Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

And…I’m back.

Squidly.com is now at it’s new host, and I’ve converted the blog to WordPress. I’ve still got some clean-up to do, particularly over at Hawk News Daily, but so far so good. It’s been an adventure playing around with CSS and tweaking my old templates so everything looks the same.

I’ve re-enabled comments, so give ‘em a shot if you’re in the mood.

The iPhone Commercials

The iPhone commercials are cool. If you haven’t seen them already, you can check them out here.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes:

These spots are also a testimony to the talents of the makers of the ads themselves; no matter how clever the iPhone is, it’s hard to make 30-second spots that are both easy to follow and yet contain so much information.

All three ads are good, but the best is the third, “Calamari”. Here’s what we see: unlocking the phone, playing a movie, locating a restaurant with the Maps app, and calling the restaurant. All this – including switching between apps – with just one slide and eight screen taps

…well 8 taps not including the word “Seafood”. Anyway, it’s a remarkable interface, and he’s right…I don’t recall another phone company advertising their products by showing the interface.

I’m also taken by how fast everything is. Switching from a playing movie back to your phone interface is near-instantaneous. Can’t wait for June 29th..

Dogs and Cats, living together.

Here’s a collection of videos of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together at the D5 conference.

Interesting and funny..

Happy Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there. If you’re not a mother (or even if you are) I hope you took care of yours.

Today we’re going to see Alice in Wonderland performed by a local ballet company. Not my first choice of way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but as you know on this day: “What mommy wants, mommy gets.”

In other news, I’ve converted our photo management system over to Adobe Lightroom from iPhoto. The stacking and integrated processing were much needed. I’ll still use iPhoto for some tasks and classes of photos, but Lightroom is where I’ll work with the stuff I really care about.

I spent a lot of time doing the whole Lightroom vs Aperture thing, and found it MUCH faster. For me at least, performance wins the day.

Yesterday I took Lauren to another t-ball practice. She’s definitely one of the top players on the team, and in the running when it comes to best hitter. I took up a position behind the pitcher, and when her turn came up, she hit it over my head into the outfield! She was the only player to get the ball up into the air…most other kids hit little skidding grounders that barely reach the pitcher’s mound.

Another parent came up to me after practice and asked me how old Lauren was, which I found kind of funny as she’s younger than many of her teammates.

I get the feeling that a lot of these kids simply haven’t spent enough time outdoors playing. Their physical development simply isn’t there.

Creating Flickr Slideshows

Click “Read More” below to check out my test of embedding Flickr Slideshows.
Read the rest of this entry »

Gear

Yesterday I picked up a 500Gig Western Digital SATA drive for the Mac Pro. Installation couldn’t be easier with these things. You just pull out the drive sleeve, screw on the drive, and slide it back in. No cables. Then when you boot up your system, you tell it how you want to format the drive and off you go. This brings me up to 1 Terabyte of storage.

I also picked up a Razer Copperhead, which works remarkably well with the stock OSX mouse drivers. Far more accurate than the old Logitech MX-1000 I had been using. I just don’t get the level of accuracy I need from a wireless mouse (bluetooth or otherwise) under OSX.

Later, I downloaded Bootcamp, partitioned a 100Gig slice, and installed Windows Vista Home Premium. Everything worked like a dream, except for the fact that I had to spring for the full (non-upgrade) version of the software in order to get it to work. The Mac Pro gets “rated” by Windows Vista as a “5 out of 5″ for performance, and after installing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and giving it a go, I can see why.

It blows away my old Windows box in every concievable fashion. Vista is also a very pretty operating system…

So now I have a “1 box fits all” solution. An OSX video and photo editing monster with 900Gigs of storage, and a Windows Vista machine with 100Gigs for gaming. This should keep me going for the next 5-6 years or so.

Mucked around with iMovie for awhile after midnight. Made a simple DVD which displayed some photos in a slideshow fashion (the photos were from a paintball tourney a couple years ago.) It’s easy to get some pretty nifty looking results, but I can already see that the limitations of iMovie will force me to move on to Final Cut Express rather quickly.

…

Still struggling with my cold. Missed work on Friday with a temperature, and now I’m in the “infinite nose drainage” stage.

And now Lauren is symptomatic too.

New Squid-Sites

I’ve updated my links a bit, including my .Mac website, Twitter site, and Tumblog. They can be accessed directly or from the links to the right.

Additionally, you may enjoy a briny trip to Squid.us. Lots of Squidly-goodness to be found there.