Listen Up

Posted at November 3, 2006 07:41 PM - Category: Compooters

Tunatic is officially the coolest thing ever. I've been bugged by that new Intel Core Duo commercial with the guy in the purple shirt poplockin' into multiple versions of himself. The song in the background is something I really like, but I've not been able to track down. So, it came up on TV and I once again remember that the song bugged me, but I also thought of some news item a short while ago detailing a service you could use to find a song using a phone or something. Did a Google search and Tunatic showed up, which turns out to be freeware. I downloaded it and held my laptop up to the speaker. I've got my Tivo working now, so I just rewound and played it back for it, and it got it spot on. It identified it as Ursula 1000's "Born To Funk" and provided a link to AllOfMP3 for it. It's sort of the right answer, since it's actually the same track on the same CD, only one before it. Pretty neat if you ask me. Should come in handy for future commercials.

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So Close

Posted at September 12, 2006 03:58 PM - Category: Compooters

Goddammit, Apple. You were so close. iTunes 7 has syncing from an iPod to a computer, but it's only for stuff purchased from the music store. Seriously, that's just a kick in the nuts...

But at least they gave me some freakin' gapless playback. Whoever coded that, I'll buy you a beer sometime.

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It is upon us

Posted at August 31, 2006 02:00 PM - Category: Compooters

CrossOver Mac has been released.

This is perhaps the biggest thing to come to the Mac world in a very long time. Yeah, the Intel switch was big. Sure, so was OS X. But this is huge. Two of the biggest consumer-oriented libraries of software are now available to run on a single platform side-by-side. Hate it or love it, Windows owns the marketshare. With this in place, people will be able to transition over to a Mac even easier.

Now isn't this funny looking: ha!

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Scram Spam

Posted at July 26, 2006 03:05 PM - Category: Compooters

I've been dealing with an increasing amount of spam getting into my inbox. I have things set up so that all my mail from the various accounts I use is forwarded over to Yahoo! for storage and webmail access. They offer an excellent web interface (the beta is the absolute shit) and good mobile access. They also had a good spam filter. They still do, but a lot more stuff is making it's way to my eyes. I get around 1500-2000 emails per day and a bit less than half of that is spam. Most of it is automated and gets filtered in my email client, and the spam gets filtered out by Yahoo.

I've done extensive spam reporting with their filter to get it to function well, but lately it seems to just not be listening. Plus, I have no feedback on how much it thinks something is spam. This leads to holes that are allowing more and more spam through. They are very good at not creating too many false positives, so I get 99.9999% of my legit email, but also about 20% of my spam is starting to get through.

I primarily use Mail.app for reading my mail and it has a built-in junk filter. However, and most curiously, that filter seems to be completely ineffective. I've actually recently reset it to ensure there wasn't some sort of corruption with it's database, but now it's not learning anything and hasn't found a single mail since I reset it. So, I was left almost defenseless until this weekend.

I'll put this simply: If you check your mail on the Mac and have a spam problem, get SpamSieve. I mean, seriously, there's no other way to put it. It's that good! I installed it this weekend as a demo and it's already gone WAY beyond anything the Mail.app junk filer has found. Plus, I have tons of feedback provided to me. Any message that SpamSieve classifies as spam is color coded to show how "spammy" it is. There are nice detailed statistics on everything, including accuracy percentages and even the individual words in the bayesian filter. I just dropped the $25 to buy it and it's been well worth it. At this point, I'm getting almost zero spam in my inbox and it's already 99.3% accurate. It's basically like DSPAM, but in client form and with better data mining tools.

In other news, I've gotta update to MoveableType 3.3. Wish me luck!

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Holy Fucking Shit

Posted at July 11, 2006 07:49 PM - Category: Compooters

Enough said.

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Sans Media Center

Posted at May 31, 2006 09:37 PM - Category: Compooters

On Monday, I was sitting at my desk when I smelt that wonderfully disgusting odor we all know and loath: burning silicon. Since both my PC and Macbook Pro were working OK, I had to hunt around for the source. I looked for a bit and then noticed that the power light on my media center PC wasn't lit. I pressed the power button: nothing. Alas, my media center is now dead.

Upon opening up the case, I found out the power supply is to blame, but the exact cause is rather scary: dust. I have an Antec Overture II for the case. The side has a vent with a cleanable dust filter as either input (or output) for the PS. That had become so clogged with dust, it wasn't letting air in (or out). That overloaded the PS and caused it to blow. Luckily, it doesn't appear much else is destroyed, but I figure it's time to overhaul things.

In particular, I want to move to MicroATX for size and embedded video reasons. I picked up an Asus A8N-VM mobo. This has an onboard nVidia 6150, which happen to do HD content with PureVideo. Based on how well it went with my Athlon 1600+ in the old media center, we should be good to go with this (it'll actually be a step up!). I'm also getting a new case to go along with it, the Antec NSK2400. It's a little smaller than my current one and clearly designed for media center uses. I've got some left over memory available, so it's only going to cost about $300 shipped. Should be a pretty sweet machine for a relatively cheap price.

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Insanity

Posted at April 6, 2006 03:36 PM - Category: Compooters

First, Windows supports Linux.

Now Macs support Windows.

What is next? XBox 360 supporting PS2 games?

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I'd Like McBook And Can You Pro-size That?

Posted at March 29, 2006 01:13 PM - Category: Compooters

So, I've had my MacBook Pro for more than 24 hours at this point, so I suppose it's time to make some comments on it.

First, thanks to FedEx for delivering it a whole day earlier than expected. That made my day! (although, it did throw me off a bit...)
The white bar at the bottom of the screen isn't there. Well, it is, but only if you look down from the top and my PowerBook or any other LCD I've seen does that already.
The 2nd CPU definitely makes noise. It sounds pretty much the same as my Powerbook did if you turned the processor performance on Highest. Luckily, there is QuietMBP, which basically keeps the processor busy enough to shut it up. I'm sure Apple will have some sort of fix for this eventually, too. And overall, it's not too distracting anyways.
It's definitely thinner than my PowerBook and that's surprisingly noticeable. In fact, that's probably the most noticeable feature about it from my perspective.
Performance is better, but not really noticeable for my kinds of tasks. I suppose if I start browsing the web more on this machine, I'll feel it. But email and other apps are just about as speedy as they normally are on the PowerBook. Of course, Mail does process my smart folders a lot faster now, though.
I've yet to fiddle with Windows on this. I need a copy of iPartition, and I don't know if I want to shell out $45 just to fiddle around. Gathered, I do occasionally desire to repartition my Mac, so maybe it's worthwhile. We'll see if I crack...
The iSight is OK, but not really useful to me. Front Row just seems gimmicky to me, since I don't really need a media center on a portable computer. That belongs in my living room.
Apple's transfer tools are absurd. I let it run for an hour and when it finished and booted up, I basically had everything running on my MacBook Pro the same way it was set up on my PowerBook. That's basically impossible with Windows. However, make sure you do Software Update first! I spent 2 hours trying to figure out why Safari wouldn't load my saved passwords from the keychain. Turns out the last security update needed to be installed and included a slightly bumped up version of Safari that caused keychain to see the older version as untrusted (as the passwords in the keychain were authenticated for the newer version number).

Overall, I think it's a nice upgrade. Not as spectacular as I had hoped, but definitely solves some issues I've had with my PowerBook over time. Hopefully, I'll discover more of it's potential soon.

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