Schinckel.net

Well, my MBP still hasn’t arrived. If I’d been clever, and bought it through the online Apple Store, then it would have “shipped in 2-4 days”. I stupidly went through Next Byte, and it hasn’t entered the store yet. It has officially been three weeks since I ordered it. If I hadn’t paid a deposit, I’d cancel the fucking thing. The thing that shits me most is that they don’t seem to know (or care!) when it is coming in. Surely a company would have some sort of tracking that tells them where stuff is. I’m even more peeved that Apple has updated the machines since I ordered mine. I wouldn’t mind too much, in that I would have originally received the machine before the updated machines came out. But it’s now ages since the update, and I still don’t have even one of the old machines, let alone a Santa Rosa machine. Which, incidentally, would have cut the price I paid by about $300, if I’d waited. Even if the machine I get ends up being a Santa Rosa machine, I’ll still feel cheated out of that money. On second thoughts I could almost get a Santa Rosa machine from the Apple Store, and it would only cost the same amount as me paying the remainder on my on-order machine. That way, I’d get it the next day, upgraded, and piss off Next Byte too. Perhaps I’ll do that if it doesn’t come tomorrow.

Saturdays • Cut Copy • Chillout Sessions 6

Okay, I finally got around to using Pages to create a decent length document. Or rather, edit someone else’s. There is a big difference, as the Word document, like all of those that seem to come out of SSABSA, was pretty badly laid out. No real use of styles, apparently. Although, in it’s defense, it was tons better than the crap that comes from Design & Technology. I guess it would have to be, coming from Information Technology. You would kind of expect them to be able to use a little bit of the technology… Anyway, I used it to modify the examination, and basically rewrite it for my Stage 2 Information Technology Studies class. I was able to do some pretty cool stuff with it, and it really felt a lot quicker than using Word. Word just seems to crawl, whether on a Mac or on Windows. Whereas Pages flies along. It just has an unusual interface, although said interface is standard across Keynote, and IIRC iWeb. Because I’m not sharing the document with anyone, then I didn’t need to save it into any other format, although with a lot of stuff I need to give it to students, so saving it as a PDF is handy. It might be nice to automate the setup so that documents saved automatically have a PDF version (or a flash version, for Keynote presentations) generated.

Akula • Art Of Fighting • Wires ★★

Just had a random thought. I’ve set up an automated method, in ecto, to add at the bottom of a post the currently playing track in iTunes. What about the ability to do the same when commenting on a blog. Is it possible for the browser to get this info, or is that getting a little too spooky. I’m guessing that browsers have restrictions in place, just to stop this sort of stuff happening. After all, if you can get this info from a JavaScript, it’s not too far to stretch grabbing the /etc/passwd file, or similar. And putting that onto a server. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Cold As Ice • Foreigner • The Platinum Collection ★★½

I love PostSecret. However, I’m getting close to dumping it from my feed, for one reason only. They update the blog post several times a day to add comments in. This is bad news, as each updated page causes a new addition to my RSS feed. Meaning I see several dozen “Sunday Secrets” posts each week. Only one of which is really new.

Heebie Jeebies • Louis Armstrong • This is Jazz 1 ★

There’s a fairly neat feature in the new Parallels: you can edit a file from your Windows installation in a native OS X application. That is, when you “Open With…” under Windows, Mac Apps (but possibly only those in /Applications) are available as opening tools. Very cool.

Steven Johnson • Steven Johnson • SALT - Seminars About Long Term Thinking

Apparently, wget is only able to recognise files smaller than 2G as proper sizes. You can download files larger than this, but unusual sizes are displayed: This was funny when I first started this download, as it reported a negative number of bytes to go, but after crossing the 2G threshold in downloads, it now reports a true value of the file size remaining.

Shoulder Holster • Morcheeba • Big Calm ★★

1. Open Registry Editor (Start, Run, regedit).
2. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control \TerminalServer\Licensing Core.
3. Create a new REG_DWORD value named EnableConcurrentSessions.
4. Set the value to 1.
5. Exit the editor.

(via joe boy)

I’ve come across an interesting issue. I have a PC, which I plan to put away in a closet, and run it as a server. Since one machine I use is a PowerPC iMac, I’d like to run some AutoDesk software on the server, and access it via RDP/RDC. I have managed to get connections, but there’s something weird about Architectural Desktop. I can start the app fine if I’m sitting at the machine itself, but if I try to run it over an RDC, it complains about not being licensed. This is very frustrating.

Don’t, under any circumstances, even try to install VMWare Fusion if you are running OS x86. That is, on a non-Apple machine. I think it happened with the last beta too, but this one causes a Kernel Panic on installation, after it has managed to install the files that cause the panic. Which means a reboot also causes a panic. If you find this happens to you, boot in Single User mode (-s), and, after running fsck and mounting the root partition as readable, move or delete one or both of the following things:

• /Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.vmware.launchd.vmware.plist

Then, reboot, and run the Uninstaller.

Lazy River • Louis Armstrong • This is Jazz 1 ★

I’ve just started being a beta tester for Mailplane, and it seems pretty cool. The only things I’d like to see:

• the ability to mark items as new from a button
• a search bar in the toolbar

That’s after a couple of hours of playing, including some time stripping out redundant features using CSS, which is kinda nice.