Just because I don’t have enough to do (ha-ha), here’s a great list I came across over at the Make blog:
50 Great Summertime Projects for You & Your Mac mini.
There’s definitely a few there I’m going to get to if it kills me.
The EFF is reporting that Congress may sneak in the Broadcast Flag into other legislation in the next 48 hours. This is not trivial – HD content is available over the airwaves unmodified already today and the Broadcast Flag will stop that single-handedly – once it goes forward there will be no going back to using your media and your hardware the way you want to.
Fill out the Action Alert now and / or contact your Senators.
Just say no to the Broadcast Flag.
My new favorite magazine and website is brought to you by the geniuses behind Make Magazine.
From their website:
The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.
It’s like Popular Science was, except for the 21st century.
The MAKE Blog is fantastic, updated often with lots of DIY tricks and links.
I even downloaded two of their Podcasts last week, and those were pretty good too.
The magazine is fantastic – it’s a quarterly, nice and thick, with information on what others are out there hacking on, one project with detailed step by steps per month, and tons of cool other articles.
O’Reilly has done it again.
I came home today to my desktop looking like this (look at the top panel):
You can’t even tell there is a panel there in the screenshot, click for full view.
A normal panel should look like:
I unlocked the Firefox icon so I was able to move it around, I moved the panel to the side just to check, I added a new panel to the top and clicked properties, but no joy on re-adding the Applications / Places / System drop down menus. I’ve played with the menu settings, and you can add specific programs to the panel, but I haven’t found the menu settings.
I’ll have to reach out to the Ubuntu community and figure this one out. Gotta love that a 1 year old can remove it with a few clicks, and it stumps me.
Update about 5 minutes later: To reinforce the discussion Novell gave at the recent GUADEC, there are some usability issues in GNOME, this being one of them. Right click on the panel, click add to panel and choose “Menu Bar – a custom menu bar”. What’s so custom about it? It’s the default panel menu option in GNOME – it’s not custom at all.
At least it’s back.
Mac Daily News is reporting that OS X for x86 is available on P2P networks after someone took the developer version and seeded it.
Supposedly, it will work on any Intel processor, and the iLife applications are already compiled for x86. Mac Daily News goes on to theorize that Apple knew exactly what it was doing when it offered the developer edition after watching Tiger burn up the p2p circuit. The theory is Apple is offering a try before you buy scenario for OS X right now.
I wish I could say I thought Apple was that smart… they had to know this would happen, but that they planned it? A bit of a stretch.
Some people just don’t get it, and Jack Valenti is one of them. The former head of the Motion Picture Assoc. of America, his voice is still heard in Hollywood as an advocate against movie piracy.
We all know who this is: in the early 80’s, he’s the one who predicted doom for the movie industry if the VCR was allowed to be legal – and we all know how that turned out for the movie industry – 20 years later 40% of their revenues are from DVD.
In a recent interview Mr. Valenti has many choice quotes of how he still doesn’t get it. Locking content to protect against “piracy” isn’t the answer. Embrace technology, share, and don’t get in the way of innovation and let people use their legally bought content how they want to.
I’d like to ask one question about the DMCA, and its effect on home moviemaking for personal use: Let’s say a homeowner is making an amateur video using video footage of his son playing pee-wee football. To jazz it up, he buys a copy of the movie Rudy and uses the De CSS program to strip it of its copy protection—
[Jack Valenti:]Well, then he’s committing a violation of federal law.
So if he wants to add a few seconds of crowd shots to the final version of the new home video he’s creating—
[Jack Valenti:]He should go to the company that owns the movie and get permission to do it. If you start that, where does it end? How much is a little snippet? Is it 10 seconds? Ten minutes? Thirty minutes? He might want the first 23 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, or all of Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain. Once people have the power to do a snippet, they could do a whole movie.
So you’re suggesting there is no fair use right to a few seconds?
[Jack Valenti:]There is no fair use to take something that doesn’t belong to you. That’s not fair use. If you’re a professor in a classroom, you show Singin’ in the Rain to your class. You can fast forward it, and there’s no performance fee for that. That’s fair use. Now, fair use is not in the law. People are taking fair use and changing it to unfair use and claiming that it’s fair use.
I’ve had a Mac Mini for the last week. I am ecstatic about getting it for a couple of reasons:
Mac OS X is the only operating system I don’t own.
Max OS X is based on Unix, and I’m a big Linux guy.
Finder’s new functionality in Tiger is supposed to be similar to Beagle.
PowerPC processor – again, only processor architecture I don’t own (Pentium 4, AMD, AMD64).
Ok, so I’m bragging a little bit, but I’ve wanted a Mac for a long time, and they’ve just been too darn expensive. Even the Mac Mini I customized on Apple.com when they came out for over a $1000 (this one was a gift, it’s the entry level one).
Initial thoughts: Mac OS X is as well done as everyone says. It’s polished, the bundle iLife applications are very good, and the OS is very intuitive. It has it’s quirks – I still haven’t found where to launch Dashboard and play with the desktop widgets. I’ve looked in the software folder, I’ve looked in the dock, and I’m stumped.
The form factor is awesome. This thing is about 20% smaller than I really expected it to be. It’s just so darn cute.
The bad: The entry level Mac Mini is way too damn slow. 256 megs in a modern day operating system just doesn’t cut it. It feels sluggish. And for a real kick in the teeth, the Apple store offered to upgrade it to 512 megs for $150 with free installation. $150 for 512 meg DDR 333 stick? I can go to the local Best Buy store and get a 512 stick for $30-$40 on ad and have the Geek Squad install it for $30. I didn’t even bother to ask Apple how much 1 gig is.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed. The tiny, tiny footprint of the machine combined with a well done operating system bodes well for Apple as they switch to Intel over the next two years. I still won’t switch from Linux though.
Icculus sums up similar thoughts to mine on Apple picking up Intel much better than I can.
He’s 100% right when it comes to gaming. And that’s me saying that after making the switch to Linux 100% this week (more on that later).
I went to my first Twin Cities Linux User Group meeting Saturday. I’ve been to a few of the installfests, but was always too lazy to go downtown for a meeting.
It was pretty cool – held in the Computer Science building of the U of M, Jeff Price from Novell gave a talk on everything Novell is doing around Suse. While vague at times, Jeff gave a very good overview of how the entire suite of Novell products (Suse Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Linux Desktop, etc) work together, how NLD9 is different than Suse Professional 9.3 (corporate vs. hobbyist respectively), and various other topics.
His tone was conversational, and he skipped the slideware, which was just fine. Good participation from the audience, including sidebars on HDTV and MythTV. I’ve volunteered to burn some copies of Suse 9.3 Pro, so I’ll definitely be at the next one.
I love GNOME. As I use Linux more and more these days (now averaging over 90%, the only exception these days seems to be some online music stuff), GNOME helps me do my stuff better.
Spent tonight catching up on GUADEC, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference. All the hackers get together and listen to speeches, meet each other in person, and collaborate on GNOME.
Watched Miguel De Icaza’s keynote speech while reading a PDF document of the slides Glynn Foster presented on the 101 things to know about GNOME.
Miguel had some very interesting comments in his keynote about usability testing, and how users use a computer desktop. He threw out a challenge to the GNOME hackers, and it will be interesting to see over the 2.12 and 2.14 development cycles how the teams start to address usability, especially from a beginner standpoint. People who use GNOME every day, might miss some of the forest for the trees sometimes.
Glynn’s slides took me way back. It’s amazing to me now how long I’ve used GNOME on and off over the years. Going back to my first Red Hat Linux purchase (5.2) in January of 1997, where has the time gone. From the panel tiles, to Eazel, Helix, and how the look and feel has changed over the years to what I’m using today, it’s been revolutionary.
The donation is coming, it’s too bad the GNOME Foundation uses Paypal, as Paypal hates me. I have increased motivation to get my projects done around the house (music server, fixing 2 PCs, lots of cleaning and the basement) so I can dedicate some time to a GNOME project of some sort.