Monthly Archives: July 2010

Hosed by MacMall

In late march this year we bought an iMac from MacMall to replace a dead PowerMac G5. Called bank to clear the purchase amount. They didn’t have the exact model, but could ship immediately one with a larger HDD. Fine, let’s giterdun.

Turns out they forgot to charge the difference till the other day. Turns out they send you notice of this from the same domain they send their junk e-mail from. Dummies.

We’ll definitely think twice before going through them again.

Tech forums sans trolls?

Can this be done? Please? Mankind has flown to the Moon and back but can we get a tech news site or forum or blog that doesn’t draw trolls? Apparently not. 😐

Also, damn I’ve been doing a lot of bitching here lately. :-“

Steam client for Macintosh

What a pile. All it is is a web browser. That’s pretty much it. And a poor one at that.

Instant beefs:

  • It installs games as hidden files not applications.
  • It runs a process named ‘ipcserver’ that remains alive after you quit the client.
  • The UI is non/sub-standard.
  • It doesn’t clean up after itself if you relaunch after force quitting it which then prevents it from starting* (though the ‘ipcserver’ seems to have no trouble starting).

To overcome that last item (which throws an error stating “steam engine instance already exists”) you have to manually remove a couple of files from /private/tmp. In Terminal type rm /private/tmp/*-steam-mstr-* and press return, then launch Steam.

*[UPDATE] Newer clients (the About window doesn’t actually list a version. More Steam on Mac “goodness” 😐 ) will launch after a force quit by apparently recycling the left over files which needed to be removed manually before.