Part 3 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal

Startup Sound

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear
—“Romeo and Juliet”, act iii. sc v.

Tue Apr 19 15:37:51 2005

It's possible to reduce the volume of the startling chime using StartupSound.prefPane.

Look-back Addendum

Tue Apr 19 16:43:49 2005

One thing I forgot to add to the “Things I miss” list in my Lookback (above) is Windows/XP System Restore— the ability to roll-back the system to a previous known working state. This feature has saved me may a headache when a Windows Update borked the video-drivers on aleph. Even Solaris has the ability to back-out of patches.

For Future Reference

Introduction to Developing Cocoa Objective-C Applications: A Tutorial.

Quicktime Droplets

Tue Apr 19 19:33:09 2005

Found a collection of Quicktime Apple Droplets, one of which does what I want— the ability to grab a single frame from a movie clip and export it as a JPEG.

Quicksilver Tutorial

Thu Apr 21 00:09:50 2005

If you haven't installed QS, do it now. If you have, and you're only using it to launch apps, then read Dan Dickinson's Quicksilver Tutorial.

My First Photobook

Fri Apr 22 21:40:05 2005

After working a few weeks on it, I have submitted my first Photobook to Apple. I chose the small softcover book for USD$ 3.99 (minimum order of 3) to be shipped in 3 to 4 days; total cost (with tax) USD$ 19 (VISA will charge me a fee for exchange).

There was a bit of a hiccup when I first submitted a book with 11 pages and the software cautioned that I needed a minimum of 20 pages otherwise the book would have 8 blank pages added. Checking Apple's iPhoto Tips page, the minimum number of pages was 10— so I fired off an email via the iPhoto Feedback page about the discrepancy:

8. Check your book's page count. Your page count should be between 10 and 50 pages. The minimum page count for a book is 10 pages. If you submit less than 10 pages, we will insert blank pages. The maximum page count for a book is 50 pages.

After getting no response, I just added more photos to the book— we'll see what happens.

I also submitted feedback about notifying the user about the size of the upload before it is sent. I was worried that the upload would be huge (it was only 1.2MB) but it would have been nice to know the size when iPhoto assembled the book.

· is now displayed in Terminal!

I don't remember the last setting I changed in the Terminal prefs (may have been language support: Latin1) but now extended chars are displayed in Terminal. Also, Cmd-V now pages down in emacs rather than pasting a copy (via Cmd-C) even though Alt is my meta-key. This comes as a complete surprise to me!

Talk is Cheap

Sat Apr 23 14:35:48 2005

In trying to help <weed> on #macosx who wanted to be able to "talk" between 2 macs I discovered that I couldn't even talk between 2 ttys on mathilde (talk elf@mathilde.local /dev/ttyp1). Looking at /etc/services, talk is on port 517, but a comment there:

# like tenex link, but across machine - unfortunately, doesn't use link protocol (this is actually just a rendezvous port from which a tcp connection is established)

gives me the impression that "talk" on OS X is not meant to work.

The workaround I suggested was to ssh to the other computer and use a "write" session instead of "talk".

Gimp, RIP

Sun Apr 24 15:03:23 2005

I just deleted The Gimp after another frustrating interaction. The less said about this, the better.

Looking through the Apple Educational Store, it seems that Photoshop is available for purchase with a discount, but not Photoshop Elements. Hm.

Playing a Sequence of Video Clips

Sun Apr 24 15:26:24 2005

The Quicktime player is quite inept at playing a sequence of video clips (e.g. 30s video clips from a digicam). So I installed MPlayerOSX which has the playlist capability and I was able to program a playlist of videos by just dragging and dropping them from iPhoto. It's a great app.

A few weeks ago I installed VLC (another media player) just to try it out and deleted it soon after, as it stuttered the audio track. Now, when I went to play the videos in MPlayer, the audio stutters just like with VLC. I uninstalled MPlayer and installed it again to no avail. So now, I'm back to playing videos, one at a time on the craptacular QT player.

iPhoto Update 5.0.2 Installed

No installation problems and iPhoto started and ran fine after the update. I always worry about updates because, unlike Windows/XP or Solaris, there is no way to back-out of system updates.

OS X and X

UNIX is a second-class citizen in the MacOS X world.
—<dagbrown> on #emacs

Mon Apr 25 00:17:11 2005

A couple of Emacs users had strong feelings about the lack of interoperability between X applications and native OS X applications. For hardcore nerdlings and übergeeks who need the comforts of xterm, OS X is an alien environment that is more of a hindrance than a help— like I said before, OS X has a long way before it becomes enterprise ready.

Here is a brief transcript of the IRC discussion on #emacs:

<e1f> pll: is terminal not a replacement for xterm?
<e1f> what needs does it not meet?
<dagbrown> Terminal is not a particularly good replacement for xterm.
<pll> NOTHING is a replacement for xterm!
<pll> When will people learn this?
<dagbrown> It's a particularly awful replacement for rxvt, so I use rxvt.
<pll> The terminal app is okay for something quick and dirty, kindof
like vi is for a quick edit. But, just like vi is no fun to live in,
neither is Terminal.app.
<pll> It's not just a matter of switching to Terminal from Xterm either.
<pll> The same problem exists running Emacs under X and trying to
copy something from Carbon Firefox (or Carbon whatever) into the Emacs frame.
<pll> It boils down to, I'm trying to use the Mac as a hybrid system,
and it sucks for that.
<pll> It's not a good X-based system, and it's not really UNIX.

Someone at Apple is not thinking things through completely. Clearly cut-and-paste integration between OS X and the X cut-buffer needs work (yeah, i know about pbcut and pbpaste).

My Photobook Shipped

Mon Apr 25 19:25:36 2005

I just received confirmation that my Photobook has shipped via standard shipping by the US Postal Service. I have a tracking number for the shipment but when I enter it into the USPS tracking form, I get "Tracking service has not been purchased for this item." Lovely.

Crimson Skies Redux

Tue Apr 26 13:02:57 2005

This morning, out of desperation, I began searching for the email address of John Howard, the designer of Crimson Skies, to plead with him to consider a port of Crimson Skies to OS X. The best I could come up with was the email address of FASA Studio (bought by Microsoft) and so I emailed that address.

In my email, I suggested that they consider using the X-Plane flight-simulator engine as most of the work required to develop a game is already done (all it would need would be the AI for the friendlies and enemies). I tried the free Space Combat game available on that site but I quickly deleted it because it was too confusing, slow and it bored me to distraction.

There is an interview with Austin Meyer, the author of X-Plane.

“iCon”

Thu Apr 28 08:59:07 2005

I got a good laugh today when I visited AppleInsider and found an Amazon link to “iCon”, a book about Steve Jobs that is banned from sale in AppleStores.

Ars Technica Tiger Review

e1f: hey if computers weren't meant to be fun we'd all be using Windows
—<risc|pb> on #macosx

Thu Apr 28 19:26:03 2005

A lengthy review of Tiger by John Siracusa of Ars Techinica.

PhotoBooks Arrive

Fri Apr 29 17:57:52 2005

The PhotoBooks arrived on Thursday in a 8½ x 11 FedEx envelope.

A sequence of images showing 1) the front of the package, 2) the back of the package, 3) the front and back of the books and 4) the inside of a book.

I was not impressed with the resolution of the photos— it looked like they were printed on a 300dpi inkjet printer; the "grain" of the photos is clearly visible; the colors are muted; the grey apple on the back cover is "fuzzy". The quality of the printed text, however, is superb, it looks like 600 dpi colour laser printer. I would hope that the photos of the larger sizes of the PhotoBooks are not of the same poor quality.

Point-Zero Releases

Sat Apr 30 09:22:24 2005

Point-Zero sunglasses advert on a TTC streetcar.

<tugalone> alright, mail crashes consistently for me in Tiger.
<e1f> tugalone: BWAHAHAHAHAH!
<e1f> *ahem*
<tugalone> e1f: see, i knew i'd make someone happy.
<tugalone> hehe

Around the 25th or 26th, I promised everyone on #macosx to laugh maniacally everytime someone logged-in to complain about something breaking on Tiger— I have been enjoying myself immensely since the 29th.

I really don't understand this obsession that compels people to install point-zero releases of software. They don't call it the bleeding edge for nothing, you know.

Recently Watched DVDs

Sat Apr 30 20:48:04 2005

Guns of Navarone, Barry Lyndon, T2, Citizen Kane, Raging Bull: Special Features

Rendering Bugs in Preview?

Sun May 01 22:45:45 2005

I was searching for information on Computational Linguistics and came across PDFs of introductory chapters from two books on the subject. After downloading them, I noticed that beginning with page 2, there were rendering errors like mis-placed letters and overwritten text. I don't know if it's a bug in Preview or the documents themselves. I will have to try to view these documents under Windows and also print them.

Update: Mon May 02 14:05:11 2005: “Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing” prints fine and is viewable fine under Acrobat Reader under Windows/XP. I filed a bug-report with Apple.

Official Apple Putty Knife

Mon May 02 17:42:29 2005

There is an official Apple Putty Knife (part no. 922-6761), 1.5 inch (38 mm) used for prying open the Mac Mini for servicing or to add after-market RAM. One side of the putty knife is sanded-down to a beveled edge so it can wedge tightly into the gap between the upper and lower halves of the case.

Apple Announces iMac hardware upgrades

now that apple can't get the cpu going any further without shipping powerbooks with a fire extinguisher, they're trying to upgrade everything else in the powerbook - the video card, memory, hard drive. hah!
—<tugalone> on #macosx

Tue May 03 16:56:19 2005

iMac G5s are now available with 1.8 GHz or 2GHz CPUs, 512 MB of RAM and improved video cards to better support Tiger.

Security Blanket

...a service pack in all but name
—The Register

Thu May 05 08:13:04 2005

On May 3rd, Apple released a critical security fix for 19 vulnerabilities in OS X 10.3.9. This means that I have to first upgrade to 10.3.9, then apply the Java patch before I can even apply this patch. And of course, there's the problem of what to do if the patch b0rks my system— there is no way back out.

Mezzoblue Tiger

Fri May 06 11:19:30 2005

Dave Shea, a fellow Canadian, famous for CSS Zen Garden, has some first impressions about Tiger. I agree with his comments about the slideshow feature in the Finder. As noted in my two-month review, I do miss the nice workflow that Windows XP has, when looking at a folder full of images and also the ability to resize these images easily right in the Explorer. He also makes the same observation about the Dashboard widgets behaving like the old DOS TSRs.

Image Well

<DrunkenDonut> pointed out an utility called ImageWell that tries to improve this particular deficiency in OS X. I have just finished downloading it and will be trying it out.

Fri May 06 11:46:48 2005

OK, I ran it and just deleted it as it got stuck on the Preferences dialog which I couldn't figure out how to dismiss.

Update Sun May 08 10:38:44 2005: David suggested what could be wrong:

The main issue with it is that it not only is it a thumbnail generator, but a file uploader as well. To close the Preference dialogue you have to have at least one entry to upload files to. If your list is blank it won't let you hit "OK" and close the Preference pane.

The problem was that I had deleted the mac.com entry from the upload list and left it empty. Any piece of software that just sits there without telling me what's wrong is poorly programmed. Checking for boundary conditions is an important aspect of good programming— 0 items in a list seems to be a good thing to check on and report.

QuickImageCM

Sun May 08 10:42:24 2005

In his email about "ImageUnWell", David suggested checking out QuickImageCM as an alternative. It looks promising.

Extracting DVD Audio

Sun May 08 12:35:41 2005

My brother borrowed a DVD of a 2002 performance (available on Amazon) of J. S. Bach's Musical Offering in the Fest Hall in Leipzig's City Hall and asked me to extract the audio so he could play it on his iPod. I used Soundflower to re-direct the audio from the DVD and I used Audacity to record the audio and save it as an MP3. Here are the steps I took to extract the audio from the DVD:

  1. Download and install the Soundflower Package. Either re-boot or manually install the Soundflower kernel extension (thanks to <Randall64> for the tip): (cd /System/Library/Extensions; sudo kextload Soundflower.kext). I initially used kextstat | grep -i flower to see if the kernel extension was installed as the documentation gives the impression that it's installed automatically and it magically shows-up in the Sound Preferences.
  2. Open Preferences > Sound > Output and select "Soundflower (2ch)".
  3. Open Audacity > Preferences > Audio I/O and select "Soundflower (2ch)" for Recording Device.
  4. Begin playing the DVD and start recording in Audacity.
  5. Keep the laptop cool as CPU hits 100% for the duration of the recording.
  6. Save the audio as a WAV until the various movements can be individually exported as MP3 or OGG.

Battery Reading

The battery icon in the menubar now reads 97% for a fully charged battery. It's slowly dropping.

Dashboard/Safari Exploit

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
—Robbie the Robot

With this new addition to Safari under Tiger, Apple has made a large step in catching up with Microsoft Windows...
— SmoothTom on Slashdot

Sun May 08 16:28:24 2005

There is a Dashboard/Safari Exploit that allows a malicious Widget to be unknowingly installed. Removal of Dashboard Widgets has to be done manually as there is no mechanism to remove them via Dashboard.

OMG! President Bush Listens to an iPod

...the iPod— and Apple products generally— have reached near cult status partly because they cultivate an image as the electronic toys of the anti-establishment set. If someone as mainstream as President Bush has caught on to something allegedly so hip, what can Apple do to keep iPod chic and cutting edge?
— Ken Belson, May 8, 2005 NYT, Week in Review

Mon May 09 14:34:07 2005

I was very surprised to learn that President Bush listens to an iPod, a present given to him by his daughters in July 2004. A Presidential aide downloads music from iTunes (it's unclear whether iTunes runs on Windows or a Mac) and the President's musical tastes lean strongly towards Country Music; the only song I could recognize is Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl.

To compare, here is my current playlist on my Sony Clié:

Apple Tablet?

Tue May 10 23:35:14 2005

The Mac Observer SCOOP - Apple Granted Patent for Tablet Mac by John Kheit, 5:10 PM EDT, May 10th, 2005
Apple Computer was granted a patent for an enigmatically titled "Electronic device" Tuesday, May 10th, 2005. Illustrations for the device clearly indicate it to be a tablet-style Macintosh, and patent filings specifically compare it to the "HP Compaq Tablet PC" and several other tablet machines.

Rotate Screen

Tiger (10.4) has a built-in feature that allows you to rotate the screen. Go the the System Preferences and then hold down the option key while you click the Displays button. You will see a pulldown thats labeled "Rotate". Select it and you will see your screen rotate.
— CypherXero on Slashdot

iPhoto Keywords

Wed May 11 14:23:02 2005

I couldn't remember how to add new keywords to iPhoto. I looked through all the first-level menu entries, and clicked on all the visible buttons and finally had to consult MacHelp (specifically iPhoto MacHelp as typing "iphoto add keywords" into MacHelp results in nothing useful). The Keyword interface is buried in the iPhoto Preferences menu!

Heavyweight Bout

As the lightest all-in-one consumer notebook on the market, the 12.1-inch iBook G4 weighs in at a mere 4.9 pounds.
—iBook advertising copy

Housed in a stunning, scratch- and stain-resistant aluminum alloy enclosure and weighing just 4.6 pounds...
—Powerbook advertising copy

Wed May 11 15:28:08 2005

Yesterday's Globe and Mail newspaper included a copy of “Backbone” magazine. One story, titled “Best for Mobility - The top seven on-the-go notebooks” had Apple computers conspicuously missing. I was ready to flame the author when I noticed that one of the requirements was that the weight had to be "less than five pounds and ideally less than three". I double-checked the weight on both the 12 in. iBook and 12 in. Powerbook and found that both weighed less than 5 lbs; the aluminum-alloy Powerbook weighs less than the plastic iBook. Hm.

I then sent the following email to the article's author:

Hello,

I got your magazine with yesterday's Globe and Mail and I was surprised that the "Best for Mobility" article didn't mention any Apple laptops.

Were the 12 in. iBook and Powerbook missing because of an oversight, because they didn't meet certain criteria for inclusion or did you asked Apple and they never replied back?

The 12 in. Powerbook is at: http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index12.html
The 12 in. iBook is at: http://www.apple.com/ibook/

Wed May 11 19:40:10 2005

I received a reply from the magazine's editor:

Hello Luis.

Overall I would like to get more Apple products into Backbone. The last time I checked, however, Apple was at about number seven in the notebook market and much of that was among non-business buyers.

However, your point is well taken and we should pursue Apple in the future.

Peter Wolchak

DVD Player (Non) Update

Thu May 12 13:28:19 2005

I was happy to read about DVD Player updates this morning. There is a serious bug that crashes the DVD Player when you eject a DVD while it's displaying a menu, iconify DVD Player, put the laptop to sleep, awake it, then re-start playback with the "Ask what to do" option selected in the Preferences. (No need to file a bug-report as the crash-report gets sent-off.)

Reading the release notes, it looks like this bug is fixed, however this patch is released for 10.4 systems and requires QT updates. Feh.

I have modified the Preference to "Play from last position". Let's see if that makes a difference.

Battery Reading

Thu May 12 17:31:34 2005

I followed David's suggestion of not leaving the Powerbook always plugged-in to AC and ran it on battery (including sleeping overnight on battery) down to about 30% and charged it back up, for the last couple of days and now the battery charges to 100%.

Update Wed May 18 19:04:39 2005: David also sent information on prolonging the life of a Li-ion battery pack.

Yahoo iPod

Thu May 12 19:22:58 2005

Yahoo! recently announced its music subscription Yahoo! Music Unlimited (YMU) and all the iTunes critics said that it would kill iTunes/iPod/Apple. I wonder if they realize that the iPod can play WMA files natively? This capability is built into the heart of the iPod, the Portalplayer 5002 chip. Unfortunately, iTunes does not permit WMAs to be copied onto the iPod and the software used to login to the Yahoo store is Windows only.

DVD Imager

Thu May 12 19:57:41 2005

Got a pointer from <joshua> about DVD Imager an utility that permits you to make an UDF image given a VIDEO_TS folder. Downloading now... I also got a binary of mkisofs since DVD Imager is just a wrapper.

Chopper

Fri May 13 19:03:37 2005

David sent me a link to Chopper a OpenGL remake of the old Apple ][ game that was played with game paddles. I installed it and played the easy level for most of the day— it takes some time to get used to flying the chopper. Spent the rest of the day watching Fawlty Towers.

wget

wget is not available by default on OS X. Feh. Now I have to write a zsh alias to use curl (until I install Darwinports).

iPhoto Books as PDF

Sat May 14 11:20:13 2005

You can preview your Photobook as a PDF document by selecting File >Print >Save as PDF from iPhoto. Of course, if you have a color printer, you can print it out locally.

iPhoto Crash

Sun May 15 22:53:54 2005

iPhoto went and crashed when I went to delete 151 items from the Trash— bug-report sent off. They were still there when I re-started iPhoto (I didn't notice until a few hours later that the images were still in the Trash) and one image was "blank"— it could be selected but it showed nothing but grey. Hmmm....database corruption. I attempted to delete them again, confirmation dialog popped-up, I answered yes, and while the SPOD did it's thing I went to get a drink of water. When I returned, everything was OK.

I have close to 1000 images (I take approximately 50 photos a day in my “A Day in the Life” series) and iPhoto does slow-down noticeably, once in a while, doing I-don't-know-what and the disk crunches away. At least if it told me what it's doing or if it could do it more discreetly, I would be more impressed.

Finder Improvements

With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn. A sentry send forth;
Search every acre in the high-grown field,
And bring him to our eye.
—“King Lear”, act iv. sc iv.

Mon May 16 08:29:54 2005

Windows/XP can group files in individual folders with tags like: "Yesterday", "Last Week", etc.

Complaints about the Finder surfaced on #macosx yet again— "it's slow", "ftp sucks" (only GET, no PUT); some of my complaints— the wasted white-space because of a wide grid-layout, illogical alignment of items dropped into folders— they just stay where i drop them rather then aligning themselves nicely by nudging other items out of the way.

Smart Folders in the Finder

I was also thinking how useful it would be for the Finder to have Smart Folders. Basically I want to be able to groups files by, e.g. most recently used date with a folder for files I used yesterday, another one for last week's files, one for last month's files, etc. The contents of these folders would be symlinks to the actual files. Windows/XP has something similar where the contents of individual folders can be grouped (with English headings) by time of last access.

Update Tue May 17 08:24:05 2005: David notes that Tiger does have smart folders in the Finder but Windows/XP displays its grouping more elegantly. I can live with ls -lt for the time being.

Tiger 10.4.1 Released

Tue May 17 10:34:33 2005

First update for Tiger was released last night.

Nothing much...

Dr. Fun takes a poke at the iPod.

Wed May 18 16:22:45 2005

Spent most of last night watching Is Paris Burning? (172 minutes long!). I was expecting the CN engineers to strike and allow me a legitimate excuse to stay home and watch The Merchant of Venice, but alas, an 11th hour deal was negotiated and the strike was averted.

I downloaded the ffmpegX binaries zip-file (these are the supported codecs that ship separately for legal reasons) sometime ago and now need to configure ffmpegX to support these files.

The AppleStore in Toronto is scheduled to open this Saturday in Yorkdale Mall (it's a long weekend as Monday is a holiday— Victoria Day). A couple of people on #macosx have promised pictures of the madness (freebies galore).

Register's Review of “iCon”

Fri May 20 09:42:27 2005

Charles Arthur of the Register reviews Steve Jobs' biography “iCon” which covers the period of Jobs' leaving Apple to found Pixar until his return to head Apple after Amelio. He notes it has anecdotes recycled from one of the author's previous book and leaves the reader to decide whether Jobs is an "icon" or merely a "Con".

Closed Captioning

Fri May 20 16:56:10 2005

Both the “Henry V” and “The Merchant of Venice” DVDs do not include subtitles (why?). This is especially annoying with “Henry V” as the sound recording is poor. So I have to resort to enabling Closed Captioning which, on the VAIO, is rendered with a black background in a grossly jagged font with random artifacts within the picture, which makes watching quite distracting. I just watched The “Merchant of Venice” on mathilde and the captions are rendered in a beautiful anti-aliased sans-serif font within the black-bars below the picture. Very Impressed!

Battery Exchange

Sat May 21 10:53:18 2005

There is a iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 Battery Exchange Program for batteries sold from October 2004 through May 2005 for use with 12-inch iBook G4s, 12-inch PowerBook G4s and 15-inch PowerBook G4s. My battery is affected by the recall. I do remember this being a topic of discussion just before I purchased my PowerBook but I seem to remember it being concluded when I ordered my PowerBook. I don't know where my Userguide is, so I searched MacHelp for information on "removing laptop battery" and there was nothing useful available. Lovely. I just used a Loonie to release the battery.

Continues in Battery Exchange Redux...

Battery Charge Cycle Count

You can check the number of charge cycles the Li-ion battery has undergone with:

ioreg -l -w 0 | grep Capacity | cut -d, -f3 | head -1

My soon-to-be-replaced battery has a count of 9.

AppleScript Thumbnails

I downloaded the AppleScript Language Guide from the AppleScript Resource Page. My plan is to learn AppleScript by writing a script that generates thumbnails of images that are dragged onto the script. Yes, it's possible someone has written one, but that's not the point.

Update Sat May 21 21:23:36 2005: The AppleScript IDE is called ScriptEditor, not AppleScriptEditor— I had to ask in #macosx.

Rebinding Keyboard Shortcuts

Sat May 21 11:48:55 2005

I wanted to bind Cmd-ArrowDown and Cmd-ArrowUp in Preview.app to perform Page-Down/Up. So I tried doing this in Preferences >Keyboard &Mouse >Keyboard Shortcuts by choosing Preview.app and then "Next Page" as the menu item. But when I went to type the Cmd-ArrowDown key-sequence in the last window, I wasn't allowed— I tried Ctrl-N and that worked. Hm.

AppleStore Yorkdale

Sat May 21 19:42:26 2005

<risc|pb> e1f: damn that's one BIG line :)
<e1f> risc|pb: yeah, i knew that would happen so i didn't go
<e1f> too many mac weenies in toronto
<risc|pb> lol
<risc|pb> in Australia I've never seen that many people in a Mac store

David attended the opening of the AppleStore in Yorkdale Mall in Toronto and put together a photo album and a movie of the grand-opening.

In return for posting the Yorkdale pics to #emacs, I got a movie of the opening of the Ginza AppleStore.

Slow Mo

Sun May 22 16:06:55 2005

Shift+Fn+F9: Slow-motion Exposé
Shift+Minimize button: Slow-motion Minimize into Dock

<offby1> my God.  You've blogged ... every ... minute ...
<fnord123> haha
<fnord123> i dont know who is worse, you blogging it or me reading
           just one page of this

Bug ID# 4127120

Sun May 22 21:52:37 2005

Problem Title: Backlit peripheral ports on the Powerbook

SUMMARY

It is difficult to find some of the ports on the sides of the Powerbook in the dark.

It would help to have the borders of the ports and the port icons backlit in the same way the keyboard is backlit.

NOTES

I wanted to watch Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and had to feel where the head-phone jack was and remember which one of the two audio jacks it was.

Wishingline

Mon May 23 10:35:14 2005

This morning, I was searching for other bloggers who went down to the AppleStore Grand Opening and who may have taken pictures; I found a blog called Wishingline.

I was particularily interested in his comment about where the in-store sessions that Apple has planned will be taking place:

The one thing I'm not sure about is where exactly they'll be holding the in-store sessions since it wasn't the largest Apple Store I've been to. The San Francisco store has a special designated area with seating and a nice big projection wall, so unless I somehow missed it, this store doesn't appear to have any of that.

DVD Images Test

Mon May 23 17:08:22 2005

Still having a wee bit of trouble with configuring FFMPEGX to convert a VIDEO_TS to another format (I am missing the mpegenc binary) something that will fit on a CD or a single layer DVD. In other news, DiskImager seems to be doing what's expected of it (converting a VIDEO_TS to a DMG) even to the point of finding the binary of mkisofs (unless it comes with its own binary).

Continued in Part 4...

luis fernandes / G4 PowerBook Journal, Part 3 / Last Modified: Sun Sep 04 16:01:25 2005