Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Bugs

Well, Leopard finally arrived and there are some really cool features packed in. It definitely blows away Vista and I'm amazed at what Apple can churn out. Unfortunately, there are some glaring bugs in this version. Some of the new features just don't seem to work at all. Here is a partial list:

- Windows shares just don't show up in Finder as advertised.
- Can't change the Windows network name in system preferences. Whatever I put in there is not saved at all.
- "Back to My Mac" feature just does not work even with their recommended router. 
- Time Machine seems buggy and there is a "progress" window that you just can't get rid of. I thought this was all handled in the background?
- iChat quit on my forcing a reboot that led to non-working WiFi that required an AP Extreme reboot as well as a 2nd MacBook reboot.

More to come...
 

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Thinking Different

Perhaps people experience a mid-life crisis when they discover the truth. Life is nothing as well as everything. You can reboot your life at any time. Escape the slavery and free your mind. You have all of the power in the world. Use it.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

We Are Living in a Matrix

I realize that there is probably a ton of misinformation in the Zeitgeist movie but I believe the underlying premise. We are all slaves to this system. Slaves to "the matrix" mankind has created. Slaves to debt, slaves to media, slaves to religion...

You can break free. Take the red pill.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

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.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

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.

Friday, August 10, 2007

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.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Fascinating High Res Galactic Imagery

Stunning pictures of galaxies and nebulae. Many of the photographs are large enough to use as backgrounds for all but the largest monitors.

read more | digg story

Friday, April 21, 2006

'Bride' Stripped Bare

Cool article about the digital gear and process used to make the animated move "The Corpse Bride".

Friday, April 07, 2006

Geek to Live: Develop your (digital) photographic memory

Great ideas for using your camera phone + flickr to record and catalog things other than just snapshots.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Iraq War TImeline

Here is a timeline that I found documenting the current conflict in Iraq. On May 1, 2006, it will have been 3 years since Bush declared "mission accomplished" in a military flightsuit abord the USS Lincoln.

Friday, March 31, 2006

ILM’s state-of-the-art (storage) studio

Industrial Light & Magic uses high-speed NAS servers with a distributed file system, 10gb/sec Ethernet, and a 5000-node renderfarm to store and move 170tb of content.

Read more

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Apple's Mac Os X 10.5 Leopard Will Probably Run Windows!

Rumors have been brewing that Jobs and co. are taking steps toward allowing Windows apps to run on Macs. Now evidence has surfaced that Apple has begun the process toward doing just that!

Is this the beginning of the end for Microsoft's juggernaut 95% market share?

read more | digg story

Friday, March 24, 2006

Babies decide what words to learn

Like teenagers, babies don't much care what their parents say.

Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study has found.

read more | digg story

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Windows vista delayed to 2007

Microsoft has delayed the release of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system to 2007.

read more | digg story

Monday, March 20, 2006

Life Expectancy Calculator!

This is the test that insurance companies use to calculate your probable life expectancy! This test merely calculates the probability of your life expectancy based on your habits and environment!

read more | digg story

Iraq Three Years Later: The Path to War

This is the best and most frank recap of what led up to the Iraq war. The pronouncements made by members of the Bush administration are startling considering what was actually found and what actually took place. It is clear to me that this administration did more than act on bad intelligence.

NPR Article

Radio dial scan from the night John Lennon died

Amazingly, 25 years ago somone recorded a dial scan of their radio on the night John Lennon was murdered. A fascinating way to capture history, and something that might become impossible if the Radio Flag legislation goes through.

read more | digg story

Saturday, March 18, 2006

In What Language do Deaf People Think?

An interesting column on how the prelingually deaf think since they've never been exposed to spoken language.

read more | digg story