So, on Saturday 3rd Nov. my shiny copy of Leopard arrived and I promptly installed it on my Macbook.. No problems there, perfect first time.

Then I proceeded to install it on our other two Macs...


I know, i know, my setup is hardly sleek and minimalist.. This is only one of two(or three?) screens too..

( Leopard first impressions, grabs, issues etc. )

My last rat was put down yesterday after a couple of days having fits and becoming a vegetable. I took him for a post-mortem (to Wetherby.. By taxi) . I chose to do this on the off-chance that there was something more sinister behind the recent rat deaths - if there's any chance there was something contagious I need to know in case i want to keep rats later on..

Having pets die is depressing.. Having a day of vet stuff costing over £200 when they're already dead even more-so.

---

On a much more positive note.. i got my marks for 1st Yr of uni, and my average is 72.. Which I'm very happy with. The first year's marks don't really count for anything other than progressing to the next level, but.. Still nice.. I got 90 for the end of year assignment.

Andy and Jamie were round and played a load of multiplayer stuff which was fun, and good to distract me from other stuff. Today Danny, Lucy and Owen should be coming round to play random stuff too.

Apple launched a load of new stuff (iMac, software, no portables though).. Which is good, but rats > Macs.. I'm really dreading the call from the pathologists.. Lets hope it's nothing too scary or anything I could have avoided.

Okay, so, a few months ago I flashed an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to work in the Mac.. It seemed to work fine, until recently..

Anything using Core Graphics (iphoto mostly) froze up the system completely.. Everything stops, mouse pointer doesn't even move any more type freeze where you have to hold down the off button for a few seconds to get out. So I switched to my old graphics card for a week, which was unbeaaaarably slow now I'm used to the 9800.

So I switch back to the 9800 and look in the console/error log and see the scanner driver is polling the buttons on the front of the scanner about 30 times a second.. "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" "are you pressing a button on the scanner?" .. So I stop the scanner monitor from loading at boot time, and now I can't make the Mac crash anymore..

So, either a weird coincidence or weird behaviour. Secondary Mac graphics library which crashes when USB devices are spammed by their own drivers whilst using one particular graphics card. Whaa.. I'm not complaining, but I don't trust it not to crash again.

... On Tuesday Owen and I went to Danny's taking a load of games, controllers and the PS3. That was tiring.. PS3s aren't exactly super portable. A lot of fun though, and I kicked butt. Go team Mixel!

Damn you Jeebus!

My monitor is on next working day delivery.. Great! It's Easter! Foiled again..

I'm on my old CRT at the moment until it arrives. I forgot how unclear it is.. It's not a bad monitor really, it's just so eye-strainy in comparison... Hurry up Tuesday! ..

Octocore 3Ghz MacPros came out a couple of days ago.. Comically impressive, Though a full refresh of all Mac hardware is probably due relatively soon anyway.. This seems to just be a BTO option for people who need 8 3Ghz cores.. Which I can't imagine is many people, but hell.. FASTNESS!! .. £3k(ish)

My video card adventure took another turn yesterday when I fitted the new, v nice, giant Zalman fan (the old fan enclosure didnt fit in the Mac!) , only to realise it requires power from a 4 pin molex connector.. "No problem!" I thought.. "I'll use one of the PSU connectors".. The G5 setup has *one* 4 pin molex connector - for the optical drive.. All of the other power connectors are SATA. So now I've had to order a molex splitter. G5 PSUs are unexpectedly strange.. I've never had much need to look at it before..

Worlds most expensive/complicated "free" upgrade!


3 generations of cooling, one stupid 9600xt.

Missed Andy's colouring thingemy last night by just .. not going. Terrible reason. I hope it went well anyway..!

Also.. It's Friday Flock tonight.. Probably not going to that either, but thought I should mention anyway! The Sunday Black Sheep-a-thon thing also sounds interesting though.. Going to that instead. :D (Thats the plan anyway.. Must leave house for reasons other than Uni.)

It saved me ~£100!

I'm totally dumbstruck.. Just flashed my previously bricked ATI Radeon 9600xt into A) working.. B) working in the PowerMac!

Previously whenever anything taxing happened the GPU fan would switch off. .. Now its working perfectly in a machine its not even supposed to work in at all. :D

When we/I got this machine it needed to run Photoshop etc.. And that still is what it does 90% of the time. 64MB video cards were acceptable then.. Not really anymore - Between the OS and other thing there's enough visual stuff going on to warrant needing more.. Kats laptop had 4x the video ram of my graphics workstation. Now I've doubled it for nothing, and made the machines graphics performance skyrocket.

(GeForce FX5200 Ultra previously to 9600XT)

Just forked out £25 for a display adaptor + quieter fan, but I'm super happy! I'm glad it died originally now. as i'd never have dared flash it had there been nothing to lose.. Does make me wonder what went wrong with it in the first place though. When i leant it to Owen did his motherboard scramble its eeprom? would that explain why his current video card is being bizarre?

.. Zombie holiday gets a constant full FPS, I can't make it drop regardless of on screen activity. I didnt realise video cards had that much impact on PGF-made stuff.. Apparently so though!

Woo!

One day europe/UK Applestore sale (1st December - Today).. Pretty much the same thing as the Black Friday sale in the US..

Just in case anyone was planning on buying Apple stuff before Xmas. there are some decent discounts.

... And some crappy ones, but every little helps I guess.

...

There are a couple of ppl on my list who'd want to know about this. It's not some odd xmas related hint. hehe.

Anyone getting a macbook/macbook pro I can seriously recommend Parallels desktop too - running windows full speed(ish) in a window is better than a dual boot solution for most stuff.

Apple Fifth Av. store offends (some) Muslims? - "and moreover, contains bars selling alcoholic beverages" - the "Genius bar".. Doesn't sell alchoholic beverages...! That would be amazing. You could take in your broken iPod and drunkenly mourn it's loss at the same time.

I'd never seen pics of the Ka'ba before, so at least its been an educational story.

I bought myself an EyeTV DTT stick.. Largely for film4 and News24.. And to solve the (infrequent) wanting to watch different things at the same time problem.

Been using it a few days. Only problem I've had with it is the tiny little aerial which is surely only any use if you live next to a transmitter..

( Aerial shenanigans )
Using it is really slick - being able to pause and rewind TV is great, and the scheduling system is brilliant - you can just click the red dots by stuff on the program forecast and the mac will wake up from sleep and record the stuff to HD.



My mobile phone works as a bluetooth remote control.. There's all sorts of little details which make it great to use. I'm very happy with it. :)

Oh, and...



Tonight! Rarr!

I upgraded my RAM and got a second internal HD.. Always running photoshop and 4+ other big apps* was slowing the Mac down a lot. :/ It sucked having a nice powerful machine but having it bottleneck all the time.

2GB should be enough for anyone! ... When the hell did HDs get so cheap!? I got a SATA2 Seagate Barracuda - 320GB (!!) - 16MB buffer..... £75 including postage?! WHAAAaa?!

- whahaha! (I don't expect this to make sense to most of you..)

Anyway, working on the machine should be considerably faster now. Woohoo!

*Sad how what used to be small apps.. IM programs, email, browsers etc are all getting huge too. Ah well.

Well, WWDC wasn't that exciting, but some of Leopards features have been revealed.. Most interesting to me was Time Machine ... Funny visual implementation too.

Obviously the 'secret' features are going to be additions to the finder, a new version of safari(?) and better Exposé stuff.. Probably optional 3D Exposé stuff to keep GUI idiots from going "VISTA must be better, the windows move in 3d space and can spin!!" Err. Yeah.

New "Mac Pro" looks nice, but my Powermac does fine! Little Macbooks are super seductive though. @_@


Also.. DeviantART finally updated their layout.. I think it's such a big improvement! My DA Gallery.

I just flashed my DVD-RW's firmware to support Dual layer burning and be twice as fast at some stuff. Apparently Apple got them adjusted to be quieter and crippled them somewhat. Very strange. Also made it multi-region.

Talking about Apple - it's apple's 30th birthday today.. A lot of people were expecting announcements.. I was too.. But.. doesn't look like anything's going to happen at all!

Also.. Invader Zim arrived. Woohoo! And a little Zim-house collector box.


I've been playing quite a lot of retro games recently (research!).. Was playing the Addams Family and Kat came in and asked "why are you Saddam Hussein?"

- hahahahah.. Messed up!


Also, been checking out Turrican fan-sites, and my desktop now looks like:

- RULES. (even though I'd swear there are no dinosaurs in any of the Turrican games?)

Finally, using Face Transformer I've established what I'd look like if I was a satan-baby.

I've also been doing productive stuff but I thought I'd make a flippant entry instead.

I'm VERY behind on email..

Anyone expecting replies.. I'm still alive - just really slow!

Sidenote: New Mac Mini

It's so cuuute!

It's strange to think that 1GB of ram is proving 'not quite enough for optimal performance'..

I'm thinking back to when 1MB was 'not quite enough for optimal performance'.. I wasn't trying to do as much back then, but still.. Progress is weird!

To get more Ram because of the 64bit Dual G5 thing I'll actually have to get 2 identical DIMMs, which runs the price up. Bah. Using Crucial.com prices - £62 for two 512MB dimms or £126 for two 1GB Dimms.. 3GB should be enough for anyone! Hmm. 2GB total should be fine. Won't do any harm to be prepared for when Leopard comes out though. 1GB is really "ok" now - it just slows when i do crazy stuff in photoshop. That seems to happen a lot.. And Photoshop doesn't exactly seem to speed up with each new version.


CMO's 2nd "birthday" came and went.. I'm coming up to the end of the first book. Half of me wants to finish it ASAP, redo some earlier bits and move on.. Another part of me is dragging it's feet - it'll be very strange not updating for a long period.. It's taught me a lot. Been very helpful practice and experimentation.

When I updated to 10.4.4 I got the single most marked speed increase I think I've ever got out of an OS update apart from when upgrading from Jaguar to Panther. Impressive!

All the swooshy effects behave much better now.

I ordered iLife '06.. Curse you Apple and your annual software rollout. Seems worth it though as I missed '05, and I'm using Garageband to make ZH's music.

Early benchmarks (seemed to) show the new Macbook Pro is faster than my dual CPU G5 powermac... Hehe. That's pretty impressive for a little laptop.. This thing doesn't exactly feel slow. ed: May have spoken too soon actually. Either way it's fast.

Beware the mouse -

Hmm, wow. That was a weird conference.. Announcing 'Macbook Pro' and new iMacs? Most of the rumours pointed at a low end - up transition starting with the ibooks and minis.. Ah well they'll all be Intel by the end of the year. And insanely fast. Interesting times.

Steve Jobs' habit of saying "boom!" hundreds of times in every keynote is still funny.. boom! Booom!! And then.. Boom! Just.. boom! And the cheesy staged showiness of it all was, as always enjoyable.. If you're interested in such things. Watch it here..

I'm slightly underwhelmed though, only new freebies are tiny updates and a few pointless widgets. Boring. I'll probably get iLife 06 though just for the GarageBand and iPhoto updates. Hurrah.

OMG I ran out of LJ subscription! So I bought more. Phew. Crisis averted. Set up an automatic payment thing.. $30 a year doesn't really seem like much for what I'm getting.. 100 LJ icons should be enough for anyone!

Hmm, considering I basically never use anything but my main one that's probably overkill. Extra incentive to get off my ass and make a nice (largely CMO-based) iconset..


I've been watching tons of films recently in the background.. Most of the zombie variety.. Sheesh, who would've thought there are SO MANY zombie films?

Nothing to do with Zombies, but Casshern is one hell of a great thing indeed.


Web Stuff..
I'm still waiting for my webhost to upgrade Perl.. I'm not doing something like this by hand when they have the official roll-out so soon.. This is totally my fault, but it's still annoying having about a quarter of my site not work until it's done. Grr!


Mac Stuff..
New Dual CPU Dual Core Powermacs support 16GB of RAM. The G5 itself supports upto 4 terrabytes.. Whatever intel macs Apple has planned for next year are going to have to be nice to compete with the current line-up.. I guess that's a good thing.

Last week we finally got round to reformatting Kat's ibook and starting from scratch.. It wasn't as big an undertaking as I'd thought, nothing was lost and it was easy to reimport all her mail/bookmarks/settings etc.

The main reason for this was her ibook was going far too slowly, and various things were getting crashy on Panther. (most notably "find" always crashed the finder, mmm, irony) The ibook had 9.2, 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3 installed on it, all as upgrades, and there was a lot of bloat. Anyway, now she has 10.4(Tiger), and it runs super fast considering it's a 600mhz G3 with 256MB.. I was a bit worried I'd be making it worse by upgrading.. Instead it seems to cope really well with Kat's usual '1000 browser tabs open simultaneously!!' behaviour.. Spotlight & dashboard run nice and fluidly. Mission accomplished.

( Butler: Probably irrelevant unless you use Macs..You've been warned! )

- In other news, nothing all that interesting is happening. Woo.

I don't know whether it's just my machine, or recent versions of 10.3 and 10.4, but I recommend NOT running http://psyncx.sourceforge.net/ - (2.1.1) AT ALL..

I left it going overnight, and when I woke up the mac was using 11GB of virtual memory and running in sloooooow motion! Strange.. I have 1GB RAM.. All it's supposed to be doing is copying files!

Looks like I'm going to have to switch to something else for backups. Not impressed.