odd and annoying fact

If you leave your iPod plugged in to charge via the FireWire port, and the Mac secretly has a kernel panic while going to sleep (as it will once in a blue moon), the iPod battery may well start discharging and be drained by the time you see the Tasteful, Translucent Notice of Death.

This kind of thing is why I don't gloat a lot at Windows PC users. Many people tell me that Windows XP never BSODs. Of course, there are also Mac OS X users who swear to me that they have never seen a kernel panic, so it could be a small-sample-size thing. And if I judged an OS solely by lack of catastrophic crashes I'd be using Linux right now, no question about it.

That said, iPods are great things, and on the whole, the experience of using an iPod is much better with a Mac. But Apple's supposedly working on removing most of that advantage.

playlist perfection

OK, if you go from the Beatles' "Revolution 1" to the NotR version of "The Robot Song" (which needs more wanger) to TMBG's "Till My Head Falls Off", this is perfect.

Update: And then the Stones' "Brown Sugar", but that works after anything.

Grundy NewBrain.

I just like saying Grundy NewBrain.

Mystery video game.

I spent much of yesterday evening poking around that Old Computers site trying to figure out the identity of the primitive and short-lived video game system that my family got sometime around 1979 or so, which promptly died, driving us to eventually buy the wondrous Atari Video Computer System (later known as the 2600).

I don't remember it taking cartridges-- maybe it just came with one-- but from what I remember of the physical layout, I think it was possibly one of the games based on the General Instruments Philips/Signetics chipset, like the Interton VC-4000. But most of these seem to have been sold only in the European market, so I have my doubts.

The controllers had analog joysticks, which were chrome-plated and advertised prominently on the box as "Omni-Directional Controls", and there was a long row of buttons on the console that selected the various games-- mostly pong-like things, but there was also a shooting game, which I think might have had a light-gun controller. I remember that it could produce a foreground and a background color, but nothing more sophisticated than that. I don't remember any game graphics more sophisticated than rectangles, but I think it did have on-screen scoring.

It's definitely not any of the specific games that are in that archive, though it's tantalizingly similar to several of them...

Update: Ah, I remember now. The reason I said "General Instruments" was that the other possibility was that it was one of these Pong-alikes based on the General Instruments chipset. That might be a stronger possibility, since I remember it as more of a pong than a cartridge console.

Another update: OK, it definitely wasn't the Interton-type console; the games that supported were much more sophisticated. One of the General Instruments pongs, then.

Pong of the Jackal

Don't carry this 1977 French game through airport security.