If you wonder where I’ve been, log in to WOW. Sheesh. Have you done the seasonal quests? Been a zombie? I actually helped kill the headless horseman and they let me get the epic ring. My first epic!!.

So please forgive me if this blog has suffered. Feel free to comment

Hey did you know Wrath of the Lich King is officially released on Thursday. Even though I heard that 7/11 already had it

p.s. The Realms have been down all day, so this is a good time for you to read blogs

I spent about a day and a half reloading tons of stuff. My download folder is gone. Lots of fun stuff there.

My birthday was Sunday, so I managed to get online and visit with some nice folks. We all waited to do a run in the Underbog, but we could not get the group together. Oh well.

I got an iPod touch 2g 16GB – I’ll be posting and commenting on the wow apps i’ve found soon

yeah!

Kurn out!

Well, so far, I’ve had decent success talking to FireFox. This is largely thanks to the LifeHacker article by Adam Pash. If Speakable Items is turned on, it will create a Speakable Items folder for you when you open an application that you want to give voice commands to. My observations show that it can take a minute for the system to notice. (It probably depends on how many apps you have running.)

So far, I have not had success with WOW. I know it’s possible because  Sean Forsgren over at Wowinsider.com has written a fantastic article on it. I don’t know for a fact, but I suspect that I have a problem becuase I am running WOW from an external drive. I will be investigating this.

That’s right. We’re Mac users, most of our Macs come with Mics built in. They come with Speakable Items. What could be better than to speak a command during those busy times when your fingers are glued to the keys.

Over the weeks to come, we will be posting more and more information about Apple’s Speakable Items. We will discus versions of the OS that support it, and we will post a growing library or speech commands for WOW. We will also try to disect them for you so you can make your own.

If you have any helpful Speakable Items that you want to share here, please send them to kurn at wowszer.com.

I’ve spent more time screwing around under the hood of servers than I would have guessed. I installed Lasso 8.5 on my local machine. Then I installed MySQL. I’m still not sure I’ve got this stuff configured. I’m learning tons about Apache settings and mods.

A few crazy pieces that I’ve setup: a multi-file upload form with a status bar, and image sizing before emailing; an ajax animated catalog; dynamic relational database system linked via arrays.

I wish I was trained as a programmer, of course that would make it all too easy. Besides, how many programmers actually started out as programmers?

I’ve recently visited the Blizzard official wow site. Their new Armory looks kind of interesting. From a web developer standpoint, it seems like they spent a ton of time on the look, but maybe missed the boat for bandwidth usage. sigh.

If you haven’t visited their site, the comic section has a couple funny additions.

According to the Armory site, there are quite a few level 70’s already. I have to wonder if they even took the time to enjoy the new work that BC has to offer.

BTW – I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what happens when you jump of the edge of outland. Anyone???

Thanks all! – Kurn

p.s it does other cool things too

OnyX is a maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility for Mac OS X. It allows you to run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance, to configure certain hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Safari, Dashboard, Exposé, Disk Utility… to delete cache, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, to see the detailed info of your configuration, to preview the different logs and CrashReporter reports, and more.

IMPORTANT NOTE: there are different versions of OnyX for 10.2, 10.3, & 10.4 – check the download page to get the right version.

As promised I tested out the OpenGL tweak. Lo and behold, I think i gained one frame per second. sigh.

Did you try this? what did you find?

If you are like, me you are addicted to a couple of add ons like Auctioneer, CTmail and Titan panel. Well, add MonkeyQuest to your collection. It’s clean, easy, and very informative.

MQ adds a collapsible floating window with your current quests. Mouse over a quest and it displays more detail. Click on a minus sign and that group collapses out of view. It does a great job of summarizing your goal, without all the extra verbiage from Bliz.

Don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. Got a favorite add on? Share!

I went to our own store, see the link on the right, and purchased the .Mac kit for $79.99 – a 20% discount

The kit arrived today from Amazon and I logged in to my .Mac account. It took a few steps to find my way, but I was able to renew my account with the new activation code. I saved $20.
Key points: log in, and click on the account icon in the upper left corner. Then look for the blue link titled ‘Review your renewal settings.’ You will need to put the code in at the bottom. Then you will be asked for a valid credit card – make it accurate (you won’t be billed). The next screen tells you that your balance is zero. You’ve done it

Used in moderation, Titan panel can really provide lots of helpful info. I love seeing how much amo I’ve got, what my gear’s durability is, and other easy to view details at a glance.

At this stage of the game, I can’t help much with the right module, but I did find the link to a core install to get you started on a stable (tested) installation. Here it is.