You might have read the reviews, you’ve probably seen the commercials. They’re all true: New Super Mario Bros Wii is one of the best Wii games ever made, and absolutely superb for multiplayer. Here’s why:

The graphics are pretty, the controls work like they’re intended to–it’s a very polished game. The game goes out of its way to make sure newbs aren’t totally lost or frustrated, and it’s challenging and deep enough to satisfy any gamer who ever enjoyed a Super Mario Bros game on any system. Other than being the most fun Mario title to date (and the truest evolution of Super Mario Bros for the 21st century), this true-to-its-roots 2D scroller has a few features to keep the non-hardcore-gamer from pulling their hair out.

• multi-player capability is guaranteed hilarity. most fun i’ve had in a LONG time playing a video game, even with people who are very bad at the game. why? if you’re about to die, or can’t get past a particularly difficult jumping sequence, you can put yourself in a “bubble” and safely float forward to join your more skilled friends. no more crying that you can’t make it past that part–as long as there’s at least one person alive and not in a bubble, you’re ok. if everyone “bubbles” or dies at the same time, you’ve got to start over. this gets to be quite funny when you all start bubbling and the last guy panics and bubbles, or jumps off a cliff!
• throwing people and jumping off their heads can lead to some very, very fun and competitive gameplay, or if properly done, teamwork doing these same things can make some difficult unlocks or sequences much easier.
• if you die too many times on multiplayer, you can watch a video to show you how to do the level.
• as you earn large coins, you can spend them to watch videos that show you how to find secret goals and powerups. then you don’t feel like you cheated when you search the internet for the same info, because you earned it!
• as you play through the game, you don’t have to always use the same number of players. that is, if you beat 4 worlds alone and save the game, the next time you turn on the game you can pick up where you left off with 1, 2, 3, or even 4 people! if you’ve cooperatively beat most of the game with a friend, you can come back and earn all the extra stuff you missed alone later.
• Penguin suit and propeller hats rock

this game is a total win. you simply MUST buy it.

Back at the end of 2005 I was looking for cheap shared webhosting. If you’ve ever been in the market for such a commodity, you’ll know it’s a complete crap shoot: there’s about 40,000 options that all look the same, cost the same, and yet offer widely varying levels of service and support.

All of them have complainers out there moaning about some issue or another, because frankly, people only talk about stuff when bad things happen.

…or, when good things happen!

Long story short, I chose webhostingbuzz for my shared web hosting, because it was loaded with features and extremely reasonably priced. Good choice.

1. I got great service at a great price. Been with them since about December of 2005, if that says anything. Perhaps more telling, I also set up a couple of websites I built for a client on WHB (The Bookends & The Great Exchange)
2. I just won an iPod touch from them! Yes, my friends, they held a sweepstakes and I won an iPod Touch. As if I wasn’t happy enough already with their service, I am now the happiest WHB customer out there

All that to say, if you’re looking for shared hosting, virtual private servers, or even a dedicated server, you definitely want to check out WebHostingBuzz.

(Well, sort of).

I’ve been coding a new template for a new venture I’ll be embarking on over this summer break, and I wanted it to look all nice with alpha’d png images. IE6 hates those things.

Despite the fact that it probably won’t matter (most of my traffic these days is Firefox, and the direction I’ll be headed is for more tech-savvy and mac users), I hate leaving little things untended.

So…. I looked, and looked, and looked for a script that might work for my pngs in IE6. Supersleight wasn’t flexible enough, (the jQuery plugin would have done the trick, but for it for some reason it did not work at all for me) and so I kept looking…

Some dude made it work. Nicely. Check it out if you’re frustrated with other solutions.

IE6 PNG fix

It claims to work even for repeating backgrounds, but I haven’t tested that. I did verify that it doesn’t work well for backgrounds on tr and td elements.

Enjoy!

If you’re comfortable with trying to use Terminal (or curious to start), you can get your twitter updates via growl on OS X. If you don’t know what growl is, you’re really missing out. Get it here — it updates you unobtrusively with program status messages that might typically show up in a popup box or embedded into a program window, or not at all.

Once you’ve got growl, you’ll need to make sure you have Ruby 1.8.3 or higher.

You’ll also need MacPorts to make this work right: Install MacPorts

• If you have 10.5 Leopard, you’re set
• If you have 10.4 Tiger, you’ll probably need to update:
  1. Open a Terminal window and type in the following command, hitting return at the end:
     sudo port install ruby

Now, we’ll install some stuff that we need for our script to run. Using terminal, enter these commands (Hit return after each one)

sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem install xml-simple
sudo gem install ruby-growl


(If the “gem” commands don’t work, you may need to restart terminal before running them)

Provided this all went well, you should be ready to install the script. Download the Squawk Scriptand move it into your home directory (looks like a house in finder if you’re totally lost here). This file is thanks to damien, but I had to make a tweak for it to all work right. You have to edit the file with your login info:

sudo pico ~/squawk.rb

It should be obvious where to put your email address and password.

Finally, run your script!

ruby squawk.rb

If you want to run it in the background on startup, check back later. I’ll be posting on this shortly.

So I have this 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac Mini (1,1), and it was a bit slow for my new TV tuner, just barely keeping up. Given than Core 2 Duo is so vastly superior, and they’re old enough now to be (relatively) cheap on eBay, I decided to upgrade.

I found a T7400 on eBay for about $150 shipped, which runs at 2.16GHz and is the next-to-best processor that will fit in a current Mac Mini. (Any Intel mini will do, even the old skool Core Solos) You need a pinned model, but I found that I could get the other (solder-type) model from Kaga with “aftermarket” pins for a bit cheaper, (something like this) so I did. It works great.

There are instructions on how to do the upgrade all over the place, but here are three very important notes:

1. Buy a 4-40 bolt set. The nylon fasteners on your Mac Mini are fragile, and even if they don’t break, probably shouldn’t be reused. Most people recommend nylon nuts/bolts, but I could only find metal at my local hobby shop (RC planes and cars use this kind of thing), and they’re working fine. There’s limited clearance underneath your Mini’s mobo, and you don’t want large nuts touching any of the circuitry underneath, so put your bolts in upside-down. Buying bolts that are “too long” will make it much easier to get the nuts on over the springs that hold your heatsink in place. Since I used metal screws, I put a piece of 3M electrical tape (the good 33 stuff) on the metal mobo tray underneath them, just to eliminate any possible electrical oddities.
2. Get your thermal paste right Clean the HS off well with Rubbing Alcohol. Put a small glob (like 2 grains of rice worth) of Arctic Silver 5 (or whatever goo you’re using) on the center of the die. Don’t spread it out, just put the HS on top and fasten ‘er down. If you spread it out yourself, you could get air bubbles and crud in there, which is not good. I did this wrong the first time and found that even with my fan set to 1900, my Mini would idle in the mid-to-high 50s. By reapplying, now my fan is at 1800 and I’m idling in the mid-to-high 40s.
3. Use smcFanControl. Set your minimum fan speed to 1800, because the Core 2 Duos run a little hotter than the Core Duos.

That’s it! My “new” Mac Mini (now with 2GB of RAM and the 2.16GHz processor) just flies, and it benched at somewhere around 30%+ better with XBench. The real story though is in how it “feels,” which is about twice as fast–I don’t hit that ceiling anymore where everything just starts acting like crap.

So… if you’ve got an Intel Mac Mini, upgrade already! You won’t regret it! (Just make sure you get your thermal paste right…)

So I was looking for great mac software, and I stumbled upon a site that I had visited way back when: iusethis.com.

This time around, I felt that I had some experience, so I made my own list. What does Andy use on his mac? Find out at http://osx.iusethis.com/user/apull.

What do you use? Make your own profile and leave the address in the comments!