Collidr

Saving GBs by trashing my unused language packs

2008-03-10T18:36:59Z

Though I think someday I may want to try and pick up French again, I doubt I'll ever really need to read any documents in French or Afrikaans or the myriad of other languages that are installed as part of Leopard. Download Monolingual and run it (I didn't actually install it). It saved me 3.3GBs. Be careful not to select your real language by mistake. Also, it will automatically remove Architectures that aren't what you're running. I don't know whether they're needed by apps that don't run in native intel 64bit code so I unchecked them just to be on the safe side.

Twittering your way through to a Wii

2008-03-07T16:52:50Z

Honestly, I've been slow in adopting many of the 'social networking' sites. I didn't even have a facebook account until I started researching my current position. I'm just on the edge when it comes to my age where some of my friends use all these social networking sites but most of them don't. This is completely off-topic, but like M. Night Shyamalan, I'll get to my original point in the end so stay with me....I recently (finally) picked up a wii by sheer luck at my local Target store. I was walking through looking for your standard home items that we all buy at places like Target when I heard over the loudspeaker: 'Would customer with Wii ticket number 79 please report to the electronics counter?'. I thought: 'What are the odds they still have any left?'. So I swiftly walked over to the electronics section only to be greeted by a security guard with one hand resting on his gun (seriously!??!). Here's how the next 30 seconds went:

Guard: "Are you here for the computer thing?" Me: "You mean the wii? Yes, I am, do they have any left?" Guard: "They have one left" Me: "I'll take it!" StockBoy: "Wow, You're lucky!"

Ever since that moment, I've been a bit obsessed about how to get my hands on another Wii. It was precipitated by the fact that two of my co-workers are trying to get one as well and being the nice person that I am - much to my wife's chagrin - I want to find them one. It has proven to be difficult. I've missed online stock by sheer minutes. These elusive Wiis go on sale on sites like amazon.com and within 7-12 minutes, they're out of stock only to return days later with a similar short-period of availability. Enter: NowInStock.net/Twitter Mashup. The website NowInstock.net has an automated wii tracker page that checks about 30 sites for Wii availability. It also keeps the history of when things have been in stock and when they've been sold out and It's fairly accurate. They do track uber-expensive bundles that go for $600 but also the standard $249 simple console. They also twitter availability from a few key sites for the standard console. So I added Twitter to my Adium contacts, and now I follow NowInStock as one of my Twitter friends and hopefully I'll be able to catch one of those $249 in stock alerts and make some friends happy. Ahhh online technology is so sweet sometimes.

MacBook Pro refresh - Still no external multi-touch trackpad

2008-02-27T04:06:39Z

Apple has released/refreshed/updated something new every tuesday of this month. Today they refreshed their MacBook Pro line adding a multi-touch trackpad 'ala Macbook Air. They're now available with up to 2.6Ghz Penryn chips and 7200RPM drives (though you lose 50GB from the top HD offering). Guess my 3 month old laptop is now officially obsolete... argh! The one thing that irks me about all the multi-touch hoopla is that they haven't come out (or won't come out) with an external version of the trackpad. I have used an external wacom tablet as my mouse for over 4 years now. It has made quite a difference in my wrists as I was well underway to having repetitive stress injuries from so much copying, pasting and clicking. I would love an external version of the trackpad. In the meantime, I'll have to settle for something like this:

YAOOS - Yet Another Online Operating System

2008-02-23T03:33:26Z

Ever since Google launched iGoogle and Google Docs, there's been an onslaught of companies vying to be the one that's going to house your web 'desktop' or even a full-fledged online Operating System. I think the concept of an online operating systems is a sound one but there will be some major privacy issues that will need to be addressed and some early stage hackers who will get around security settings that will need to be thwarted but eventually the PC and online space will meld completely in such a way that all you'll need to work anymore is a fast enough internet connection to render graphics and powerful enough processor to handle any client-side requirements. So if you're unlike me and all you need is e-mail, an office-like suite and a browser, these online operating systems are made just for you. Google has gone a long way with their online Apps and I have plenty of friends who now store very little except movies, music and pictures locally on their laptops/desktops. Even some store all their pictures on Flickr or Zooomr and only use their local copies as a backup. Why not, if it's just $24.95/yr for unlimited storage, upload/downloads and permanent archiving of your images? YouTube is still a long ways away from being able to store video in qualities good enough that would make me happy when I want to see my home movies shot on my HD Handycam (that I want, but don't own yet) and viewed on my AppleTV (that I want, but haven't purchased yet) on my 42" Plasma TV (hey at least I got that one, though I want a bigger one...shut up!). I do believe they'll one day get there and adopt a similar model to Flickr but with video unless Flickr beats them to it. Wait, isn't Vimeo working on that already? It's too hard to keep track these days. There are a slew of online sites that will store your music files for you and allow you to play them anywhere online. Shameless Plug: Qloud makes an awesome app that allows you to share your music with your social network and play it online. No, it doesn't upload anything and it's not sharing actual music media. In any case, here's a screen shot of two of the latest ones that looks fairly decent: CloudO - checkout the guided tour too, the presenter has the most interesting accent with a lisp. They claim you can change the look-n-feel so it's more familiar to your current OS (Windows, OS X, insert favorite flavor of linux here). And Xcerion - Screen shots look interesting. Still waiting for my alpha and beta accounts on both and it's been over 24 hours.

CloudO Xcerion Some others:

EyeOS - kind of like iGoogle widgets
YouOS - Doesn't even really seem usable. Their using bitty browser which is like picture-in-picture for your browser...

Leopard 10.5.2 - late updater may be a good thing

2008-02-21T15:15:19Z

Whenever big OS updates come out: microsoft, linux, or OS X; I tend to wait a few days or weeks until more people post about problems they're having with them because inevitably there's always something that was billed as a fix that causes new problems. Leopard Graphics Updates does a de-rez on external displays is a perfect example of why I like to wait. Nice reference to Tron in the title too. In the meantime, the only related problem I usually have is that if my browser is on my external monitor, my auto-suggestion pulldowns sometimes don't show up on the same screen. It's difficult to explain and I don't have my digital camera with me to show you a pic of it so I photoshopped two separate screen shots to show you what it would look like. It's a minor annoyance for now but I think I'll wait until the graphics update has it's own update.

Click for full size image

Update: I was notified by a friend that the graphics update is in addition to 10.5.2 so it wouldn't be updated unless I specifically select it.

My plugin is better than yours

2008-02-20T21:18:39Z

The plethora of plugin type apps that are available for OS X is astounding. Latest on my list of cool things on OS X are QuickLook Plugins. Microsoft should take note of something that is superbly useful, clean and pluggable. Not that MS has a history of making things easy... but yet another thing in a long list of things that make it easier to make that decision to switch. For the uninitiated, QuickLook is the ability to preview files on your Mac without actually opening them in an application by simply selecting the file and hitting your space bar. It's very much like lightbox for your computer. It works well or things like text files, mp3s, image files and desktop publishing files if you have a desktop publishing suite installed. If you've never installed any QuickLook plugins. You'll need to create a directory for your account in ~/Library named QuickLook. Want to preview what's in that ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt's SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary file you just downloaded without actually unzipping it? Download and Install BetterZip. Read about it here.

BetterZip QuickLook Plugin I write code and read other people's code. Sometimes I don't want to wait for my IDE to load to see what's in a file. I can preview it now with QLColorCode Plugin. It has fairly simple syntax highliting but it's sufficient that it's easy to see functions, variables, comments and text.

QLColorCode Plugin There are a few more I could mention but you get the basic idea. Check out a repository of plugins here.

Engadget….get with the program!

2008-02-20T15:04:05Z

For all that Engadget purports to be: Tech Savvy, In the Know, Geeky, entrenched in the industry, etc. etc. Their image gallery really blows. Don't know what I'm talking about? Check out their latest user contributed image gallery for Macbook Pro Mock-ups You'd think a really tech savvy blog wouldn't have an image gallery that goes to a new page every time you click on an image. I guess technically to display a new advertisement at the top of the page, you'd need to go to a new page. But I'm sure someone versed in javascript could setup a nice gallery that changes the inner image and also displays a new ad at the top. This last thought came to me only after I saw a ton of whitespace around the images and then realized that adblock was blocking all those wonderful money making ads that make the internet continue to grow. Adblock is a wonderful firefox plugin for people like me who are more interested in the content of a page than whether I should act now and start my free IRS tax return at TaxAct while viewing images of a laptop. Engadget, if only you were as savvy as the items you report on you would tag your images and show related ads based on those tags. Then again, that would probably defeat the purpose of said tax ad in the first place. Click on the image to the left to see a lightboxe'd image. 'nuff said.

PC to Mac to PC to Mac again

2008-02-18T04:37:41Z

Back in my college days, anyone outside of Computer Science or Engineering was either using Microsoft Windows 3.11 or Mac OS System 7. Neither could handle multi-tasking very well and Linux was around but graphically it was not aesthetically pleasing. I found an amazing OS: NeXT and I used it any chance I got. I'd open one window for programming, one window for compiling, one for downloading music from bulleting board systems (hey, I could barely pay for lunch much less expensive CDs of music), a few for talk (precursor to IM) and multiple windows for editing input files, running the compiled programs and just for kicks, a gopher window for research (http browsers were in their infancy). People around me were wowed by all this multi-tasking and wondered how I did it all. I've always been one of those people that uses their computer to the max of its abilities and overload it with multiple tasks because when it comes to computers, I'm impatient. When the Powerbook G4 Titanium and OS X were released, they had that WOW factor I had been searching for since I left college and could not use a $25,000 computer running an OS only available on that hardware platform. OS X has its roots in NeXT so clearly there was some form of nostalgia that caught me as soon as I saw it. So in 2003 after wrestling with how I could part with $2400 for an Apple laptop when I could get a comparable Intel-based one for much, much less, I took the plunge with the latest Steve Jobs item to drool for: the G4 aluminum. It was shweet! But my excitement was short-lived.

NeXT Step Having no steady full-time job back then, I depended on web design and programming sites in PHP to pay the bills. Nobody was looking for a mid-level operations manager who could manage servers, switches, telco lines and people so I had to do something! My programs of choice were Macromedia DreamWeaver and PHPEdit. The former was available for OS X, the latter only as a windows program. I was bummed I couldn't use PHPEdit but at least DreamWeaver was available and I plopped down the $120 to get me designing on my shiny new laptop. Thus ended my short lived love-affair with OS X. DreamWeaver had some serious problems displaying fonts in 'design' mode but it only happened to some people on some laptops. I contacted Macromedia about it and their support team said they didn't know how to fix the problem, nor were they planning on assigning resources to try and fix it. I tried to get Apple to send me a new laptop but they said it was a software problem and it had nothing to do with the hardware even though I tried to convince them that since it only happens on some laptops, it must be a hardware problem. They didn't bite. I wonder why?!? I had no choice but to CraigsList it and purchase another intel-based win laptop that my wife later inherited from me and continued to use a windoze base laptop when I finally got a full-time job later on. I had previously convinced my wife to make the switch because my old apple replacement win laptop was finally dying. She wasn't too keen on the idea because she's not the computer wizard I am but since it was a gift from me, she couldn't really say no. She hated it in the beginning because everything was different but after a few weeks of showing her how to do things on the Mac, she loved it. This time, I spent a few months downloading trial versions of all the software I thought I would need to make sure I could switch with a minimum amount of hassle. Late last year when I started at a new position at a new company, I decided it was time to try again. There are some things I miss on the PC and I'll probably write about them late on but I haven't looked back.