So last week I got an iPhone 4.

That point is kind of important to the rest of this. Before, I had a first-gen iPod Touch. Don’t get me wrong, it was great for the occasional pocket surfing. But nothing like the iPhone 4. My iPhone is so much faster it isn’t funny. Things I used to have to wait for, I….uh….don’t have to wait for now. Webpages load faster, I can access Facebook though it’s app, I can take photos, on and on and on. Oh, it it’s also a cell phone. For those of you doing the iPod Touch + cell phone thing, it really is amazing once you get an iPhone. It’s like your iPod grows the ability to call and text, and surf from anywhere (lol, not with AT&T, but I digress)

Ok, why am I sitting down at this blog that I only sit down at when I have something to say that can’t be contained in a Facebook status update? Because, in one sentence “I really don’t feel like owning a laptop today”. I used to check Google Reader and Facebook when I woke up or got home from work. I can pull my iPhone from my bedside and do that. I can check them for work with 3G. My iPod Touch COULD do the bedside thing, but it was slow. My iPhone isn’t, it feels just as fast as my MacBook Pro does. Despite about 1/6th of the CPU power* and 1/8th the RAM. Why? Because surfing is really not that computer-intensive. Unless it involves Flash. Or some Javascript ray tracing. O LOOK RABBIT TRAILS. For the most part though, it is a simple thing that is easier done on simple machines.

That Mac Pro is looking more and more appealing every month. Now it’s not only my ever increasing video and CGI needs for power, it is also the fact that I like my iPhone more for the portable stuff. I want a tower more. Laptops are big. They’re heavy. They’re hot. They’re noisy (what? They make noise. iPhones don’t). I’m sure I’ll come around for the school year, when I need a full computer I can pack out once again, but for now? Seriously, Apple. Let’s hurry up with that 2010 Mac Pro.

*single ~800Mhz in-order core vs dual 2400Mhz out-of-order cores. So, probably more than 6x.

A short story for my creative writing class. Thoughts, anyone?

Three hundred years. For three hundred years, she had walked this Earth. Watching the humans come and leave. Many of them, she had “helped” leave. But not her own kind. That was before the infighting began. Back when being one of warriors meant you just got into all the fancy galas, as long as you kept a weapon under your suit or dress. As if there was a need then. No one would dare assault the dark ones. Until some of their own found some excuse to declare war.

Whatever the reason, the night was no longer a safe place. Especially in this city, where the mayor was in Galen’s back pocket. That was why the mayor needed to be removed from this position, and this life. So she and Baldur had left the safe house tonight. The mayor was attending a ceremony for the dedication of a new park. This park had state of the art lighting and security systems, it was said; designed to keep down the ever increasing crime after dark. Lights and automated stun weapons an upstanding citizens could activate with their ID cards in a pinch. But the security wouldn’t be worth much. Galen had made sure it was full of holes so his own warriors could continue to carry out operations there.

Specifically, the sensors that triggered the lights, cameras, and stun weapons were infrared. She and Baldur were as cold as the night air, and they would never show up. Neither would Galen’s agents, but they had other solutions to that. So Baldur had gone to the overlook to keep an eye out. She would go in for the kill. She crept quietly through the woods, sword on her back, stake gun at her side. Her long dark hair pulled up in the black cap she wore. Her gun would be too noisy for this, she carried it only just in case. It would do the job if needed. A 10cm silver spike was a dangerous weapon before they it is put in a magnetic gun.

Getting the mayor away from the crowd would not be a problem. They had a prostitute to lure him away. Such fools the humans were. She bared her fangs in a sinister grin. This would be too easy. There he was, the fat moron. Giggling with his “girlfriend”. She waited quietly in the shadows as the two approached. The heat-sensor lights weren’t tripped. They would only trip when the warm-blooded mayor came past. Then it would be too late. It would only take a few seconds. She quietly drew her sword. Fortunately, those didn’t make a metal scraping sound in the real world. One quick lunge would do it, silently. The two passed by her, still laughing. The lights never tripped for them either. Above, the red light stayed lit. The system was still armed. The mayor was no more human than the she and her partner. Galen. Just what sort of monsters had he turned the mayor and the prostitute into? Whatever it was, the mayor was still seen out in daylight. Meaning whatever was done was bad. Very bad. Time to go, she thought. She set her sword down, and lifted her stake gun. The mayor was still too human to see it coming. She fired twice in under a second, punching holes straight through the skulls of both beasts.

I’ve spent a lot of time these last few days studying up on audio and video compression and that sort of fun stuff. And I appreciate Compressor more than I ever have before. The sheer flexibility this thing has is just nuts, and the workflow is so simple: And jobs to your batch, give each job a source file, and one or more targets. Each target has a settings and a destination. You can save presets that you just drag onto the job and the immediately load up a target. You can select multiple jobs in a batch and and drag a target to one, and it will add it to all of them. Then you fire off the batch. Coolest part: if you have multiple Macs, it can fan the batch out across all of them. If it doesn’t have enough targets to keep all the CPUs in the cluster busy, it will start chopping videos into chunks and letting them process individually. Makes me wish I had more than one…:D *evil laugh*

Oh, and it has about a cajillion formats. There are dedicated 3G, MPEG-4 layer-2, MPEG-2, Dolby Digital, and MP3 encoders included, plus it can use ANYTHING Quicktime supports. (H.264, ProRes, XDCAM, AAC, AIC, DV, and litterally dozens of others. QT’s encoder drop-down is over 1000px tall. If you are still missing something, Quicktime can be easily expanded with plug-ins. There are ones out there for WMV, Flash, DTS, Silverlight and more. This brings us to my main point. That would be XiphQT. It is badly in need of attention.

For those not aware, there is a new standard for web formating called HTML5. One of the very cool new tricks it has are the and tags. These tags allow one to easily embed streaming audio and video just like you would a pic. The problem came about as to which format to use. Nobody could agree. It was narrowed down to 2: One side, team Free Software: Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio. On the other, team We-have-standard-codecs-already: MPEG-4′s H.264 video and AAC audio. Chrome currently supports both. FF only supports Ogg. Safari just uses Quicktime. Quicktime…..does not support Ogg out of the box. That is where XiphQT comes in. For the playback side, it handles things nicely.

Preparing video is another story. Nobody actually makes video professionally with free software. It just sucks. In fact, if you go to the Free Software Foundation site, and look at their “Projects in need” page, one of the first ones is for better video production tools. On the non-free side, Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere use….Quicktime. QT has lots of support for the MPEG-4 codecs. In fact, it supports them without paid add-ons. If you have OS X, they are supported out of the box. On Windows, you only need to install Quicktime to get the same support. If you have iTunes, it’s already installed. Theora, is as mentioned, not supported. XiphQT to the rescue! Kind of.

Here is the trouble. Exporting Ogg video from Compressor is a royal pain the ass. The internets claims XiphQT makes it possible. You can definitely make a preset for Theora video. Except I still don’t know why Vorbis audio doesn’t work. QT just pukes up errors.

While I still have hope of being able to make H.264 and Theora streams from one job in Compressor, I am a techy and a persevering type. Many others would have just said “FUCK THIS SHIT” by this point. QMaster is enough a pain in the ass. Compressor doesn’t need tempermental codecs to join the party. We use Macs because we need our shit to “just work”. Sure, no system is perfect. But with H.264 you just load up and go. That’s not the case with Theora, and when people start asking for this format from places prepping their video for the web, they will start meeting resistance.

Oh, and XiphQT has still not been upgraded to the FAR more efficient v1.1 Theora encoder, meaning any video it spits out will be 30-50% bigger than it needs to be.

About an hour and a half to go….

Wow, what a busy, crazy year 2009 has been. It is really weird to look back at how different things are for me now. It’s also scary to look ahead, as I really have no idea where I am going. Before, I’d always had a long range plan. At this particular moment, I don’t. I have registered for classes next quarter, and fully plan to attend them. Don’t know much beyond that. The plan is to take some more electives in the spring, finish math in the summer, and transfer to WSUV and do the DTC program. For one reason or another, I’m not sure it is going to work. Probably because my school plans don’t ever seem to work right.

But looking back…..a year ago, I had almost no music from the bands I love now. I’d never even heard a full song from Nightwish, who is now basically my favorite band. I did not own my own camcorder, I used iMove instead of Final Cut Pro, GIMP instead of Pixelmator…I didn’t have a lot of my various cool toys, I had just finished 14 credits at Clark. Somehow, I have now finished 58 and maintained a B+ average doing it. Considering my grades in high school, I really do not know how the hell I managed to pull that off. I can still barely believe it reading that line.

Also, I’m IN MY TWENTIES now. Holy shit. How did that happen? And I know multiple people who have gotten married. I’M OLD. I learned untold amounts of stuff about computers, including hardware knowledge, all sorts of stuff about *nix, crypto, scripting, and other fun stuff. Oh, and I fixed my gaming rig, reclaiming my nerd honor. It now plays games and runs Folding@home. Oh God, Folding@home. Yet another new thing for me this year. I’ve found it is tons of fun. Not only do you get to earn points on how fast your computer is and how well you can use it, you earn the points because you are CURING CANCER. And the flu. And other diseases. I joined the fora at xkcd a year ago. That has now become my new “main forum” on the internet, and has finally succeeded in taking over the role Nsider played for my early teens. I have learned much from the people there, including the tip that finally led to my gaming rig getting fixed, and where I joined up with my Folding@home team.

I’ve also sort of re-found singing as a hobby. Although I’m still not sure I am that good at it…and I still haven’t found a church to go to. Not sure I want one. I am kind of happy being a “churchless Christian”. I don’t have to listen to other people just trying to shove their interpretations around, and fight against other peoples ideas, just to protect their misconceptions. It feels good.

Ok, so, resolutions for 2010? Lots of intangible things….I want to be more confident in myself. I also want to stop unconsciously thinking things I really shouldn’t care about anyway…like fearing looking “gay” or “being beaten by a girl”. Personally, I don’t think those are things worth worrying over, so I want to break myself of it.

More tangible things….I want to help the Clark Film Club go somewhere. I will make a movie at some point this year. A real short, something to go on the demo reel. Like, with other people. That gets shown to other people.

And who knows what fun gear awaits in 2010….

Ok, I really like wallpapers. I have ~300 now. That’s too many to select manually. So I use OS X wallpaper shuffling function. It picks one at random at the time you set, I chose 5 mins. Great. Except…I gave up a dedicated wallpapers folder awhile ago. It was getting much to large to be useful. After much rearranging, I sorted my ENTIRE pictures folder solely by the content of the images. Great for finding things. Not so great for keeping the 400×900 images away from the wallpaper shuffler.

So, now what? One idea was an album in iPhoto. This has the little problem of having to add every damn wallpaper to iPhoto. I actually tried this method once, but it proved way too much work. This had to be done directly in the filesystem. Tonight, I had a great idea! Spotlight, the built in search! It can save a canned search as a smart folder. The difference between a regular folder and a smart folder is kind of like the difference between a regular playlist and a smart playlist in iTunes. A regular playlist contains items you dragged in there, a smart playlist contains things that match a criteria. So I wanted it to look for wallpapers.

Ok, that was easy. But, problem. The wallpaper selector evidently will not take a smart folder as a valid wallpaper storage directory! Oops! Ok, now what. Well, will it take an alias? A quick test showed it does! So I made a dedicated wallpapers folder, which contains only aliases. It also contains the smart folder, which makes getting those aliases easy. Anything tagged as a wallpaper shows up in the smart folder, which can be sorted by Date Modified so new wallpapers are easy to find. So while there appears to be a dedicated wallpapers folder, it contains only pointers to the real images in their proper locations, sorted by content. The wallpapers pref pane never knows the difference! w00t!

Ok, you are now thinking, “dude, this whole system relies on the image being tagged as a wallpaper somehow! What if the word ‘wallpaper’ was never added to the image metadata before it was put up for download? Are you gonna put that stuff in one by one??” Nope. This is where OS X starts getting REALLY awesome. Each file has a field attached to it, labeled “Spotlight Comments”. Anything you type here is indexed with the file by the metadata server, which Spotlight uses for its lookups. If you add the word “wallpaper” to this field, a search for “wallpaper” returns the image, even if there was nothing in the normal metadata about wallpapers.

But doing “Get Info” and adding that word for hundreds of images? fuckno. Still a lot of work. But computers were built so we wouldn’t have to do the same crap over and over and over. To the rescue comes Snow Leopard’s contextual services menu, and the OS X Automator program, which can take a series of actions and make them into a service. There is a built in action for “Append to spotlight comments”. I simply set this one up with the text ” wallpaper” (the space was in case there was stuff already there, and saved it. So….select all the files you want to tag and Finder > Services > Tag as Wallpaper. Done.

If you want that Service for your Mac, you can download it here. Unzip it and copy it to your ~/Library/Services folder. I am 95% sure you will need to be running Snow Leopard for it to work.

I really wanted to. It seemed like a such a great idea. Everything just syncs between my devices, file storage online from iDisk….

iDisk is ridiculous. It’s like Dropbox, but worse. The Dropbox folder can be navigated in Finder just like any other folder. It IS just a folder. The iDisk, obnoxiously, mounts as it’s own volume. Meaning you’re stuck seeing the damn thing on your desktop, with no apparent way to make it go away save for hiding all external drives. Not to mention it’s appearance on lists of drives in programs like iStat. You can symlink folders into Dropbox, and Dropbox will follow the symlink and sync the target as though it was in the Dropbox folder. For reasons unclear, symlinking a folder into the iDisk produces a “You can’t have symbolic links on your iDisk” message, instead of just bouncing the sync-er to the target folder. And did I mention there is no Linux client for iDisk? Whereas there IS one for Dropbox, meaning the ~/Dropbox folder on both my Macbook and my Linux box are kept synced with each other as well as the cloud? Lastly, did I mention Dropbox syncs a hell of a lot faster and more predictably? As in, you change a file, and it then syncs immediately, taking only as long as you’d expect to send the changes over the internets.

Now, syncing data. Supposedly the awesome thing. I would be free from syncing my iPod constantly to update my calendar and notes. Well, first problem. Notes don’t sync over the air to iPod Touches. They sync over the air to other Macs, and they sync through iTunes to iPods….but for reasons that are also unclear, they do not sync over the air to iPods. For that matter, Safari bookmarks don’t sync either, despite, again, syncing to the iPod via iTunes, and from one Mac to another over the air. (Yeesh, I think this one even works from a Mac to a Windows box).

Also, it seems rather haphazard as to when things actually DO sync. Exactly what triggers my iPod’s calendar to sync with my Mac’s is beyond me. It just seems to go when it feels like it at some point after I wake the iPod up and open the calendar app. I’m basically left doing a magic dance and making an event out of syncing my calendar, just like before, except without the USB cord. Except it really is a ritual dance this time, since I have no idea how to actually trigger the sync beyond opening the calendar and hoping. Unlike iTunes, which syncs immediately on connection, and tells you what it is doing throughout the process. Honestly, I think wifi iPod syncing would get this all done at least as well. I’m sure Apple will get to that one of these days.

Oh, and in case you forgot, the old song and ritual dance is still required to sync Notes and Bookmarks. Also, forget about your Contacts syncing until you actually open the Contacts app on the iPod. And even then, it will take several minutes. Unless you quit the Contacts app, then you have to go back to start. Syncing data through iTunes was as amazing as I had envisioned it to be. MobileMe, I envisioned, would scale that up and streamline it to use the internet instead of relying on the iPod sync. That is not the case. At all.

So, impressions on my free 60 day trial? VERY unimpressed. I will not be renewing. This is simply not what I was expecting. Based on how well Dropbox worked, and how well Apple’s own data sync via iTunes worked, I was expecting a magic combination of the two. What I got was, by comparison, under-featured, unpredictable, and just plain annoying. Seriously. Apple? You can do so much better than this. Get on it.

I just used linked my Linux’s box’s Folding@home log file into it, so I can view it anytime, anywhere.*

*Unless I accidentally modify the file, then Dropbox replaces my symlink with the new version. Hence why their wiki warns to only do this with folders, not files.

w00t!

Yes, this is in HD! Go watch it at Vimeo.com, not here, it looks much better as the 720p non-embedded version.

Hey, I haven’t posted in awhile! The main reason being Facebook has mostly replaced this blog as being my “personal news feed”. You may have noticed. I also shook up the links section a little bit, namely I spun off celebrity blogs into their own section, as it had the potential to get a little mixed up over there. And I added some new ones to the personal blog roll. Mostly all that was done after paging through Google Reader, and noting the blogs folder there contained a bunch of entries that weren’t on the sidebar there. And this particular skin arranges all links and categories alphabetically, sorry, nothing I can do there that I can find. Also, a note about the celeb section: the requirement to be in there is that the “celeb” in question actually makes the post themselves. None of those “glorified press release ‘blogs’” will be included. By and large, it’s for blogs I read not because I know the person, but because I like their work in one way or another.

And I really should post here more, maybe with more detailed thoughts, or, heaven forbid, pictures or something. I don’t know. This page is not dead, oh, heck no!

Me and my laser pointer! Also, I got Final Cut Studio, and made this while playing with it.

Also, the status of this blog……you may be noticing I post on it a lot less these days. That’s because I formerly used it as a sort of personal news feed. That function has been mainly delegated to Facebook, so I mainly only post here when I need to say something a lot longer.

http://kanyelicio.us/

God bless the internet.

Lulz.

Ok, it will be a week tomorrow! So far, so good. I wanted to sit around with the OS for awhile before posting my thoughts. What’s the verdict? Well…..part of me wants to write “meh”, but I think that is a little too harsh. When Apple sells something for $30, you know you probably aren’t getting anything mind blowing.

First the good: It’s better than Leopard. That’s the good news in a nutshell. I can’t think of anything it’s slower at, and it’s pretty slim. A barebones install takes just under 8.5GB. RAM usage is about the same.

What’s different? I’ve kept a text document on my desktop I could add things to. Some of my favorites:

-Lock on sleep/screensaver can be put on a delay, so it doesn’t require a password right away

-The Spaces icon. When you are switching spaces, it does not have an arrow, instead the white box that shows your active space slides. This is one of quite a few new Core Animation effects. Another one is when you click and drag the selection box on the desktop, after you let go, it fades out rather than dissapearing.

-You can minimize to dock icon! Hiding is no longer needed! Yes, there is an option to make the little yellow traffic light kick the window behind it’s application icon rather than to right side of the dock. So you don’t have to use the hide function to get rid of window without cluttering up the Dock. Which brings us to….

-New Expose! It now shows the windows in a grid with labels below them. It’s a lot cleaner looking than the old one. It also shows minimized windows as tiny icons at the bottom. You can also trigger it on an app by clicking and holding the app’s Dock icon rather than using F10. (F10 still works, if you prefer. F9 still triggers All Window mode, and F11 still clears the desktop)

-System Profiler shows network connection type in the Network overview. (Ethernet speed, Wifi mode ([a/b/g/n] and speed, Wifi channel, S/N ratio, and BSSID). AirPort menu shows signal strength for available networks, and can be option-clicked for the same info as System Profiler. Quite a few of the built-in extras can be option-clicked for extra stuff too. For example, the volume menu, when option clicked, can change the I/O devices or launch Sound Preferences

-There’s a cool new monospace font called “Menlo”, which replaces the venerable Monaco font. (You can see it in my new header up there^)

-System Profiler shows HDD rpm speed, assuming the drive supports sending this info. Also, “Ethernet Devices” is it’s own section under Hardware, which will list your dedicated NICs (ethernet chipsets and wifi cards) and some info about them, like the interface the connect to the system with. There’s also a section for WWAN devices.

Ok, the bad? It doesn’t feel THAT different. Sure, there’s the nice little touches mentioned above, along with other stuff. It honestly doesn’t seem THAT much faster to me. Maybe to folks with older hardware, but Leopard generally didn’t seem that bad to me. Although maybe I’ve already started to get used to it. Oh….and K64….

You may be aware of a huge flap by some people about Snow Leopard’s x64 version of the kernel, called K64. Namely, that only the Penryn and Nehalem Xserves boot it by default. And many machines with 64bit CPUs cannot boot it at all, because they either have a 32bit EFI, or an arbitrary lock. (The 32bit EFI thing is really an arbitrary lock itself, as a 64bit loader is not needed to start the 64bit kernel.) Many people are up in arms over this, apparently not realizing what it means. K32 can run 64bit apps, which is where 64bit mostly counts. K32 also supports PAE, so unless your machine has more than 64GiB of RAM, it will all be recognized, and 64bit apps can access all of it, even if they are running atop K32. So, essentially, K64′s changes:

-Increases RAM limit from 64GiB to 16TiB
-May be slightly faster, assuming everything works with it.
-32bit kexts cannot load, so odds are not everything works with it. Kexts include drivers, so if you have something lacking a 64bit driver, you will need to run K32 to use it
-Despite being capable of being faster, many report it is not, likely due to compatibility issues.

For the record, I have a Mac that can boot K64, and I know of multiple ways of enabling it. I have not bothered, there really isn’t a point.

Oh, and Snow Leopard stops doing the “Lable GiB as GB” thing. Unlike Linux though, which labels it GiB, the Snow Leopard solution is to count drive space in base 10. This is NOT how the system actually counts it, as the df utility and third party software that queries disk usage, like iStat*, still shows base 2. But, System Profiler, Finder, and Disk Utility all show sizes as base 10, and there is no apparent way to make them show base 2, even with a proper “GiB” label. I have, however, been inspired by this to use the proper terms and labels, so I will be referring to RAM as “GiB” and “MiB” from now on. Deal with it if you don’t like it.

*The new version of iStat Menus has an option to show base 10 instead.

…is going to be awesome. (yes, I have launch day delivery on Snow Leopard, it just hasn’t shown up in the widget yet)

After some room rearranging, I was able to accomodate my PC by my desk, so it and my MacBook Pro could share my monitor. Without overscan to worry about, getting things up and running was a snap! Today…..the big challenge: Get AFP working so it and my Mac don’t have to talk like they are both Windows machines. Because that is just sacrilegious. With the help of this guide….

Taa-daa!

Also, I got my email running too….next up, configure sound card and get music playback working.