Tim Cosgrove

Saw this out on a walk tonight in Golden Gate Park Panhandle and it made me smile.

Can you tell I just hooked up Flickr to my sadly neglected Drupal install? I'm having fun.

This past Sunday I went to the Pacifc Pinball Expo. It was essentially a collector's and hobbyist's show rather than a professional trade show. There were about 200-300 machines, about 75% of them vintage. All of them were playable with entry.

The vintage machines were interesting from an art perspective. Somewhere in the mid-80s it seems pinball machines hit a rut of chrome and airbrush and movie tie-ins, but prior to that the machines seem to be primarily inspired by the pop art illustration of their given period. I'm not particularly well-versed in art history, but for example the early 60s machines had lots of angular bright colored shapes, with clean lines, and in the 70s things became much more psychedelic. There were also a couple of gameplay elements that aren't extant today; flippers that would move together and close up the center gutter when you hit a particular bumper, a bumper in the center gutter with the flippers set far wider than normal, etc.

Ultimately though, the gaming experience itself just isn't as good on the vintage machines. I think primarily it has to do with the table angle. Modern pinball tables are a few degrees steeper than older ones, and the speed at which the ball travels downward increases. I have a hunch that the flippers are also more powerful. Additionally, modern games have a wider variety of goals, particularly multi-stage goals, which I'm sure existed to some degree in some earlier machines but not nearly to the variety and length which modern machines have. Finally, I didn't observe any machine that seemed earlier than 1980 or so that had multi-ball, which as my friend Steve said is the only reason to play pinball.

There are loads more pictures in my Flickr set. They were all taken with the iPhone so they're not great, but you can see some of the art. I didn't bother taking pictures of the modern machines.

I compiled a list of tips for a co-worker who recently bought a Mac, and it occurs to me that they're probably potentially pretty useful to any Mac user. There are no Seriously Profound Revelations here, just a list of apps and tips that are not particularly power-user but definitely handy.

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I agree with Kevin; I find Apple Mail to be just fine, though I don't use any Exchange e-mail. If you use Gmail, I recently implemented a nifty set up to use Gmail over IMAP that syncs in all the right places (Apple Mail, iPhone (which you'll be getting of course now that you've drunk the Kool Aid), Gmail itself). Details are here; modify to suit your needs.

Other apps I would throw into the mix (most of which are free) (and this is all specific to how I use my Mac; everyone finds different things that work for them obviously):

- Quicksilver: minimally it's the best app launcher for OS X and allows you to kill the Dock, which is a POS and a waste of desktop space in my opinion. Maximally it's like extremely fast from-the-keyboard access to most of your files and allows you to perform actions on them extremely quickly. I can explain more about Quicksilver and there's also ample info around the interweb, though the documentation the Quicksilver dude provides is pretty minimal.
- Parallels: run any number of Intel-based OS's within OS X. It costs $80 (and you have to install your own copies of say XP or Linux or whatever) but it's totally worth it.
- Renamer4Mac: I would replace R-name with Renamer4Mac, a very similar application that is still being developed; R-name is abandonware.
- Azureus or Transmission for BitTorrenting. (Oh wait, I'm SURE you would never torrent anything. Nevermind.)
- Flip4Mac: allows you to play Windows Media files via Quicktime.
- HandBrake: rip movies
- OnyX: allows you much better access to a lot of system preferences than OS X allows you out of the box. Alternately use Tinkertool, but I switched from Tinkertool to OnyX and like it better.
- Audacity: if you need to do audio editing, this free editor will do you fine.
- SuperDuper!: best backup/cloning software for OS X, bar none.
- UnRarX: for putting together .rar archives. (Oh wait, you don't BitTorrent. Nevermind.)
- VLC: plays pretty much any video format that Quicktime won't, in particular DivX; also plays all DVD regions, and allows you to take screenshots of DVDs, which Apple DVD Player won't allow you to do.
- Perian: plug-in for Quicktime that also gives you access to most video formats, in particular DivX and FLV. Essential.
- WhatSize: free utility that lets you see where all your hard drive space is going and delete things you don't need anymore. Totally invaluable.
- Quicksilver: Did I mention you want Quicksilver? Really, it's the best thing since sliced bread. Get it.
- Growl: on-screen notifications for incoming IMs, e-mails, etc, similar to those IM notifications you see on PCs but more configurable and somehow less annoying. I believe these days it's rolled in with Adium but if it's not I recommend getting it and trying it out. You can always uninstall.
- Electric Sheep: The best screensaver currently out there, in my humble opinion.
- AppZapper: Application uninstaller. Gets all the pesky random files that get strewn around your system. Good for getting rid of apps you tried out and don't use. Worth the money.

Other tips:
- Like Tor, I think the Apple Mouse is a POS, though the bi-directional scrollball thing is a nifty idea. Get a 2/3-button mouse, or a trackball. For travel I personally like a 4x6 Wacom tablet, since it's flat.
- Learn to love Expose (F9 F10 F11 keys). It will make you work much faster. Also, Command-Tab and Command-Shift-Tab for switching between apps is great; so is Command-Tilde and Command-Shift-Tilde for windows (Tor mentioned I think).
- Did I mention Quicksilver? :) The Dock is a total waste of space. It might become more useful in 10.5 but right now it's like something Playskool would make. Make it as small as possible, and tell it to hide, then never think about it again; use Quicksilver and Expose.
- Don't forget you've got Terminal (Tor also mentioned), which gives you full access to your Unix subsystem and to the parts of the file system that the Finder tries to hide from you, like /etc. Also allows you to view the error logs that MAMP puts out which I find really handy. Emacs and VI are both pre-installed in OS X.
- Don't forget Spotlight for finding files and text within files. Super useful. Quicksilver is better at finding and launching files, but it doesn't index the whole drive for performance's sake, and it doesn't currently look inside files, except for metadata from certain files like MP3s. Command-Space to access.
- Widgets/Dashboard are pretty and sorta nifty (F12) but mostly sorta useless; if you find yourself not using them (I don't use them at all) then you can turn off Widgets entirely. Dashboard is a memory hog. Here's how; it's not a system option Apple makes readily available to you.

Hope this is helpful! Feel free to ask about anything. Welcome to the fold! It's nice here, and the Kool Aid is so yummy. Steve Jobs is our great and powerful Leader and He makes everything wonderful.

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Three other small things I just thought of:

- Command-Option-Escape: gives you access to the kill application window.
- Your Desktop: Don't let TOO many files accumulate on your Desktop. The Finder treats every item on the desktop as an open Finder window in terms of how it allocates memory. That means if you have 50 items on your desktop you are using the memory equivalent of 50 open Finder windows, which will bog you down.
- Max out your memory, especially if you plan on using Parallels or Adobe CS3 or MAMP (or Firefox for that matter, which is a ridiculous memory hog). 2GB is a reasonable absolute minimum for anyone doing development on a Mac. If your machine can do 4GB or whatever, all the better. If you have a Mac Pro, you probably don't need 16GB of RAM, but wouldn't it be really cool? You can always eat next month.

I'm not a music critic/writer, so I'm a bit daunted by writing about music, except for brief emotionally-oriented posts. But, whatever! Modeselektor's new album is one of the best things I've heard in a while. Their last album Hello Mom! was a great combination of dancehall/grime with European dance influences (kind of reductive, but it'll do), but it was kind of ADD and abrasive. The new album has a lower idea/minute ratio, but they let the ideas develop more. The result is a really listenable album that'll probably please most fans of album electronic(a), though it definitely is not late 90s dot.com office music. Of course, if you absolutely need a guitar or else you don't think it's music, you're not going to find much here.

Listen: The First Rebirth (6.1MB mp3) | 20000007 (5.2MB mp3) | Full album (low quality stream)
Buy: Bpitch Control | Amazon | iTMS | Beatport

Hooray, the forest elves got themselves a mountain of Marshall stacks and a stadium! Let us rejoice, for one day we will die. But not yet!

Sigur Rós - Glósóli (7.5MB mp3)