Baby news first: There is no baby news.. batkat had a membrane sweep today though.. (well, at least I'm learning a lot about pregnancy!) That *might* kick-start birth within 48hrs, and if not it'll be induced next week.

Soo, within 1.5 weeks we *will* have a baby. :O

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Uni stuff now.. Macs.. Are.. Everywhere. Seriously, its normal to see 3 student Macbooks in a room, and 2 of the 4 people (other than me) in my group, who'd previously been "ugh macs" seem to be getting Mac Minis or Macbooks.

... It's nice! We're planning on using a combination of the iPhone SDK and Unity3D to make an iPhone/iPod touch game next year, too.

For the work in progress (middle milestone) on our current brief we got 70.. 78 for the concept document, which is going to be used an example for later years as how to do it well. :D Now that made me very happy as it took ages to lay everything out, do pictures, etc.. I have a mitigating circumstances form to fill in "Re: Baby stuff" too, so I don't need to worry about impending fatherhood effecting my marks (in the short term!)

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House stuff! Apparently our water supply goes under the house behind ours, and under her house it's lead piped, and we're sharing the same supply.. That seems a bit dumb. So we're probably going to share the cost to get the lead pipes removed, and are going to ask about getting the supplies split.. Which would be worth doing.. Probably.. Hmm. We wouldn't have known if she wasn't converting her basement either..

Stupid pipes.

...

I love this thing.

I was considering getting a 12" Wacom Cintiq after Dave Cheung bought one and seems to like it, triggering a research spree.. Which led me to the realisation that for £hundreds less I could get an obsceeeeenely nice display instead... (Cintiq was still tempting, but its un-portability lost it for me, I'd want to move it around, or what's the point? it'd be replacing one of my displays too, so that'd be a huge downgrade in screen space...)

Took me days to calibrate the Samsung, but its absolutely gorgeous.. Colour reproduction is spot on (lol, NOW it is), it displays more of the RGB gamut than any other display costing <£1k (that I can find on the internet anyway), it pivots, it's 24" 1920x1200, the colour doesn't change at all regardless of viewing angle.. It has enough inputs for me to plug every console I own (from within the last 10 years anyway) into it simultaneously.. It does Picture In Picture too. - That may seem like a daft feature, but I might have to move the consoles down into the basement when there's a 2 year old running around at console height knocking over PS3s etc, so it's all good.

So, yes it was expensive but I spend over 60% of my time looking at my monitor/s I'd estimate, so I didn't want to compromise on a "good value" panel again. My other monitor's over as a secondary display now, which is great. It never was a good screen for art though, and was a daft purchase. :/ It's good to use as a giant EyeTV/IM/irc/iTunes screen though. :D

Fear it..

Umm, the polar icecaps are overrated anyway.

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. )

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.)

Damnit!!

Massive thanks to the guys at Strangedogs.. The video card seems to be working perfectly. My G5 seems to perform better than my PC now.

Just one small problem.. Flashing the card disabled its DVI support. Guess what my main monitor uses? Yup.. DVI.. To convert the signal I'd need a $200+ gadget. It'd make more financial sense to get a new monitor..

Arrgh. So I potentially saved tonnes of money on a video card upgrade, but it's all getting a bit complicated now!

I have a nice monitor (was incredible when i got it! Stupid fast moving tech!) and a nice video card.. But I can't use them with each other!?!

So.. Frustrating..!!</f>.. Saying that, having more good monitors around wouldn't be a bad thing. and TFT prices have dropped insane amounts.

A replacement "silent" fan for the 9600 has been dispatched too.. This is going to be lovely once its all sorted out!

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!

I like it, but what on eeearth? (this is a totally pointless entry, ignore me.. I know people couldn't care less what style I view LJ in..)

It's almost like mixelmagic.com.. All this messing around with pop up CSS menus and bizarro "clever" stuff, and it takes them this long to come up with probably the most logical and simple layout yet.

I haven't done the necessary research, but I'm guessing this is the result of people bitching about "horizon" and how everything wasn't there when they want it (they.. actually.. had to click a couple of times! or move the mouse a bit! GOSH!) Nah, i can think of a couple of situations where mobile browsers would make horizon work crappily, and user choice is always good when it comes to stuff like this, I just don't understand why this hasn't always been an option, as it's the simplest thing ever - it's just like Dystopia minus the weird colours?

I think I'll stick with horizon, Vertigo is super cluttered, but it's a step forwards for people who want "everything there" - personally I don't like options I'm never likely to use eating up screen-space, so pop-ups (horizon) suits me fine!

http://www.tunecore.com/ - lets anyone sell their music on itunes (and other) stores.. You get the full cut of profit. (about 50p per track in the UK, $0.70 for US sales)

Pretty exciting implications and a deserved kick to the big labels and RIAA (boo, hiss etc) And Apple have just started selling indie movies.. I wonder where this is headed.. But the Apple TV is looking a lot more logical.

In related news:

Kat bought me my first ipod. :D It's so cuuute!

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Last night Andy and carrot_teeth came round. Was nice to catch up and play some games. :D

Uni stuff is going well too, not much to report though.. Doing stop frame animation at the moment. Still haven't put the stuff from the last brief online.. Also, World Of Warcraft is eating more time than I anticipated. Oh dear. At least I can hang with batkat and some random people i've met on the way.

I was warming to the idea of Vista (i ran the public betas and it didnt give me problems back then, it seemed quite nice. Reminded me of osX, heh).. I only just got round to reading the comparison matrix for the different editions. I had assumed there was actually a reasonable difference between the different editions, with logical reasons behind them.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/choose.mspx

What the hell? Completely insane. Crippling some versions so you can sell an 'ultimate' version which does everything the others should do. I can understand not including individual apps, but parts of the OS and normal functionality?

Damn. And when you take into consideration scary info like this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html and reviews/articles like this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/14/pricey_beta_bugger/ ..

Well, we're still stuck in a Windows-hooked world, and Vista will likely end up on most Windows PCs within the next few years, so it makes sense to do the same (and do it earlier than most), but no way am I forking out extra to get stupid gimmick features and support crippleware.

AND there's no family license, so in this house we'd have to buy *3* copies of at least the Business Edition because you aren't allowed to virtualise the lesser ones. Even buying OEM copies from CCL that makes £270.. And why the hell cant they put a 64bit and 32bit version on the same damn DVD?! .. Apple manage!


This annoys me. Fingers crossed Linux makes big inroads over the next few years.

Whilst shopping on CCL I bought:



Wow. So brilliantly retro.. It's USB, now has 4 buttons (in oppose to the original 2) and is great for a lot of emulators (UAE particularly - Amiga games played on pads/keyboard feel totally wrong) and Zombie Holiday. It's funny to think the stick feels so nice now, and that the retro market is big enough for them to warrant marketing these!

Also bought 2 GB RAM for the Macbook, which really appreciated it. Poor little thing, I ask quite a lot of it.

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 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.

</a>

- Pretty no? Well.. That was a map of my HD.. Each box is a file, colour coded by folder.. You know something's wrong when you have a 5GB error log. It was the bit-torrent client I use. NO idea what was up with it, as it was working fine apart from making the giant log. Sorted now anyway.

Things have been treating me ok. Tired as usual, but alright.. Went and visited Clare & Jenny.. umm last week? That was fun.. Met their housemates and Dougie the hamster - It's amazing how many houses have unsecured wireless networks in their area! (Their house is nice and it was good to see people and stuff.. Trust me to think of geeky things to write, blah.)

Hamster!


He also gets his own movie! (right click/save as/play in QT) (3MB)
http://mixelmagic.com/crap/blog/Douggiemix2.m4v

I'm VERY behind on email..

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

Sidenote: New Mac Mini

It's so cuuute!

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 was attempting a 're-plug the battery' style repair on Mary's borked ipod mini.. No luck. Shame really, it wasn't really warrenty-able anymore, and it started going wrong when I was doing a software update (typical!).. I looked up all of the possibilities, and it needed a repair of some sort.. More than just a replacement battery too, so the repair cost wouldn't be worth it considering the mini is so cheap in the first place..

If anyone's interested, the insides of a iPod mini:


Now this is where it gets more positive:
4GB hitachi microdrive new £127
4GB Sandisk microdrive, new. £199
Hitachi Microdrive on Amazon.. £145
Ipod mini, new £132

There's a perfectly good microdrive here.. It's working fine.. And Mary has a digital SLR which she uses a lot which it'll work in, so the dead iPod might actually be more use than it was when it was alive.

Well that's what I'm telling myself anyway, beats feeling guilty about trying to update it's firmware. Oops. There's no reason to think it wouldnt have done the same thing when she tried, but still.. I hate stuff like that.