I left work a little early yesterday to go get a haircut, it went quick, so I stopped at Best Buy. After discovering that I needed stereo sound and that I'd have to hack my Tiger 10.4 installation to get A2DP support for my MotoROKR S9 headphones, I thought I'd browse around and see if I could save a trip up "north" to the Apple store on a future journey to upgrade to Leopard 10.5.
I ended up looking for a bluetooth mouse as well as other things... Time Vault, Airport Extreme, external hard drive enclosure with card reader, etc... and found them all. I also found a couple of sticks of DDR 2700 SODIMM for $55... a significant discount from the usual rapage that Best Buy provides on memory. I didn't have money for that, but I'd like to upgrade my PowerBook.
Anyway, I bought a Microsoft Notebook Mouse for Mac, since my old "notebook" mouse got destroyed by my kids. It is essentially the same as the Microsoft Notebook Mouse 5000, but packaged differently so that Mac users think it is special. I'd have normally just gotten which ever I saw first, but the one I saw was discounted for being open. Normally the mice are $50, but this one was $37-something, a weak discount, except that the last sale price was $39.99, so it was more like a $12 discount. I decided that had real value and that I'd go with that. It comes with a nice little pouch too.
Fortunately the AAA batteries hadn't been run down completely, since they were already in the mouse. I will need to download some software from Microsoft to get the "superior" functionality. Too bad I can't hook my laptop to the Internet at work. Also too bad I didn't pick up Leopard... Bah.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Bluetooth Headphones
So, I'm thinking of a way to blow a few dollars... I mean enhance my productivity at work. I also wanted to get headphones that don't make me look like a martian, and will make me able to listen to music at work and walk away from my desk without a big disconnection exercise. Monday, I picked up the browser and searched up the Motorola ROKR S9. Normally a $150 and up purchase, I find them for $37.
Sold... but $17 for shipping? Oh well... might as well bump it up to Next Day Air, and get a day of working out with them. Oh... I forgot my phone at *work*! So, I get home, open the box... the packaging looked like OEM knockoffs, but they seem to work okay. I was solo on Tuesday night, so I didn't get a chance to test them out with anything.
Wednesday morning, I throw them on my wife's head, and explain that there are no wires... but I get them all tangled in her hair... nice. I don't know if she understood that they'd work with her *phone* because she asked me about having a "burner" for getting music off of some CDs.
Anyway, I wore my set to the gym, not listening to anything but the music that was already playing, but getting a feel for comfort. They're great. I love them. I got to work, and hooked them up to my phone... after discovering how to choose between, being a crappy phone headset and stereo headphones, they worked great... on the sample songs that I had on the phone.
Next step, since I haven't ripped any tunes to put on my phone with Windows Media Player is to try using my PowerBook. I chose a headset profile, but they aren't supported. Short story... after several tries, I couldn't get them working. So, I turned to the Internet, and came across this article: Get a Bluetooth Headset Working with a PowerBook.
Goodness, I need a firmware update? Oh, and the update from Apple apparently doesn't actually install anything, it just puts the files on your system for you to run later. Sigh... I'd download the file, but I don't have my PowerBook hooked up to the Internet at work. I guess if I had a flash drive, I could move it from my work machine... jeez, this is hard.
And so ends a blog post at work, when I should actually be working... Thanks for listening.
Sold... but $17 for shipping? Oh well... might as well bump it up to Next Day Air, and get a day of working out with them. Oh... I forgot my phone at *work*! So, I get home, open the box... the packaging looked like OEM knockoffs, but they seem to work okay. I was solo on Tuesday night, so I didn't get a chance to test them out with anything.
Wednesday morning, I throw them on my wife's head, and explain that there are no wires... but I get them all tangled in her hair... nice. I don't know if she understood that they'd work with her *phone* because she asked me about having a "burner" for getting music off of some CDs.
Anyway, I wore my set to the gym, not listening to anything but the music that was already playing, but getting a feel for comfort. They're great. I love them. I got to work, and hooked them up to my phone... after discovering how to choose between, being a crappy phone headset and stereo headphones, they worked great... on the sample songs that I had on the phone.
Next step, since I haven't ripped any tunes to put on my phone with Windows Media Player is to try using my PowerBook. I chose a headset profile, but they aren't supported. Short story... after several tries, I couldn't get them working. So, I turned to the Internet, and came across this article: Get a Bluetooth Headset Working with a PowerBook.
Goodness, I need a firmware update? Oh, and the update from Apple apparently doesn't actually install anything, it just puts the files on your system for you to run later. Sigh... I'd download the file, but I don't have my PowerBook hooked up to the Internet at work. I guess if I had a flash drive, I could move it from my work machine... jeez, this is hard.
And so ends a blog post at work, when I should actually be working... Thanks for listening.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Moving my FastMail Photo Gallery to Flickr
I took some pictures on a weekend trip to Ohio to see my Mom. I had them stored on my file space on FastMail, but that account is expiring, and I wanted to move them to Flickr. The e-mail upload function works really well so far, let's see how it handles 50 pictures.
If this works out, I might have to just change back to FastMail... and move my domain name
back... and pay... Ugh... who knows. For now, this will work.
Heh, they all got returned... because the attatchment size limit at *Yahoo!* is 20 MB... Sigh.
Oh well, someone marked a picture of my sister-in-law as a favorite, according to the little Yahoo! Go applet on my phone. I don't know who it is, but I'll try to look up their Yahoo! ID when I get a chance. I did link Flickr to my Facebook account, so maybe it is someone I know.
If this works out, I might have to just change back to FastMail... and move my domain name
back... and pay... Ugh... who knows. For now, this will work.
Heh, they all got returned... because the attatchment size limit at *Yahoo!* is 20 MB... Sigh.
Oh well, someone marked a picture of my sister-in-law as a favorite, according to the little Yahoo! Go applet on my phone. I don't know who it is, but I'll try to look up their Yahoo! ID when I get a chance. I did link Flickr to my Facebook account, so maybe it is someone I know.
Jaunty Jackalope
WTF? Ubuntu's new code name for the next release is Jaunty Jackalope. I thought a Jackalope was when you carved a face into a cantaloupe, like, on Halloween. Oh well. These guys continue to push hard, but still replicate effort done by others already. Hopefully the pragmatic approach will at least get Linux out of that 1% domain into mainstream use.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Catching up... some more.
Facebook is awesome, if only a reminder that I need to blog more... I keep getting little reminders of my past with people that sign on. We're really social creatures...
Anyway, it's 4:00 AM, and Holly is going to go to the gym early, since she's got a full day, and needs to be up north by 8:00 AM. I'd really love to ditch, but I'm going to just wait for the 5:30 arrival of the baby sitter and then go catch up.
I'm using my PowerBook, and I really have to comment on the keyboard. It is very nice to type on, and the backlit keys are awesome. I recently moved the "computer table" back in to the "loft" area, from being in the spare bedroom. The kids were always going in there and wrecking stuff, so I figured I might as well leave it out in the open. I've had my traditional folding table back for a while, but I finally got around to setting that up. I'll probably just use the spare bedroom for sensitive hardware tinkering and storage. We'll see.
I pulled the Airport Extreme back out. Mine is the teardrop model with wireless G and a modem. Seems to be working fine. I was going to ditch my Mac stuff (again) and send the Powerbook and Airport base station to my Mom in Ohio. She has a PowerMac G4 400 MHz box that seems to work fine. However, I'm really wanting to give Leopard and Time Vault a go, so maybe I'll just stick this out and then keep the hardware as a machine for my wife/kids... again, we'll just have to see.
Man, I'm really writing a lot. I need to just do it more often instead of writing huge blog posts. It'd probably involve writing on lunch breaks at work... speaking of which. I've officially transitioned into an Application Support role at my current client. It's a good move for me, since I hated doing document control so much. But, I've got a meeting with someone about doing some "old" work today. Bleh. Supposedly it is just perodic metrics, but I have a feeling I won't be happy about it... real... positive... attitude.
Speaking of positive attitude, the Linux Haters Blog is really sucking these days. It used to have really insightful posts about things that suck in Linux, but really could be improved if someone got overthemselves and stepped up to the plate and fixed it. Now it's just random stuff that sucks, and not nearly frequently enough. Eh, well, I got my Mac back out, and I'm happy, LOL.
My 2.5 year-old son is ready for potty training. He identifies when he has gone, and he's used the potty once a while back to pee. I think I blogged about that, so I can't hide how lazy we've been as parents. Our M-W sitter keeps asking when we're going to start. This weekend, we bought a seat cover that attaches to the hinges and tried it out... didn't fit. Grr... after a modification and some finagling I got it on upstairs, and I think we'll be able to repeat the affair for a second round with the downstairs toilet. Yesterday, he watched me go, and I think he may be tallk enough to stand on the floor and use the standard toilet. That'd be nice. He'll still need a stool to wash his hands though.
Speaking of hand washing... (boy these cheesy transitions are getting... well... cheesy) I nearly washed my hands of Linux, twice. My media center got a wipe of MythDora and an install of Vista Media Center again, but before I could finish, Julie got a hold of the power button and power cycled the installation into oblivion. Nice. I don't know... I might just buy a freaking TiVo upgrade. Our series 1 won't get an upgrade to support the 2009 digital transition, and the "offer" of transferring our lifetime subscription for the standard price of $299 and a refurbished unit for $99 bucks is pretty easy to reject, but I'm missing shows now. It might just be time to bite the bullet and put the media center project on hiatus.
So, this linux abandonment thing. I had Vista installed, I wiped for Linux... then reinstalled Vista, then reinstalled Fedora again. Fedora installs are quick, since I have a Live USB key. The updates take a long time though, and I really should invest in a local repository that rsyncs to get the installs from a mirror and serves them up over PXE. I did get ClarkConnect up and running though (and then went back to the Airport, so that tells you something right there) and got a PXE boot and remote installation going. It was cool, but pointless, I like burning media, and I like doing installs off of flash media.
Well, that's all for now, more to write, but Holly says I need to vacuum up the cereal her son spilled on her watch before the sitter gets here. Scott is up. Life is grand. Happy Monday.
Anyway, it's 4:00 AM, and Holly is going to go to the gym early, since she's got a full day, and needs to be up north by 8:00 AM. I'd really love to ditch, but I'm going to just wait for the 5:30 arrival of the baby sitter and then go catch up.
I'm using my PowerBook, and I really have to comment on the keyboard. It is very nice to type on, and the backlit keys are awesome. I recently moved the "computer table" back in to the "loft" area, from being in the spare bedroom. The kids were always going in there and wrecking stuff, so I figured I might as well leave it out in the open. I've had my traditional folding table back for a while, but I finally got around to setting that up. I'll probably just use the spare bedroom for sensitive hardware tinkering and storage. We'll see.
I pulled the Airport Extreme back out. Mine is the teardrop model with wireless G and a modem. Seems to be working fine. I was going to ditch my Mac stuff (again) and send the Powerbook and Airport base station to my Mom in Ohio. She has a PowerMac G4 400 MHz box that seems to work fine. However, I'm really wanting to give Leopard and Time Vault a go, so maybe I'll just stick this out and then keep the hardware as a machine for my wife/kids... again, we'll just have to see.
Man, I'm really writing a lot. I need to just do it more often instead of writing huge blog posts. It'd probably involve writing on lunch breaks at work... speaking of which. I've officially transitioned into an Application Support role at my current client. It's a good move for me, since I hated doing document control so much. But, I've got a meeting with someone about doing some "old" work today. Bleh. Supposedly it is just perodic metrics, but I have a feeling I won't be happy about it... real... positive... attitude.
Speaking of positive attitude, the Linux Haters Blog is really sucking these days. It used to have really insightful posts about things that suck in Linux, but really could be improved if someone got overthemselves and stepped up to the plate and fixed it. Now it's just random stuff that sucks, and not nearly frequently enough. Eh, well, I got my Mac back out, and I'm happy, LOL.
My 2.5 year-old son is ready for potty training. He identifies when he has gone, and he's used the potty once a while back to pee. I think I blogged about that, so I can't hide how lazy we've been as parents. Our M-W sitter keeps asking when we're going to start. This weekend, we bought a seat cover that attaches to the hinges and tried it out... didn't fit. Grr... after a modification and some finagling I got it on upstairs, and I think we'll be able to repeat the affair for a second round with the downstairs toilet. Yesterday, he watched me go, and I think he may be tallk enough to stand on the floor and use the standard toilet. That'd be nice. He'll still need a stool to wash his hands though.
Speaking of hand washing... (boy these cheesy transitions are getting... well... cheesy) I nearly washed my hands of Linux, twice. My media center got a wipe of MythDora and an install of Vista Media Center again, but before I could finish, Julie got a hold of the power button and power cycled the installation into oblivion. Nice. I don't know... I might just buy a freaking TiVo upgrade. Our series 1 won't get an upgrade to support the 2009 digital transition, and the "offer" of transferring our lifetime subscription for the standard price of $299 and a refurbished unit for $99 bucks is pretty easy to reject, but I'm missing shows now. It might just be time to bite the bullet and put the media center project on hiatus.
So, this linux abandonment thing. I had Vista installed, I wiped for Linux... then reinstalled Vista, then reinstalled Fedora again. Fedora installs are quick, since I have a Live USB key. The updates take a long time though, and I really should invest in a local repository that rsyncs to get the installs from a mirror and serves them up over PXE. I did get ClarkConnect up and running though (and then went back to the Airport, so that tells you something right there) and got a PXE boot and remote installation going. It was cool, but pointless, I like burning media, and I like doing installs off of flash media.
Well, that's all for now, more to write, but Holly says I need to vacuum up the cereal her son spilled on her watch before the sitter gets here. Scott is up. Life is grand. Happy Monday.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Kiss... Daddy... Cheese
A quick one before I start work, since the training class I was supposed to go to got cancelled (and I bothered to check my messages before I headed over... good thing.)
Anyway, my son bit his tongue yesterday, eating shredded cheese. He asked me to kiss it to make it better. Nasty... He was eating shredded cheese, because he chewed up and spat out the cubed chese he had eaten earlier, but also refused earlier... Julie is a good eater, she ate them all up.
The gym sucked today... I could hardly lift the weights, I just wasn't focused... I was a bit short on time, trying to make sure I got out of there in time to get to this training session at work... only to find out it got cancelled. :( I did speed up the tredmill today though, it was fast enough that it actually recommended that I not use the hand grips to measure heartrate... Yikes, I might be running sooner than I thought.
I weighed myself today, and I actually gained 3 pounds... must be all that muscle I'm putting on... or the two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I shared with the kids on Tuesday, LOL.
I think I'm going to like the Shadow well enough... XT9 predictive text messaging is okay, for not having a full QWERTY layout. The phone doesn't make me look like a nerd, and I think I'll go ahead and get those bluetooth headphones for me and holly to work out with. That might push me over the edge to stick with Vista Media Center on this computer too.
Oh, speaking of which, I found colorcase.com through copious, extended google searching... They have an eBay store that has the Ahanix cases (302, 303, and D4). Then there's the Moneual Store, which basically has the Ahanix MCD303 with a stamp and iMon for $300... uh, no thanks. The colorcase eBay store might work out though. I'd love to get a D4 and a couple of 30x cases... but that really brings me back to the front-end/backend scenario with MythTV. I might just have to do MythTV, and have some sort of music synchronization scheme worked out with the phone, or get back on the freedom pony and get a Cowon iAudio 7 and go with .ogg files... I dunno at this point...
Anyway, my son bit his tongue yesterday, eating shredded cheese. He asked me to kiss it to make it better. Nasty... He was eating shredded cheese, because he chewed up and spat out the cubed chese he had eaten earlier, but also refused earlier... Julie is a good eater, she ate them all up.
The gym sucked today... I could hardly lift the weights, I just wasn't focused... I was a bit short on time, trying to make sure I got out of there in time to get to this training session at work... only to find out it got cancelled. :( I did speed up the tredmill today though, it was fast enough that it actually recommended that I not use the hand grips to measure heartrate... Yikes, I might be running sooner than I thought.
I weighed myself today, and I actually gained 3 pounds... must be all that muscle I'm putting on... or the two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I shared with the kids on Tuesday, LOL.
I think I'm going to like the Shadow well enough... XT9 predictive text messaging is okay, for not having a full QWERTY layout. The phone doesn't make me look like a nerd, and I think I'll go ahead and get those bluetooth headphones for me and holly to work out with. That might push me over the edge to stick with Vista Media Center on this computer too.
Oh, speaking of which, I found colorcase.com through copious, extended google searching... They have an eBay store that has the Ahanix cases (302, 303, and D4). Then there's the Moneual Store, which basically has the Ahanix MCD303 with a stamp and iMon for $300... uh, no thanks. The colorcase eBay store might work out though. I'd love to get a D4 and a couple of 30x cases... but that really brings me back to the front-end/backend scenario with MythTV. I might just have to do MythTV, and have some sort of music synchronization scheme worked out with the phone, or get back on the freedom pony and get a Cowon iAudio 7 and go with .ogg files... I dunno at this point...
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
E-mail - Switching to TuffMail from FastMail
The ebay spoof e-mails that try to get you to click on links so your password and personal information can be stolen are getting good. They even have the little link that tells you to go to eBay's special page for reporting fake messages.
Fortunately, my e-mail filter just directed that straight to the "Discard" folder. I probably wouldn't have ever seen if if I hadn't looked in there.
This month, I paid for a 1 year subscription to TuffMail, and don't plan on renewing my subscriptioin to FastMail. For those of you who just send me e-mail, nothing should change. I've been running my mail on TuffMail since last month. That's the beauty of owning your own domain name. I can change e-mail service providers whenever I want, and I don't have to send everyone a new address.
I decided it was time to do the same thing with my blog, so now I'll probably actually start advertising it as http://blog.mvpittman.com, rather than the direct LiveJournal or WordPress addresses I was using before... I guess that will require an e-mail to at least the 10 people that matter.
Back to the e-mail thing. The main reason I did the switch was cost redution. FastMail had lots of features, but I didn't need all of them. They were working on features I wanted, but they weren't fast enough in implementing them. No real problems with the service, but for what I need, TuffMail does the job fine and I'll end up spending less money... so maybe I can find that extra money to keep up my World of Warcraft subsription now...
Anyway, this calls for the obligatory comparison of features between services, to somehow justify that I've made the right choice. However, I wrote this blog post a month ago, and still haven't transferred my paper comparison list to any electronic format... maybe I'll make a post a bit later, when I have time. Or, maybe when I decide that e-mail just isn't important enough for me to pay for, and just go with a free service or one that comes with my AT&T Yahoo! DSL account, I'll post that.
Fortunately, my e-mail filter just directed that straight to the "Discard" folder. I probably wouldn't have ever seen if if I hadn't looked in there.
This month, I paid for a 1 year subscription to TuffMail, and don't plan on renewing my subscriptioin to FastMail. For those of you who just send me e-mail, nothing should change. I've been running my mail on TuffMail since last month. That's the beauty of owning your own domain name. I can change e-mail service providers whenever I want, and I don't have to send everyone a new address.
I decided it was time to do the same thing with my blog, so now I'll probably actually start advertising it as http://blog.mvpittman.com, rather than the direct LiveJournal or WordPress addresses I was using before... I guess that will require an e-mail to at least the 10 people that matter.
Back to the e-mail thing. The main reason I did the switch was cost redution. FastMail had lots of features, but I didn't need all of them. They were working on features I wanted, but they weren't fast enough in implementing them. No real problems with the service, but for what I need, TuffMail does the job fine and I'll end up spending less money... so maybe I can find that extra money to keep up my World of Warcraft subsription now...
Anyway, this calls for the obligatory comparison of features between services, to somehow justify that I've made the right choice. However, I wrote this blog post a month ago, and still haven't transferred my paper comparison list to any electronic format... maybe I'll make a post a bit later, when I have time. Or, maybe when I decide that e-mail just isn't important enough for me to pay for, and just go with a free service or one that comes with my AT&T Yahoo! DSL account, I'll post that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)