I built the base for the chicken house/tractor tonight. It was a good feeling, to translate the image in my brain of what it *should* look like into a physical object. The next just will be to set up the hoops that will hold up the roof.
My hackintosh’s one lasting failing was that it’s “about this mac” dialog has never worked. Worse, clicking the menu item to view the dialog would crash finder, dump me to a blue screen, then restart finder.
Finally, I ran across this forum thread where the poster Rushabh suggests disabling quick boot in bios.
I did this one my UD3P’s bios, and voila! I have an about this mac dialog! Silly as it seems, this is important for some apps because they base their settings off what’s read in that dialog.
The skies overhead tonight were clear. Mel and I sat on the back porch and watch a line of storms that filled the horizon to the northwest. We thought it was odd that we couldn’t hear any thunder, since the thunderheads were full of nearly constant lightening. We could feel the rumbling slightly in our bones, but no sound. When we got inside, Mel checked where the storm is on weather radar. It is 80 miles away!
I had no idea it was possible to see anything 80 miles away in Indiana. (:
I got a beta invite for Soluto today. Soluto is a tool for improving the boot times of Windows-based computers. It examines your bootup, then tells you what you can remove from your boot, what you can delay, etc. The best part of the tool is that there is a wiki on the back end that allows for discussion of the various processes that you’re making decisions about. That means that (hopefully) you’ll have some up to date and relevant info on each process, rather than having to google each one.
I installed it on my work machine. Even with an SSD, it was taking 2 minutes and 30 seconds to boot. After just five minutes with Soluto, I was able to bring that down to 1:30, shaving off an entire minute. It’s quite a beautiful tool as well. I’ll have to post a screenshot later, if I can find some time.
My only concern with the tool is the amount of access that it has. Since it has direct access into boot areas of the OS, it pretty much has free reign of your system. It could (and does) collect stats about who runs what at startup. I’m worried that the community aspect of it could be astroturfed into making people believe that malware was useful. I’m also worried that it could be used as an infection vector.
Here’s what I worked on after work tonight. It is the start of a retaining wall for the front of the house. I am hoping to finish a little each night that the weather is good enough (and that I am home).
Money saving tip: pee in the bathroom sink. Then wash your hands. You just saved somewhere between 1/3 and 1 gallon of water by not flushing your toilet. You were going to wash you hands afterwards anyway, right?
Note: not recommended for women, men with bad aim or men who are not taller than their bathroom sink. Also not recommended for public spaces, unless it’s a public space occupied largely by Hippies.
The hackintosh tells me that 10.6.3 is available for download. Going to let it install overnight. Hope I still have a working hack in the morning. (:
update 30Mar2010: The 10.6.3 update didn’t finish last night, but several other updates did. Also, found a kext that finally fixed my “About this Mac” problem. It works now!! w00t. Trying the 10.6.3 update again tonight.
As a Christian, my worldview is that the entire universe is under the effects of sin. The whole damn thing is wearing out and dying. Nothing works exactly as designed. The entire creation is still an amazing thing, even in this state. The beautiful things of this world really drive home for me what a wonderful thing the redeemed world will be.
Those “zen” moments, when the perfect song comes on while I’m *understanding* a piece of code. When a perfect, clean fix implements just the way I wanted it to. When people truly, selflessly work together for the common good (I’ve never seen this, but I’ve seen shades of it). When multiple cars come up to an intersection from opposite directions and all make balanced (if the roads were a see-saw, they would be flat before and after the cars turn, because of the “weight” on the roads) similar turns. When my daughter has a smile on her face and runs to meet me, so full of joy, after a long day of work. When my wife, in her knowing way, smiles at me (weapon in hand) when I enter the door.
All of these things, each in its own way, serves to cause me to simultaneously praise the Creator of an orderly, beautiful creation (that can shine even behind the patina of sin) and long for the day when the entire thing is redeemed to His Glory.
“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
This is a really trivial thing, but it’s so nice! You can separately set the image, scaling, rotation etc for the wallpaper on each monitor in a multi-monitor setup. I’m cheap, so my monitors are different aspect rations. The main monitor is a fairly nice widescreen LCD. The secondary monitor is a 4:3 CRT. This means that wallpapers need to be setup differently to look nice on the two screens.
Yes, I realize this is super trivial. Most of the time, I can’t even see my wallpaper. Regardless, it’s nice when things work so nicely. No more stitching images together in MS Paint!
I’ve now spent about a week using my new OS X setup. Everything continues to work except for the “about this mac” screen, even through software updates. I have a suspicion that my motherboard’s ethernet ports are only partially supported, which is what’s causing the about this mac to crash, but I’m still hunting that one down. I’ve installed Transmission (bittorrent client), Quakelive and World of Warcraft.
I started off by putting only 2 gigabytes of ram in the machine. I eventually upped it to four because the swapping behavior when I was close to using all the ram was really nasty. With four gigs of ram, everything is happy.
So far, my favorite things about it are Spotlight and how software is installed. Spotlight is the search/run application. I hit the hotkey for it (Windows key (meta) + spacebar on my machine) and a box pops up. I type in part of the name of the app I want to run, and it starts showing me a list of matches. I can select the program I want out of the list. Very handy. Software installation is also quite nice. Software seems to come packed in two different ways: disk images or directories.
Simpler software seems to come as a directory that I just copy or move into my Applications folder. Voila, installation is complete. More complex software seems to come in .dmg files, which are disk images (although I can’t help but think of them as “damage” files). When I download them, the system mounts them and they generally have a script that runs to install the software that they contain. Basically the same as how a software CD normally works when you stick it in your drive.
Last thing for this post: I gave it the IP for our printer and the operating system detected the type and everything worked correctly. Very cool. It’s a Samsung 4828 laserprinter/scanner/fax, for what it’s worth.
I’m sure I have lots to learn still, but my initial impression is positive. I have the iPhone SDK and xcode downloaded now. I’ll probably install it tonight and start going through tutorials to see if I can get some code running on my iPhone.
