Error-ridden nostalgia

As a Mac user, I sometimes think back longingly on the days when my PC and I were inseparable—oh what a pair we were. Thinking about he wonders of DOS, 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP always made me smile. I’d cast a fleeting glance on my pile of 200 or so computer games that don’t work with my Mac and my heart would sink. There was always a little part of me that missed Windows, to the point where I was almost beginning to consider considering the thought of thinking about possibly getting another PC sometime before I die.

But then today I actually had to use one. I’m better now.

A Good Looking Icon

I’ve been playing with Photoshop CS3 for a few days now, and I’ve come to realize that in all I know about Photoshop, I guess I just don’t know enough to see the difference between CS1 and CS3.  Because all I see is a prettier interface and…everything else that was there before?  I’m not enough of a power-user to benefit.  There’s more stuff, I’m sure, but I don’t know where it is or what it is.  I guess what I’m saying is that CS3 isn’t really worth the upgrade for me.

I still need to try InDesign and Illustrator.  Those might be more fun.

Realistically

Apple’s iPhone is without a doubt one of the few products ever to be so far out of my reach that it actually diminishes my want for it.  Like exotic cars and lakeside mansions, the iPhone seems so expensive to an on-again-off-again cheapskate like me that I can’t imagine myself ever being in the position to be like, “Oh?  Yeah?  500 for the cell-phone?  Yeah, sure I guess.”  No.  It will be something more like, “The iPhone came out five years ago and you’re selling it for $50 bucks?  I’ll take it.”  But there are a lot of really expensive things that I still like, such as trips to foreign places, mopeds, and widescreen televisions and I want those more than I want the iPhone.  Maybe it’s more because I just don’t need the iPhone–I’ve got a phone, I’ve got an iPod, (and I can’t afford a data plan anyway), so these two devices already fit in my pockets, and I don’t see why they have to be one.

It’s still pretty.

Random Feat of Genius

Two days ago, I was cleaning the basement when I decided it needed a purpose–I mean, there’s a sofa in there, why not sit on it and do something? So I moved my television, Xbox 360, GameCube and stereo out there and hooked them all up to each other. There’s no cable in the basement, but I don’t watch a lot of television anyway, and if all else fails, I Tivo it. But my bigger problem was the lack of ethernet cable hookups. Sure, we have wireless all over the house (mostly), but my Xbox 360 doesn’t have wireless. So what’s a guy to do?

My first thought was to find a really long ethernet cable and run it from my room into the basement, but that seemed impractical. Then I thought of something that could never work in a million years because it made too much sense and was just too cool–wireless internet to my Mac, shared over crossover cable to the Xbox 360. How cool is that? But it couldn’t possibly work, right? Wrong. Someone on the Xbox Live forums at Mac OSX Hints had all the instructions to make it happen, and I rejoiced, cause it worked!  Now I can update it whenever I need to, download demos and whatnot.  Amazing.

Re: B

I didn’t really elaborate on keyboard settings before, but using Japanese input on Macs is fairly simple.  On the International pane in System Preferences is an Input Menu tab.  This lists all the built-in keyboard layouts and input methods.  For Japanese, it offers Romanji, Hiragana and Katakana.  It’s not really a layout for the keyboard, that is it doesn’t change what the letters type.  Since all the syllables have a Romanji spelling, you simply type in the letters and it’ll be automatically changed to the appropriate character.  How does Kanji work?  I have no clue.  Mac has a ton of built-in languages, though I deleted a lot of mine cause they take up space and I don’t even plan on writing in Sanskrit.  Windows, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to include a lot of the languages–you need to go back to your install disk, at least with a standard installation.

On a side note: I love the keyboard viewer you can activate from the input menu on the menu bar.  It serves no purpose for me except to entertain myself with how fast I sometimes type.

Don’t go…please.

What’s a hotel without internet?? The answer is really a long and involved rant, but simply—it sucks.  As nice as a hotel can be, it becomes so much nicer when you can jump on your computer and look up…whatever.

Blurb’s BookSmart is my software pick for the day.  If you’ve ever used the book-creation software in iPhoto, you’ll see a lot of similarities, mostly because Apple uses the stripped-down version of the same program, or so I’ve read.  BookSmart is useful if you want to be all crafty and scrapbook-y without actually needing craft or scrapbook skills.  You simply put your photos into the program and it’s all drag and drop from there.  You can do all photos, all text—anything your heart desires.  It runs rather slowly on my PowerBook G4, but then again it’s a PowerBook G4 and I bought it four years ago, so that’s to be expected.  I like how customizable it is, and all the built-in themes are good-looking enough.  The books themselves are a little overpriced to be buying a bunch, but still cheap enough for those special occasions.

I’m nixing the new thing for now.

The new thing?  A WordPress blog not hosted by WordPress.com.  It’s currently being developed, but right now I’m mostly in the mood to just update here, cause I’m a lover of content.

Today I was messing around with Pages and Keynote.  It’s not that I use either regularly, but I like to open random applications every so often to remind myself why I own them in the first place.  Why do I own iWork?  I don’t know.  I’m sure one day, down the road, it will come in handy when I need to start publishing my own newsletter, obviously covering my path to world domination, but for now it sits there, sad and lonely next to GarageBand in the “Maybe I Should Use These” folder of my mind.

Sitting in the dark.

I’ve been in discovery-mode lately, and therefore found a nice, tiny little application called JDarkRoom. All it does is bring up a black screen for you to type on. It sort of reminds me of the DOS days, but prettier. It saves to .txt files, but it’s easy enough to just copy and paste into whatever you want. It’s nice for whenever you’ve got way too much going on on your desktop and you just want to sit and write. Enjoy.

[UPDATE:] Or, as Jason points out, you could just download WriteRoom, the original Mac program the java version is based off of. It’s nice, and a lot more user-friendly. The one thing I don’t like about it is the pop up you get every time it’s opened—they give it to you for free and then never let you forget it.

Just something neat I do.

For a long time, the contacts list in my new cell phone was weak—I had just gotten it, I had a bunch of numbers in my old phone, but I just didn’t feel like reentering all of that into the new one. So what am I to do? If only there were a place online, say a social-networking site (whatever it is we mean when we say that), that already had all of my friends information? Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could just take all of that data and suck it offline and into my phone? It would. And it is.

First I had to find a program that would download all of the information off of Facebook and into something that would sync with my phone, like Address Book—I’m on OSX, remember. Bring in FacebookSync! It does exactly what it sounds like, and grabs things like phone numbers and addresses, and even gets their Facebook picture, too. So now I have everything on my PowerBook, but the point of this is to have it on my cell phone.

I have a Nokia 6133 which I love very much. There’s a beautiful display, decent camera, and the most gimmicky button that I press to automatically flip it open. Unfortunately, it was decided at some point to make it incompatible with iSync. This troubled me, but I refused to give up after coming so far (because it took forever to find FacebookSync, let me tell you). Bring in…this guy! In all honesty, this isn’t what I used, but it’s the same method: I downloaded a patch that added support for the Nokia 6131, and then changed every file in the iSync package to read 6133 instead. How clever. After that was set up, all I needed to do was turn on the Bluetooth and let iSync work its magic. And now all of my old numbers, and new ones, are safe and sound on my new phone.

Image via Geek and Poke.

It’s not there.

I searched and I searched, but I could not find a decent WordPress client to use on a Mac. They all bother me in some way—they all don’t even have blogging as their primary function (Journler and Flock, which I don’t understand at all), so why they are on the official WordPress list as clients, I don’t know. Qumana seems to be all about Google Adsense, which I’m not interested in. And the download for JBlog Editor is broken. The only one close to being decent is Scribefire, which is a Firefox plug-in—except if I have my browser open, what difference is there between opening that up, and opening a new tab and going straight to my dashboard? I don’t even know why I would need a client, but it was just something I was looking for and could not find (for free, see below). But I’ll live.

[UPDATE:] Matt made a good point in his comment—MarsEdit and Ecto are both good programs. I guess I just wish there were free programs that were as good, but that’s probably asking too much. I’ll try to be more clear next time. This was sort of rushed.

Joost+Powerbook=Nothing.

Depending on how you look at it, I’m very upset at Joost and/or my laptop because I can’t run the Joost beta.  So my laptop is old and runs on a G4, it’s true.  I don’t see why they have to automatically disable it from running on my system—just give me a chance!  It could still work, maybe.  I could be totally off-base, actually.  I don’t know much about software programming, but even if it could never work on a G4, wouldn’t it be possible to design a version to run on older hardware?  I can’t buy a new computer every year, because if I could, I still wouldn’t be spending all that money on buying a new computer every year.  And I was so excited, too!  Joost was going to let me relive my childhood with episodes of Transformers!  And…National Geographic shows…and…uh, rejected Comedy Central shows? 

Hmm.   No, no.  On second thought, I’m good.