Logitech’s two new Quickcams for notebooks
via Engadget
Logitech = $40 and $60 respectively iSight (Apple)= $149 Read More
Extensis Suitcase X1
I was messing with my font collection so I could check out Extensis’ Suitcase X1 (pronounced “eleven”). I ended up moving so much fonts around that I wanted to start from scratch.
Stupid me, I even deleted fonts from my /System/Library/Fonts folder. But not because I had a death wish. I already had copied the said fonts somewhere and just wanted to do some sort of a “clean install” of them.
The bad part was I couldn’t copy the fonts back. Permission errors abound (which weren’t really permission related) Suddenly my menubar acted weird, apps started crashing (probably because they couldn’t render the system fonts (because they were erased).
I had no choice but to reboot… but on reboot, I couldn’t get into any GUI… I was thrown into the Darwin commandline. Sweat proceeded to pour down my forehead as I was thinking that I may just end up like Joel and his Archive and Install adventure… which I didn’t have time for. Read More
More covert technology
The 2005 Powerbooks have an accelerometer chip to take measurements of the laptops’ motion (e.g. during falls, etc.)
This is a tilt-sensitive game which uses the accelerometer in the new Powerbooks!
via Joel’s blog
The real purpose of said chip is:
Apple’s PowerBook laptops now have a little accelerometer inside that’s used to protect the hard drive if you drop it (it notices the sudden speed increase and parks the drive heads).
However, is it just me, or can that chip also be a safety precaution for Apple – so that people can’t just claim warranties left and right. Sorta like the black boxes of aircrafts… to determine wether it was “mechanical problems” or “pilot error” hehehehe.
But then again, you can disable it if you wanted to:
$ pmset -g Active Profiles: Battery Power 1* AC Power 3 Currently in use: acwake 0 … ams 1 $ sudo pmset -a ams 0 $ pmset -g … ams 0
So I guess it’s a cool safe thing to have after all!
Ecto-schmecto
I apologize to the Ecto-supporters out there, but quite frankly, that piece of software you love, can be quite intrusive at times.
Since I heard Ecto was the best offline blog-manager out there, of course I had to see what’s up and give it a try. I’ve been using MarsEdit for the longest time and was quite happy with it save for one problem: You could only keep an offline cache of the last 30 posts you’ve made.
I thought “Hey, since Ecto can do Markdown too, then there’s nothing to lose.” – or so I thought.
For the love of Music
I noticed that every post I make recently is either about technology or stuff related to the internet. What about my other categories? Exactly!
So in the interest of posting on a different categories and utilize those category icons I’ve prepared in the past, I will post something in the “music” section.
Anyways, my friend is submitting a demo tape (song) for some singing group – and has asked me to do the vocal track for it. Happened a while ago and it was quite an experience.
I dare not post more “incriminating” information; considering the people that may read this, baka magka-bukuhan, which is the last thing I want to happen. It ain’t my song to begin with, so I don’t want to be the one spoiling anything (if there’s anything to spoil, that is).
We recorded in the studio of our group’s usual sound engineer. I had fun not only recording, but actually watching him do the whole “sound engineering/production procedure.” I do my own sound production/engineering for my songs, and watching someone with years of experience was really a treat. I got to ask a ton of questions with regards to the technical aspects of recording/mixing/mastering – I really enjoyed every minute of it.