Latest Project

I have a Kill-A-Watt power meter coming today from New Egg. I've got way too much crap on 24x7 sucking down juice and want to meter that appropriately. I got a new logic board battery for my PowerMac to allow it to sleep again so I don't have to run it 24x7. Perhaps I can use WOL to bring it up remotely as well. My RAID-5 Linux box seems like overkill. I really don't need the RAID-5 protection since it's mainly just a backup disk. I want a machine that provides NAS, ssh tunneling, and perhaps iTunes serving. I'm thinking of just using the Mini-ITX PC that was my media computer. I'll connect 1 gb of disk to it via usb. It's small enough to fit in my stereo stand that I use as a network rack. Unfortunately, I'll have to run XP. I'd much rather run Linux on it for many reasons but using it as an iTunes server is key.

The best thing would be to use a Mac Mini as a server but I don't want to spend the cash right now. It could replace the PowerMac G4, Mini-ITX PC and the Linux RAID server. Perhaps I'll keep my eye out on Ebay.

iMovie 08 Not As Bad As First Thought

I have nearly finished editing my first video in iMovie 08 and there are more than a couple of things that I like about it. Unfortunately, it is definitely a version one product and needs quite a bit of improvement. First of all, the skimming feature really makes editing a breeze. Everything you do is nondestructive. This is something that I've wanted in iMovie for a long time. The audio editing is terrible to non-existent. Even changing the volume in multiple clips is quite a chore.

I've seen some complaints that iMovie is unstable but that is not my impression at all. In fact, it seems much more responsive than 06 ever was. iMovie 06 used to always pinwheel no matter which Mac I was running it on. I'm hoping that we some updates to this program over the course of the year. I'd hate to have to wait another year for more features to be added to flesh this thing out.

iMovie 08 Immediate Impressions

I'm about to turn in for the night but I've played a bit with iMovie
08. After our mini-dv camcorder bit the dust, I picked up a Sanyo
Xacti C6 digital MPEG-4 camcorder (damn you Adam Curry!) and I have
not made a DVD since. I have moved on to posting to Google Video. I
usually avoid YouTube because of the size restrictions. That said, my
initial impression is that iMovie 08 is geared more towards web video
publishing. After all there is no iDVD integration. I think the
writing is on the wall for home-made DVD's. Burning DVD's is time
consuming and wasteful to say the least.

Now after playing with this for awhile I must say that I'm lost. I
guess I'll have to go over the tutorials when I have a bit more time.
It's not at all intuitive.

Restarting this blog

So, I'm redoing my website in iWeb 08 and trying to bring this blog back to life. I was using Tumblr as a blog but have decided to put my original posts on this site. They will still be aggregated at Tumblr.

I was able to throw together a basic iWeb site very quickly that looks decent. I just don't have the time nor the inclination to develop anything too elaborate or customized at this time. My previous homepage was done with Google's fee page editor but thought it really looked bad. This new look is much better.