Category: technology

·

Nerd

Two weekends ago I went on a skateboarding trip to North Carolina. It was a jam for Small School Skateboards, with whom I am now affiliated (which means I begged Jeremy to put me on his team, so I could say I was sponsored before I croak).

Anyway, here’s a pic of my hotel room’s desk in the middle of the visit. MacBook, iPod, digital camcorder, digital camera, USB cables, high-speed interwebs connection, battery chargers, coffee, etc, etc. The only thing missing is an iPhone. I have a cell phone, but it is a cheap one. I’m just not a cellphone guy.

I felt like such a nerd/road-warrior. But having everything small and portable enough to just set up in the hotel is great.

·

Disk Warrior

Yes, another Mac software post.

Last night before going to see Beowulf with my friend Matt down at Northpark Mall, I stopped by the Apple Store. I got one of the good folks there — a fellow skateboarder — to show me the new Leopard OS. Pretty slick. Amazingly slick no less. It will be a bummer to go back to my Gateway PC at work tomorrow after seeing the beauty that is Leopard.

Did I buy it? No. Right now I feel like my current OS (10.4.10) is working just fine. All my software runs, and I don’t have any crashes really. So I will wait until I really need an upgrade to get Leopard or whatever replaces it.

Of course, about half of the demo was on one of those giant Apple studio monitors, which make everything look like magic. Too bad they’re too big to have in your lap. I’m really enjoying just doing my web stuff from my chair in the Chill Zone with my MacBook. I spend enough time sitting at a desk.

I did, however, purchase DiskWarrior, by Alsoft. It is a utility for repairing damage files, optimizing you hard drive, etc, etc. My brother-in-law does tech support for them, so I figure I can get help if I need it. I ran the program this morning, and it found a few things to clean up that cleared up a little hard drive space on my MacBook.

I also backed up all my files to my external hard drive this morning. I’m using iBackup, which works pretty well. I’d really like to find a “smart backup” utility that only backs up the files that have changed — for a faster backup. I’ll have to look into that.

Beowulf was pretty cool. I liked it a lot.

·

Audio Hijack

This is a great product — Audio Hijack.

 Allows you to grab audio from nearly any source, as long as it is playing on your computer. I’ve used it to capture some music performances from the Henry Rollins Show website. You can then use other audio editing software like GarageBand to put it in the format you’d prefer. Really cool.

Only for the Mac — so get yourself a Mac.

Speaking of music from the Henry Rollins show, if you like Thom Yorke, of Radiohead, check this out.

·

Headphones

I’m really enjoying my iPod Nano. The old one  — not the new one with the little video screen.  I like to lay down on the bed with headphones and listen to music. That’s one of my preferred activities. Just lay down, turn on the iPod, and zone out. Good stuff.

Anyway, I got these Bose headphones for my birthday. They aren’t the noise-cancelling kind. But they sound really good. I hate ear-buds. Can’t stand having something stuck in my ears. These headphones are pretty light, so it’s not like wearing a helmet.  For a nice set of ‘phones for laying around listening to music, I recommend them.

·

Death of a Dell Laptop

My wife’s Dell Inspiron laptop died last week. The fan will run, but nothing boots up. Took it to the repair shop, and they predicted $200 to diagnose the problem, and $700 – $800 to replace whatever electronics were fried. All this on a $1400 computer. I told them to do data recovery on the hard drive (Cost: $100.), as we were about to replace it with a new MacBook anyway.

The machine is 2 years old, has seen extremely light use, and has been well cared for.  Piece of shit.