Borderless printing fun

Our new printer ( Canon
i9100 ) has arrived

It’s quite speedy. Border-less 4×6″
photos print in 45 seconds, while 8.5×11″ prints in 3 minutes. Hardly any noise
while printing. Just a little when it grabs the paper. One thing we’ll still
have to fiddle with is calibration. The photos lack a little bit of vibrancy in
the red area, which I confirmed with a calibration sheet.
Otherwise we
really like it so far. Just need to find a place to put it. It’s too big for our
(temporary) computer carts.

How to ruin a new $2500+ Dual G5?

Note Feb 1:
Turns out this
was a prank using an empty G5 Case with some spare PC parts. Made a lot of
people scratch their head though! Andy only had to wade through 1300 emails
after his photos & story were published. - LOL.

So
Andy’s parents give him a brand new Dual G5 for Christmas.
Great, right?
No, Andy wishes it was a Dell.
So what does Andy do? http://www.overclockers.com/tips1133/

I am at a loss for words, like so many Apple users.
It’s like
getting a brand new Mercedes, tossing everything out to put some hyundai
hardware in it.

Camera & printer order

Wanting to expand our possibilities a little bit, we took
the plunge and ordered a new digital camera … and are upgrading our printer
as well.

We decided on a 5 MegaPixel Canon Powershot G5 & a
Canon i9100. The jump to a compact 6MP or an SLR model was a bit bigger than we
wanted to take, so we settled for the G5. It’s not exactly pocket size, but it
does come with the features we considered crucial in order to upgrade. (5MP,
better zoom, bit larger LCD, swivel display) We’ll probably need some extra
compact flash storage given the 2.5 MB photos, but a 256MB card will do for the
time being.

The printer has received plenty of recommendations, uses
6 individual cartridges and allows up to A3 size printing, so that’ll be sweet.

Needless to say, we can’t wait to see FedEx & UPS stop by later
in the week.
(hopefully
they’re not shipping from California!!)

Better keep warm in the NE

Tomorrow morning we’re going back to -10F (-23C) with a
real feel of -27F (-33C). I think we’ll just stay inside I cross my fingers
that the building doesn’t run out of heating oil again the way it did last
week!

You may have noticed I said there has been no snow. Well, the
weatherman said last night we only had 0.5″ this January compared to over 12″ on
average. Small difference. Maybe king winter still packs a big punch, but right
now the lack of snow is a problem for the winter sports.

Last night’s sunset

A quick snap of the sunset, viewed from our
apartment.

The faster cube

Thanks to C :)We exchanged our Cubes, so I’m nowsmiling ear to ear behind the 500 MHz Geforce 2 Cube. Swapped our hard disks andplanted some extra RAM. (1GB up from 768MB). The difference is not huge, butnoticeable. It’s nice to have a bit more “headroom” . I look forwardto update OS X from Jaguar tohref=”http://www.apple.com/macosx/”>Panther to get the addedbenefits. Maybe by the weekend I’ll be Pantherized. The only thing I don’t knowis how iBlog will import the existing data. I always prefer a clean install overan upgrade (= erasing the partition) so I would need to make sure I know how torestore the blog …For the rest it’s waiting forhref=”http://www.apple.com/hardware/ads/1984/”>Anniversary of theMac. Something new is bound to come out! Rumor has it there’ll be an importantApple ad at the superbowl. No, we’re not curious!

Site update - first set of changes

I have pushed the first set of changes through iBlog.
There are still a few areas where I’m plagued with browser interpretations. -
No, the times
where 4 browsers show 4 different results for whichever reason are still not
entirely behind us - On the plus side the site should be quite a bit
lighter (KB-wise) and thus faster to access for those on slower connections. I
strapped iBlog down quite a bit and look forward to doing so a bit more

My only big obstacle has been my advanced site menu, which I can’t
seem to fit into it’s new space - yet. For now I’m forced to leave it
offline.

Another thing I noted is that when activetopic.com is down,
that the site will stop loading till the browser times out on activetopic.com. I
hope this won’t be a persistent problem.

More to come

10 Reasons email is like a penis

10. Those who have it would be devastated if it was ever
cut off.
9. Those who have it think that those who don’t are somehow
inferior.
8. Those who don’t have it may agree that it’s neat but think
it’s not worth the fuss that those who have it make about it.
(read
more)

Small site update: Soap box

The “soap box” is the small chat column /
messageboard-like area on the right where you can leave a short message. These
are independent of my entries and their comments. Neat thing is they don’t
require a popup. (unlike the comments). The text entry fields are below the
posted messages.

Feel free to “step onto the soap box” and say
something
No need to be shy WINK
WINK

icerabbit

PS: and if you have a homepage I’ll pop in
for a visit

XP re-install = 69 updates (44 critical) => instant reboot + Website Trojans

What does one do when it’s -15C outside? Stay warm &
solve computer problems. I had an “interesting” afternoon yesterday.

A) You take a working PC. Reinstall XP and the required drivers.
Insert a very long list of Windows updates … and it will crash playing an MPEG
clip. Repeatedly. (more)

B) Last October I wiped a computer,
installed Win98, updated it, installed antivirus, etc and took it off the
network. Turns out it was infected with a drive-by installed trojan
(downloader.esepor) that very same day. It had been piggy-backed onto some
(hacked?) homepage and exploited at least one MS vulnerability.

Ain’t
PC’s fun?
Well, I do love my PowerMac! WINK

XP re-install = 69 updates (44 critical) => instant reboot + Website Trojans

What does one do when it’s -15C outside? Stay warm &
solve computer problems. I had an “interesting” afternoon yesterday.

A) You take a working PC. Reinstall XP and the required drivers.
Insert a very long list of Windows updates … and it will crash playing an MPEG
clip. Repeatedly. (more)

B) Last October I wiped a computer,
installed Win98, updated it, installed antivirus, etc and took it off the
network. Turns out it was infected with a drive-by installed trojan
(downloader.esepor) that very same day. It had been piggy-backed onto some
(hacked?) homepage and exploited at least one MS vulnerability.

Ain’t
PC’s fun?
Well, I do love my PowerMac! WINK

Arctic temperatures?

So, I walk to the car last Friday, thinking “it sure is
nippy this morning!!” Inside the car I stare at a can of Mountain Dew left
overnight in the cup holder - ready to explode. It expanded every possible mm,
bulging 10mm at the top & 15mm at the bottom. Wow! It must really be cold.
I fire up the engine, look at the overhead display and it’s a whopping
-24C (-12F)
!!

This
morning it’s “milder” with only -11C (13F) -
Right! - But, get this: Thursday & Friday we are looking at
daytime high
temperatures of -20C (-4F)! Yes, daytime high. Somebody left the door
open at the North Pole. Better keep warm!

MacWorld San Francisco ‘04 Keynote = boring

In short: Good news = iLife 2004. Bad news = new hardware
delayed, overpriced mini iPod.
Steve Jobs promised an exciting anniversary
year, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Everybody had high hopes for
desktop updates, some new peripherals, a few price adjustments and something
really new … but Apple didn’t
deliver, which, for the start of the year of 20th anniversary of the Mac doesn’t
feel right.

The keynote begins with the famous 1984 commercial
which has a cute detail: the female athlete runs listening to an iPod

Apart from Apple’s iLife package which now is updated as iLife 2004 with some much
requested features and the mid level video editing upgrade to Final Cut Express 2,
there wasn’t anything exciting for most. For businesses there are finally G5 XServe systems available. MS
Office 2004 for Mac was presented briefly. New features in iLife were
highlighted (and there’s quite a few in iMovie & iDVD) with a lot of time
for the 5th and new application in the suite: Garage Band, a sound
mixing application. Not really important to most, IMHO.

I didn’t
believe the rumors, but there it was: iPod mini. A bit smaller than
a common cellphone, available in 5 colors and holding 4 GB of storage. Neat.
Euh, sticker shock: $250! You could hear a pin drop. Fact is that for $50 extra
you have 4 times the storage capacity with regular iPod. General agreement: yes
it’s cute and miniaturization costs, but it is simply overpriced compared to the
regular iPod $$/GB to become a hit.

This time there was no “and
there’s one more thing”. The keynote ended quietly with a recap of the
highlights.

Happy New Year!

Best wishes to all. May 2004 be a good &
memorable year for all of us

So, yes, we’re back We had a safe
trip, which of course was way too short. You can only do so many things in a few
days. Air travel was OK, considering how things are nowadays. Unfortunately TSA
ruined the zipper on one of C’s favorite bags (yes, it was unlocked!). It was a
top brand limited series so we’ll have to wait and see what response we get from
TSA.

We had a nice time with C’s mom & aunt and some friends.
It sure felt hot in Florida. After knee deep snow the previous weekend it was
like full summer for us in a matter of 4 days. We enjoyed the 2 extra hours of
daylight, green plants & trees, and had to keep the airco on in the car to
feel comfortable What a difference a few hours makes.

Speaking
of difference. It’s a whopping -7F / -22C here this morning. Add quite a bit of
wind and even I’ll say it’s cold outside. LOL. No snow or precipitation, so
driving is safe out here.

We planned to join the gym and were really
committed … only to find they raised the bit elevated price by another 50%.
Ouch, Sticker Shock! The only affordable way is to join for a year, but we
can’t commit to that. I’ve been to another gym in the mean time but am not
really enthusiastic. Maybe there’s a third one that matches our taste &
wallet.