There’s quite a number of you Apple users out there that use Boot Camp to run Windows naitively on another partition. When Apple released their 3.1 drivers (64-bit version here), most of us  jumped the gun, downloaded it and installed it. With it brings support for the new wireless magic mouse, official support for Windows 7, and a couple of other stuff.

Wait a second, why are my colors brighter? My reds look like they’re about to vomit all over my screen. The new 3.1 update automatically adds “digital vibrance” (i.e. “enhancements”). I wouldn’t call this an enhancement. It looks horrid.

In the NVidia Control Panel, under Adjust desktop color settings, you can see that the third option, which is Digital vibrance is bumped up all the way to 79%. That’s right, that’s the default. Apple is blinding you by enhancing the colors to make up for the fact that they put 16 bit LCD panels in Macbook Pros, even though these were advertised of displaying “millions of colors”.

Thankfully, you can turn it completely off. Just set the slider all the way to the left to turn off the disgusting explosive diarrhea of colors. You’ll have to do this to a second monitor you may attach as well.

We’ve been meaning to add our own forums for I/O (and general netlabel) community for quite a while. Since we decided to bring I/O up from dead, we thought we would go ahead and go with the idea.

First forum software i thought of was phpBB. It’s free, it’s popular, everyone knows about it. It’s also extremely complicated (from the admin look of things) and creating templates from scratch can be hard and time consuming. We started looking for other alternatives and we came across one called bbPress, which is a nice little lightweight forum. Very simplistic and minimalistic. Problem is, it hardly comes with any features built in. Out-of-the-box, it doesn’t support:

• custom avatars
• attachments
• signatures
• post count
• ability to display members online
• bbcode
• private messaging
• polls
• smilies/emoticons
• topic icons
• post preview
• ability to report post
• display unread posts.

That’s right. From a clean installation, bbPress doesn’t have any of that. Features that are common in even the most obscure php based bulletin boards. bbPress, however, does support plugins. And guess which features i listed above are available in plugins? All of them! Which means people who were willing to use bbPress had to go and manually find (Or write their own!) the plugin they want, download it, upload it to the proper folder via FTP, then activate it from inside bbPress. Repeat this process for every single plugin to cover basic features that other bulletin boards have from the get-go. Oh, let’s not forget that if a bbPress update were to come out, there’s a good chance that upon upgrading, you’ll find half of your plugins malfunctioning and/or completely dysfunctional. At least the community is a little more helpful than a certain other plugin.

So for all the work of modifying the theme and uploading a ton of plugins just to do basic shit, we’re moving back to phpBB. It’s just not worth it.

I do salute you, mr/mrs. developer, who may have spent countless hours of their own time, writing plugins for such a shameful excuse of a bulletin board. Let’s just hope your plugin doesn’t spontaneously combust if a bbPress update were to come out.

i’ve been nearly at it the entire-freakin’-day setting up the shop outside of the main UL website. As you recall earlier, the plugin on the UL site went haywire and had to disable it by deleting the plugin via FTP. Attempts to renable the plugin have failed and the site had been stuck without a functioning cart for over a day.

In comes the unnecessary work of adding a second wordpress blog to the “shop” subdomain! Since i couldn’t gather any of the settings I used for the plugin when it worked, i had to redo everything from scratch. On the bright side, I do kind of like the idea of separating the shop from the main site and it’s a lot more cleaner as well. Here’s to hoping this plugin doesn’t crash and burn! Again!

It’s kind of a little terrifying working with these plugins. This one in particular, does have a development team but they aren’t doing much as to helping out individuals who need the help. In other words, their “Support” forum (notice the quotes) is bombarded with questions (of which I even posted my own with no reply) and hardly a post gets responded with helpful information. Topics from over a year ago are still left unanswered and demanded by newer users. Documentation is abysmal and out-of-date.

Why I continue to use this plugin you ask? Well, because it’s capable of doing functions i desire. Notably donation-based downloads. This is perfect for our “Pay-what-you-want” (User input price) MP3 downloads and it’s the only shopping cart i’ve seen that’s capable of doing it. Okay.. maybe that’s the ONLY function I really desire.

So all of that is done and i finally got the I/O site fixed up (minus the M3Us, i’ve still got to get on that). All that’s left is the i/o forum, which requires CSS modifications to match the i/o site.

more coding, great! tom is helping with that bit though.

on the bright side, i’m learning more as I go.