Chasing My Own Tale
From Jock:
Lemur-Labs – Who Are You?:
It is quite possible that half of the reason that people watch the various editions of CSI can be attributed to the brilliant choice to play The Who during the opening. The selection of Who Are You? is especially brilliant. It speaks directly to the core of any criminal investigation: establishing identity.
It’s cool to listen in while the wizard makes up his latest spell… Even cooler when you get mentioned. : )
Ben, another suggestion on how to respond to this question…
Q: “How much does a Web site cost?”
A: “How much does a book cost?”
This usually sets the stage pretty well since people start to understand the possibility that all web sites may not be the same size, even though they are viewed through the same browser window…. This tactic has worked well for me in the past.
(I didn’t think it was that pithy…)
Until I recently rebooted in order to load up some OS updates, my PowerBook’s uptime reached a new high of 132 days, 17 hours. That is all.
Over the last few days, i worked on getting our living room television to display properly from the Mac Mini. The adventure (as boring as it was is documented on my site as: Test Pattern for Wide-screen Displays:
Getting the right aspect ratio to your home theater display.
So a couple years after getting a 27″ LCD display, I finally got fed up with the poor scaling options the display had. There aren’t many options for widescreen source material until we switch to digital cable, so most of the TV we watch is standard definition (SD). If you watch SD, 4:3 video on any display for a few weeks or a month you’ll end up burning-in the center of the screen, leaving the wide left and right margins darker with a very definite demarcation line when you finally start watching widescreen (16:9) content.
Read the full article: 16:9 Test Card / Test Pattern
CatNip is a program which, while running, detects “cat-like typing” and locks the keyboard, usually in under a half second. Optionally, CatNip will fade your desktop and display a warning message to your cat (which is of dubious value, since if your cat can read, your cat can probably type, too).
For some reason, this has become an important part of my software toolbox…
Each year I end up revisiting this post from the Electric Vehicle Archive for October 2000:
“I was in 2nd gear as I eased my foot to the floor, taking us right to the adhesion limits of the tires as we cornered through the bend in the road.”
John Bryan’s post is a continuing inspiration for a goal that will come one day.
From Pixelgirlshop Presents Fine Art & Handmade Goods:
Mini version of the painting of the Newton Apple Cynthia received as a gift from a very special nerd. Limited edition prints mounted on wood, signed and handpainted with stellar bronze paint by the artist herself. Looks awesome hanging on any tech-savvy person’s wall!
I just set up an iCal event to remind me to request a free annual credit report every 4 months from each of the three Credit Reporting companies: Experian, Equifax, TransUnion.
AnnualCreditReport.com : the official site to help consumers to obtain their free credit report.
I set the event to repeat annually 20 times, with an e-mail alert, and included the above URL in the mail so as to not get confused as to which is the real Credit Report request site. I wish they would have registered it as a .gov site. Those are a lot harder to spoof.
So I got the $100 rebate from Apple for my iPhone and added that to a small monetary gift I got recently to purchase the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid which I had on my wish list for a while. The device receives HDTV signals and passes them to a Mac and works pretty well.
The one piece missing from the package is an antenna. A simple $20 antenna gets a good solid signal. Given the location of our TV, facing west out through our westward-facing windows out to the West Hills where the TV broadcast antennas are at, we could have gone with the even cheaper $10 model. Remember, in most cities, HDTV broadcasts use the UHF band, and any UHF antenna can be use. (There’s no need to get an HD-specific antenna so don’t over spend in this arena.)
The biggest problem with our setup is that the Mac Mini only has the base 512MB of RAM. Until an upgrade, a few of the highest quality channels stutter. KGW seems to be pushing out a full 1080p signal, which I think is overwhelming the RAM buffer. Whereas the KOIN and KATU feeds are at 720p and the Mini keeps up with them pretty well.
The reason I’m most interested in Over The Air (OTA) HDTV is that our analog cable signal gets horrible crosstalk and ghosting. With a lack of insulated coaxial wiring, local channels are bad to really bad. Now we can see them really in clear, sharp high quality. Next to getting Digital Cable, this is the best way to get these channels.
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