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Stuff + nonsense. Updated daily. So far. Pretty much. Overwrought by Scott Knaster.
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Saturday, March 22, 2003
Lists #1: U.S. states I have visited1. Alaska 2. Arizona 3. California 4. Colorado 5. Connecticut 6. Delaware 7. Florida 8. Georgia 9. Illinois 10. Indiana 11. Iowa 12. Kansas 13. Kentucky 14. Maryland 15. Massachusetts 16. Michigan 17. Missouri 18. Montana 19. Nebraska 20. Nevada 21. New Hampshire 22. New Jersey 23. New Mexico 24. New York 25. Ohio 26. Oregon 27. Rhode Island 28. Texas 29. Utah 30. Vermont 31. Virginia 32. Washington 33. Wyoming
How many have you been to?
Friday, March 21, 2003
Caution! Airport construction
Yesterday was upgrade day for our home 802.11 network. We have been running an original Apple AirPort Base Station (ABS) for several years. The broadband comes in upstairs in the office, then goes into a small hub, and from there to three places: the ABS, an ancient and super-reliable LaserWriter 320, and a little-used cat 5 cable for those times when some poor wired machine needs a connection. The AirPort feeds three laptops in the upstairs office and the kids' two iMacs downstairs. It mostly works great The network is dandy except when I take a laptop into the TV room downstairs, which is down 14 stairs and on the other side of several walls from the base station. In that room, reception is iffy, especially on the antenna-challenged PowerBook G4. So to fix the problem, I decided to invest in a new AirPort Extreme Basestation and external antenna. Setting it up was a breeze. I simply installed the new AirPort software, replaced the old base station with the new one (which looks subtly cooler than the old, although I miss the multi-color LEDs), and ran the AirPort Admin Utility. I was pleasantly surprised to find the new base station automagically picked up the old one's settings flawlessly. And the new station + antenna improved signal reception everywhere, although I still get dropouts in the TV room, so I will have to play with base station placement. I might even consider a second base station for downstairs so I can use wireless bridging, which lets you create a roamable multi-base network. There's always a catch The only spanner in the cogs came when I tried to print: the venerable LaserWriter, hooked to the hub via a Localtalk-to-Ethernet adapter, was nowhere to be seen from any machine. While thinking about the problem, I suddenly remembered the new base station has two Ethernet ports, unlike my old one. So I tried plugging the printer into the base station instead of the hub. That worked! The printer magically appeared on the network, and all was happy again in the peaceful kingdom.
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Calling all geeks! Cool new tech! FREE!
The Danger hiptop software development kit shipped yesterday! Get it while it's fresh and hot. During my vast 11 days of employment at Danger I contributed to this SDK by writing approximately 4 pages of documentation. So proud! If you like this sort of thing, please check it out. It's very cool, and it will only get cooler.
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Poetry corner
Check out this haiku periodic table.Writing random crap Sending bits into ether Does anyone care?I declare it's International Blog Self-Referential Haiku Day! Write a haiku describing your blog today.
Howling at the moon
There's going to be a statue of legendary DJ/TV & movie star Wolfman Jack in Del Rio, Texas. The Wolfman was one of the great radio heroes of all time. Getting your own statue is pretty cool.
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
It was 20 years ago today...
I hopped on a plane to the Bay. On March 19, 1983, I immigrated to Silicon Valley from my native home. So what. Big deal. Nature provides me with a reminder of one big reason why I moved.
Monday, March 17, 2003
Snow crystal photographs
Check out this page for incredible high-resolution pictures of snow crystals. No, these photos were not taken in my freezer.
Cold as ice
Yesterday I opened my freezer and found a winter wonderland. Flakes of "snow" were all over the place, and cold freezer smoke wafted out the door like the condensed breath of frozen dinners and ice cream. What happened was that earlier that day, the freezer cooling fan had gone on the fritz, then been repaired. So there was some melting in the freezer, enough to produce a little water everywhere. Then, when the freezer became strong again, that water froze and produced the wintry scene.
Sunday, March 16, 2003
Converting OS 9 alert sounds to OS X
Yesterday my brother asked me to convert his beloved and venerable alert sound (James Brown saying "Unhh!") from Mac OS 9 to X. With tons of help from the really smart people on the SmartFriends list, here's how I did it:1. I used ResEdit (in Classic) to figure out that the old sound file had an 'snd ' resource in it. I think pre-OS X alert sounds could also be in the data forks of files. I'm not sure how these steps might be different for data-fork sounds. 2. Smart people told me (and Google knows too) that OS X alert sounds live in Macintosh HD/Library/Sounds/ (change Macintosh HD to whatever you have renamed your hard disk). I didn't have a /Library/Sounds/ folder, so I created one in the Finder, then used File --> Get Info to make sure its permissions were set to read/write for everybody, just in case. The same smart people also told me that OS X wants its alert sounds to be AIFF format.
By the way: after you do this, don't forget to change your iTunes importing preference back to MP3 before you rip any more CDs.3. When I double-clicked the file, I was surprised to find out that iTunes knew how to play it! What's more, iTunes knows how to convert to AIFF. I went to iTunes --> Preferences, Importing tab, and chose Import Using AIFF Encoder, then clicked OK. 4. Still in iTunes, I selected the sound file and chose Advanced --> Convert Selection to AIFF. This created a new Unhh entry in the iTunes library right next to the first one. I right-clicked (you can also control-click) on the new entry and chose Show Song File to find Unhh.aif. 5. I copied Unhh.aif to /Library/Sounds/ 6. I quit System Preferences and started it again. There was Unhh. I clicked on Unhh and I heard from James! Yippee!
