Archive of January 2008

More RAM and maybe a new HDD? You'd better add a printer to that mix too...

Today, my 2GB of Crucial RAM arrived. It cost me just £32 inc. shipping. It is by far the cheapest RAM I have ever bought.

Now, Parallels runs amazingly. I can use Coherence mode and forget that it is running. Now, if I could only find my Office 2003 CD...

Whilst installing the new RAM I discovered how easy it is to do upgrades to these machines. The RAM is cheap and, as a complete bonus, you can upgrade the HDD yourself.

I suspected that it was the HDD when I opened up the plate which covers the RAM. (Unfortunately, I didn't take any photographs) But you can literally pull out the HDD, this makes it easier to upgrade than a desktop PC. This got me thinking. As SATA 2.5/Laptop HDD's are so cheap these days, how about upgrading it? It is only a 60GB at the moment, and, as usual, it is full. My problem is, is that I already have masses, and masses of HDD space. I think that dealing without having much HDD space at all slowly affects you so that you don't want to spend money on upgrades until they are very much due.

I think though, that this would adjust my TV viewing quite a bit, as I would pick up the shows from my various sources and wack them in iTunes, the same would go for movies. At least then, I wouldn't fill up drives with stuff I rarely use, or never get around to watching.

This is priced at £77, from ebuyer for 250GB. It is very tempting, although, I should be saving, rather than spending.

I am currently looking into getting a reasonable photo printer. - This of course comes from someone who never prints - However, this problem may be down to the expenses and the lack of a decent printer. The model I am looking into is a Canon PIXMA iP4500. It seems good, and although not completely customisable, for example I can set custom colour maps.

I am going to add some images to this post sometime tomorrow, or at the weekend, so bear with me.. January 30 @ 11:14 PM | 0 Comments

Parallels

Yestarday, I installed Parallels. It took ages. 5 Hours to be exact.

What I was doing was setting up XP, so I could have it when I needed. What I can recommend though is setting it to install over night and not trying it on only 512mb of RAM.

Once it had installed, and wasted most of my evening it appeared to be quite good. I haven't yet tried Coherence mode with this newer version but the last time I did it was rather good.

The unfortunate thing is that my disc didn't have SP2 slipstreamed, so I done this after, that took so long that I eventually gave up and left it over night.

From this, what I can say is that Parallels although a very good app requires at least 1GB of RAM, I wouldn't try it with any less. January 29 @ 11:09 PM | 0 Comments

Getting Mac connected printers working on Windows

Today I tried setting up my printer, which is connected to my PowerMac to work on a networked Windows machine. It didn't appear to work for quite a while. However, after googling and primarily finding articles on getting printers working with Apple Airport base stations I discovered this:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/windows/bonjourforwindows.html

Although I use just basic home networking gear and not Apple's stuff I decided to give it a go. Fortunatly, it worked. Its now part of my arsenal of getting Windows machines working and Mac machines exactly how I want them.

A successful story all round really. January 28 @ 07:02 PM | 0 Comments

Upgrading my iBook G4 to Leopard, Part 6

What a mess. Today, I tried putting in the new HDD into my iBook with the intention of reinstalling Tiger on that and having everything as new. Instead, I ended up installing Tiger on a MacBook. The reason? I broke the power cable connector off, off the logic board.

Now I am using my Mum's MacBook. She offered it to me as she doesn't really get on with OSX, which is a shame, but an expensive problem for me. I now need to build her a reasonable spec PC, or work a way around it. I refuse to let her buy something, as a. it will be way over priced and b. it will be under powered and bundled with Vista, obviously, she only knows XP, so this would be somewhat pointless.

The basic plan of mine is still going ahead, apart from now that I am using a different machine, an Intel Mac too, which I suppose is an upgrade. I feel terrible about it though, the thing is, my iBook still does work, you just need to short the two contacts where the socket used to be. This is next to useless though, if you want to try it with the machine put back together. This leaves me with an effectively dead iBook. I cannot use it without stripping the case down, not exactly ideal when I often use it on the move.

On a lighter note, I can now play 720p video on my "main" machine. I am yet to try 1080, but its not like I am going to use it anyway.

I do however have this all setup, CS3 and everything, with most of my apps running on their original settings. Firefox for one was rather good, as all I did was copy the profile folder over. (It's located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox)

My plan now is to keep using this as my main machine, get a replacement monitor for myself as I have scrounged a 17" CRT, which I do not have the space for and repair my iBook. I'm now searching for reasons to keep my iBook, the thing is though, it won't go for much, and I have just bought a new battery and HDD for it.

One lesson I have learned though, is that laptop's aren't upgradable, at all, and probably shouldn't be and that I should be running a desktop, most of the time with the laptop as the second machine. People will probably disagree with this, but with my usage, it would be more appropriate.

The default 512mb of RAM in this though is a bit shocking, and quite a downgrade from running a gig. I've just gotten a paired set of 2GB from Crucial to upgrade this which should be quite a worthy upgrade, it was only £30, and seemed the best thing to treat this MacBook to in what will now be a big jump in usage.

I still cannot get used to the keyboard though, I miss my old one.. January 27 @ 11:53 PM | 0 Comments

Project Ideas

Lately, I have been getting plenty of ideas for projects, but have never gotten around to thinking beyond the idea, let along implementing it. For your satisfaction, I am going to outline a couple here, including some limitations of it, to see if I can think through it a bit more.

The primary ideas I am going to run through are:

1. an rss feed for the BBC's iPlayer
2. an rss feed for movie trailers
3. a better way of browsing masses of images on Mac OS Tiger without using Adobe Bridge, importing to Lightroom, or upgrading to Leopard for cover flow.

RSS is a pretty powerful way of providing a data stream. Apart from the ever so many versions that are around including RSS 1, 2 and Atom they are all essentially the same thing. Although, this makes them a nightmare to think about implementing. Unfortunately, two of my ideas involve it. This makes it harder, as I essentially need to provide support for the two most popular types, unless of course, there is common support for both across the board.

iPlayer RSS Feed

For some reason, the BBC do not provide an RSS feed for their ingenious iPlayer. This is unfortunate, as I would rather like to be able to be told through my news reader about new programmes, rather than getting an email. For this, I would like to provide an RSS feed that pulls the data from the email that iPlayer sends out to everyone and allow people to syndicate it. I am yet unsure of how to do this.

RSS Movie Trailers

My next idea, which still still involves RSS is a feed for movie trailers. This could case licensing problems as I will not be getting a license to redistribute trailers pulled from Apple's site. That's the start of my plan. I plan to pull the trailers from Apple's site and purge these as an RSS feed. The RSS feed provided by Apple is unreliable and does not provide full details of the updated trailers.

The second part of this plan involves re-encoding the trailers in a multitude of formats. One would be a direct iPhone/ iPod Touch feed. Another would be one in 480p, for desktop users, that saves you streaming the trailer, something that is impossible on a slow connection.

Using BitTorrent for this seems appropriate, but, if the feed is linked directly to a client such as uTorrent, and the feed is broken, I could send several hundred torrent files to the client in one go, over and over again. This would be a problem. This doesn't mean that it would be a problem though, as most RSS feed readers can detect "containers" inside the feed and most, for example, NetNewsWire can be set to download them automatically.

The problem with this idea is the lack of obvious licensing, there is no-where stated that I cannot redistribute what is essentially marketing material and the internet seems to be none the wiser on it. I must assume that I cannot do this, otherwise it would have already been done..

This would be a plan to allow film-lovers to get the trailers directly on their desktop, say, one released per day re-encoded in a format that they prefer and, with licensing problems in place, this could set this dead in the water before I have even started.

A better Image Viewer

The third idea of mine involves making a better way of viewing large amounts of photographs in an easy way. Currently, I either import them into Adobe Lightroom, or open them individually. It takes a long time and I would like to setup a better system for doing this.

It would involve making slideshows up on the fly from a pre-specified folder, and either only pulling the RAW or JPG files from it, thus not causing any viewing problems or duplicate files. Obviously I cannot go straight into this, as I am yet to know how to program with anything apart from Visual Basic, which is primarily aimed at small business database products, not image viewers. This will be a valid idea once I learn a reasonable programming language, and by then, I may be using Leopard totally, negating the problem.

This list will change over time and I will find ways of doing stuff I want. I do though, find it limiting not knowing a reasonable programming language. In other words, learn one.. January 27 @ 01:45 AM | 0 Comments