Howdy, this is my personal online journal for whatever I feel like writing about.
A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” is a humorous essay about the author’s hike down (or up rather) the Appalachian trail. Bill Bryson is not a naturalist, an outdoorsman, or even remotely athletic. He’s an author who after living abroad for many years decides to rediscover American by hiking the “AT”.
Bryson shares not only his experiences but some trail history and lore as well. You meet interesting characters like Bryson’s friend Katz, who struggles to keep up, and a variety of trail mates that range from obnoxoius to memorable.
More importantly Bryson share’s his feelings about the land, America, and the deep chord traveling the trail strikes with him. While not a long book, I certainly enjoyed it.
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Universal Car Mount for Portable DVD Players
Found! An inexpensive way to play DVDs on the road. This Universal Car Mount for portable DVD players really works. You can use this universal mount with your portable DVD player to securely mount the player in your car, so you can enjoy your favorite movies on your next long road trip.
The ridged bars on either end of the platform extend (thanks to internal shock cord) and hook around the headrest posts. This leaves the DVD platform suspended between the driver and passenger seats, perfectly positioned for back seat viewing. We use these on road trips to keep our son happy.
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Using ACLs to Share iPhoto and iTunes Libraries
In this article over at Trent Davie’s ad Hominem blog he discusses an elegant solution to the whole notion of sharing an iPhoto library amongst several users on the same Mac.
My wife and I have this problem. We certainly don’t have our own sets of photos, but we do manage our own accounts. The old way was to wrap iPhoto in a bourne shell script that set the umask before each execution, maintaining group permissions. This works fine, but has the significant downside of having to be rebuilt every time a new iPhoto update comes down.
I’ll be trying out this solution to see if it works better for us. It also mentions in the comment trail that a similar approach could solve the problem for iTunes. What I really want though is for each account to share the same music library (the songs themselves), but maintain different ratings and playlists for each account. I’ve seen nothing that will do that for me yet however.
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The Pirate Hunter
“The Pirate Hunter” by Richard Zacks details the life and times of the infamous Captain Kidd. Hanged and vilified as a pirate for three hundred years, there’s much more to the good Captain than meets the eye.
As Zacks explains in his wonderful narrative, Captain Kidd was actually a legal privateer with a strong since of duty and honor. After a series of unsuccessful missions and a mutiny by his crew he became unfairly branded as a pirate.
Returning home to New York in an attempt to clear his name, Kidd was arrested and shipped off to England. To the end Kidd had faith that the English system of justice would save him. It was not to be.
More than just a history of this individual, this is a great adventure set in the golden age of pirates. The author uses a wide array of historical material and tells his story in an exciting and always entertaining manner. I recommend it highly.
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Target Mode: Turn your Mac into a FireWire Drive
This is one of those cool Mac tricks that you tend to not hear about until you actually need it, and then its a lifesaver. I learned about “target mode”, a feature of all but the oldest Macs that turns your computer into the world’s most expensive external FireWire drive.
I needed this the other day when moving files between my old PowerMac and new Intel iMac. FireWire is 4X faster than ethernet, but you lose a bit if you have to copy from computer A to an external drive, then connect the drive to computer B and copy it back. Enter “target mode”. How to use target mode:
- Shutdown the computer that you want to copy to (the target)
- Connect the source computer to the target computer via FireWire cable
- While holding down “t” on the keyboard (t for target of course) power on the target computer
After a few moments, the FireWire logo will dance around the screen and you should see the target computer appear on the source computer’s desktop. It will look like any other external FireWire drive. Drag and drop! When you are done, “eject” the target computer, then power it down.
Elegant, simple, but amazingly useful. How very Apple.
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Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer 0.99 Released
Version 0.99.0 of the Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer has been released. Ethereal has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product. It runs on all popular computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows. (No Mac port as of yet unfortunately)
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Significant update to FireBug for Firefox
Joe Hewitt has released a significant update to the popular FireBug extension for Firefox.
FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including an error console, command line, and a variety of inspection tools.
One of the really cool new features is the inline editing. Navigate through the content/DOM inspector and modify HTML and attributes and see them updated in real time on the web page.
If you are a web developer of any sort, you need this tool!
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Solution: Intel Mac Wireless Networking Issues
I’ve heard several reports about poor downloads performance on the Intel Mac over wireless LAN. The symptoms are unusually slow download speeds, intermittent connectivity problems, and general flaky performance.
Turns out that it is a conflict between the Bluetooth and Wireless card in some configurations. I finally dug up the solution in this thread from an Apple support site. The gist of the problem and fix is here:
The engineering departments says that there is interference between channel 6 on wireless routers with Bluetooth. They told me to change to any other channel and the problem should be solved. I just changed my D-Link 624 to channel 11 returned to our wireless keyboard and wireless mouse and we now have screaming fast download speeds that match our 15 inch PB.
Surprise, this is the default channel on the popular Linksys wireless router. To fix it, visit your admin server panel (normally at http://192.168.1.1) and select a different channel:
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Escape From Alcatraz
“Escape From Alcatraz”, by J. Campbell Bruce, was written in 1965 around the last days that Alcatraz was used as a Federal prison. I didn’t know that when I started this book, and was surprised at its age, though I was wondering why it was written in the present tense. This book’s finale is the famous Morris escape, chronicled in the Clint Eastwood movie Escape From Alcatraz.
Far from focusing solely on escapes, this book details the entire history of “The Rock” and its inmates from its earliest days as an army prison, to is final closing. Sometimes it focuses too much on the history of the inmates in fact, detailing their childhoods and misdeeds. Surprising to learn however was that the majority of inmates were not the “worst of the worst” that the prison was supposed to be made to house, but pretty much run of the mill robbers and crooks.
The ingenuity of the prisoners is simply amazing. Their escapes and ability to improvise would bring a tear to McGuyver’s eye. I’ve read a number of interesting escape books, notably Great Escape. This was good, but I’d say only half the book or less is escapes, the rest is history.
I’ve been to Alcatraz (as a visitor, not a resident), and I think it would have been much more interesting with the background and stories from this book fresh in my mind.
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Mac Performance Comparison at Geek Patrol
The folks over at Geek Patrol gives us rundown of relative performance amongst a variety of processors, the most wide reaching I’ve seen. To quote from their conclusions:
The PowerPC G4 has served us well, its time has past. It still performs reasonably well as a lower-end CPU, but when compared to the PowerPC G5 and the Intel Core Duo it’s sorely lacking; it was blown away by both processors in almost every test (save for the Blowfish tests). With the Intel Core Duo in both the iMac and the PowerBook1 hopefully we’ll see the Intel Core Solo replace the PowerPC G4 in the Mac Mini and the iBook.
Other comparsions:
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