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Hello, Hi, Goodbye

Today, I left MacTalk Australia. In doing so, I put an end to almost six years of daily news posts on all things Apple, along with countless of reviews and editorials. It’s the end of an era.

I posted up the news this morning, but that all ends today. I’m leaving MacTalk — it’s time to close this particular tab, nay, entire window, in my web browser, and that means putting an end to the daily news. It’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly, seeing how much I’ve contributed here, or how long I’ve been around. And it has nothing to do with you; I’ve immensely enjoyed writing the news (and your continued readership) over the years. It’s just that this is the part where I disembark the MacTalk train, so to speak.

When editor Peter Wells left almost a year ago, I was given the choice: did I want to stay, or did I want to go? While that would have been a nice, neat, ending right there, I stayed. Even thought I knew there weren’t going to be anymore podcasts, opinion pieces, or reviews from some of the smartest people I know, I stayed because it was no different to what we’d been through before. You know, when Anthony sold to Niche halfway through 2011 and basically everyone complained about excessive advertising. I was a little disheartened by the community at that point, and said so in the piece that I wrote back then.

Tumbleweeds on the front page weren’t anything new, and I’ll even admit I got used to sharing airtime with the infamous sponsored posts of 2011.

So, I stayed. After all, someone had to, and I wasn’t ready to give up on the community just yet.

But after Mr Wells left, little by little, I wondered how much longer I could stay and write the news with little to no input from MacTalk’s parent company, with no map for the future, and no plans or goals to speak of (at least, none disclosed to me). Probably forever, if I really wanted to — but that was the question — did I really want to?

And when it came down to it, I didn’t really want to. Like I said in the last paragraph of my post above, I’ve more or less done as much as I can. MacTalk is now in that strange position where a website built around a community, not eyeballs, is expected to somehow make money while spending at little as possible — that’s not an equation for success, no matter how far you stretch the dollars.

I stayed because it was no skin off my back. And I left because there was nothing left for me to do — if Niche still have no idea where things are going a year after they re-oriented by killing off the daily articles and weekly podcasts, then I’m not sure when they will. But I guess I won’t be part of the team that finds out.

Lastly: I’m not completely ignorant. I’ve read the threads in the forums surrounding MacTalk discussions, and even participated in a few private discussions of my own. If my leaving kicks Niche and MacTalk into gear like it seems to have done, then all the best to them. I wish them the very best with their future endeavours, but at the same time, I have to ask myself what else there is to be done. The question is not what people can do to restore MacTalk to its former glories, or even whether MacTalk can be restored to its former glories at all, but what people can do to prevent it becoming a complete ghost town, any more than it currently is.

That’s not saying I don’t think it’s possible. I’m just… sceptical.

But enough about that. Onwards and upwards, as they say.

I can’t wait for you to see what’s next.

DotA for Recreation, Not Profit

Dat courier, though. Phwoar.

Dat courier, though. Phwoar.

Alternate title: remember when online gaming was fun?

As part of my ongoing adventures in DotA 2, I’ve stopped playing ranked matches altogether. After experiencing how much they brought out the worst in people (and I include myself in that), I decided they were making gaming less fun, so I gave them the flick. Of the online games I am playing, I stopped choosing “All Pick” as a game mode and starting choosing basically everything else: Single Draft, Random Draft, All Random, Least Played, Captain’s Mode, and Captain’s Draft. The other game modes change things up a little by not offering the full hero roster, and do a decent job of teaching me to be a better player by playing with hero and team combinations I’m not necessarily familiar with. Ability Draft, on the other hand, is just… weird, and almost seems like an arcade version of DotA.

The thing I enjoy the most isn’t sledging my teammates when the carries can’t actually carry, despite what you may hear or read. No, it’s playing DotA with friends, either in friendly 5-on-5 matches, against bots in coop, or even online, when it takes our fancy. Work and other commitments mean we hardly get to see each other and catch up as often as we’d like, but playing DotA together means we can jump in Mumble or TeamSpeak and catch up with other while participating in some truly epic teamfights.

And at the heart of it, isn’t that what online gaming is all about? Having fun with people you know in real life, online? I’m no stranger to playing single-player games, but every now and again, I enjoy playing with friends. Multiplayer games like DayZ, Wasteland, DotA, and so many others just aren’t the same when you play by yourself. You could argue that there’s a time and a place for playing single-player games by yourself, but at the end of the day, there’s no denying that online gaming is infinitely better with friends.

But you know what isn’t fun? When friends get too serious about a game. I’ll admit straight up that I’m guilty of this, but aren’t we all? Our naturally competitive nature means that a disappointing loss hits harder than any elation from a convincing victory, which leads to blaming people we’re usually on very good terms with.

Continue Reading →

Point and Click Adventure Game

Casual readers of this blog might think that this will be another post on the latest title from Telltale Games, purveyors of the finest point-and-click adventure games around. I’ve previously reviewed The Walking Dead: Season One (the video game), and plan to dive into The Walking Dead: Season Two and The Wolf Among Us very soon, but no, these aren’t about those kinds of point and click adventure games per se. At least, not the ones you might be thinking about.

I’ve played a lot of ARMA 2. Along with DotA 2, it’s pretty much all I play these days. (According to my Steam stats, DotA 2 has the lead in terms of gameplay time.) It all started with the DayZ mod a few years ago, but since then a few of us have moved on to Wasteland, which is less about scavenging for survival items as it is about simply hunting down and killing others, building bases, that kind of thing. Kind of like a realistic version of Battlefield or Counterstrike, if you will.

Anyway, we’ve been spending a lot of time on a server that doesn’t have that many powerful guns. Perhaps less than ten are are one-hit one kill, and of those, only a handful can do so at range. The M110 with NV Scope is my current favourite weapon, purely because it’s so easy to get kills with it. Provided you’ve calculated the range properly (something that comes with experience, a few map waypoints, or if all else fails, a rangefinder), it’s ridiculously easy to get kills; you can hit someone anywhere and kill them. It also has very little recoil, meaning you can fire off a number of shots in quick succession without having to re-adjust for every shot. All this means it’s a veritable killing machine, in the hands of the right operator (in ARMA 2, anyway).

Short explanation of the video below: it all starts by us hearing about a base to the West of Kamenka. Armed to the teeth, we head over to see if the rumours are true. On the way, an immobile tank objective pops up, and a short while later, we spot an SUV driving along the main road. Things happen rather fast from that point: Janson takes out a tyre with a well-timed and well-aimed shot, which causes the SUV to skid to a halt. One guy doesn’t get out of the (now on fire) SUV fast enough and dies. Strike dies as five others pour out of the vehicle, guns up. I pop up momentarily, manage to kill one with a lucky shot, and get back down. I notice they’re all gathered on the opposite side of the road, next to a wooden house, so I put my eye to the scope, pop up, and take aim. I fire a round just as the first starts to run, and he’s down. I move across to the right, and fire off five more shots. One, hit. Two, hit. Three, hit. Four, miss — I quickly compensate and fire off the last shot. Five, hit. And like any good point and click adventure game, that’s the end of that.

Close Air Support →

A-10 Thunderbolt II

Of all the flying aircraft in the world, the A-10 has to be one of my favourites. The Gatling gun on them is so powerful that it can slow the aircraft by a few miles per hour.

Frivolous Internet Purchases, Part I

TwelveSouth BassJump

There’s usually two kinds of online purchases. There are those that you do a ton of research on, looking up reviews, spec sheets, comparisons with other similar products, and whether anything else even comes close to offering better value for money.

Then, there are the ones where you just pull the trigger on something without looking into it beforehand, thinking it will satisfy a particular need or want. Others call these “impulse purchases”, I believe, but I prefer the term “frivolous internet purchases”.

The TwelveSouth BassJump 2 I recently purchased falls squarely into the latter category.

Strangely enough, I couldn’t find it from any of my usual Australian retailers of TwelveSouth gear, so I jumped onto Amazon and ordered it from there. Ordering from Amazon meant it took a little longer to arrive, but I wasn’t in a massive rush to get it anyway.

Before we talk about the BassJump 2, I suppose I better explain why I wanted one in the first place.

I use a set of Audioengine 2 speakers at my desk. They’re a 2.0 set which I bought back in 2009, and I love them to death. They rank among the best speakers I’ve ever used, and are definitely the best 2.0 set I’ve ever come across. I had nothing but praise for them back in 2009 — and in 2014, they continue to impress me with their consistently balanced sound, great mid-range, and capable, punchy, bass.

But as good as they are, I get kind of jealous when I hear the chest-thumping, wall-shaking bass from other, albeit pricier, 2.1 systems. We have a set of Bose CineMate GS Series II speakers at work, and any time we crank up the bass on those bad boys you can feel it. Even the more humbly-priced Companion 5 have much more epic bass by comparison. While I’m generally OK with the bass produced by the Audioengine 2s, it doesn’t scale well — at higher volumes there just isn’t the same amount of bass as there should be. Obviously, units with a dedicated subwoofer will pump out the low-end more than my lowly 2.0 set ever will, but I wondered if there was a way around that didn’t involve adding a bulky bass unit to my compact setup.

Hence, the TwelveSouth BassJump. Technically, the BassJump is marketed as a bass-extension to the inbuilt speakers of any portable Mac, but I thought it’d be able to serve as a compact subwoofer for my Audioengines, too.

It could, and kind of couldn’t, at the same time.

After installing the BassJump driver, I had to plug my Audioengines into the headphone jack1 on my MacBook Pro. Combining the Audioengines and the BassJump was pretty underwhelming — the BassJump just didn’t have the amount of bass that I was expecting, and honestly, the Audioengines produced better bass by themselves, without using the BassJump as a separate subwoofer.

In hindsight, it was probably a little much to expect the same amount of bass as the CineMate’s gargantuan, almost PC tower-sized subwoofer, from a USB-powered subwoofer the size of a desktop external hard drive. I guess that’s why they call them frivolous internet purchases, right?

In any case, the BassJump is great for what they’re marketed as, i.e. a companion to your built-in speakers on your portable Mac. It actually does a great job of providing some much-needed low-end when paired with your inbuilt speakers, which handle mids and highs OK by themselves. But if you already have a great set of 2.0 speakers and are looking to add a little wall-shaking thump, my recommendation is to look elsewhere — there’s probably a reason all dedicated subwoofers are big, bulky things.

  1. I knew beforehand that the BassJump was powered by USB, but didn’t know they wouldn’t be compatible with my Thunderbolt dock (the Belkin Thunderbolt Express dock, for those interested). Normally I plug everything into my Thunderbolt dock, including my display, Ethernet, Audioengines, external USB hard drive, iPhone dock, and another USB hub, and that works fine — getting all those peripherals connected to my MacBook Pro via one Thunderbolt cable is great.

    But the headphone jack on the Thunderbolt dock shows up as a UPnP audio device on the Mac, which the BassJump driver somehow overrides in order for it to do its own thing over USB, which is why I had to plug in my Audioengines directly to my computer via the headphone jack — the usual UPnP sound device of the Thunderbolt dock had simply disappeared after I installed the BassJump driver. It may also be worth noting that it did not reappear even after uninstalling the BassJump driver. I ended up removing a file called “BassJumpOverrideDriver.kext” from /System/Library/Extensions, reboot, and then my Thunderbolt/UPnP audio device magically re-appeared again. ↩