Wednesday, January 30, 2008
iChat AV tip
iChat is one of Mac OS X's best features and with the Leopard upgrade it's even better. My family use it to videoconference with my parents living overseas. However, my parents often complained about the degrading audio and video quality during our iChat sessions. On my side everything would look crystal cleal.Using the Connection Doctor, I noticed that the remote end would see degradation when my local bandwidth rises up to 500+ kbps and the remote bandwidth stays around 300+ kbps. When I set a bandwidth limit in iChat preferences to 500kbps then everything was fine. Now our iChat sessions are a much better experience.
Labels: iChat
posted by eugene at 11:23 AM
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Friday, January 18, 2008
Yahoo and OpenID
Since the recent reshuffling of Yahoo's executive team, the company has started back on a road of innovation. Yahoo is releasing more and more of the technologies they use, opening up their API, and now they're embracing OpenID. It's a good sign for the company, and hopefully for their stock price.
Article Link
posted by Edward at 5:03 PM
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MWSF Notes
So my Macworld 08 trip is officially over now. I stood in line since 3:00 am, waited for 6 hours, and finally was shuffled into the reality distortion field of Steve Jobs' keynote. I didn't bother doing any live blogging, as most people out there were probably following the keynote coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo, or any other number of blogs.And by now, you know the Jobs announced a new Time Capsule, AppleTV, updates to iPhone, and the new MacBook Air. A good amount of people were expecting even more, and were kind of disappointed about the announcements. Considering the growing popularity of Apple, and huge amount of hype and media coverage, I would say Steve jobs has done an excellent job with the keynote.
I think Time Capsule, although not very glamorous, is a great device. Combined with Time Machine, this little device basically fulfills most if not all the needs of a small business and definitely the average user. It covers networking, file and printer sharing, and backups. I believe this is basically the Mini-XServe. Perhaps the only thing missing is VPN access, however the Back2MyMac service provided by a .Mac account does address this somewhat.
As expected, and possible purposely leaked, iTunes movie rentals was released. Apple TV was also upgraded to offer more of what users want to do on their monster HDTVs. These things were expected and needed. The surprise was that Jobs was able to sign up ALL the major studios. Finally, the big studios are 'getting it'. There's no point in fighting advances in technology, instead of spending millions and millions of dollars fighting the inevitable and suing THEIR customers they should have been embracing the new technologies.
iPhone got it's slew of updates. Most significant I think was geo location without GPS. The technology has been around for a while, so it wasn't too exciting of an announcement. Plus, Google announced the technology for Google Maps Mobile late last year already. Other continued software updates to iPhone, while not very exciting, is confirms Apple's commitment to continue improving the iPhone over the years. It is actually quite encouraging for new users to know that their $399 is well spent, and their phone won't be worthless right away.
And then there's the MacBook Air. This is pretty much everything I wanted. Super light weight laptop, with good performance and a long battery life. It is pricey, but not that out of line with other ultra portables. Nowadays most people just need to be online and run a few office applications. I think it will be a big seller, and I'm sure the technology will soon migrate to the rest of the MacBook line.
Overall, it was a good start for Apple this year.
Labels: Apple TV, iPhone, MacBook Air, MWSF
posted by Edward at 4:23 PM
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Sunday, January 13, 2008
ZFS on Mac OS X is now here
via OSNews.com it looks like a fully read / writable ZFS port ( with a few kinks )has arrived for OS X. It's in sync now with the Solaris version of ZFS, but is still not bootable for OS X. It'll be interesting to see how Apple will leverage ZFS in the future.Labels: Apple Mac OS X, ZFS
Article Link
posted by Edward at 12:57 AM
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Saturday, January 12, 2008
MWSF 2008
Well, Macworld San Francisco 2008 is upon us, and we have dispatched Edward to the west coast for coverage of the news and events. Rumors are already flying through the blogosphere of new products such as a new sub-notebook, iTunes movie rental, new iPhone, and other application updates. Here's my prediction:* iPhone SDK to be released ahead of schedule. How to top off last year's awesome iPhone keynote? Tell the public that their iPhones can now run custom applications (officially)!
* New portable device, possibly incorporating iPhone's touch-sensitive interface. Sub-notebook? Tablet? Existing laptops with new configurations?
* AppleTV enhanced with more DVR-like features. This product better get updated before people forget about it!
Counting down to Tuesday!
posted by eugene at 10:36 PM
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Thursday, January 03, 2008
Quick notes on Leopard LAMP
Leopard ships with Apache2, MySQL, and PHP5. Follow the link for notes on getting it up and running.Labels: Apache 2, Apple Mac OSX Leopard, MySQL, PHP 5
Article Link
posted by Edward at 7:00 PM
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Printing Return Mailing Labels in OS X
1) Create a new document from a Template.2) Select the 'Labels' template.
3) Check the Address box;
Type your return address;
Select 'Sheet';
Select your type of Label.
4) Select 'Entire page' in the Options tab; click New Document.
5) Print your labels.
Alternatively you can print labels from the AddressBook program. However, there is no way to repeat a single address. So you will need to create a while bunch of contacts with the same address and select them all to print.
Labels: Apple Mac OS X, Mailing Labels, Tips
posted by Edward at 12:51 PM
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Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Put that old laptop to good use
What happens when a geek gets some vacation time and has an old laptop sitting around? Hmmmm.Some time ago I bought an Apple PowerBook "Pismo" off eBay and actually spent some additionally money on it to beef up the CPU (to a G4), a combo drive, and new batteries. It ran MacOS X Tiger just fine for the past year or so, but I finally decided to gut it and install Linux on it. Oh what fun...
First, Linux has really matured into a stable desktop environment with notable distributions ("distro") such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Yellow Dog. Of course, the Pismo is a PowerPC machine so that limited the choices out there. I finally decided on Ubuntu as I've heard many good things about it (plus it has cool version names, e.g. Gutsy Gibbon).
The installation process wasn't too bad. I downloaded the .iso image, burned it onto CD, and booted with it. It detected just about all the hardware, but there was a problem with the display. A few searches on ubuntuforums.org revealed the fix (includes Linux shell commands) and the next step was getting the wireless connectivity going.
Be warned! Ubuntu does NOT like WPA-enabled WLANs. After hours of trying to get WPA to work, I gave up and "downgraded" my WLAN to WEP encryption plus MAC filtering. Once I configured Ubuntu for WEP, everything was great!
The other complaint I have is Adobe Flash support, but that's Adobe's fault for not respecting PowerPC systems. Thankfully there's an open source player called Gnash which sorta-kinda works. If all you need is a Web browser, word processor, simple games, IM client, etc. then have no fear in making the Linux move, especially when you have an old system lying around...
posted by eugene at 2:24 AM
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Happy New Year!
Welcome to 2008, everyone! It has been a good year and all of us look forward to another great year.
posted by eugene at 2:22 AM
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