Category: Macintosh

Mac-related computer stuff. I also put iPod-related stuff here so I guess this should have been called Apple.

Analog blog 2

I blame Merlin Mann of 43 folders. He’s the one who popularized Moleskines years ago.

How else can I explain that right after I wrote about my analog blog that Brian Moon pointed me to the very next xkcd about that. Which caused my friends to point out the sequel article:

journal 2

Journal 2 by xkcd

Which gave me this weird flashback to the Kubrick and Cupcakes Get Satisfaction/Songbird party, where I caught both Ramon and Dave McClure as being one of the few without hats.

Ramon

Ramon
Terra
South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/20sec @ f/2.8, iso640, 21mm (31mm)

Ramon is almost always styling with a hat. Since everyone else is with hat, I suppose he is doing without.

Dave McClure

Dave McClure
Terra
South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/10sec @ f/2.8, iso640, 18mm (27mm)

Dave wears 500 hats, but the only one he has on this day is his party hat.

[Why Merlin Mann is the anti-christ after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

Perfect Ringing (This iPhone)

At work today Mark Kater and Sarah were joking that I’ve been as sick as long as I’ve had my iPhone. I guess my iPhone has bad Feng Shui.

Then Mark mentioned that the song in the iPhone television commercials, gives him the classically Apple 38 seconds of “all is good in the world” before he wakes up back to reality. I hadn’t heard the song, but when I mentioned this to our graphic designer, he said he hears the song in his sleep. The song is “Perfect Timing (This Morning)” by Orba Squara.

Hmm… that would make an awesome ringtone. 😀

Perfect Ringing

Perfect Ringing
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 85mm f/1.4D, Canon 500D close up filter
1/45sec @ f/1.4, iso200, 85mm (127mm)

It was indeed “Perfect Timing” because today was also when someone posted a desktop app for customizing the iPhone ringtone.

Some notes:

  • To get the song, there are a lot of ways. I purchased it in iTunes Music Store, burned to CD, and reimported as MP3
  • Intel Mac binary only. No PowerPC, No Windows
  • “There is no Step 1.” 😀
  • If your unlock fails, you have to click the “skip” button the second time around. Else it will keep playing the pig zapper sound.
  • The “Put the iPhone into Recovery Mode” means to hold the home and sleep buttons on the iPhone for 25 seconds until you see the recovery mode icon
  • Just kill “iTunes Helper” so iTunes doesn’t start up on you
  • Remember to select the ringtone (a green + appears next to the ringtone)
  • The iPhone speakers have a shitty bass

Have fun!Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

The iPhone

I was talking to Dru about that today. He said he’s not worried. “Apple says it’ll be fine as long as you go to a Cingular store and not Apple Store on the day of launch.”

Web 2.0 lunch

Web 2.0 Lunch
Chinatown, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina AT-X PRO 16-50mm f/2.8 DX
1/640sec @ f/2.8, iso100, 16mm (24mm)

“Maybe in podunkville. This is San Francisco, the geeky New York City. I don’t think is enough space in the stores to house all the phones people are going to want to buy. I love it when pundits say that the iPhone is going to bomb. More! More of that! I wish more would say that so I’d actually have a chance at getting one.”

*laughter* “I have an engineer who said it was too expensive and all that. And then this morning, he downloaded the guided tour. I haven’t seen it yet, but he has—it’s like twenty minutes. After he watched it he said, ‘Blackberry is going to get crushed.’”

:-O

When I got back from lunch, I so had to check out the video. When we were watching, Gerry kept saying, “That’s sick!” The demo of the new earbuds are especially impressive in its cleverness.

When the video got to this fictitious SMS conversation between the speaker and Johnny Appleseed about having a drink before going to Sushi Ran. The place?

Let’s meet at Kell’s

“Let‘s meet at Kell’s.”

Coincidentally, my last SMS message reads… 6/21/07 09:51PM. A: “Kels, jackson and montgomery.”

Yes, I just got drunk there yesterday after the RockYou! party.

Morgan and Jia

Morgan and Jia
Thristy Bear, SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina AT-X PRO 16-50mm f/2.8 DX, SB-800
1/25sec @ f/3.2, iso2000*, 16mm (24mm)

Maybe God is trying to tell me something…

I read you loud and clear, Steve. 😀

(Speaking about New York and San Francisco, I went to my first baseball game in 18 years and it was between the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants. Last time I went, I saw Barry Bonds play also, as my friends heckled him from the corporate boxes. This time, I noticed I had no reception on my cell phone and I thought to myself…hmm, I’m switching to AT&T soon. Bonds hit his 749th home run.)

Posted on by tychay 9

Back to Safari

(No, I haven’t tried Safari 3.0.)

At work yesterday we were talking about how slow Firefox has become. You’re chugging around, opening a few tabs and then, after a few hours, you notice that everything takes like a second to respond. Has anyone else noticed this? It’s also been crashier of late—to the point where I’m actually depending on the Restore Session feature.

I decided I’d set Safari set as my default for personal use and Firefox for work. Rasmus does this for security reasons, I’m just doing it because I need Firefox for web development.

And while I’m wishing that Mozilla move back to their core and fix their shit before they talk about features in Firefox 3.0 that I and nobody else in the world are interested in—besides the three people using microformats. Why don’t they fix things so that when I drag the bookmark to the desktop it uses the page title as the file title instead of part of the URL?

u-whines about Safari: It needs real debugging. Add session restore, how come I lose my block popup settings? Why open “safe” by default? Has the Mac world become that lame? Now that I’m using it again, is it time to Pimp My Safari?

Posted on by tychay 5

Aperture supports Panasonic/Leica

I noticed in the release notes of the Mac OS X 10.4.10 update today:

  • Adds RAW image decoding support for the following cameras: Panasonic DMC-LX1, Panasonic DMC-LX2, Leica M8, Leica D-LUX 2, Leica D-LUX 3, Fuji S5 Pro, Nikon D40x, and Canon EOS 1D Mk III.

Since Apple Aperture uses the same RAW decoding. That means that I no longer have to do that crazy hack to get my LX-1 RAW files into Aperture. I blogged about this earlier, so I’d like to say, “Thanks, Apple!”

Coincidentally, I almost purchased a Fuji S5 Pro. I bought lenses instead. You really have to have more lenses before you can justify a purchase of a second body, right? 🙂

I think the Leica M8 is a sweet camera for the photo buff who has gobs of money to spend. I mean besides the body, the lenses are astronomical. Or is it just me? I don’t know. I’m just thinking the days when I shied away from Nikon because I thought, “their stuff is too expensive.”

Aperture Users @ Flickr discussion

Posted on by tychay 1

2007-06-14 My ten seconds at WWDC

A friend of a friend hooked me up with a WWDC pass. Shhh… The real reason I went there was to meet a friend, but he had to miss out that day because of bugs and a release. (I won’t name names, but you suck!)

Unfortunately, I was too tired from driving back from Lunch 2.0 and errands to make it there for much of it. Actually, I caught exactly 5 seconds of the last talk’s Q&A on Dojo Toolkit. It’s probably for the best since Alex doesn’t need to hear me rant about Dojo for the hundredth time. My host scored me a free pass to the Apple Bash after the event just before they went off to dinner and I had to head the other direction to sflickr.

As I was passing Yerba Buena Gardens, an Apple Person In Black saw my bash band and said, “Right this to the Bash, sir.”

“Thank you. But no thank you, I’m skipping the party.”

My ten seconds at WWDC (2007-0048 12)

My ten seconds at WWDC
SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina AT-X PRO 16-50mm f/2.8 DX
1/160sec @ f/4.5, iso100, 17mm (25mm)

[OSCON, Microsoft, and Apple after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2

PHP (and mac) pinup

I was catching up on some of my newsreading when I ran across this article, with the quote:

Is this quote for real?

Image from Macenstein and model from Suicide Girls. (horny php guy desktopper)

I thought I’d make it into this desktop image as a shout-out to all you (male) PHP devs out there. (There was an old PHP image I saw about five years ago sort of like this…those of you who remember, know what I’m talking about.)

(Passing thought: this person has been a PHP developer longer than me.)

[Commentary after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

Complete my album

Complete My Album

It’s (almost) finally safe to make a single song purchase in iTunes Music Store. A new feature called Complete My Album will count your single song purchases to the purchase of the entire album.

Nice.

It’s currently a limited time offer. My guess is they’re going to see the conversion rate before deciding to make it permanent. That’s clever but annoying.Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 0

Pair your remotes

One f’d up thing I ran into today is that every time I try to do anything on my Apple TV, my MacBook starts reacting to the remote (going in and out of Front Row for instance).

The solution is to take your remotes and pair them. What pairing does it it forces the computer or Apple TV to only recognize one remote. To pair your Apple TV, just go to “Settings > Pair Remote” with the remote you have on hand. To pair your Macbook, read this hint.

Here is another tip. If you want to turn off your Apple TV (actually, put it on stand by), think of it like an Apple iPod. Hold down the Play/Pause button on your remote for five seconds.

Posted on by tychay 0