every word of it.

It’s so drab

Also, I hate the close/minimize/zoom buttons

Starcraft 2 came out last week on both the Mac and Windows simultaneously. Great news! (If you don’t know, I hate rebooting into Windows for the games I barely play.)

Aside from the performance disparity between platforms, Blizzard needs to polish off the rough edges on the MacOS version.

If you got the game from Battle.net, you’ll have found that the Installer for Mac doesn’t work, unless you chmod a few files. That is pretty sloppy. And I didn’t find the solution to why I couldn’t get the installer working on the known issues list, a giant oversight.

Also, they didn’t include proper strings for their Updater program

And the window controls on the launcher is kind of a joke. (The little chiclets on the middle top left of the window)

But the good news is that they’re using Growl. Steam doesn’t use Growl. Instead it’s some terrible Growl-like notification system.

Earlier this week, I needed to make an animated gif. Needed. If you have ImageReady, it is pretty easy to do. But what do you do if you don’t have ImageReady?

Well I’m here for you and Future Raishad

First things

1. Get a Mac. (This is for the next step)
2. Install MacPorts
3. Install gifsicle (Really, you don’t need a Mac for gifsicle. But since you already got one, let’s continue and you can thank me later.)
4. Gather your source images. It will be helpful to name them sequentially
5. Use gifsicle to create your animated gif
   gifsicle image*.gif > animated.gif
6. Adjust the looping
   gifsicle -l animated.gif > looping.gif
7. Adjust the delay
   gifsicle -d 30 looping.gif > finished.gif

After all that hard work, you’ll have something as brilliant as this

Yes, I got an iPad.

I was always planning to get one really. But I didn’t want to seem over eager. I couldn’t reserve one sight unseen. That’s what I told myself.

But then last week – with all the announcements and reviews – I couldn’t say no to the building iPad momentum. So on Saturday morning, I woke up at 7am and by 10:30am I was back home with my iPad.

I love it. Using it is addictive.

My favorite app so far? Tab Toolkit.

Tab Tookit is a really nice viewer/player for Guitar Pro/Power Tab tabs on the iPhone. It’s priced as a premium app for the iPhone at $10, but it is really well done. You can add tabs from the app itself, i.e. you don’t need to go to a computer and send files to it. And it can do the stuff that I care about – playing only selected tracks and adjusting the tempo.

If you’ve ever used the site Songsterr, it’s that in pocket form.

Well for the iPad, instead of releasing a separate app, they upgraded the existing iPhone app and it’s just what I’ve always wanted.

You’re going from this

to

The extra resolution really makes it compelling to use.

It’s my “killer app”

And not to mention, the iPad works beautifully on a music stand.

So in preparation for the iPad and in the spirit of simplifying my life, I’ve decided to get rid of extra computers. I’m in the process of switching from a giant Linux file server to a tiny ReadyNAS NAS. And I’ve decided to get rid of my Dell laptops. I have a Dell Vostro A90 and a Dell Latitude D600. I’ve put the Vostro A90 on Craigslist.

So far I’ve gotten one reply from a David Woodgate, woodgate962@gmail.com It’s so obvious a scam, it’s a cliche.

His first email

Hello, I am very much interested in buying your item which i see on craigslist list.Is the item still up for sale?

What stands out? The terrible English? Maybe this person doesn’t speak English as his first language, so let’s ignore that. How about he doesn’t ask anything about the Dell? He refers to it by “item”.

Anyways, I reply. Maybe this guy is just an idiot.

Hi David, Yes the item is still up for sale.

His reply is even better

Thanks for your mail. i really appreciate your response to my mail. like i said i will like to buy this item from you and i want you withdraw the advert from craigslist. i’m using this opportunity to inform you that i wont be able to come and inspect the item or pay by cash cos i have been advice by craigslist never send payment via bank transfer ,check, money order or sending cash by post,that is why it will be safe and secure for us to complete this transaction through PayPal though i am a us citizen and i am willing to buy this item as a valentine gift for my cousin and i would appreciate it if i can pay through paypal.mean while i’m willing to offer you the sum $150 for the shipping.However if you don’t have paypal account you can just log on to www.paypal.com and set up an account it is easy and secure to pay and receive money through paypal.pls get back to me asap Thanks

My favorite part from that? Playing cautious by following best practices from Craigslist regarding money. Yet, Craigslist recommends dealing locally to avoid scammers. Also, I don’t know about you, but I constantly mention to people I’m a US Citizen. And I love that he’s paying half of my asking price in shipping.

So yea, anyone wants to buy a Vostro A90? It runs Mac OS X and (if you insist) XP.

Quit Adium and Delete

~/Library/Caches/Adium/Default/DirtyLogs.plist

~/Library/Caches/Adium/Default/Logs.index

When Adium restarts and you open up the transcript viewer, Adium will reindex everything.

It’s true. They know they have the best product available. And they know that they will really, really, really, really have to piss me off before I switch to another service.

My Residential Gateway has been resetting sporadically for the past 2 months. Note the word sporadically.

sporadic |spəˈradik|adjectiveoccurring at irregular intervals or only in a few places; scattered or isolated

UVerse phone support seem to have trouble with this word.

I’ve called UVerse an innumerable amount of times complaining about this problem. And the tech on the line will rattle off the same steps – have you checked the power cable/have you reset the residential gateway/is the problem occurring now. And I indulge them. After all, I did the same job. And I know they’re just referring to a knowledge base. Sometimes this will result in an offer for a call back. This is when I have to explain to them the meaning of the word sporadic – “Yes, you can call back tomorrow. But it might be fine tomorrow and the next day, and the next, but then it’ll reset. Anyways yes, you can call me back.” Because really, it’s a very rare occurrence if they do follow up.

Twice now I’ve had a technician make a house call. The first time was a few weeks ago. That guy said it was a problem with the line and he’d schedule a line tech. I don’t know if that happened. But I do know that after his visit, I was fine for some time.

Yesterday, I had another visit. This visit was primarily to replace my DVR. Last week it deleted all my recordings and refused to record anything afterwards. I mentioned the RG problem to this guy, and he said it was a problem with the “bridge tap on my line”. And he would schedule a line tech to remove that. I don’t know if that happened. But a half hour ago, my RG reset.

UVerse is now up to “really, really, really”. I’ve started logging everything now. I know I should’ve started keeping track weeks ago.

UVerse, don’t make me switch to Road Runner or Dish or DirecTV – I love the guide too much.

Are you getting errors like ‘A Volume Failed To Mount’ after you upgrade Netatalk?

Delete the .AppleD* folders at the root of your shares. Or just mv them to a backup if you don’t trust me.

.AppleDB/ .AppleDesktop/ .AppleDouble/

Handbrake is wonderful. And now it’s even better – since you can now encode from any source, not just DVDs.

Anyways, on the download page they have available a .deb for Ubuntu 8.10. That’s fine and dandy, but I’m running 8.04. So time to compile!

Following the guide – you’ll eventually encounter an error like

LibX264 ./lib/libx264.a
patching file encoder/slicetype.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 487 (offset 108 lines).
Found yasm 0.5.0.1591
Minimum version is yasm-0.6.1 or nasm-2.0
If you really want to compile without asm, configure with –disable-asm.

    cd dirname ./x264.tar.gz && CONTRIB=pwd &&
    rm -rf x264 && (gzip -dc x264.tar.gz | tar xf – ) &&
    cd x264 &&  patch -p0 < ../patch-x264-idr.patch &&
    bash ./configure –prefix=$CONTRIB –enable-pthread &&
    make libx264.a && cp libx264.a $CONTRIB/lib/ && cp x264.h $CONTRIB/include/ && strip -S $CONTRIB/lib/libx264.a

…failed LibX264 ./lib/libx264.a …

The issue is that the yasm version in the 8.04 repository is too old. So you need to build your own version.

$sudo apt-get remove –purge yasm 
$wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-0.7.2.tar.gz 
$tar xvzf yasm-0.7.2.tar.gz 
$cd yasm-0.7.2 
$./configure 
$make 
$sudo checkinstall

Once that’s set, you should be able to build Handbrake with no issues. Hooray!

I wrote those last 2 entries using Microsoft Live Writer. It’s a really great program. It’s simple to use, and I like how everything works.

But sadly, it only runs on Windows. I either have to run it in my VM, or Remote Desktop into my crummy Dell laptop.

So MacBU, please please port Live Writer to MacOS.

Thanks!