Niggy Tardust
Posted: Oct 30, 2007
The new Saul Williams album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust is out November 1st, and Saul’s decided to go the In Rainbows route.
Trent Reznor-produced, Alan Moulder-engineered and available direct from the artist without money going to the record companies? Yes please. Consider me pre-ordered.
My quick Leopard review
Posted: Oct 30, 2007
Now that I’ve had a few days to play with it, I’d have to go with 80% completely awesome versus 20% what the fuck were they thinking?
Time Machine – awesome idea (I’ll like it better if I can ever get it to back up more than 14k), Quick Look – awesome, Spaces – awesome, new iChat – awesome.
But Finder, the Dock and the shitty new folder icons—you’re totally in the 20% figure. I thought the idea was that when you upgraded something you were supposed to make it better, not suck way harder than it already did? Seriously, just take the Dock out back and shoot it already willya?
One the whole it’s gonna be worth the upgrade, but mostly because of the stuff people like Panic and Wil Shipley will do with the new developer goodies, I reckon.
Still, could have been worse (hello Vista).
Classic
Posted: Oct 25, 2007
Yesterday we took Hank to get checked out by the vet. Seeing as we picked him up after spending almost week in the shelter we were worried that he may have been left to roam the streets because he had heartworms or some other nasties.
He does have a bit of a respitory infection, but everything else checked out fine. His joints are fine, he’s free of heartworms, his teeth and gums are good and he’s not overweight.
Turns out he’s happiest when I work on the couch and he flops down in front of VH1 Classic.
He’s a ridiculously mellow, healthy, temporarily snotty pooch who loves classic rock. Rad.
This concludes our Hank programming on partiallyblind.com for the forseeable. I’ve already gone into “new dad” mode – no point in dragging it onto here too. There’ll most likely be good few pictures on my Flickr stream though.
Hello Hank
Posted: Oct 22, 2007
I’ve been a huge movie nerd for as long as I can remember, and for pretty much the same amount of time, I’ve wanted to own a basset hound.
I spent a good few hours this past weekend looking at various local pet adoption websites in the hopes of finding a four-legged critter to bring home. Lots of awww-ing at some ridiculously cute dogs later, I eventually stumbled upon a listing from the Rocky Mount Animal Control centre for a sweet little 2 year old basset who goes by the name of Movie.
Basset hounds + movies. It’s like fate. Sweet, slobbery, stinky fate.
I exchanged a few emails with them this morning and he was still available, so Samara left work early and we drove over to Rocky Mount to meet him and hopefully bring him home with us.
Movie was just the name they gave him to list him, but that’s a little silly and he totally doesn’t answer to it. He seems to be real happy with Hank, so Hank he shall be from now on.
I’ve bored family and friends alike with my dreams of owning an old pickup truck and driving around town with my hound while we both howl away to Johnny Cash records, so I’m ridiculously excited right now.
Say hello to my little friend. Come on, Hank, sing that song.
There’s a few more pictures on Flickr if you’re interested.
Layer Tennis
Posted: Oct 19, 2007
Today’s Layer Tennis match is a surefire winner—pitching bearded genius Chris Glass against my man Naz Hamid.
Kick his ass, Naz!
Update: Holy crap, Glass knocked it clean out of the park. Outstanding work, gentlemen. Well played.
The Curious Incident of the Wrong Power Supply From Apple
Posted: Oct 17, 2007
So yesterday I had an interesting experience with my three year old 15” PowerBook that I’d like to share with y’all. Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink or two…
A couple of weeks ago I had a client meeting, so I took my PowerBook into their office and powered it up like I normally would. When it was almost booted into OS X the laptop locked up to the point where the only way I could shut it down was to remove the power lead and take out the battery.
When the laptop was plugged back in and I’d replaced the battery the laptop booted just fine, only once it was up and running I noticed that the battery display now showed me that there wasn’t a battery present at all—nothing but the big black X in the menu bar where the percentage meter usually is.
Now, my PowerBook is three years old so I’m used to the battery life being shot—I’ve been considering myself lucky if I could get an hour out of it on battery power for the last few months. An hour is one thing, but nothing at all without being plugged into a power outlet? That’s doesn’t make for a very portable portable if you ask me. Despite it’s new desktop-bound status I could still use it just fine, so I figured that I’d wait til the end of the month and buy a new replacement battery and carry on as usual.
The Distinct Lack of Power
Monday night I shut down my laptop when I went to bed, but on Tuesday morning when I tried to boot it I got nothing at all. The green light on my power cord was lit to show that the machine was getting power, but pressing the button to turn it on got me nowhere.
I unplugged it, removed the battery and reseated it, then tried again. Nothing. I had mostly recent backups for everything I was working on but I still didn’t want the hassle of a dead laptop and, lovely as my wife’s new MacBook is, it’s not mine so I couldn’t very well steal it til I bought a replacement machine.
I tried again and again with all the troubleshooting techniques I knew of and no dice, til randomly I got the thing to boot after about six hours of doing the same thing over and over. I used our Apple ProCare to book a chat with a Genius at our local Apple Store so they could take a look at it, then got back on with my day til my appointment time rolled around.
The Genius Tells Me Something Interesting
So we go talk to the Genius (hi Barry!) and he repeats all the same stuff as I’ve spent the day doing, tries booting the laptop with my power adapter and the store power adapter and testing the results.
Turns out that when he uses my power adapter – the one supplied by Apple when I bought my laptop back in London – it booted once out of the four times he tried, but with the store adapter it went four for four.
Hmmm.
He tells us that we might need to replace my power adapter too, as well as the battery, but seeing as we have my wife’s old iBook sitting around we ask him if we can just use the adapter from that for now?
He tells us how some iBook power adapters aren’t powerful enough to drive my PowerBook and charge the battery as they’re rated at 45W – not the 65W that mine is and points it out by showing us the marking on mine where it clearly reads 45W and not 65W like it apparently should have.
Oops.
The power adapter supplied by Apple for my machine was never powerful enough to be used with my machine in the first place!
I’ve been using my laptop pretty much every single day since I bought it with a power supply that, according to the Genius, was dangerous. Awesome. Is the distinct lack of power the reason why my laptop hard-drive died suddenly a few months after I bought it? It is the reason why the battery life has completely sucked for three years?
Right now I’m using the iBook’s 65W power adapter and my new battery and the laptop is behaving better than it has in a long time, but come on! This is the sort of shit you’d expect from Dell or Sony, but Apple?
Steve, I’m disappointed. I’ll glady accept a free iPhone if you want to make it up to me though…
Al Gore for President
Posted: Oct 15, 2007
It’s Blog Action Day so today’s post is about the environment.
There’s really no escaping America’s influence on the modern world.
Sometimes that’s no bad thing, but since 2000 when Al Gore’s Presidential election victory was dubiously taken from him at the last post, America has had a rather different effect on the world at large than it may have had with Gore at the helm.
Gore’s resumé up to this point, as pointed out by The Nation’s John Nichols, reads like no-one else’s currently in the race for the Presidency:
This is how Al Gore’s resumé reads as of this morning:
Son of a great senator.
Harvard graduate, with honors.
Vietnam veteran.
Award-winning investigative journalist.
Congressman.
Senator.
Vice President.
Winner of the popular vote for President of the United States.
Best-selling author.
Environmental activist.
Academy Award winner.
And, now, Nobel Peace Prize winner-he shares the prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
As resumés go, that is one for the top of the pile.
But it begs the question: Shouldn’t a man who has gotten this far be thinking about how to finish the journey?
And isn’t the last stop the Oval Office?
I know he’s said time and time again that he didn’t intent to run for President again, but seriously, after this latest honor who else is more qualified to replace Bush and repair the damage he’s done?
There’s never been a better hope for getting a man elected who could actually do something concrete about the environmental issues facing all of us, rather than one who’d willfully ignore and distort scientific data presented to him.
The person who inherits the country Bush will be leaving behind will have an unenviable task, to be sure, but to have a President who not only understands the global nature of this crisis and not just one who focuses on America’s interests to the exlusion of all else, so much good could be done to repair the USA’s current global image.
America, and the rest of the world, needs a leader who can take on a task like helping repair the damage done to our planet over the preceding years, and who else would be better qualified to do the job?
Al, I may not be able to vote for you if you do run, but I’m hoping that you’re considering it. The world my future children would inherit will surely be a better place if you do.
iPhoto 7.1 Launch Crash Tip
Posted: Oct 05, 2007
So after I ran the latest update to iPhoto I had a problem where the program would open but almost immediately crash regardless of whether I tried to use it or just left it alone.
Fixing it turned out to be a depressing game of trawling the iPhoto support forums and a whole lot of trial and error, so I’m writing this to spare someone else the stress of finding a fix for it should they have the same issues.
The Fix
First off, back up your iPhoto database which will be found in the Pictures folder in your home folder. I can’t stress this enough-back up your iPhoto database! The last thing you want to do is risk losing all of your photos.
Right click on your iPhoto library (or press Control and click for the mouseless amongst you) and select the ‘Show Package Contents’ option.
Delete the files named Thumb32Segment.data, Thumb64Segment.data and ThumbJPGSegment.data [1].
Close the Finder window and hold down the Command + Option (Alt) keys and launch iPhoto – it should present you with the ‘Rebuild Photo Library’ screen below:
Check all of the boxes and let it run through each task. If your Mac is anything like mine this will take a while.
Hopefully after doing this you should be able to open iPhoto again without it continually crashing on you. As with any software troubleshooting fix your mileage may vary, but hopefully it’ll help someone else out there.
1. This step shouldn’t be necessary considering you rebuild everything when you run the rebuild command, but for whatever reason I still had the issue until I deleted these files first.
WebKit Now Supports Downloadable Fonts
Posted: Oct 04, 2007
WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another. This article on A List Apart describes the feature in detail. All of the examples linked to in that article work in WebKit now.
Via John Gruber.
In Rainbows
Posted: Oct 01, 2007
Radiohead release their long-awaited 7th album titled ‘In Rainbows’ on October 10th, and interestingly, they’ve chosen to release it without a fixed price as a download through inrainbows.com.
The price I chose? 10 quid, plus the obligatory 45 pence fee.
Well worth every penny, even if the checkout process did fall over from all the traffic the first four times I tried to buy it.
