East of the Sun, West of the Moon

2006/1/15

Laptop fun

Filed under: Family,OS X,Software — Erwin @ 4:04 pm

Now that I’ve gotten myself settled on the new laptop, typically having a desktop open with a setup created by Ubuntu and an additional desktop with a VNC session to the MacMini, I’ve finally gotten around to installing OSXvnc on her MacMini, so now she can enjoy the same thin client experience that I had been for a while now.

I’m sure the view of both of us sitting there, one 10″ laptop and one 15″ laptop while often also watching some previously recorded show on MythTV, could be considered fairly amusing, but so be it. It works for us, and we’re getting a bit more value out of the wifi network while we’re at it. ;-)

Reminder to self: Set up a VNC password file for M so it can go directly there instead of prompting her for one in ugly old X11 style (Athena widget, if I’m not mistaken).

2006/1/12

Linkage (35)

Filed under: Linkage,News,Technology — Erwin @ 6:42 pm

A few random bits that caught my attention recently:

  • Ars Technica reports that Spammers rights do not prevail against institutional rights:

    The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling found that UT was well within their rights to block the e-mail in question, and that in doing so, they were not in violation of First Amendment interpretation. The Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the case sends a strong message to spammers everywhere: it is permissible to block spam, no matter how closely it confirms to marketing practices, rules, and even federal communications laws.

  • Levi’s announced iPod jeans!

    Designed for both men and women, the jeans are designed to be compatible with most iPod systems. A special joystick is built into the jeans’ watch pocket, with four-way controls to allow the wearer to play, pause, track forward, track back and adjust the volume control without ever removing the iPod from the pocket.

  • The MoGo MouseBT is a tiny cordless mouse that fits inside your laptop for storage while traveling:
    MoGo MouseBT

I’ll leave it at this for now as I’m a bit busy cleaning out the collection of tabs I’ve been gathering in NetNewsWire. At a guess I’d say around 50-100 of ‘em, where I normally keep it under 20. Ugh.

2006/1/11

Shoot

Filed under: OS X,Software — Erwin @ 12:43 am

Google Earth released a version for OS X, but:

What operating systems can I use for the Mac version of Google Earth?

Currently, Google Earth isn’t supported on the Mac OS 10.3.9 or earlier versions. We’re working on this issue and hope to have Google Earth available for more Mac OS versions in the near future.

Bother.

2006/1/10

You’ve got too much mail! (2)

Filed under: OS X,Software — Erwin @ 4:08 pm

Shortly after I wrote the previous entry I ran into YAMB, a Thunderbird extension that enables you to fire up an executable/script with several parameters indicating the subject, sender, etc, of newly arrived email.

The problem seems to be that it just doesn’t trigger all the time and occasionally triggers at the wrong time, before a message has been filtered to the appropriate folder.

So, back to my vague idea of parsing the filter/junk logs myself, then. At least I installed /usr/local/bin/growlnotify now so I can do that easily from a shell/perl script and don’t necessarily need AppleScript or something with even more overkill.

2006/1/9

You’ve got too much mail!

Filed under: OS X,Software — Erwin @ 5:30 pm

This weekend I happened to be glancing at the list of applications that support Growl and noticed MacBiff, a biff-like application that supports checking multiple IMAP servers.

I just now abandoned it again, though, for the following reasons:

  • The application is geared towards someone who may have multiple accounts but assumes they all pretty much serve the same purpose. In the menu bar it shows you the sum of all accounts, as far as new and total number of messages goes, where I’d want my work and private email to be shown separately.
  • While it says to have an option for excluding folders in the total that have been marked as needing to be ignored, it’ll still include those in the total. I have huge archive folders and subfolders, causing this number to be quite out of proportion.
  • I let Thunderbird do 99% of the filtering, these days, including marking certain messages as “read” immediately upon arrival because I only care about them for archival purposes. This means that occasionally, when MacBiff looks at the state of the IMAP account, there are messages in my inbox that seconds later will be filtered away (possibly no longer “new”) in different folders.

What I really need is an OS X specific extension (if that is even possible) that talks to Growl. Lacking that it’s very tempting to see if I can convince some Perl script to parse the filterlog.html and make sure there is a fall-back filter so that any and all messages are processed at least once.

2006/1/4

New year, new toy

Filed under: Technology — Erwin @ 1:34 am

I picked up a new laptop last week, effectively buying the cheapest (reasonable) one I saw online, with a bit of comparing. I did this because I thought it was time to replace the (given to me) Sony Vaio that has served me well for a few years but was showing signs of possibly falling apart in the near future, not to mention the fact that the contrast between the 10.5″ display and the 19″ CRT that I use became more irritating as I’ve once again started to use it regularly as a thin VNC client.

Of course I took some chances here and the laptop wasn’t all it looked on the webpage:

  • The 15″ display is not capable of doing 1280×1024 as was implied. Instead it is capable of doing 1024×768 at 60Hz at the most, and the CRT output can do 1920×1200 or so.
  • The specs page that it referred to mentions a wifi upgrade involving a mini-PCI Orinoco card, but the wifi upgrade that I got involved a no-name PCMCIA card with no S/N, MAC or any other distinguishing info on it that would help me figure out if and how to get it to work.
  • The webpage says it’s a display model. Apparently a display model where they used the Ins and Del keys a lot because they have a tendency to get stuck. Fortunately I seldom use those and they’re easily unstuck.
  • One of the fans (not entirely sure which one, yet) is a bit noisy.

On the plus side:

  • That specs page says the RAM needs to be PC1600 and PC2100 is actually included, so they didn’t go with the minimum possible there, I guess.
  • Speaking of RAM, I bought it with 256 and it looks like an upgrade to 512 is going to be about $30-35, so I may do that.

Flaw in the current setup is that the PCMCIA hardware and the video-card use the same damn interrupt, so when I’m pushing/pulling a lot of data over the wireless the response gets really slow. This might be something to convince me to buy a mini-PCI card instead of an additional PCMCIA card (I’m borrowing one from the play/kids PC right now) if I really can’t get that no-name card to work.

All in all I think it was worth the money and by the time I feel the need to replace this one I’ll have a slightly better idea of what to look for in a laptop. :-)

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress