mac os on a dell mini 9

For those who want the speed of mac os X on a slow processor, and the glamor of owning a dell mini 9
(so exclusive that you even can't buy one anymore), there is: mac os on a dell mini 9

Ghost windows in Firefox

The weirdest thing just happened to me: Firefox was using an excessive amount of cpu. Ok, that doesn't seem too unusual; but as it was constantly over 80%, no matter what i had open, i started worrying about the extra heating for my thighs... After some unfruitful searches (plus a couple of reboots etc), i finally restarted in safe mode; and there they were, two extra windows with flash-heavy sites that i certainly never requested myself. Most probably pop-ups that came from the sites where i downloaded emulators for my vintage gaming binge recently, judging from the contents of the offenders... Crazy, i had never noticed them before. Could it be that they really stayed hidden all that time, quietly(!) eating up my cpu??

Vintage video games are fun

(for 5 minutes, approx.)

This week-end, i tried to fight boredom and frustration of not having a playstation 3 by looking at what i could get from the internet as a gaming experience. Oh, i would have bought a ps3 already, have i had a tv... And, i do have a psp, but i'm tired of that tiny screen since i spend my days reading the news on my iphone...

So, here's what i found: There's this arcade-game machine emulator called MAME, with a version for mac OS. You can play Fatal Fury:
or marvel super heroes:
or gazillions of similar-looking fighting arcade games... Nostalgia was the motivation there, as i remember reading about this Neo Geo game console in magazinesas a teenager, without ever having an opportunity to approach the thing in the area where i grew up, let alone buy one. Crazy how it was supposed to be 100 times much better than the common-people nintendo or sega stuff we all had. And now, it looks, well... slightly outdated.

That's how i had fun for half a minute; the rest of the 5 minute entertainment was actually provided by a similar experience, but with a megadrive (or genesis) emulator, which allowed me to replay games i used to like...
Amazing how many hours i could spend then, trying to memorize the whereabouts of silly ninjas and other pitfalls, which was not particularly fascinating but totally necessary since more often than not, one tiny mistake meant you could do it all over again.
Yes, i haven't got any better over time, but at least i still remember the trick to get you infinite shurikens! Otherwise i might not have made it to the second half of the first stage.

But, fortunately, there is still the beautiful ice hockey game which kept a good friend and i busy for years...
I know, i know... where did i leave that psp?...