Hello, I’m Mark Castro and I lied. I said I’m going to blog more and sort of chronicle what’s happening to my life here in Spain. Obviously, that did not happen. Oppurtunity just did not present itself for me to be in the writing mood.
A lot has happened in these past few months, mostly good, or dare I say it, the best half year of my life. Let’s just say that when I look back 10-20 years from now, I would say that this is the point that really made a difference and changed the rules of the game. I won’t go into details because frankly I don’t really know if anyone interested.
Changing gears, if you’ve been here before you have probably noticed that there’s a new section on this site called Tumblr. It’s, you guessed it, my Tumblog. That section will be more updated than this blog as it’s easier to maintain and gives me more freedom on what I can post. I will still keep this blog, of course, but will keep it for articles, tips or other cool stuff I deemed worthy to write about.
Anyway, that’s it for now, hasta luego.
For the majority of iPhone owners, what am I gonna blog about is nothing new. You have been taking advantage of the Maps app the moment you first laid your oily finger on that cute little icon. For us in the Third World which don’t have detailed street maps on even the major-est of the city, calling that app useless is an understatement. A waste of icon space is probably more appropriate.
Imagine how I felt the moment I arrived in Barcelona and realizing that I have the whole city in my pocket. There is no place I could not reach, no awesome little corner shop I could not visit. I felt like a lost kid in a candy store, except I don’t need my parents because I can find my way around easily.
I knew coming in that I won’t have data connection when I arrive. There is no way I would enable data roaming at current prices. So I need a way to access Maps offline. What, a paper map? That’s madness!
Oh hello long-forgotten blog. Yes, this is another one of those “I am so sorry I haven’t updated for so long but promise I will write an entry regularly…PROMISE!” Well, it’s not like I have any active readers so whatever… I’m BACK!
So what have I been up to? Well you all know about me quitting my job, slacking at home for almost half a year and now I’m in Barcelona. Yes, you’ve read that right, en España. If you’re oh-so-shock then apparently you haven’t been following me on Twitter and you really should because I’m awesome. If you don’t have an account, create one just for me because you know, that’s totally the reasonable thing to do.
What am I doing here? To study. I have enrolled in a university to take my Masters in Advanced Computer Science. I have always wanted to come back to school and I’m usually the guy who chases his dreams no matter what so here I am, chasing that dream.
Am I having an awesome time? Well, not so much. You see I am missing home so badly and I can’t believe I am exchanging all the comforts I was having for this self-reliance crap. I know that sounds a bit spoiled but I’ve only been here for a week and I’m still having detachment pains. I don’t have any regrets though, not at all. I know this is all part of growing up and all this minor-but-seemingly-major hardships I am having will all be disregarded in the long run.
I haven’t really explored the city much so I can’t say anything about it yet but I PROMISE I will post regular updates from now on. Or whatever, it’s not like you will believe me. But I will.
A couple of weeks ago, I was searching for a way to have Adium show up my currently playing game on Xbox Live. Windows Live messenger automatically does this but seeing that I only have 2 buddies on that and more than a dozen on Yahoo Messenger, that feature is useless to me. I was surprised that no one has done it yet, it just seems like there is an Adium Xtra for everything now. I found out why, there isn’t a publicly available API for Xbox Live, only a select number of developers can access it.
Looking for a workaround, I stumbled upon a Twitter app by Duncan Mackenzie that kinda does what I wanted, replacing Twitter with Adium. He was kind enough to create a service that relays the Xbox Live data and make it available to those working on small sites or writing scripts.
Anyhoo, a whole afternoon and four cups of coffee later, I was able to create my very first AppleScript in the form of an Adium Xtra. I know it’s not exactly a feat since AppleScripts are very easy to write but it just warms my heart a little bit when I contribute something, even if it’s not the most useful thing in the world.
Usage instructions and download link are detailed on the Xbox Live Status Adium Xtras page.
Late last year, I made a somewhat snarky post about WiGO and their free WiFi service. I admit, I was a little hard on them, after all they were just starting out and naturally they would not try to roll out features all at once. Now that they have enough time to settle in and get comfortable, maybe it’s time to give them a fair review.
Armed with my MacBook and iPhone, I went to the Power Plant Mall last weekend. WiGO blankets the whole mall and surrounding areas, which is awesome. I can be anywhere and still get a signal but I’ve decided to stay at my favorite coffee shop, find a comfortable spot and order a latte. I woke my MacBook from sleep, connected to the WiGO hotspot and launched the WigoBar application which I downloaded from their website. On the Mac, the application is a Java jar file which is really jenky but will do until they realize that it sucks and write a proper Cocoa application. So anyway, I launched my browser, logged-in on their customized welcome page and off I go, pretty much free to do anything I want.
Now there is a bit of a problem here, the WigoBar. Remember the bar that sits on top of all your windows and display ads? That bar and the business model behind it died during the dot-com bust. Now, WiGO dug it out from the grave and renewed its sole purpose of annoying the hell out of us.
