A lot of people don’t know that NASA makes their satellite images available for free. They actually have a lot of cool websites these days (a lot better than what they had a few years ago), but the one I’m most interested in right now is the Visible Earth website. That’s where I found the most amazing picture of planet Earth.
Click on the image to view a (very) large version.
I just updated my WordPress admin interface to use the WP Tiger Administration plugin. Take that.
Last May I bought a Sony PSP because it was a really cool portable device. I’m not big on games but I figured if I could play them for five minutes at a time here and there, I might enjoy that. More than that though, the device plays movies and music and it has built in wi-fi and web browser. The web is what really hooked me. And the USB port. I couldn’t believe it: a standard port on a proprietary device from Sony? Imagine the possibilities. All the wonderful toys that could run off of that USB port.
Well, it’s been a year and do you want to know what you can run off of that USB port: jack and shit. There is a 4GB external hard drive that looks cool but why can’t I plug in my digital camera and moblog with pictures on the go? That’s the kind of shit I want to do with my Sony PSP. That’s the kind of shit that would let the PSP dominate it’s market, whatever that market would be at that point. It would certainly be more than “portable gaming” and would probably cross-over into the “ultra-portable” category.
It looks like Sony is finally going to release Sony hardware for GPS and VOIP. Great. They can’t license these things out? This tells me that: a) they’re going to cost 4x more than it should and b) they won’t work very well until at least version 2.
This is a perfect example of a killer device being destroyed by the very company that released it. At least one of the predictions I made when I bought the thing finally came true: Sony will start releasing UMDs and DVDs together since nobody wants to pay twice for the same thing. I’m looking forward to being able to pay once and watch a movie at home on my DVD player or on-the-go on my PSP.
If you know much about computers, I need your help.
Let’s start with the backstory: I have a homebuilt machine (my last homebuilt machine) that a friend and I put together a couple of years ago (stats listed below). We ghosted his hard drive to get me up and running quickly. Note: I already had the same applications on CD with the exceptions of some games that I didn’t play and a bunch of MP3s that I didn’t like.
I created my own admin user account and left the original one alone. My plan was to setup my workspace and all of my saved files from my last machine the way I wanted, pick and choose anything I wanted to keep from the ghosted account, and then wipe the ghosted account.
I didn’t actually get around to deleting the other account until very recently. I realized it had been a long time since I had pulled any files out of it and I went ahead and killed it. Then I started playing Civilization IV. Great game. And one that my machine should have been able to handle without a problem. However, when playing on a large map my computer would slow to a crawl. I took to reading magazines while waiting for it.
That was not an acceptable solution. I checked on the RAM usage and determined that my test web server running Apache, PHP, and MySQL was consuming some resources. So I could kill those before playing the game. I defragged the hard drive for the first time in two years. Then I ran error-checking on the disk. This is when things went horribly, horribly wrong.
The computer restarted to run the check, steps one, two and three went off without a hitch. When it got to step four it rewrote the file ID for every system file. When the computer finally finished the check and booted up everything went haywire:
That last one is the key to everything, I just don’t know how. When I boot from a Windows CD to repair or re-install the OS, Windows doesn’t recognize that there is a hard drive. When I go into the BIOS (Phoenix Award BIOS v7.8) it doesn’t recognize that there is a hard drive either. Keep in mind, things were pretty much fine until the error-check rewrote the file IDs. It may have done something else too but that was the only thing it reported when it ran. How in the Hell could that possibly affect the BIOS?
Does anybody have any idea how to fix my computer?
Other notes:
Hardware Profile:
I can’t view properties via device manager, so some items I can’t get the full details on without pulling them out of the computer altogether. I’m not opposed to doing that, but at this point I haven’t gotten to it. If someone wants that info to help me troubleshoot, I’m more than happy to get it.
P.S. Don’t mock the hardware, it’s three years old and was built on a budget. I’m not replacing it until I buy a high-end Intel Mac that can run both operating systems (OS X and either XP Pro or Longhorn). I’m planning to put 1.5GB RAM into it and run Windows via Virtual PC and have both OSs running simultaneously. I can’t do that right now though, so I need to get this machine working again.
As cool as this is, I’m not sure I want to sully my Mac with Windows. My desktop machine crashed this weekend after I rank a disk check. I’m going to have to pull it and send it to a professional. Argh. That has never happened on one of my Macs. And why would I expose my Mac to Windows virii?
The flip side is that this might bring in a lot of Windows users who will be willing to experiment with OS X so long as they have the option to switch to Windows at any time. Especially given the fact that the MacBook Pro is the fastest Windows XP notebook on the market.
I’m a little behind on my reading (and posting) but work has been busy and taking time off for SXSW didn’t help things. I found myself reading the February issue of How while I ate my lunch today. February was the issue on typography. I was surprised to find an article on web typography but even more surprised by what it wrote:
Of course, you can create text as a graphic using any font in your arsenal. The drawbacks to this tactic are that it’s not easily changed later, it can’t be copied and pasted with other text on a page, it doesn’t scale in size when the user chooses a different default font size for the browser, and it’s not accessible to people with visual impairments who use text-speaking devices. The benefit, however, is that the text you create in Photoshop appears exactly as you want it to appear, with your font of choice and any graphic effects or other visual stylings.
Now, there was a little bit of FUD there about the screen readers (text-speaking devices). If you provide the text in an alt attribute for the image it will be perfectly accessible. However, I found it amazing that a magazine for designers, primarily print designers, would be so astute as to point out all of the failings of using images for text.
Later in the article was another paragraph, this one about Flash:
When designing Flash projects, most of the same typographical rules mentioned above still apply; you’re simply gaining the freedom to use whatever font you like. However, Flash isn’t nearly as accessible as HTML, and certainly not as flexible as CSS if you want to change the appearance. Frankly, waiting for Flash animations to load can be annoying to site users, even those with broadband internet connections.
Steering designers away from Flash because of accessibility and load times? I’m not religious but Hallelujah! I take this article as a sign of the maturity of the online design community, our tools and our pool of knowledge. We’ve come a long way in the last 10 years and pieces like this give me hope for the next 10.
That would be “married web designer / writer seeks illustrator / animator for fun.” Not like that you dirty minded pervert. I’m married! I have a cartoon and website that a friend and I want to make. I’m looking for someone in the Austin area who can draw and might be interested in joining the project. The story is very South Park-ish. It’s written and ready to go. Interested? Drop me a line.
An amazing thing happened to me today. I was sitting at my laptop working when, all of a sudden, the connector for the power cord that plugs into the laptop caught on fire. I yanked the cord immediately. The thing gave off a few thin tendrils of smoke and then died a quiet, peaceful death.
Had I not been at my computer when it happened I’m quite sure my computer would have burned up. Had I not been home my entire house might have burned down.
Apple makes really shitty power connectors. What are the odds that on the same day this happens to me I would pop over to read the “Cult of Mac” blog and see a discussion about a power cord melting down on a MacBook?
Different laptops, different situations. I really doubt that guy’s cat pulled the cord out of his laptop. I think the magnetic link broke once the connector caught on fire and the thing fell out on it’s own.
In my case, my connector had been previously bent when it had been yanked out of the laptop on accident. Over time the thicker part of the cable at the base of the plastic plug (the one that goes into the laptop) split open. I can’t say exactly why. It could have been a stress fracture from the new angle of use or heat from the electrical wire inside acting on a point of weakness that developed when the cord was yanked or, most likely, some combination thereof.
The split got worse but the plug still worked. I was planning on using the Ultimate Tool to Fix All Problems (duct-tape) but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I really don’t know what the final straw for it was today but I do have some advice for people with broken power cords. This may seem like really obvious advice, but go with me here, as I made the mistake myself and I’m not a total idiot:
Don’t use broken power cords.
Bent may be okay but once the electrical wire inside of the plastic is exposed stop. It’s time to buy a new cord. It hurts. Apple charges $80 for the $%@! things. Your house or business most likely cost more than that though, so it’s worth it.
Monkey Bites has a quick post up called “A heap of AJAX tutorials” which links to 30 tutorials + one.
I don’t know how he did it but somehow he managed to steal this list straight out of my brain. Sure he added a few things like move to New York and picking up music again, but it’s basically my list. Compare:
See? Same damn list. He might have tried to customize it a bit to “make it his own” but we all know the truth. James Craig reads minds. I don’t know if he has to get close to you to do it, so I want to make sure I get these out now:
Okay, it appears that Structured Blogging is way ahead of me on the whole microformats-for-WordPress thing, so I’ll have to check that out.
* This one is major since my wife’s family doesn’t speak English and we visit them several times a year. I would also like to learn German since my own extended family doesn’t speak English either. As it stands right now I can’t communicate with her family or mine.
Chat Clussman is a design technologist and a father. His main obsession is quality of life but he’s also fond of writing, photography, design, grids, Apple, and WordPress. He lives in Austin, TX.
