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.

Notice in the picture below, how small the toon is in the center. This is because Blizzard quietly added a feature to push the camera further back. This lets you see people attacking from behind. It also let’s you do a top town view (ala Warcraft or Diablo) that is very informative.

Exhibit A

How do you do it?
1. Go to Options and click on Interface.

Options

2. Click on Camera. Move the ‘Max Camera Distance’ slider to the right.

Camera settings

3. Click Okay and click Return to Game.

Now when you zoom in and out with your camera, you  will get a wider view of the action.

Note: if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can use that to zoom in an out. If you have one of the recent notebooks you can use the two-finger scroll on the track pad to zoom in and out. Try it, it really helps your situational awareness.

Kurn.

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.

Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Bejeweled will be rolled into the next update of WOW. At least that’s what wired says. (And they are responsible journalists – I’m told).

Go see for yourself. We’ll be here keeping the coffee warm.

Well, you can. There are two simple tools that will help you out. Both are found under the Video options in-game.

1. Your first option is the ‘Resolution’ menu. It will allow you to make everything more detailed an reveal more items on the screen. The higher the setting, the more screen real estate you get.

2. The second tool is ‘Use UI Scale’ check box. With this marked, you can move the slider to the left and shrink all user interface elements. This includes your mini-map and your toolbars.

You must close the Video options window to see the results of your changes.

Video Settings

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!