Category Archives: Tech

Alphabetically Canadian

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This has nothing to do with anything, I just thought I would mention that I have been listening to my entire iTunes library again so I could re-rate everything and fix up some playlists from scratch.  This is necessary sometimes, but especially when you move from Windows to Mac since the library formats are completely different for some god-forsaken reason.  The only unusual thing about it all this time was I decided to listen to all 4200 songs (give or take, I try to get rid of all of the Jonas Brothers/Hilary Duff/bland unrecognizable hip hop artist of the week that ends up in there from Jordy, but it’s a constant battle…) in alphabetical order by song title.  This means you get a rather, um, varied musical experience from one song to the next.  One thing that came to light today is that Loverboy’s Take Me to The Top (hm, one star, thank you) was followed immediately by Bob and Doug McKenzie’s Take Off (that’s about 4 stars, folks, based entirely on Geddy Lee’s fine performance).  It made me wonder how many alphabetically consecutive Canadian songs have I missed to date from A-T?

I’m not (quite) anal enough to actually find out myself, but it’s your homework for the week to find out the longest run of consecutively Canadian songs you can find in your iTunes library.

That’s all class, dismissed.

Mac Nerdery

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Please forgive the raw geek post.  If you have no idea what a virtual machine is, just skip to the picture of the pony at the bottom.

It’s been a few months now since Nikki got me my first Mac, so as a Windows user I am now more fully coming around to new habits and shortcuts.  I use Windows all day long at work, so the Mac habits have been a little slower to become second-nature than they probably would have normally.  Still, they are coming along quite nicely.  I have also settled into the new desktop, finally.  I no longer flounder when trying to find that window I know is running, but have minimized to the dock.  I am slowly learning the (still arcane) differences between the option and command keys.  Mutiple select is still an achilles heel, but I now find myself reaching for alt-T on windows to open a new Firefox tab, so some things are definitely sinking in.

Running Windows on the iMac is something I was always planning on, since Windows pays the bills I will always need it somewhere.  I had always assumed that I would be using Boot Camp to do just that and just be living with the inconvenience of restarting each time.  I figured that this way would work just fine, but most importantly it was free, and I’m incredibly cheap when it comes to this stuff.  So, I almost started that process, but decided at the last to check around to see what I could find in the virtualization area for this purpose.  Man, am I ever glad I did.  I stumbled onto Sun Virtualbox, a free VM engine that runs on OSX very very nicely.  So nicely in fact that after I had set up a quick XP VM I found that I could run it in a Spaces desktop in full screen mode, and it’s just dandy.  There’s something magical about alt-tabbing, er cmd-tabbing through the open apps and sliding right into a windows desktop.  I still need to get the work VPN installed there and a few other things, but man, this is the real thing folks.

Speaking of Spaces, I like this feature so much that I have actually installed Dexpot on the Vista box at work so I can have a similar experience. It’s not as smooth as I would like, I particularly miss the full cmd-tab list of open windows and just switching to that desktop when I select it, but it’s pretty good so far.

Now, something for the non-geeks, suitably distracting I hope.

Look, a pony!

Sleeping pony

Twitter

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As a geek, I have naturally noticed the presence of the Twitter phenomenon as it appeared on the web a year ago or so.  It’s a micro-blogging service, you get 140 characters to type something that your followers will get to see.  It’s a little like instant messaging, except that anyone can follow you, so instead of a relatively private conversation, you are shouting across a crowded room.  It’s hard to describe until you try it.

Anyway, since it has exploded in growth recently, it’s hard to miss.  Lots of people are writing and talking about it.  Still, although I joined over a year ago and sent one lonely tweet (as updates are called), I decided I didn’t have time to get into it, and since I knew no-one else who used the thing, I forgot about it.

Then good cousin PJ mentioned that he and the rest of guys from Crush Luther would be recording their new album this week and would be Twittering updates from the studio.  Since Nikki and I were away on our weekend getaway, I thought it might be fun to see if I could get their updates on the iPhone.  Silly question naturally, a few minutes of hardcore geekery later I had rediscovered my dormant Twitter account and had located their Twitter account (crushluther, imagine that) and we were in the loop.  Way cool.  TwitterFon is the app for the iPhone that seemed to work best of the few I tried.  Anyway, over the last few days I have been slowly adding a few people here and there just for fun, and sure enough it’s really pretty cool.  The only thing about it is the urge to post a Facebook-style status update every once in a while, which I guess you could do, but it seems to be a lot less personal than just my Facebook friends, although there are lots of people on there that I know only in passing and they all get my inane status updates.  Maybe I’m still just a noob.  Anyway, if you decide to check it out be sure to add me so I can find you, on Twitter I’m known as _court.

Happy New Years

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The last post of the year would normally be some sort of top ten list, or perhaps some new year’s resolutions.  Not here though.  Here’s the past year of the blog, highlights and lowlights.  Mostly it’s just the stuff that jumped out at me today scanning back through the year’s posts.

First off we have perfect hindsight.  This one really smarts.  Looking back at January I was excited about the new Apple TV and thought it was ready for prime time.  Flash forward to just this past week and it seems that I am as stupid as can be.

I debated my increasing maturity because I realize I am now capable of listening to cover songs without instantly rejecting them out of hand based on some sort of naive sense of purity.  I noted that the music industry continues to die without many other signs of life, in spite of some really excellent advice available for free.

Technology was still of great interest of course, as it always will be.  The ever increasing use of social networks to keep in touch with people led to greater and more intricate knowledge of your network of friends, ambient awareness was the term coined.  It’s continuing, and the Friendfeed sidebar is a good example of how that will grow even more.  This year led to even more robots designed to assist humans live every day lives, which I noted would inevitably lead to the death of us all.

I spent quite a bit of effort trash talking Mexico and Winnipeg for their attempts to make their mark on the skating world, even thought I didn’t have to defend Ottawa all that much.  We still win.  Similarly, the LimerickDB is still the best place on the web for rhyming jokes, and we sampled a few of my favourites.  Also, we were privy to the most private thoughts of a monster, disturbing stuff though it was.  I had lots of fun with rubber truck nuts, not directly however.  It doesn’t hurt that they are silly beyond belief in the first place, but then the legislation starts and things get really weird.

It seems that a series of gun-related events cause me to post about them far more often than I normally would.  One gun post even actually resulted in a series of (gasp!) comments from actual other people.  Most often it was just me complaining about them and the people who are clearly not wise enough to be holding them, especially in public.

Speaking of people not wise enough to protect anybody, how about those TSA airport screeners?  It spawned a whole new category of posts that will no doubt continue to grow.  Similarly I particularly enjoyed myself writing about a certain monkey-smuggler who succeeded and then failed in remarkable fashion.  Also we saw a family who was too stupid to protect their dog from a hungry snake, although they had several days to do something about it.

The financial crisis and subsequent auto bailout wasn’t funny, but that didn’t stop me.  It lasted a few days, but we aren’t done with it yet since there’s more to come.  Finally the strangest news story to hit here must have been the multiple feet washing ashore in B.C. I stopped mentioning it, but the story continues to this day.  Crazy.

Finally, some of the more personal posts that kept me amused over the year, I mentioned Nikki’s growing fresh laundry addiction, just one of the hazards of staying home to watch the kids.  Similarly, I revealed how she is a heat vampire bent on freezing me solid.  She also laughed heartily at me for this little escapade with the Stratus, where I learned to use the Force to drive the car.

So there you go, it’s the past year of the blog condensed for your convenience.  Hope you had a good year, I think we did.  All the best to you and yours, see you next year.

Neuros OSD

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Christmas shopping for a nerd is not easy.

Nikki has in recent years simply asked me what I wanted for Christmas, which works out well for me of course and makes her happy since she can give me what I actually want.  This year I asked her for a Neuros OSD (which I won’t link to, so that they won’t get any Google juice from this blog, har har), which lets you store movies on your home server and play them on your TV.  I was looking at this as basically a way to box up all of the DVDs that lie here and there around the house and still have them accessible when needed.  So, I did some research and found that the Neuros was a favourite device for the nerdy set.  Open source, DRM free, it had all of the right buzz to make it seem like the perfect device to get for my needs.

So needless to say I was more than a little disappointed when it arrived and it sucked.  It sucked hard in every way.  Let me explain:

1. Firmware updates.  This was one of the main reasons to get the thing; regular infusions of developer goodness to make the thing more useful all the time.  Well, the shipped device had an old firmware (to be expected) so I kicked off an update right away.  It failed spectacularly, resulted in a non-responsive hunk of plastic.  I had to go through an “emergency firmware upgrade” process.  That got the thing working again, but still it shouldn’t have been that hard to do, and that process would have been beyond most home users.

2. It was ugly.  The interface when I plugged it into my HDTV was blurry, pixelated crap.  Nikki suggested it looked like a Commodore 64, and she was right.  That was AFTER the update to the latest firmware, it was even worse out of the box.

3. Quality. The Neuros only plays Mpeg4 files, and only has RCA-type connections which means that in general, video looks like crap even when compared to a very cheap DVD player using the same type of cables.  We watched one movie on it and I kept noticing the pixels instead of the movie, which tells me that this thing is dead in the water for any real use.

4. Ease of use.  The firmware out of the box connected to my home server without any issue, but things quickly went downhill from there.  Once I updated to the newest firmware I could no longer browse to my server and connect.  In the end I had to telnet to the thing and edit up some files to mount the samba disk at boot up.  If the last sentence made any sense to you, congratulations you may be part of the target market for this device.  That got the thing back on the network, but even then the interface is clunky in the worst way, navigating files and folders on the disk instead of displaying any artwork, or even abstracting the Linux mount point in some useful way.  Instead, playing any file (video or audio) results in at least 6 (teeth-gnashing, laggy, frustratingly slow) remote button presses.  That’s far too many, if this thing really lets me “instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote”.  Um, no.  Fail.

It’s not what anyone would call user-friendly, and this especially became the deal-clincher.  I don’t have the time to be tech support for any other device in the house, I do that all day at work, and there’s more than enough to do already at home with all of the PCs, TVs and game consoles.  I don’t want a project to work on, I want something that works already.

I can’t believe how positive all of the reviews I read were.  I really couldn’t find a review that mentioned any of the bad stuff, but a closer troll through the company’s support forums would have revealed some cracks that would have kept me away if I had known.

Sigh.

This piece of crap is going back, and I’m buying an Apple TV.

Presidential Webcast

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Remember how I worried that in order to lead today you should really be able to embrace technology?  I also worried that the old guy was actually a clue-less dinosaur?  Anyway, it seems that my worry was needless, since McCain really should have given that old Internet thing a closer look.

There is a lot of proof that Obama’s use of the Internet has not only been a crucial piece of his victory, but has forever changed American politics.  Didn’t hurt that he recruited one of the co-founders of Facebook to help, I suppose.

It’s going to be fun and awesome and probably very rocky for a while until everybody figures this stuff out.

“There will be a lot of collateral damage coming to grips with the fact that we’re in a reality TV series, ‘Politics 24/7,’” Mr. Newsom said.

That’s a good thing, Mr. Trippi said. “This medium demands authenticity, and television for the most part demanded fake. Authenticity is something politicians haven’t been used to.”

Even something as simple as a weekly radio address is (somehow just now) being taped for YouTube and Internet consumption.  Brilliant.  If he can really pull off this kind of connectedness and grass-roots organization it just might be the start of something better than I expected.

Now we just need to get Stephen Harper to wake up and smell the coffee.