reesesWeb

Any of you have a recommendation for a Mac-friendly non-iPod video capable portable media players that handle video? I'm disqualifying the iPod for now as its codec support is pretty minimal. Otherwise, it has almost everything I'm looking for.

Other than that, I'm looking at the Creative Zen Vision W, which looks great on "paper" but is ugly and doesn't love the Mac. In fact, the only way to get it to work with a Mac is to use xnjb, an open source MTP application. Suck. That's so far from iTunes integration that it makes my head spin.

I went to look at the new MacBook today at the Apple store. I feel this desire to replace both my G4 PowerBooks with another Macintosh laptop.

Now that I've validated its functionality, I'm ready to migrate the Mac Mini to be a home theater pc, and I miss the dual screen functionality afforded by having a laptop with screen-spanning ability.

That said, the MacBook non-Pro will not be replacing anything at my house any time soon.

The good:

• The keyboard is much nicer than it looks. I expected a Mattel Aquarius experience, but it types almost as well as my PowerBooks. It took about three femtoseconds to adjust.

I have some .dfont files I wanted to convert into true type (ttf) files. .dfont files are peculiar to the Mac, and peculiar to Mac OS X, which seems kind of strange, because they're data-fork true type font files.

9:30 PM: Start Parallels and create a pre-configured instance for Windows XP, modifying RAM allotment to 512MB, relocating the data files to an external FireWire Drive, and changing the CDROM from an ISO file to the Mac's SuperDrive DL.

9:35 PM: Put Windows XP disk in drive, start VM.

9:46 PM: Windows XP installer says,"39 minutes left to install," as it copies files, probes hardware (probably especially easy with a virtual machine with constrained virtualised hardware), and tells me how much better life will be with XP. On my last install (on a PC), 39 became 23 which lasted for FOUR HOURS.

From:   sales@coriolis-systems.com
Subject: iDefrag version 1.2.1
Date: April 4, 2006 12:32:01 PM PDT
To:   customers@coriolis-systems.com
Reply-To:   sales@coriolis-systems.com

Hi all,

Just a short e-mail to apologise for the delay in the release of version
1.2.1, which fixes a number of bugs that people have reported with 1.2.0,
including:

* Reference count exceptions from the B-Tree code
* (Potentially severe) slowdown and excessive memory usage under some
  circumstances, due to a threading bug
* Problems with unmounted disks that are marked as having a custom icon

  

Note: if you're looking for a headset you can buy, I ended up buying this Logitech headset and have been reasonably happy with it.

At first, my expectations were not high. I had the only-ever-used-as-microphones iPod headphones nearby, and I was using the laptop's built in microphone. This microphone is really close to a fan, and a particularly noisy hard drive. Not a good experience. However, I didn't have a real headset around the apartment, so I thought about how I would improvise a suitable alternative.

There seems to be a progression one goes through after every purchase of a computer-connected camera.

1. Hey, I can video conference people!

This started at least as early as Doug Englebart's demo, and received another boost with the Intardweeb and cuseeme (which is now commercial, surprisingly enough), before reaching ubiquity with the current crop of instant messaging systems and iChat/AV, Yahoo!, along with free or nearly-free USB cameras.