I had a long post in the making about my experiences with Android and why I did the switch. But in the end, it’s all tweetable. Here’s the two graphics I made for it I didn’t want to throw out along with the blabber

Battery icon © Lapo Calamandrei.

I’ve raved about Dropbox a couple of times in the past.

I’ve recently needed to create some new poses of Dister, our project mascot. I also needed to add a glass full of juice into the scene and suddenly my PC wasn’t beefy enough to do render iterations fast enough to get the materials right in a reasonable time. I have a Macbook Pro that’s mostly just idling so I looked at the renderfarm scripts that people have written for Blender, but all of them just require too much configuration that’s not worth it unless you need to render a long animation. People are probably not lazy enough.

I ended up writing this horrible script that watches a folder for blender project files, and as soon as one shows up, it unleashes blender on it, renders a still and deletes the project file. So the workflow is simply to copy a .blend over to a local directory. As Dropbox syncs this folder across all my machines, I immediately have the render available on all my boxes. Of course those machines don’t have to belong to you if you can convince your friends to run the script. Loop’s 8core Mac Pro really screams I must add

The script is really a joke, but it may inspire someone to create something as easy to use.

I’ve had a very expensive evening yesterday. My macbook pro locked up (well dead samba shares stalled Finder) and Linda was impatient to watch a DVD, so I pushed the power button for 5 seconds like I do from time to time. That was the last time the machine booted.

I have so much junk harware, but nooo, the fastest machine has to kick the bucket. I spent like an hour trying to find a purchase proof. Epic Fail.

After some googling it looks like the most expensive bit is hosed, the whole logic board. And since the repair is going to cost a like a US mbp, I may just use it as a table for 4 years until some broken screen machines show up on ebay. He died too young. I will miss him.

Update! Luckily thanks to the remaining week of my world-wide guarantee, the nice folks at MacServis have replaced the faulty logic board and I have a breathing machine again.

I’ve been struggling to get Linux installed on my macbook pro running 10.4. OpenSUSE installed fine, but rEFIt wouldn’t boot it from either USB or Firewire drive. So I shrunk my HFS+ partition using diskutil patched by the expired beta of Apple Bootcamp. Installed openSUSE, with the rescueCD workaround to get MBR updated and booted. Thinking I am done I ejected the DVD, but then I realized I’ll probably need something installed without grabbing it off the net, I put it back in. Well I though I have, but instead I put in the damn PowerPC DVDRW I failed with on the iMac. It is cursed. Like seriously cursed.

The mac wouldn’t boot. If I let it boot, it showed the rEFIt logo and spin the drive and that’s it. Woudln’t even dim the screen if I closed it. Took about 10seconds holding the power button to actually shut down. I couldn’t eject it holding eject button. It was just a grey screen waiting for the drive before I could do anything useful. Time to disassemble, I thought. Luckily I still had my miniscule Phillips and Torx screwdrivers from my PSP experiments.

So I opened the machine up and disconnected the drive. Booted to OSX. Removed rEFIt. Power down. Attached connector. Booted to OSX. System info shows that no drive connected. Powered off. Made sure the connector is really attached properly. Rebooted. No drive. Wha? Rebooted using the option key to ‘Windows’ (insert MS&Novell deal jokes here). No CD drive under Linux either. Wow. That DVD is really damn cursed. It makes whole drives disappear. Turned off and continued disassembly. Finally got the DVD out and put the machine back together.

How does that make me feel about slot loading drives, Apple? Gah. Now I need to find a way to ritually destroy the damned DVDRW. Suggestions welcome.

Dear Free-software-loving macheads!

If you want some decent app icons for your Free apps, please patch up Brion’s icns GIMP plugin to properly save to the mac icon format.

Love.

Dear lazyweb,
do you have a working xorg.conf for an imac g4 + external VGA xinerama setup?

Yours desperate

OS X is too much of a hog to keep it running on my ‘lamp’ iMac and I figured the hardware is old enough for even PPC Linux to install painlessly. Sadly we don’t have live CDs for PPC and I haven’t been able to burn a DVD-RW that the imac would read, so I went and grabbed Gutsy. Booted right into the native res, and in less than an hour I had refreshed the life of a dying machine. I am still impressed by ubuntu installation. It’s precisely how it’s supposed to be done for a desktop machine.

Few more years and I’ll even have GL running

While I can’t disagree with reasoning why this is bad, I also find it kinda neat that Apple did that in a world full of fake political correctness.

Graphic on the left © Apple, Inc. Inappropriate use of the Windows logo on the right, me.

Having a bluescreen is actually just as recognizable as using the windows logo, which they likely can’t use due to trademark (just like us). The association is just as strong, the metaphor works (Well, if it was the CIFS protocol that was the important bit and not the fact it’s a remote share). BSOD *is* Windows, just like bucket of mayo and a few chips is Belgium even if there’s plenty of countries that consume more of each.

This is the sort of groundbreaking application that I’d love to see us shipping by default in future. Most comfortable viewing of videocasts, easy searches on youtube or even your local drive. It tops iTunes by a large margin. Sadly the mac client is tons more polished than the Linux one.

You may know it under its former name, Democracy player. It has gotten a very nice face lift recently, including the app icon from John Hicks. Too bad the few tango icons are horribly broken. I smell Adobe Illustrator involved.

Absolute jealousy. Looks like one of the AVCHD cams isn’t a stupid buy anymore. We’ll see how long the transcoding takes though.