Wirehead

Wirehead presents the best of the cool

By Jeff Boulter

Congratulations to The Online Bucknellian. Just recently, The Online Bucknellian became one of the "top 100 web sites on the planet," according to some self-proclaimed web authority guy in Australia. While I think The Bucknellian's web site is pretty good (I did a lot of work on it myself), there are hundreds of thousands of web sites out there, and I doubt The Bucknellian is really even close to a soundly derived "100 best."

Making lists of things that people like seems to be the "in" thing on the Internet. The original Cool Site of the Day was, well, the coolest thing around for a while. My personal favorite is Pointcom's Top 5% of all web sites award. I have to commend them for constantly rating every web site on the planet and empirically calculating the top five percent. What a job. I wonder if they are in their own five percent.

So as not to be out of vogue, I now proudly announce the super prestigious Wirehead's Top 0.02 % of All Cool Mac Shareware Insofar as Yesterday Awards. I've divided them up into three arbitrary categories and without further ado, the envelope, please...

The coolest tool for fooling yourself

Aaron

Coming soon is the next major update to the Macintosh operating system (MacOS System 8), code-named Copland. Apple's new OS will bring a virtual fruit basket of improvements, one of which is changing the entire look and feel of the software. While Copland won't be out until the end of this year, Aaron (Get it? Aaron Copland?) changes the way your computer looks according to Apple's previews of System 8. This extension's cool 3D look and spinning windows makes System 7's interface antiquated. Aaron is so cool that "The X-files" uses it when they show computer screen shots on TV. Yes, it's that cool.

Coolest way to shirk Bill Gates of a few bucks

Symbionts

Do you know why Bill Gates is so rich? It's certainly not because Microsoft makes such great software. Every time a new version of Word comes out, memory chip makers pay him big bucks to make it require a couple more megs to run. Then people go out and buy more memory and the demand makes the price go up. In turn, Bill uses the cash to buy human souls. He's already got all of Redmond, Washington. He figures that if he gets a majority stake in souls, he'll finally be able to compete with The Big Guy up there and then, well, there will be hell to pay. OK, that's probably not true, but it makes a lot of sense to me at least.

When you install extensions like Aaron into your System Folder, you run the risk that it won't get along with one of your other control panels or extensions and your computer will crash or act oddly. Even if it doesn't crash, it gobbles up more of your memory and makes less available for running applications like Word.

Symbionts help solve both of these problems. It's Apple's Extensions Manager on steroids, allowing you to turn on and off anything in your system folder or even throw them away if you're truly feeling fed up. To top it all off, Symbionts tells you exactly how much memory each thing takes up, so you know how much you have left to sacrifice to the almighty Bill.

Coolest '80s retro game

Asterax

In the beginning, there was Asteroids and it was good. By today's standards, however, it was pretty horrible. The old Atari arcade game had no colors, the graphics were just lines and all flickery, but it left a lot of teenage Wireheads quarterless in the early '80s and began a huge industry. Now, Asteroids is back in Asterax. Nostalgia in a shoot-'em-up video game-what could be better? Asterax adds general coolness to an ancient game: cool graphics, cool upgradable guns, and cool sounds.

I remember a news story about some kid who had played Asteroids on one quarter for several days straight. His parents brought him food. God knows how he went to the bathroom. Asterax adds one feature over the '80s Asteroids this boy desperately needed: a pause button.

You can grab all of Wirehead's Top 0.02 % of All Cool Mac Shareware insofar as Yesterday Awards Recipients on the web. If you want to pick them up individually, check out the INFO-MAC hyperarchive. It's huge, it's searchable, it's fast, and because it's not an FTP server, you'll never have a problem getting in.

Don't forget to pay for this stuff if you use it. You may not care now, but an angel told me that every dollar of unpaid shareware fees is another minute in purgatory. If you're one of those atheist Wireheads, or you have already cashed in your soul with Bill Gates, just never mind.

Next week: "Can't we all just get along?"

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Jeff Boulter