Entries related to techology in general…
Shortly after the unofficial method of running Windows XP on Intel-powered Macs was released, Apple released a public beta of Boot Camp, their own solution to the problem. Given that I'd just used the unofficial solution on the Core Duo mini, I was the logical candidate to do the same via Boot Camp. So I did, and wrote about the steps involved.
Before the days of Boot Camp, some very bright folks figured out how to get Windows XP running on Intel-powered Macs. I volunteered to give the process a test run on the Core Duo mini, and wrote about my experiences.
Sorry it's been so quiet around here lately, but I've been doing a lot of big projects for Macworld. Last week, I wrote a series of articles on the new Intel Core Duo mini. I even wrote about why I'm sometimes SO DIMM, concerning a small (or not so small) mistake I made when purchasing RAM for the new mini.
This week, I took that same mini and turned it into a dual-booting OS X / Windows XP box, and detailed my experiences during the project. So that's why things have been a bit slow around here lately; after finishing up my daily duties, the fingers and brain have been too worn out to blog about some of the things on my mind. But this particular item was too good to ignore, so I worked on it last night and I'm posting it now for your enjoyment...there's even a bit of a tip in here, though not an OS X tip.
A couple weeks ago, we bought Disney's Lady and the Tramp DVD for our daughter. When I put it in for the first time, it was hard to miss Disney's new feature--Fast Play:
While you're looking at this pretty screen, whose buttons don't show up for several seconds, you're listening to the announcer say:
This Disney DVD is enhanced with Disney's Fast Play. Your movie and a selection of bonus features will begin automatically. To bypass Fast Play, select the Main Menu button at any time. Fast Play will begin in a moment...
My first thought was, wow, cool, a way to skip all that cruft they load our DVDs with nowadays?! Too cool! A not-so-quick experiment, however, proved my initial thought wrong...very, very wrong! Select Fast Play on Lady and the Tramp, and here's what you'll get:
Add it all up, and it takes roughly seven minutes and 10 seconds!! to go from the first time I saw anything onscreen to actually seeing the movie. Fast Play? They call that Fast Play? How long does the Slow Play alternative take to start the movie, three days?
I restarted the disc, and clicked the Main Menu button as soon as I could. From there, I chose Play Movie, then Widescreen. Next I got to see the two Disney splash screens and the two piracy screens, then the movie started. Total time required, only one minute and twenty seconds. But you can actually do better, much better, than that. And this tip works with pretty much every DVD I've tried it with.
After inserting a DVD, press the Menu button on your remote, or an onscreen button, whatever you can, to get to the Main Menu as quickly as possible. From there, click the Scene (or Chapter or whatever they choose to call it) Selection button. Then choose the first scene in the movie, which is almost always the opening credits. Then select your screen format (if necessary), and you're done. The movie will simply start playing. No Disney splash screens. No FBI warnings. Nothing but movie, the way things were meant to be.
For Lady and the Tramp, this process takes only 28 seconds, from initial screen activity to viewing the actual movie. Now that's what I call Fast Play!
After receiving my first-ever Intel-powered Mac, a new Core Duo mini, I spent the better part of a week testing out the machine in nearly every aspect of performance I could think up. This started as a three-part series, but based on feedback from the first three parts, we added two additional sections. Here's how the entire series came out:
While not at the technical level of an Ars Technica report (I won't even pretend to have the skills to go there), this is a very detailed look at the machine from a somewhat typical user's perspective.
Ever wondered how to tell if you've bought the wrong brand of RAM for your mini Mac? Thanks to a recent misadventure, I can now tell you exactly how you'll know. Ugh.
Yes, I really did purchase standard-size RAM for the mini, and (even worse than buying it) not even notice that it was way to large to fit inside that small case until I got it home.
For a long time, Apple has simply done packaging 'right,' especially for the iPod.
Although the packaging for iPods isn't the flashiest on the shelf, it is a marvel of simplicity and amazing design, like the machine itself. The experience continues inside the box, where it seems the iPod engineers must have been involved--everything has a place, and space is never wasted. I still recall opening the first iPod I ever bought, fascinated by the multi-foldout design that let so much stuff fit in such a compact space. As a matter of fact, that box is still on my shelf. But this post isn't about the inside of the box, it's about the outside of the box.
iPod packaging is clean, well thought out, and almost spartan when compared to similar products from others. Where competitor X will have multiple font sizes and colors, huge blocks of text, splashes of varying color and style, and legal mumbo jumbo, the iPod box simply tells you what's inside in a few words and images. It stands out because it's not garish and overbearing, unlike everything else.
Which is what makes this video parody (alternate lower-quality link), in which Microsoft redesigns the iPod's box, so amazingly funny. Forget that it's even Microsoft being parodied; it could be nearly any of the other major players in the technology business. This spot is very well put together, and to me, it really demonstrates how very hard it must be to go simplistic and clean when everyone is probably pushing quite hard to "fill that empty space with something!"
And no, I don't normally post just links to other things, but this one is so well done, it really is worth watching!
And now, for something completely different, although it is somewhat technology related. I've known my wife Marian for close to 30 years. We've only been married for six, though, as we somehow never connected as 20 some-odd years passed. We wound up on different coasts, leading different lives, until fate figured it was time for us to get together.
When we finally did start dating, things moved rapidly, given that we already knew everything about each other--we were married less than six months after our 'first date.' We knew early on that we were going to get married, so that left me with a huge challenge: how do you surprise someone who's 100% certain they'll be getting an engagement ring? To add to the complexities, our relationship was also being carried out via United and Southwest Airlines--she lived in Arizona, and I in Oregon. So I couldn't really just show up on her doorstep with a ring, hoping she'd happen to be home. Or could I?
Read on for the details on how I used my Mac, an instant messaging client, a cell phone, and a good bit of deception to surprise Marian with her engagement ring. Caution, some syrupy romantic stuff will be included. It is, after all, Valentine's Day!
Update: The annoying captcha has been replaced.
Today I took the long-avoided step of adding a captcha to the comment submission form. It seems my blog has been discovered by the spambots, and (even with Spam Karma 2 installed) the flood of meaningless spam has gotten too large to ignore. Most of you probably don't see the postings, as I get notified via email whenever they appear, and I do my best to delete them immediately. However, as the number of meaningless comments increased, this process was becoming too time consuming.
So I was left with two options. First, I could allow only registered users to post comments. I don't like that solution, since this is an informal, hopefully fun place to just drop by. If someone feels like leaving a comment, I'd like them to be able to do so without the hassle of registering for an account. So that left the second option--adding the captcha to the comment screen. This is far from ideal, as I know sometimes the stupid things are nearly unreadable, and they present issues to those who have problems with their vision. I wish I had a better solution (a future update to Spam Karma may solve the problems, I hope), but right now, I don't.
So for now, we have a captcha. It's not like there are a ton of comments here anyway, but hopefully this won't cut down on the dialog as much as would happen if I were to add a registration requirement. Please let me know if you have any issues with the captcha; I'm using SecureImage, which is fairly widely used, so hopefully the problems will be minimal. This plug-in does have one nice feature--if you are logged in, you won't see it (so there you have it, one minor reason why you might wish to register). And spammers, please find a better target for your vileness. There's no way I'm going to let any of your drek stay on these pages for any length of time!
And yes, there is more content coming here in the future--I've just been a touch busy with Macworld and macosxhints.com stuff lately!
It’s a simple question, though some context might be needed. You see, when I first started driving (many eons ago), every car I had any experience with had a setting on the heating/cooling control panel labeled Vent. When you set the system to Vent, you basically opened a channel from the dash-mounted air vents directly to the outside airflow. If it was 60F degrees outside, you got a stream of 60F degree air. If it was 30F, you got 30F degree air. The car’s system was basically bypassed, though you could also turn on the fan to increase the speed of the outside air. In many less-expensive cars, air conditioning wasn’t even an option; Vent was it as far as (theoretically) cooling airflow went.
Hence today’s ranting question — where has the Vent gone? No car that I recall driving in the past 10 or so years has had a vent setting. If you want airflow, you have to have the air conditioning or heater on. The newer the car, it seems, the worse this problem is. Cars with so-called automatic temperature control are perhaps the worst. My car (since sold) had such a system; you’d simply dial in the temperature of the air you’d like in the cabin, and the system would do the rest. Fine in theory, but in practice…if I picked a temperature below 65F, the air conditioning system would switch to ‘Max A/C’ mode, kicking the fans up to full speed. I couldn’t set a lower temperature than 65F, and why, oh why, is the speed of the fan tied to the temperature of the air? I didn’t tell the system I wanted a full-power blast of 65F degree air, I just wanted 65F air at the current fan setting.
But that’s actually not what I really wanted. What I really wanted was to not waste gas and horsepower running the A/C system when the outside temperature was 63F. I just wanted to vent some of that temperate outside air into the cabin. Alas, no such choice is available, not on my car, and not on any car of recent vintage that I’m familiar with.
So where oh where did the Vent go, and are there good reasons for its demise? Or am I mistaken, and there are lots of cars still out there with Vent settings on their A/C panels? Anyone who can enlighten me, please do so. In this era of looking to save gas whenever we can, this seems like a simple way to do so. And since I’m presently auto shopping, I’d love to know if the option still exists.
Sometime last year, someone told me about the Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones, which I'll just call the QC2 from here on out in the interest of saving my fingers! The selling feature of the QC2s is active noise cancellation, which I won't even attempt to explain--I'll let the collected experts at Wikipedia handle that task. I had my doubts, but finally made my way to an Apple store to try a pair out just before Christmas.
The store was quite busy on the day of my visit, with lots of background noise. I put the headset on, but left the active noise cancelling disabled at first. Though things got notably quieter, there was still a very audible level of bacgkround noise in my ears. Then I turned on the noise cancelling. Wow. There's really no way to describe just how quiet it got, but literally all of the lower-level rumbling from the crowd vanished, leaving a near-silent environment. Then I started the iPod, and was further amazed that there was no apparent loss of sound quality when compared to a non-active-cancellation headphone (the Bose Triport). Keep in mind, my ear is far from audiophile quality, but the QC2s sounded great to me.
Now the QC2 is not a cheap set of headphones--at $299, they're the same price as a new 30GB iPod. However, I use my headphones a lot (every day, hints are posted while I'm under the 'phones, as the household is still sleeping), and I value a comfortable, high quality product. So after some discussion with my wife (hope she enjoys her Christmas present!), I purchased a pair of QC2s just after Christmas. Having now used them relatively extensively for a couple weeks, I thought I'd share my impressions, in case anyone else is considering a purchase. Note that Playlist also reviewed the QC2s, and probably in a more thorough and professional manner than what you're about to read :).