It’s been rumoured and debunked every so often for the last couple of months that Apple’s long-standing partnership with IBM and their PowerPC line was coming to and end and would be replaced with something from Intel, and at the WWDC Steve Jobs has confirmed that it’s going to happen starting next year. What’s really amazed me is something he said about how they were going to handle the wholesale conversion from one CPU architecture to another (quote from Macworld):

Mac OS X has been “leading a secret double life” for the past five years, said Jobs. “So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years.”

Talk about a trojan horse. While everyone has been wondering how Apple would do it, the truth is that they’ve done it. Five years ago. Wow. I can’t remember anyone managing to pull off anything like that with barely a rumour escaping. I doubt that it will be x86 architecture because if OS X has been compatible with that for five years some enterprising meddler would have had it running and its 64-bit support is poor, so I’d guess that EM64T or IA-64 is likely.

This could have big implications for Apple’s hardware, not least because it should become more affordable. Intel architecture is familiar to PC developers so we could be seeing more Mac games which will be nice. Also, advancement of Apple laptops has stalled as the G5 has been too hot and power-hungry to be fitted into a viable portable. Intel have caught up with the G4 with their fast and efficient Pentium M line, so something similar in Apple’s camp could put the lead back into their hands and be even more powerful than existing G5s. Some might feel somehow betrayed by this news, but I’m very excited.

PC case modding, even though it’s never been something that interests me, can be quite cool when it’s done well and be really crap when it’s not. I suppose it’s a bit like car modding where it’s impressive when you build something unique from scratch but slapping a spoiler and neon lights onto a shitty little Micra just makes you look like an idiot. I’m not saying that my car’s not shit, but at least I don’t feel the need to draw attention to that fact that it is.

But like I said, case modding can be great when it’s done right, and this is a case where it’s done right. Not only is the idea amazingly cool but it’s very functional as well, acting as a desk in addition to the case. It really shows up how ugly those Star Wars cash-ins of cases that Alienware put out are.

When the first images of the Xbox 360 surfaced a month or so back we all speculated that it would be a good amount smaller than the current Xbox, and now it seems that we were right. It’s perhaps not as small as we might have been expecting from the size of the disc tray in the original photos, but it’s certainly nice and svelte compared to the old monolith. I never found the Xbox excessively big – it’s not like we carried it around all the time – but any size reduction is nice and shows what some bespoke hardware can do over off-the-shelf stuff.

Any Firefox user probably knows how absolutely invaluable the Adblock extension (couple it with these filters and it’s doubtful that you’ll see an ad again) is, but it’s still missing some key features and development seems to have all but ceased – I haven’t seen a new version since I started using it and the last development news was posted in October 2003. Despite this it’s been one of my main reasons for sticking with Firefox over Safari, since I’ve yet to find another ad blocker with the same combination of simplicity and potency. It would get the occasional false positive that would make me pine for a whitelist and some annoying white space left behind that I couldn’t block would crop up occasionally, but the few ads I saw really didn’t bother me.

No more! I just came across Adblock Plus, a development branch straight from the community which adds those features that I wanted and should make it possible to block any ad. First of all, creating a new filter and prefixing it with “@@” will whitelist it so that anything matching that filter won’t be blocked, so that puts an end to the few false positives that I don’t want it to block.

The other important addition that I hadn’t seen in the official release is the ability to block divs, the subdivisions of a page used to apply different styles and properties to different sections. That eliminates the problem with white space being left where your blocked ads once were, as they’re almost always contained within their own div. There are other nice features like synchronisation so that you can keep your filters updated over the Net, but those two are the big ones that I’d wanted for ages.

It’s well worth checking out if you’re an Adblock user, and if you’re on Firefox and don’t have it I heartily recommend the download.

I’m a fan of the webcomic VG Cats, and I just had to show their latest comic on the 227th best film ever (snigger). Whether you liked it or not, you have to check out their latest comic which happens to crack some great gags at the expense of some of the more…frustrating parts of everyone’s favourite piece of crap. The last four panels in particular are absolute gold.