marv's blog

People who read this blog (if they exist), may know that I am a big fan of the Trackmania games. These are racing games, where you need to complete tracks in a given amount of time. You can play against the clock or online against anybody who is part of the huge Trackmania community. On top of that, you can create your own tracks and race against your buddies. In this entry I will show all intel Mac users how to get the awesome Trackmania Nations Forever running on their machines. Best of all, getting this game up and running won't cost you a dime! (In all fairness though, it may cost you some time, depending on the installation and how addicted you will get once you have the game installed).

Right, I know I haven't been blogging in a long while, and that now that I am blogging I should probably tell you about Dublin. Well, so that I don't look like a complete geek (as if I could give you any other impression), Dublin is nice, rainy, has Guinness and lots of people with strange names.

Much nicer of a place however is Beer Island, which I have been telling many of my colleagues about, and who are very eager to see it. (Also, some are skeptical it actually exists). So if you'd like to see proof that Beer Island exists, please read on!

This is probably the best live piano interpretation of a video game, that I have ever come across. Sure brings back a lot of memories...

The day after tomorrow Obama will be become the 44th president of the United States of America. His biggest challenge will be to clean up the enormous mess Bush has left behind. If you have forgotten how Bush has transformed the world's mightiest nation into deterioration, or just need to realize the full extent of it, watch Olberman's summary of Bush's 8 years after the jump.

Don't forget to tune in to the MacWorld Keynote tomorrow at 6 pm Berlin time. As usual, there will be no live stream, but you can follow the keynote transcript live with pics at the known places, such as engadget, gizmodo, MacTechNews (German), and this year on MacRumors. As you have probably heard, although Steve is not giving the presentation, there are quite a few rumors surrounding the keynote, so that we are probably in for quite an interesting event. Read on to learn more.

Apple just released this press release a few minutes ago:

"CUPERTINO, California—December 16, 2008—Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris."

So what does this mean? Well, Apple could still hold its own special events (at more appropriate times than in early January), but there are two things that concern me (after the jump):

Frankly, I did expect more from the Obama team when they allowed users to post and vote for their most pressing questions a few days ago. It seems rather half-hearted that many of the questions were omitted, and that the answer to the top question was buried somewhere between other answers and given real-estate of a single lonely line. See their blog entry here. Furthermore, the answers did not seem at all personal, as if someone had really sat down and thought about these questions. Instead, standard political answers were given.

Now I don't expect miracles from the president-elect, but if you start such a democratic Q&A, you might as well do it right, and actually respect the vote counts. Here, I feel the most interesting questions were ignored, and those that were answered felt like a quick copy&paste from the campaign book. I may be over-reacting, but I feel gypped.

What do you guys think?

When I see America's future president using Web 2.0 technologies to create a Digg-like website, where users can post - and digg questions to the president elect, I begin to grasp just how much I look forward to the next administration. The idea is simple: Anyone can post a question to the site, and other (logged in) users can vote for questions of their interest. At the end of a round, the ten most popular (most votes) questions are selected, and answered by Obama and Biden themselves. Click Read More to find out the winners of round one. I can tell you this much: I am really interested in the answer to the top question!

As you can tell, I've been in real video posting mood these past few days, and here is another little demo I have wanted to show you for a long time. It's a small app I developed a while ago, which does live color object tracking with your web-cam (in this case, the iSight camera from my iMac). I blogged about it before, but I think we all agree that a video would better explain how this little thing works than a textual description. So check it out after the jump!

Here is another little demo I want to show you guys. It's an app for the iPhone / iPod Touch I hacked up a few weeks ago, and allows you to draw shapes using the multi-touch screen. The app recognizes the shape you are attempting to draw, and replaces your squiggle with a nice clean version. Check out the video after the jump and please let me know what you think!