my stupid AllNet NAS ; or maybe it will get a place right beside my new TV, when I will finally make up my mind an buy one. Should mime a good musicplayer, although powerconsumption is too high. It uses 13w in standby mode and about 50 when running (without drives). Let’s see…

Ohh one more thing: I got it with no keyboard, mouse and the speakers went bust. So if you happen to have such things for sale… post a comment.

Steve! You did it again. At first I was not amused, when you stepped into the ringtone market, although this is just a logical step. Boring….and stripping down the IPhone off its Edge/GSM Module and sell it as IPod was the next step that Apple had to take, off course. 

Concerning Starbucks… well, I don’t drink coffee, and in germany prices are far from cheap, so I don’t spend much time sitting at Starbucks. But hell, that was the next logical step, to provide the playlist of of a starbucks store. This feuture is just brilliant… or in your words, Steve “amazing!”.

Not that there are countless services that try to recognize a played  song over telephone line, but Apple once again added the ease of use, by building up and changing the infrastructure. Now let’s hope that Apple puts out the API so that others can follow.

Just imagine your favorite DJ opened up its little store on Itunes and just when you leave the club where he just performed, the actual mix is right online and you can pick it up. Or you just get the playlist of every hughe cafe, store, club, whatever you are in. At the moment, video content doesn’t make much sense, but who knows what the future brings. Adding a cam to the Pod/IPhone and the posibility to stream directly to youtube, maybe? Well, the future has just begun and it is logical in all its steps. Hooraayy!!!

…. ohh.. and by the way: At the end of your keynote, I was amused, not to say euphoric –  like always, after Steve has left the stage. 

Watch the keynote:  http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/s83522y/event/index.html?internal=g4h5jl83a