My buddy Scott is beginning a comparison of Lightroom vs. Aperture (maybe he’ll blog about the results). It turns out that it’s really easy to get Lightroom to upload a web gallery to an FTP server. On the other hand Aperture only has one-click uploading to .Mac; there are plug-ins that allow exporting images directly …
Category Archives: Tech
New Addictions
So part of what helped keep me occupied this weekend (other than my friend Donald’s wedding) was Chain Factor. Compared to DTD, it’s more of a traditional puzzle game, but no less addictive. My current top score is: 191,449 in Basic mode. Since there’s no groups standings on the Chain Factor site, feel free to …
MythTV vs. TiVo
I’m hooked on TiVo. If you’ve never used one, I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, the company’s insistence on charging monthly for TV schedule information, means that I turned to other sources when I got an HDTV and wanted TiVo-like features. Specifically I turned to MythTV (or MythTVHD if you prefer). Being a bit of a …
Distance to the Linux desktop
I want to preface this rant (and it’s going to be a rant) with some background. I do this not trumpet my own experience , but to point out that I’m not ranting because I’m not capable. I’ve been playing with (and programming) computers for about 25 years. I ran my first Unix-based computer 17 …
Playstation 3 Dilemma
So I wandered into the local Best Buy — half looking for Clerks 2, and half looking for a Nintendo Wii — and walked out with a 60GB Playstation 3. I can probably eBay it for a couple hundred in profit, or Craigslist it for somewhat less, or I can just keep it and enjoy …
Of Lightning Strikes and Motorcycles
It was a long weekend. Thursday night the torrential downpours brought with them a lovely spate of lightning; which in turn struck the oak tree just in front of my house. While chilling and interesting at the time, the real relevance didn’t become evident until somewhat later. Our DSL modem and Linksys router both got …
Subtle Changes
Kate‘s comment last week regarding content “above the fold” reminded me of my posts from last year on making an impact in less than 30 seconds and tools for more effective blogging. I realized that I hadn’t evaluated my own blogs in the intervening 18 months since I wrote those posts. Much to my surprise, …
Outage
I apologize to anyone who had problems accessing the blog and related sites today. Heavy rains in the area knocked out our Internet connection for about 6 hours. We’re back up for now, but the rains are expected to continue, so please bear with us.
Less Comment Spam
Comment spam has been on the rise lately, and I’ve been deploying anti-spam software on the blogs to counteract the recent increase in spam activity. Akismet is a great tool, sorting out 99.8% of the comment spam I’ve received in the last couple of months with very few errors. Available as a plug-in to WordPress, …
Out with Windows in with…
This is the operating system I chose to install on the Shuttle XPC. (Click to enlarge) And here’s one of the entire rig. (Click to enlarge) With the correct tools from the Web, the entire process was pretty much point-and-click. Sound, video (Quartz Extreme and Core Image), and Rosetta were all working immediately; overall this …