Do any of you have an opinion regarding glossy screens on laptops? My dad’s Dell has a glossy screen, while mine has the normal matte screen. I may be purchasing a laptop soon, and I’m still torn as to which I like more.
What about you? Which do you like? Why? What do you primarily use it for? (eg: Desktop Usage, Coding, Photo Work, Games, etc.)
Adobe has officially announced Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with an introductory price of $199 ($299 after 30-April).
I guess I know what my next software purchase will be. Hopefully both OS X and Windows versions will ship in the same box.
So, tonight I took a big step and drastically simplified my network here at home. After moving the cable modem to the living room (photo gallery retired) and hanging it off of an Airport Express I’ve been able to turn off the entire rack of equipment in my basement. It’s really, really quiet down there. As part of this I’ve moved my entire house to wireless, with the exception of the TiVo and PlayStation 2, which hang off of a switch connected to the basement Airport Express. (I originally had one in each of these locations so they can play music through both stereos.)
Everything is bridged together nicely with WDS, which Apple makes exceedingly easy to do. (Set up the master AP, turn on the client / repeater ones, and it’ll script the setup on all of them.)
My >3 year old G5 (photo gallery retired) is happily using the connection and both my work laptop and the DS (photo gallery retired) see it just fine. I’ve also moved all backup receiving to an external disk hanging off of the G5. A few more external disks are likely to find there way here soon, just so I can back everything up to some sort of removable / different media.
It’s now strangely quiet in the basement, and I need to figure out what I’ll do with the rack down there. I might trash some of the machines, as they aren’t especially useful anymore. Maybe I’ll use it to store some of the project stuff I’ve been working on. Maybe photography and music equipment, or something like that…
I find it a bit weird to be cutting my home network down so far, but I really think that it’s the smartest thing from a power consumption and simplicity perspective. Also, fewer machines to support means fewer things to go wrong, and that’s a good thing.
Well, the iPod article which I was quoted for in the New York Times seems to have been published.
To quote from page 2:
Honda’s Music Link also offers voice commands, but some owners have had problems with the system. Steve Vigneau of Shelby Township, Mich., said he had Music Link in his Civic and found the system hard to use and slow to operate. The software uses Honda’s text-to-speech technology and needs to be installed on a home computer so it can link with iTunes.
Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman, said that text-to-speech “has not been as trouble-free as we expected, but many Music Link users are still quite pleased that with a single connection they can get a high-quality audio connection, head unit control and constant charging.”
Not great, but I’m happy enough with it.
And, of course, here’s the obligatory link to my Honda Music Link iPod Adapter Review. (It may be changed slightly in the future… the date-by-date updates at the bottom are becoming a bit tedious.)
RectFish with a Peleng 8mm fisheye is pretty neat. Compare:
RectFish‘d
And yes, I know there is watermarking, but without paying $30 for a license I can’t export non-marked full res images.
I’ll research other apps for it later. OSS stuff, things which remove all distortion (resulting in a dogboned image), etc.
Oh, and click each image for a full size copy, if you’d like. Now, off to the post office. And my parents house.
Ah, I’ve now done a write-up on nuxx.net. So, feel free to give it a read if you are curious what sort of things are running behind the scenes on the box which hosts my (and others) sites to… well… host things.
I cannot figure out what is wrong here. Either the MAME devs seriously broke some things between 0.69 and 0.100, or something I can’t figure out is wrong.
See, I’m trying to run a nice, simple copy of DOS on my MAME cabinet. It should work fine, but… it doesn’t. In some cases. :D
Using MAME 0.69 I have no problems, and everything seems to run rather well. Bump the version up to 0.100 for DOS and everything gets really slow. From, say, 60fps in Bad Dudes down to 17fps.
I thought that maybe the increased size of the binary was being weird with SMARTDRV, or maybe it needed to write back to disk more, and the CF card I’m using is slow, so I copied everything over to a hard disk. Same problem. :\
I’m sort of at a loss for what to do.
For some reason (probably because of the size of my gallery and the number of sites hosted on the box) I’ve been having problems with Google being able to pull an XML sitemap for the gallery. Google was apparantly timing out while attempting to download it. I’m not sure if some change was made on their end recently regarding the length of time which could be spend during sitemap downloads or what, but I think I found a solution:
#!/bin/sh
newfile=~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml.new
oldfile=~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml/usr/local/bin/curl -Sso $newfile http://nuxx.net/gallery/main.php?g2_view=sitemap.Sitemap
if [ -d ~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml.new ]; then
mv $newfile $oldfile
fi
Yes, I know it’s a hack, but running it every six hours should work around the problem.
UPDATE: Yep, I just realized this won’t work. The test argument needs to be changed to -f (or -e) because it’s not a directory. Doh!
The Honda Music Link communicates with an iPod at 9600 / N-8-1, and I can successfully sniff it.
Eg: 000043 17:16:12.750 FF 55 04 04 00 29 04 CB FF 55 04 04 00 29 01 CE
This can be looked up here: http://ipodlinux.org/Apple_Accessory_Protocol
UPDATE: As an exercise to myself, this is as follows:
FF 55 – Header
04 – Length of Command
04 – Mode 4 / AiR Mode
00 29 – AiR Playback Control
04 – Skip– Command
CB – Checksum calculated as: 0x100 – (FF + 04 + 04 + 00 + 29 + 04)
FF 55 – Header
04 – Length of Command
04 – Mode 4 / AiR Mode
00 29 – AiR Playback Control
01 – Toggle Play / Pause
CE – Checksum
Server is back up. In short, I was using so much bandwidth that Waveform flipped my link back to 10Mb in an effort to cap bandwidth, then when that remained wholly saturated (nice to know that the to-internet link can saturate that, eh?) they turned off the port.
See here for a graph of it all: https://secure.nuxx.net/bandwidthd