10.29.06
Posted in Apple, Tech
at 12 pm
Remember way back when I added 512 megs to my trusty iBook and noted my ability to breathe easier? Of course you don’t, but I do–and it was like night and day. The ability to go back to a machine and drop in some RAM a year later has both financial and mental benefits.
The financial benefits come from falling RAM prices. Of course RAM will always get cheaper. But if you can wait a year, you can see a substantial drop in prices. 20%… 50%… I wish I had noted the price of the 1 gig RAM cards back when I got my PowerBook G4, but I have no doubt that the price had dropped at least 40% in the past year.
So now the price is down, but I’ve also become accustomed to the speed of the machine, psychologically. One year later, I can anticipate when the wait is coming, whether it’s that extra fraction of a second to get to Camino when it’s running Flash ad banners in three or four of the 12 tabs I’ve got open or it’s the 90 seconds that Illustrator takes to open up. Anticipating the wait actually makes the wait seem longer for me. But with the RAM upgrade, my PB (named Ono-Sendai) no longer waits that extra amount of time, so I get to feel the full mental benefit of that extra RAM.
Sure I could have beeen slightly more productive in the last year if I’d had the RAM in there, but them I would have had a reason to feel like I’ve still got a great machine, even in the face of the latest Intel Chip-Based Macs (ICBMs) with their fancy shmancy Cores and Duos and such.
My iBook lasted from July 2002 to August 2005 or 3 years plus change. At this rate, I’ve got till September 2008 to ride my PB, and I’m gong to make the best of it. RAM upgrade today… perhaps a speedier HD sometime in the future? Going from a 5400 RPM drive to a 7200 RPM drive would give me a great speed boost.
…but in the mean time, adding a Mac Mini to the entertainment center in the living room would be quite nice.
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04.05.06
Posted in Apple, Tech
at 11 am
From Apple – Boot Camp:
Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.
I literally feel sick to my stomach. It was one thing when this was a hack that someone could cobble together, but this is just… ugh.
But maybe I can get approval to run one at work now?
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01.07.06
Posted in Apple
at 10 am
From Mike Industries comes Design a Steve Jobs Movie Poster contest. “The theme of the final Mike Industries iPod Creativity Competition of 2005 is to design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs.”
High-larious! I really like “Byte Me” and “CEO, Interupted”. Some crap entries but some really good one too.
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09.10.05
Posted in Apple, Career, General, Life, Media, Tech, Transport, Web
at 9 am
For the first post of September, we’ll be covering August and the last few weeks with QuickNotes™…
1) I’ve got a new laptop: 15″ PowerBook. Woo Hoo! It’s teh hot! Seriously, switching from the plastic-cased iBook to the aluminium wraped 15″ PB has given me a new appreciation for thermodynamics. (But still the PB is FAST! So much faster than the iBook.)
2) Tiger is okay, but little to write home about. The UI inconsistencies in OS X from the system and iApps perspective is becoming more obvious. But I could be just railing against the fact that part of iChat crashes on a regular basis, just after I switched back to using it instead of Adium because iChat can now do multiple accounts including Jabber accounts.
3) General instability is the call of the day. Some things are craping out way too easily. I’m letting Steve use my iBook while he’s out in Astoria for school, and I’ll be putting Panther on it.
4) Went and saw part of the Woodburn NEDRA electric drag races. Took some video and put together some movies for John Wwayland over at plasmaboy racing.
5) The new iTunes interface is an unecessary change unless it’s carried out to the rest of the iApps. The name for it seems to be “Polished Metal” as opposed to the older (and reviled) “Brushed Metal”. The iPod Nano looks cool but it took me days to find out it was solid-state flash and not hard drive-based. The ROKR iPhone is for SUKRs. Totally crippled and nothing new hardware-wise. Apple can’t build the whole widget, so the widget is a total compromise.
6) Our living rooom television died. Would like to replace it with a flat LCD, but they’re still more money than I want to invest in Home Entertainment. If anyone’s got a recommendation for a $200 to $300 television with *LOTS* of input and output jacks, let me know.
7) I’ve got a freelance project launching in the next could of days. I’ll point to it once it’s got a bit of burn-in time.
8) I’ve been seeing a new testing probe-bot that’s crawling around Contact forms. It’s already hit LazerQuick where we’ve patched it and just last nite it hit my feedback form on OrderSomewhereChaos. Nasty little bugger made me dive back into Perl code that I’ve not touched in 6 or 7 years. The mail is being sent to the (probably compromised) AOL account of “jrubin3456@aol.com”. They’re looking to find tons of spamming reflectors. I’m sure they’ll find *LOTS* of them.
9) Amy and I are off to see the final regular-season game for the Timbers! Mighty Mighty Timbers!
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07.11.03
Posted in Apple, Tech
at 8 am
I took my iBook in to have its hard drive replaced. It wasn’t acting up at the moment, but I had seen two espisodes of clicking/not mounting and didn’t want to leave it with that ongoing problem. So with 7 days left on the 1 yr warranty, I took it in.
I got it back about 5 days later, and lo and behold, my 15GB HD had morphed into a 20GB HD! So the next order of business was obviously to repartition the extra 5GB into a scratch disc.
And by scratch disc I mean a single place for my MP3s…
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12.02.02
Posted in Apple, Tech
at 2 pm
I normally wouldn’t post in the middle ofthe day like this, but i’ve just got to note for the record that adding 512MB to my 128MB makes my iBook very snappy, and me very happy.
Now I’m able to switch back and forth between programs at a normal rate rather than the glacial speed I was at. Switching to Mail or IE when they did not have an exisiting window on the screen was excruciating. Now it’s slightly noticable. Swithcing to the Finder when there are no windows open actually has the default window open so quick I didn’t know it wasn’t already open until I experimented with it.
Finally I feel like I can breathe deeply and work in my digital space. Till now I felt like I was shoe-horned into this. Now it feels much better.
The only “easy” upgrade I could possibly make to this machine internally now would be a faster hard drive, moving from 4200rpm to 5400rpm. But at $250 for the 40GB IBM drive, I think I can wait.
My next upgrade will be Mac OS X.2, aka Jaguar, which I can get with my teacher discount at PSU for just $85.
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11.23.02
Posted in Apple, Tech
at 10 pm
Finally! Apple has come to their senses and are going to release the Titanium Newton G4! Yay! Looks like it will even have a replaceable skin!
EDIT 2007: The old link to www.lindkvist.com/titanium_newton/ now redirects to somewhere else. Damn you changing content!
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07.08.02
Posted in Apple, Tech
at 12 pm
I have been working on my iBook (600 MHz, 128 MB ram, 15GB HD, AirPort) with slow progress being made towards feeling comfortable with it.
I’ve been working in OS X, nearly non-stop. The only time I’ve booted OS 9 was simply to check to see if I could boot OS 9.
It’s been a bit awkward, to say the least. It’s one thing to move to a completely new Operating System. You have the benefit of having everything be differnt, you don’t bring much bagage along.
But *my* switch to X comes as a studder step, a shift in different directions at different levels. I’ve brought along a few necessary tools, DragThing chief among them with it’s keystroke commands for launching apps. Just today I got Fetch installed (Though 4.0’s only a preview release, I’ll have to register if I want to keep it)
The Dock is a little difficult for me to control yet. I’ve thrown it up agains thte left side of the screen mostly because I like having the access on the side of the screen, not the bottom, but if it’s on the right side it covers up the scroll bars of windows.
Beyond that, this is the first time I’ve had a laptop of my own. Sure i’ve had this Compaq from work, but I’ve never done much more than use it as a glorified typewriter for reports with a little bit of HTML development. Now I’m faced with truely bringing the concept of a portable computer into my computing environment.
Since my desk is still covered by my B&W G3, I don’t sit there unless I’m accessing older files directly, so I’ve ended up mostly using the laptop from bed, having my mail and web access siting on my make shift night table.
I’m reading web sites constantly. History, technology, discussions, opinions, all manner of matter has prevaded my mental environment. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing.
Ergonomically, I need to figure out some things. My back is still unhappy with most of my positions, and my right wrist remains in a brace for the tendenitus that I’ve developed over the course of the last few months.
Portland is getting some real rain tonight. It sounds wonderful coming down outside our bedroom window. Perhaps I should set down this digital tool and listen for a bit…
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04.25.99
Posted in Apple, Dreams, Tech
at 10 am
Apr 25 Sun (10 AM)
I’m in some big city, mid-afternoon. I meet a famous movie star who looks like Dustin Hoffman, but it’s not him. He’s registered under the name ‘Tom’ at a large hotel made of white marble. He invites me to the party their having that night. I asked him what time? ‘Whenever’, he replies.
So I’m walking out of the hotel lobby and down the street. I’m wondering ‘Would it be okay to bring Amy to the party too?’
…
I’m one of three childen in a Chinese family. I’m European and Asian. Suddenly I notice that I’m not so much walking as I’m gliding about a foot off the ground.
I think to myself, ‘Well this is interesting.’ I want to go higher and suddenly I’m at the same height as the street lights, the ones that are used over freeways, about 100 meters tall. I think to myself ‘I’ll go higher still’ and I start drifting down, towards the backyard of my Asian parent’s house. The more I think and try to will myself into the sky, the closer to the Earth I go.
I start realizing that I need to be Zen about this: I need to ‘want’ to be off the ground, as opposed to telling myself to fly is a particular direction.
I’m rising off the ground a bit again when a puggy asian friend of my asian parents comes into the backyard, which has a tall wooden fence around it. I don’t want him to see me like this, but there’s nowhere to hide, so I zoom up into the night sky and hover over him. I get a really good view of his bald spot.
I notice that it’s late and I’ve probably missed the party at the hotel.
———————
Those dream sequences were this morning. Yesterday I had a dream that I had this incredible Mac G3 setup, including an unreleased Apple 17″ flat-panel display.
Then I woke up. I was upset that that it was dream. I walked into the living room, and there it was. The entire setup, just like in my dream! The translucent plastics and all. It was mine! I really did have this whole package.
Then I really woke up. [Sigh.]
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03.26.98
Posted in Apple, Career, Media, Tech, Web
at 6 pm
I’m slowly transfering my work machine to be based on MacOS 8. I’ve had it the 2 gig sitting in my machine for quite a while but have been slow to transfer over my preferences and set it as my startup disk. I finally moved my TCP setup over and I’m starting to get Malph re-setup piece by piece.. I know I could just copy over the Preference files, but it’s nice cleaning things out by hand. Though time-consuming to be sure. But damn, it’s _so_ responsive. Of course I haven’t installed all my fonts yet, either… 🙂
Forest Puzzles is looking good. In fact, here’s the URL for it: <http://www.omsi.edu/~rosso/forpuz/> That’s not the final place for it, so don’t bookmark it. However Busytown has reached it’s final destination at: <http://www.omsi.edu/busytown/> which is aliased to a longer more logical pathname as the site structure goes. It’s still got to get through Paramount’s okay (they own the rights to the characters), but it’s looking good.
I’m switching over to Netscape 4.0 as well. I’ve been sticking with 3.0 for a while, because I use the mail client to read my personal e-mail (and Eudora for my business mail). I really feel that Communicator is way overblown. I wish you could install just the parts that you want. For me, it’d be the browser and the mail client. OpenNS 5.0 perhaps?? Maybe I’ll try to find a different e-mail client, though Eudora is such a landmark, it’s hard to think of another one to use. Wait, didn’t Bare Bones come out with one? Time to do some research.
Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space has been a constant soundtrack for my life lately. It’s really a beautiful CD. VW recently used the title track in a commercial. This fits in with the concept that TV commercials are more (avant-garde) musically than commercial radio. Isn’t that sad?
This week shaped up to be pretty active and productive. These are two words that haven’t been part of my vocabulary for a few weeks lately. Winter doldrums? Hopefully I’m looking at an upturn here. I’ve certainly got enough projects that could use some work. And a partner who could use some attention.
<->
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