Friday, May 30. 2008
Leopard 10.5.3 Released
| Apple has released 10.5.3 which is being touted as a major release fixing several stability issues and possibly some needed changes to be able to use the recently released iPhone SDK. According to Google, in 10.5.3, you can now sync your AddressBook with Google Contacts. Update (06/05/08): It sounds like 10.5.4 has been put into the hands of developers if the rumors are to be believed. This next coming release is supposed to fix the CS3 issue that primarily affected to trying to save files on remote servers. Current rumors put the release date the 2nd week in June. |  |
Thursday, May 29. 2008
JAlbum 8.0 Released
| JAlbum, a slideshow generating tool that I have been using since late 2004 has recently released version 8.0. There are quite a few enhancements, including faster and more memory conservative image scaling, which I like, since my JAlbum would previously crash on large albums and much improved dragging and dropping. |  |
Monday, May 26. 2008
Support for AVG 7.5 disppearing May 31st
| Just a heads-up: The support for version 7.5 of AVG Anti-Virus will expire as of May 31st, 2008. Users of the 7.5 version are being encouraged to upgrade to the 8.0 version before then. Note: The new version is not supported on Windows XP SP1. |  |
Saturday, May 24. 2008
Migrate Adium Chat Logs
If you are one of the many (and happy  ) Mac users who make use of the Adium chat client, you might be happy to know that it is relatively painless to migrate your chat logs from one Mac machine to another Mac machine.You just need to migrate the contents of this directory: ${HOME}/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs to your new machine and then bring up Adium and all of your previous chat logs should be available. (Haven't found an easy to migrate chat logs between different chat clients, i.e. Trillian and Adium, but haven't looked that hard yet either  ).Incidentally, there are rumors that the Trillian folks have rewritten their IM chat client for the Mac. |  |
Friday, May 23. 2008
Concert: Rush (at last!)
| After being a fan for so many years of the group Rush, I finally had the chance to see the in concert (thanks to one of my friends getting a sweet deal on tickets). There was no opening band and Rush played from 7:30 pm - 11:30 pm, with only a 15 minute intermission. There was a good mix of the old and new songs to keep everyone happy and it was quite nice to see that after 30+ years of making music, all three members of the group still have it (how many other groups from the 70's can you say that about? ). Happily, my Nikon binoculars worked fabulously, especially for seeing Neil Peart do his awesome drum solos (yes, there is no doubt that he is a drumming demigod )It was also obvious that there is quite a bit of creativity (not just musical) within the band. The light show was pretty cool and there were several short outtakes in between songs and a couple of the more entertaining ones was the South Park outtake doing the lead-in to Tom Sawyer. Also, the cartoon dragon that ended up spouting real fire on stage was also a nice touch. All in all, a very well spent evening and definitely worth the price of the ticket (and how many stadium concerts can you say that about? ) |  |
Sunday, May 18. 2008
Movie: Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
| With my nephew turning into a regular movie buff ;-), I am getting the opportunity to see quite a few movies this year. So the movie for this weekend ended up being The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Since the movie running time was given as 2 hours 20 minutes and the reviews hadn't been that good, I was a little nervous about seeing this one (it must be stated as well that I was a big fan of the CS Lewis books when I was younger ). So I was pleasantly relieved when it actually turned out to be a decent movie - it certainly didn't feel like 2:20 hours of sitting and as further proof, my nephew's attention was also held for the entire movie. Again (like in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe), the movie remains fairly faithful to the book. I also must complement the special effects - it seems that more movie makers are learning the lesson of letting the special effects support the movie, rather than upstaging the movie (George Lucas, are you listening? ). If you were a fan of the first movie, I could certainly recommend this one. |  |
Friday, May 16. 2008
Firefox 3 RC1 Released
| Firefox 3 had finally released RC1. This release seems to have primarily bugfixes as well as performance and stability improvements (at least I could find no mention of any new features explicitly in this version). Here are the release notes for those who want to delve into the details. For those who want to track the progress of Firefox 3, here is the release schedule for Firefox3, as well as the general release roadmap. Update (05/29/08): It looks like Firefox 3 RC2 is due out on June 5th, 2008. |  |
Monday, May 12. 2008
Transmission 1.20 Released
| For those fans of the popular BitTorrent client, Transmission, there has been a new version released - 1.20. According to the release notes, some of the fixes are better support of multitracker torrents and faster UPnP port mapping upon startup. |  |
Get Those Wallets Opened....
| Probably the strongest indication yet of the impending release of the impending 3G iPhone, both the US and UK Apple stores have halted sales of both the 8GB and 16GB iPhone. Adding fuel to the rumor mill is the uncovering of the hidden feature in latest 2.0 beta iPhone beta software that gives one the option to enable or disable 3G. |  |
Sunday, May 11. 2008
Mac: SuperDuper Backup Tool
| For Mac users, SuperDuper! Backup tool has released version 2.5. Here is also a good intro article on it (and since I took such a long time to get this post up 8-), another good article has appeared comparing three different backup options). |  |
Saturday, May 10. 2008
Movie: IronMan
| Finally got a chance to see IronMan and, even though I am not a comics fan, I did throughly enjoy this movie (especially the incredible technology on display in the billionaire's house - if I had displays like that, I probably wouldn't leave the house ). Thankfully, my viewing experience was vastly superior to my coworker's - not a single constantly talking kid to be found . The theater was packed with a very appreciative audience - always a plus for movie watching. |  |
Thursday, May 8. 2008
Free WiFi for AT&T iPhone Users
Wednesday, May 7. 2008
HOBT MayDay Parade
| I am severely behind on my blogging (sorry my two readers ), but last weekend I had the opportunity (with my grand-niece and grand-nephew) to take in the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater MayDay Parade that occurs annually near Powderhorn Park. Needless to say, the puppets were extremely impressive, as were the various drumlines that were featured. My small grand-nephew and grand-niece were good throughout the entire 90 minute parade (even waiting semi-patiently for over hour just for the parade to start). As usual, I will have the pictures up soon... |  |
Sunday, May 4. 2008
1Password: Nice Password Management Tool
| In the course of having to remember more passwords as well as having to make some more secure ones, I came across a handy password tool called 1Password, which lets you store multiple passwords and while only having to remember the one master password. I have been using it for about a week now and I must say that it has made my life much easier. It integrates with quite a few web browsers that are available and can easily remember several different passwords on the same web form. It also has a built-in password generator as well as a Secure Notes feature, which doesn't allow any to view your notes unless they know your access password (unlike the Sticky Notes program that comes with Mac OS X). For those who are interested, MacNN has a nice review of the tool. (Note: Lifehacker has a nice roundup of some of the other password management tools for the Mac). For the OpenSource folks, there is also PwManager (Linux only) which is also good. |  |
Fun With 419 Scammers
It is always important to have fun in life, and what better than to string along a 419 scammer?
Thanks to the goodness of Digg.com, here is another story of a user patiently stringing along a 419 scammer - Enjoy!
(disclaimer: probably NSFW).
Thanks to the goodness of Digg.com, here is another story of a user patiently stringing along a 419 scammer - Enjoy!
(disclaimer: probably NSFW).
