The Dantz Retrospect disc (that was supposed to come with the Iomega minimax) was in the mail yesterday morning. It took some time to solve this missing disc problem, but I got it. In a big part thanks to Harriett, the Apple After Sales support person.
Category: Blog News
News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.
Categories
The (Sony) plot thickens
vnunet.be – DN – Sony rootkit accused of licence violation
Seems like the XCP program developed by First4Internet and distributed by Sony as theu XCP copy protection program re-used parts of open-source programs like mpeg123, which is mostly GPL’ed.
Thus Sony would be, if this is true, in license violation by not including a copy of the GPL license and including the source code.
Of course, all of this is moot – since the DCMA law prevents people from reverse-compiling it to see if this is actually so or not…
The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles – Popular Science
This article recounts the amazing discovery of coloured bubbles and how hard it is to make them.
In the end, it seems that they may only be a side-effect of the new dyes that were created : instead of colours that persist, they have invented colours that disappear (intentionally).
I bit the bullet and ordered last Tuesday an Iomega minimax from the Apple Belgium store. They have a special discount running till the end of this year where you buy the 200GB for the same price (199 €) as the 160 GB.
As a strange aside, the Iomega Europe site does not sell the 200GB anymore, only the 250 GB so my guess this is one or other Apple deal with them to get rid of some overstock ?
It arrived the Friday morning, and I have since installed it after reorganising my desk. It fits very nicely under my Mac Mini and is fast enough. It connects via an ultra-short firewire cable that is delivered with it. However, the fan generates more noise (when it activates, which does not take long when you use it) than the Mac Mini itself.
At first I was going to boot from it using the firewire link between them, but I’ve come to enormously appreciate the (almost) silence from the Mac Mini, so I am going to try to keep on using the Mac Mini as initial boot drive and put all my backups and large files (like Garageband, iPhoto and iDVD projects) on the Minimax drive.
I just bought myself a Mac mini (1.2 Ghz, 265Mb RAM, 40 Gig HD) for 399€ in the MediaMarkt. They have them on sale as they are clearing their old stock out. Actually I am not so sure that they are going to buy new mac’s at all.
This was going to be a headless server box, but it is sooo much snappier than my powerbook.
Well, after my do-it-your-self-upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM, that is (I ordered it online from www.crucial.com). Otherwise it crawls along if you open more than 2 apps, due to Apple’s decision at the time to give the minimum amount of memory OS X could run on.
I am planning on buying a 200 Gb Iomega external firewire disk ‘minimax’ to complement it and have set it up to on my KVM switch.
My Mac powerbook (G4 867Mhz, 768 MB Ram, 40 Gig) was bought almost 2,5 years ago. I use it for all my email and photo’s and homevideo factory, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth to run the latest mac applications like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD which all seem to expect gigabytes of RAM, a fast disk and at least a 1Ghz CPU. And as for games, I can forget playing those that came out the last year or so.
As an aside, the gaming scene on the mac is seriously handicapped : only the most lucrative games are ported to the Mac, and you always have to wait 3 to 6 months for them to arrive (one exception : World of Warcraft !).
So I continued playing the latest games on my pc (Half-Life 2 and recently Guild Wars) and I even upgraded my graphic card to a Radeon 9800 SE which, while not the very latest card, still allows me play all of the games I want playing. With 2 kids, I don’t exactly have lots of free time anymore…
Categories
Baby update
Sam is really getting to be a big and chubby baby. Now at 7,2 kg, he is a very active 4-month old baby, with a ready smile or laughter for you if/when he recognises you.
He is also the most vocal baby I know – he just sits and kirrs when he is happy, which he is a lot of the time (so we must be doing something right). Even when he is ill, he is always happy to see you. He loves to play in his playpen.
At night, he tends to sleep between 21.00 and 5.00 or 6.00 in the morning. Somehow, this makes it harder for us than when we had to get up during the middle of the night. Even though we sleep longer hours now, it is more of a chore to get up at 5.00 than to get up at 3 or 4.
Tom is being a very good boy, and eating lots of different things. Even going as far as trying out new combinations of drinks and food spontaneously. Wow.
Categories
PlayStation continued !
To continue my post about the PlayStation one console I bought, the only thing still missing was a savegame-card. Since Tom is extremely keen on playing the Dinosaurs game, on Tuesday during lunch hour I went to the local Photohall shop in the Brussels North Train Station. Unfortunately they did not have it.
They could order one though, for 16.97 euros. Geez, that’s about half of what I paid for the whole setup at the flea market in the first place. However, the guy behind the counter told me I could probably get them at Pele-Mele, a shop near the Brussels South Station that specialises in second-hand book, computers and game consoles.
So I took the pre-metro (an underground tram) over there, getting off at the ‘Anneesens’ stop. After some bumbling around, going the wrong way, I found it. It’s actually so close to the exit of the pre-metro that I had not seen it coming out.
They did indeed have a savegame-card, at the cost of 10 euros. I figured I could either wait until there was another brocante, and perhaps not find it, or pay for it right now, so I bought it.
There was also a second-hand PSP (!) that was on sale for 190 euros (they also had them at the regular price of 249 euros), a PlayStation 2 for 100 euros, Nintendo gameboys, gameboys advance and DS a gogo, and a large collection of second-hand games.
Lots of people come in and sell them their no longer used games, all the time. While I was there a kid – probably 14 years old – sold them his Gameboy and all the titles that came with it. Probably saving up for a PSP.
I also noticed something strange – a couple of brown-skinned youths selling 2 PS2 games were accompanied by a guy that I can best describe as a tramp. I was wondering why he was there until I noticed the body language of the store clerk – he was obviously not happy seeing him and the youths.
After watching the whole sales process I puzzled it out – anytime you sell a game, the store clerk takes a photocopy of your identity card, so they know from whom they bought it, and very probably to have a trail in case they buy stolen merchandise. This is where the tramp came in handy for these two youths : when they sell the game, it’s not their identity that is copied, it’s the tramps one. He probably gets a free beer out of it, and since he is a tramp, he is probably not that easy to find should anyone wonder why he is selling all these games.
The store clerk definitely was not happy buying games from these guys, but since they fulfilled the legal obligations, he did accept the games from them, even if they were sort of smirking in his face.
You learn something every day… nothing good though, today.
Categories
California judges are full of it.
Grrrr. My blood is back to boiling temperature. The Register reports that a California judge has ruled that credit card companies or associated companies do NOT have to notify their card holders if (when) their personal information has been stolen.
But a San Francisco Superior Court Judge, Richard Kramer, disagreed. “I don’t see the emergency,” he said. “I don’t think there is an immediate threat of irreparable injury” to consumers.
More info at this Register page.
This Sunday morning I went to a ‘brocante’, or as most people know it : a flea market. The weather was not too shabby, the sun was shining, a coldish breeze played around us as a gentle reminder that summer is over.
In short, it was one of those days where you top of your internal batteries, ready for the winter that is coming.
I did not intend to buy anything except maybe a small toy or so for Sam and/or Tom, but I stumbled over a PlayStation one game console that sold for 40 euros. It was in an original PlayStation bag, and came with everything you needed to set it up, owners manual included.
PlayStation one consoles must be on the way out, I guess. There are lots of games and consoles for sale right now… I thought, it’ll do nicely for the kids.
After some haggling, I got the whole kit for 30 euros, games included, and I probably still overpaid 🙂 as a bit further they were selling PSone consoles (the small kind) for 20 euros, but without any cabling or joysticks.
Tom, our eldest at almost four, had previously seen some older kids playing PlayStation 2 games, and adored just watching them play, particulary the Dinosaur game. I found that one game as well on the market, and bought it for just 5 euros. Probably about one tenth of the price it costed originally !
Back home, I showed the Dinosaur game to Tom – he was totally delighted ! He is eagerly trying to learn how to play and move the little monkey around – his favourite character at the moment. Words like ‘up’ and ‘down’ are getting to have a whole new meaning for him.
The only thing still needed was a memory card to save his progress – the only thing missing.
Categories
Trick to writing
The trick to writing an entry for your blog or novel or webpage, or really anything interesting, is to follow up immediately on that idea that just popped up in your head. I usually get great ideas when I am not sitting in front of my computer – in fact, I got the idea for this blog entry while swimming.
Not really handy to pop out your notebook and jot down a few keywords, eh ? But still, that is actually the best way to go about it – to write a few key words down in your pda, on a piece of paper or even the back of your hand that describe what you want to tell. That is enough for me to get my key idea back into my head and start writing about it, once I am in front of my computer.
If you don’t do this, thinking that you will not forget this oh so important and elucidating idea ? It’ll pop out of your mind the same way as it popped in it.