The Big Think

I got home from Pigskin a few days ago and found almost 1000 articles to read in my RSS reader. Luckily I was able to sift the wheat from the chaff, but it was a challenge. Wonder if I should remove some feeds?

Life imitates Art.

I’m obviously messing around with a few templates. (U2) I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (/U2), though. I have to pester Sean to install a couple more templates and then things will stabilize. Sorry about the eye-burningly loud page.

Went to lunch at Apple with Giles today and talked Apple, tech, and computer lust. He just got a new Mac Mini and is using it as a central hub for all of his music and movies. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. He showed me his friends and family discount on a new Mini and I aaaaalmost pulled the trigger. But I decided to be responsible and pass. Soon, though. I really would like a Mini running as the home automation server (to replace the 7 year old G3/333) as well as doing over-the-air HD recording and compression and acting as a movie/photo/music storage center for the whole house.

What I did do is purchase the newest version of iWork. It was only $55 with Giles’ F&F discount, which made it easy. I bought iWork about 18 months ago after taking a good look at it. It promised to replace Word/Appleworks/Pagemaker. I had been doing all those setups and layout stuff for CD’s, etc, in a bunch of different programs and was looking for a way to consolidate my efforts. iWork 1.0 did a good job of this but was still a version 1.0 release (some minor annoyances). After looking at 2.0 I jumped. Apple has added a VERY consolidated and powerful spreadsheet program as well as made the layout program (Pages) more “Word-like”. You can still do all the cool layout stuff (see here), but now you can choose to just do word processing without going through the layout layer. I imagine that I will be doing all of my word processing, layout, and spreadsheets in iWork from now on. Too bad I don’t do any presentations. Keynote is supposed to rock.

By the way, I just heard on a podcast that 60% of laptop users are reporting that they will be purchasing a Mac laptop for their next machine. 60%! This jibes with Apple’s laptop market share increase lately. They’ve gone from 12% to 17% of all laptops sold in the past few quarters. We have a couple of friends who have converted over and they are thrilled to have finally made the switch. It’s true- once you go Mac, you never go back. So what are you all waiting for?

“I’ve been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it. So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly. . . . I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.”

Jim Louderback of PC Magazine

So do ya feel lucky?

I want one (or five).

Smartflix. Rent instructional DVD’s. Everything from instrument flying to firearm repari to music theory (to sewing and cooking, locksmithing, electronics, etc, etc…)

“Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company.”

via Slashdot. more here

Great Jumping Judas on a Vespa, folks. I’m sorry the blog has been so slooooow loading the past few days. I don’t know what it is and I’m powerless to fix it. Sorry!

(note: “Great Jumping Judas on a Vespa” remains my favorite non-naughty “curse”. It’s just so satisfyingly alliterative and goofily silly at the same time. I can’t remember where I heard it, but it really stuck with me. Sounded positively Lileksian, but I’ve know it for years and years. I Googled it to see if anyone else uses it. Go figure.)

Buy.com has a sale on the Brother HL-2040 laser printer. Only $59! I bought the little brother to this (the Samsung 1710) three or four years ago and I love it. Cheap, good print quality, fast, a little loud when it’s running, but silent otherwise. I’d buy another one if I needed it.

If you’re in the market for an inexpensive printer, check it out. Review at cnet here.

The new 128 bit file system architecture from Sun known as “zfs” is big. Really big. Really, really big. A 128 bit addressing space allows us to access and keep track of a LOT of data. How much? More than we’ll ever need. Trust me on that.

Okay, don’t trust me. Read this article instead. If you stacked 300gb hard disks over the entire surface of the Earth to a depth of 2.5 million miles, you would just be touching the extent of the address space. To power this many drives would take the perfect conversion of all the planet’s oceans to energy. This would provide enough power for 4 months.

Plus, ZFS has other cool things like automatic Raid arrays and storage pooling-where you just toss another drive in and that goes into the “pool” of available space transparently. Any way you look at it, ZFS looks freaking amazing. And it’s rumored to be coming to OS X.

more here.

I’ve had my new Dell 22″ monitor for about four days now. It’s not much of a long term test, but I wanted to post how much I’m loving it. Not a lot of bells and whistles (read: multiple inputs), but I only need one: DVI. I love this monitor! Bright, crisp, tons of space. Some very minor edge lighting when the screen is all black (such as during a preview or movie) but it’s hardly noticeable. And at only $279 this thing was a slam-dunk. I’d like to get a second one for work but that’ll have to wait a bit.

If you’re in the market, I can recommend it highly. We’ll see how it lasts over the long term. I expect 5-7 years of good performance from my monitors.

Oh, and my eyes don’t hurt from looking at a CRT display any more. And the power consumption is MUCH better.

Amazing CGI

I have used computer software to file my takes for well over a decade, but this is the main reason I still don’t trust those e-file systems. A bit of printer paper and $2.40 to send it registered and I’m good, thanks.

This is a beautiful idea. I’m redesigning my workdesk to fit in the new studio. I had wanted some kind of cable management system. Looks like I found it!

The operating system has been essentially rendered useless by a set of deliberately introduced malfunctions. For example, the if your computer detects erroneous data in its registers, or voltage fluctuations (both of which are typical of PCs whose parts have been manufactured by dozens of companies), it will restart major subsystems, hanging up while it flushes all your data — just in case those errors were part of a hack-attack on the system.

Vista is a disaster. Microsoft is so desperate to get the entertainment industry locked into its platform that they’ll destroy themselves to get there. This is an operating system that, when idle, will have to check itself every 30 microseconds to make sure nothing is still happening, and no hackers are attacking it. It acts like an unmedicated paranoid. If Vista catches on, hundreds of millions of computers will be burning heptillions of cycles and tons of coal just making sure that no one is putting a voltmeter on the traces on its motherboard.

And those are its good points.

via boingboing.

Friends, if you’re contemplating a new Windows PC, or an upgrade to Vista, there’s help. You don’t have to go down that road. People care about you. Friends don’t let friends…

…ah forget it. If you’re dumb enough to get Vista, you deserve it, ya lunk.

Is Microsoft’s Vista a downgrade?

I will never, ever, buy a Zune. This looks like hell on earth for computer users. I mean, seriously…. why? Why does the software suck so badly? Why does MS make you jump through so many unnecessary hoops? Why is it so hideously ugly?

Why does the PC world put up with this junk?

You know what I did to get my iPod working on my Mac? I plugged it in.

No registration required.
No installation (iTunes comes preinstalled).
No “create an iPod tag” nonsense.
No “can’t find the device”.
No repeatable, consistent lockups or crashes.
No limitations on what I can or can’t install.
Oh, and I can do what I want with my music- no getting permission from the mothership.

I think if I ever see someone with a Zune walking around I’ll laugh in their face. Then I’ll try and knock some sense into them with their own poo brown Zune.

It’ll probably just break it.

Sheesh.

Get this straight content providers: Our computers belong to us. If we’re in the mood, we might let you sell us some stuff to run on them. But they don’t belong to you, and we’re not likely to surrender control over our own bought-and-paid-for hardware, which we often rely on to do our jobs and run our lives, simply in exchange for letting you sell us something. (Honestly, most of what you’re selling isn’t all that good anyway, and you’re lucky that people buy it at all. So don’t get greedy. And while click-through license agreements may make it legal, they won’t make you any more popular.)

…As much as people in the entertainment business go on about their intellectual property, they’re pretty cavalier with other people’s personal property.

So here’s my advice: Keep your grubby software off of my computer, or do without my business

Amen. More here.