Check this out:
Fantastic. The 3-D effect looks so real with just a little head tracking. You should check out Johnny Lee’s website, too. You can download the software used in the above video and he has instructions for making a $15 steadycam. Check it out.
–kristian
I’ve recently been having some issues with my MacBook due to a failing battery and a cracking wrist rest. Luckily I was smart enough two years ago to opt in for AppleCare so I booked myself in to talk a genius.
No problem, come back in two hours and we’ll have it fixed, said Mike.
Hour later they called up and told me that it was finished. Great. My second Tall Cappuccino was running low and battery on my iPhone was dying.
As I got my hands on the Mac I noticed the nice surprise, they not only swapped the case but also the keyboard and the trackpad*. Fantastic. Not only does it look and feel like a new Mac but it also smells like one. Sweet. I’ve always hated the way trackpads start to feel like after 3 months of heavy use. Of course battery life is great now, too. As I’m writing this, it’s on red and it still has 40 min time left. It used to have 40 min left when it was full.
–kristian
*Yes, I realise they must be embedded.
And I quote:
…software comes with the MacBook Air that allows you to “borrow” a Mac or PCs optical drive.
80 GB/1.8″ hard disk standard, 64 GB SSD as an option.
Sounds familiar? You must have listened to RND Cast episode 10.
other hits and misses:
–kristian
Show which was recorded few days ago has now gone live! Featuring Alex Kent, Rikard Österlund and myself, we spent a good hour and twenty minutes talking about rumors floating around next weeks Macworld San Francisco Stevenote. Check it out!
–kristian
Check this out, friends. NetNewsWire, and it’s online counterpart, are now free. Bye bye, Google Reader. Welcome, NewsGator Online.
–kristian
Ars Technica reports:
“Lord Triesman, Minister for Intellectual Property, today announced a consultation on IP reform that could make format shifting a legal right.”
This, in English, means that consumers would be allowed to transfer music from their – i.e. – CD’s onto their iPods. Personally, I didn’t know this was still illegal but sounds like the government is taking some good steps. Few things I hope will be included in the new legislation:
Update: At the same time as I can’t see above things happening, it would be a great change for the British government to show leadership in this area. Unlike with some other decisions this administration has made, I could see rest of Europe follow.
Interestingly, the article notes that Association of Independent Music is against this reform and wants the performer to be paid for other mediums their work is played on. Interesting. Association of Independent Music? Very strange. On the other hand, BPI supports the act.
–kristian
Briefly,
To all you budding lawyers/solicitors who want to get rich quickly. Buy a printer, any consumer inkjet printer will do. Go home and start setting it up. In the process, you’ll find that no USB cable is included. Be very annoyed about this. Raise a class action lawsuit (or what ever it might be called here in Britain) against all major printer manufacturers who do this. Hire me to show up in the court as expert witness. I’m pretty cheap at £4500/day. Win the case.
The result:
and
–kristian
Just a quick tip for my dear reader(s).
Funny thing that hard drive space is, no matter how big it is, there’s always only few gigs left of it. Sunday is my hard drive clean up day, the day of the week when I try to free up about 10 Gb to be able to go through the week. One utility to visually see where all the space has gone or what taking it up is Disk Inventory X. Check it out. Reason why I’m bringing that up is because I noticed an evil 2 Gb file lurking in /private/var/vm/
The Sleep Image. sleepimage is file that stores all the data that is currently in RAM. It’s written when the computer goes to sleep. (You can notice this by looking at the light in the front. When it slowly blinks it’s a sleep but before this it’s permanently on while it writes stuff on the disk. You should be very careful moving your computer while this is being done as you might damage the hard drive.) Purpose of the sleepimage is that if your computer runs out of battery or power fails while asleep, it can recover to the previous state without having to restart. The space is always reserved for this so it can’t run out. There’s three good reasons not to use save sleep. It takes longer to fall asleep, it makes the whole process less staple and I just rather have the space in active use.
To disable save sleep, all you need to do is run these two commands in Terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
First disables it, the second deletes the sleepimage file. To re-activate it just run the first command but with 1 instead of 0 in the end. If you’ve just upgraded to Leopard you should check what state it’s on; it’s on by default and even with regular upgrade install it seems to go back to default.
–kristian
Just posted a new episode on RND Cast. Be sure to check it out as it’s about a very topical subject, data encryption!
–kristian
ps. to subscribe to the RND Cast click this iTunes link and you’ll never miss an episode!
Time Machine, no matter how some might say it’s only meant for grandmothers and alike, is so simple and secure to use, it’s would be silly not to. Even if only as an extra layer of data security
For me, the ideal setup is that the Time Machine backup drive lives on my home network rather than directly connected via FireWire or USB. All though Leopard has a simpler way interface for connecting to computers on your network – compared to Tiger – it would be nice to for this to happen automatically. After all, it’s not automatic if you have to think about it.
I’m really just a novice when it comes to AppleScript but luckily it’s a nice and easy scripting language. I wrote the script below to run at login. All it does is it checks which wireless router you’re connected to and if it’s the one you’ve predefined as your home network it then connects to a drive on that network.
set SSID to do shell script "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -I | awk '/ SSID: / {print $2}'"
if SSID is "xxxx" then --replace xxxx with your chosen wireless network name
tell application "Finder"
mount volume "xxxx" --replace xxxx with the address of your drive. you can find that by 'Get Info' on a mounted drive
end tell
end if
I know this is really basic and could have more features by adding functionality like connecting via the Internet if not at home (I’m actually not sure if that would work with Time Machine) and maybe connecting hourly, rather than just at login. If you want to improve it in anyway please feel free to do so and post your findings below (I’m looking at you Alex).
–kristian
ps. Thanks to StefanK at MacScripter BBS for the SSID bit of the code.
[update] Further investigation reveals that Time Machine automatically connects to networked drives, thus removing the need for the script above. In any case, the script still works, and can be used for other drives you might want to use on a specific network.