Broken tibia fibula

Broken tibia

I was transported to the emergency room and had surgery late that night. Surgeon installed a pin in the tibia and I am recovering without a cast, off work for a couple of weeks until I get my next instructions from the doctor.

That soccer game made a real Mess of Me!

J. P. DeFillippo put up the site a couple of days ago, and was already reporting 125,000 unique hits late Thursday night.  The site is great for a laugh, and has been spreading quickly on the ‘net, especially on Twitter.

The beauty of his plan? Click on the big “No” and you are taken to an Amazon page for a flu mask.

Not buying a flu mask? That’s OK. But if you end up buying something else at Amazon in the next few weeks, Mr. DeFillipo will earn an Associates commission, since you visited Amazon through his link.

Brilliant.

doihavepigflu.com

J.P. DeFillippo on Twitter

(Oh, and now he’s got me blogging about it, too.  Wonder if he’ll give us a report on his earnings?)

If you’re into photography, here’s a nice Top 10 list of the best photography tips and tutorials over at Digital Photography School.  Plenty to keep you busy.

After reading their readers’ Top 10 cameras list I’d like to go out and splurge on a Canon S3 IS (used of course).

Happy New Year everyone!

My brother-in-law gave us an older Dell tower with a P4 1Ghz processor.  I started messing about with different variants of Linux.  I tried Puppy Linux and Dreamlinux, both of which installed easily and seemed to run fine on this old machine.  They worked OK but it felt unfamiliar.  I became frustrated.  And another machine was beckoning…

Enter: Strawberry iMac DV sporting a 400Mhz G3 processor and a Barbie-pink exterior.  This old beauty was purchased as an open-box special at Sears (the orginal buyer said it was “too pink”) and was our first official venture into the world of Macintosh.  I fired it up, and found an install of Xubuntu loading, and then asking me to log in.  Hmm.  No username that I can recall.  Guess this was a prior experiment with Linux that I had given up on.

I dug up the old copy of Panther which had been running on it previously and proceeded to re-install.  (Note to self: Make sure the hard drive is formatted for HFS+, or else OS X’s installer won’t see the drive.)  OS X loaded fine, and the machine booted up and asked me to register (yawn).  Once that exercise was completed I opened Safari.  Web pages open .. a .. bit .. more .. slowly… but it’s passable.  This will make a handy eBay machine.

Junk in basement + computer in basement + CALC’s Auction Listing Creator and I’m up and running for listing some junk on eBay.  I added Opera, Camino and Shiira for good measure, since I am looking to maximise the performance of this old machine.  Interestingly enough I’m finding that Safari performs as well or better than these other browsers, and I’m forced to use Safari anyway due to my use of Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets.  I’m thinking this old machine isn’t going to run OpenOffice.

Since this is my first venture into Networking the machines, I’m not sure what to expect. A preliminary test of file sharing resulted in a pleasant surprise, though. After enabling FTP in OS X’s Sharing preferences, I was easily able to find the other Mac on my network by simply clicking Go->Network.  The other machine showed right up; I logged in as the user of that machine, and Bam! I have a network drive on my desktop.  Too easy!

Looking for an old iMac to mess about with?  They’re going pretty cheap on eBay lately.  Remember performance is going to be so-so, compared to a modern machine, but with a good bit of memory (they’ll support up to 1GB of PC100 RAM) they’ll run OS X up through 10.4 Tiger decently.

Looking forward to using it!

Looking for an Apple TV? Here are some current 40GB Apple TVs on eBay:

[phpbay]apple tv 40, 6[/phpbay]

Hopefully they’ll have some screamin’ deals.

For the past month I’ve had our Mac mini connected to the plasma to allow us to play videos such as stuff from our movie library, iTunes, as well as music through our stereo.  This has been great fun, and opens up many possibilities for convenience and choice, not to mention being a serious alternative to cable TV.  However, since this is our main computer, it has made regular computer use a little more difficult.

Need to check email?  Walk into the living room and fire up the plasma.  Mail.app is easy to read on a 50-inch screen, but it is kind of silly.  The kids are enjoying Webkinz in full plasma goodness as well.  As I type this I’m crouched over a piano bench sitting on a child’s chair, with the keyboard hooked up by USB extension cord.  Funny, I know, but this has become known as Problem Number 1.  And we don’t plan on buying another computer just to have in the media center.

So that brings me to the title of this post.  Apple TV has been out for quite a while now, without much change other than the Take Two software upgrade.  For a little over $200 you get a small, silent box that will play your iTunes music and videos streamed from your PC to your HDTV.  Since the Apple TV connects by HDMI or component cables, it solves Problem Number 2, which was the difficulty of getting the resolution settings right.  I’m currently using SwitchResX to display my screen in an odd 1224 x 688 format (which by the way, prevents iMovie HD from opening, but that’s another story).  My Mac resolution is working, but I still have some quirks and fine tuning to work out.  The Apple TV is designed for television, and as such it will just work.

Many folks have hesitated to get the Apple TV due to some limitations, such as small hard drive space or playback of Apple-only video formats.  These limitations don’t matter for me now, as there are third party plugins for Apple TV (such as boxee and XBMC) which allow for added convenience of playing alternate video formats, not to mention connecting to internet video services such as Hulu and CBS.com (something we were already doing with the mini).  I can also use my EyeTV and Mac mini as a DVR, and stream those programs to the Apple TV as well.

The time has come. And with Apple refurb prices at $199, the time is right.  Apple TV, here I come!

How is this helpful?  You can listen to your home music library at work.  Or listen to your work computer’s music library at home.  Or listen to your home music anywhere on your iPod touch or iPhone.

What? On my iPhone??

It’s true.  And the sound quality is fantastic.  Once you set up Simplify Media at home, you can log in with your iPhone or iPod touch using the Simplify Media iPhone app (the app is US$4.00) and listen to your music, streamed in full quality to your device over wifi.  Incredible.

For months now I’ve been using lala.com to stream my music to my work machine in a browser.  This was OK, but it took an initial upload of a couple of days to get my music sync’d with the lala.com servers.  Once my music was there, I could open a browser and listen to my stuff at work.  But Simplify Media does one better than that, and plays your music right in iTunes or Winamp.

Have friends?  Good.  Have friends with music?  Even better.  You can invite your buddies (and they can invite you, up to 30 friends total) and share their music too.

I got this set up the other day with a good friend that has been living in Spain.  We both installed Simplify Media this week, shared our music folders, invited each other, and can now enjoy each other’s music library from the computer, iPod touch, work machine, or whatever.  The little Simplify Media window even tells you what songs are being shared!  At this time I’m listening to The Decemberists on my iPod touch, streamed from his laptop in Spain.  The sound quality is great, buffering is quick (plus once you’re listening to an album there are no gaps between songs; if you shuffle, there is a bit of a pause between tunes).  This is great fun.

While the iPhone / iPod touch app costs 4 bucks, the PC client is free.  They have a version for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux.  Check it out, and free your music.

The Good

• PC or Mac client is Free
• Easy to set up (and nearly firewall-proof)
• Share and stream your music anywhere you have a ‘net connection
• Share and stream your friends’ music anywhere
• Sound quality is excellent

The Bad

• Must use iTunes (or Winamp) for music playback
• iPhone / iPod touch app isn’t free (but well worth it for 4 bucks)
• Won’t play music purchased from iTunes (DRM’d)

In short

If you love music and wish you could access your own music library anywhere, this app is a great way to do it.  If you have an iPod touch, and wish you had bought the larger one, regret it no longer; you can have access to all of your music, not just 8gb.

Download Simplify Media for your computer (free)

Download Simplify Media for iPhone / iPod touch (link to Simplify Media’s site)

Download from iTunes

Already using Simplify Media?

Leave a comment below and tell us how you’re using it!

As I sit in front of a machine for most of my workday, I find my desire to be online at home is waning (a good thing).  Heck, I’m typing this now thinking I’d better wrap it up and move on to something else (and I’ve written what, five sentences?)…

Nathan talks about people going back outside, throwing a frisbee, and how that would be swell.  The other night my son and I raked a pile of leaves that was taller than he was.  That’s what Nathan is talking about, and its time that more of us do just that.  You know who you are.  ;)

One of the first things I did was connect my Mac mini so we can watch iTunes and other videos, DVDs using Front Row, Hulu, and so forth.  However, right away we noticed the overscan of the Mac’s video on the plasma.  Most of the menu bar was cut off, and at least half of the dock.  For most video sources this was OK, but the missing menu and dock made things difficult.

I took to searching the net and had a tough time finding settings specific to my display.  I discovered SwitchResX, a program that lets you make custom resolutions for your Mac in order to fix this type of issue. There is a good tutorial over at AV Science forum. It was still a confusing process though, and I was really hoping to find someone else with this same Panasonic so I could try their settings.

I finally discovered a user with a similar plasma using a custom 1224 x 688 resolution with DisplayConfigX (similar to SwitchResX). Based on his settings, I came up with the following:

The main difference between my settings and his are the vertical front and back porch settings. The 1224 x 688 resolution was correct, but I was still getting a bit of the menu bar cut off on the top. I played with these settings a bit and got it to where I have full view of my menu bar (just the tip of the Apple leaf is cut off) and full view of the dock.

I do have a bit of horizontal shift problem, where the image shifts back and forth a pixel or two, once in a while, but it is something I’m still working on. It was mentioned in the thread at AV Science forums, so once I get that sorted I’ll post an update here.

My current settings:

• Horizontal (H) active – 1224
• H front porch – 136
• H Sync – 80
• H Back porch – 208
• Vertical (V) active – 688
• V front porch – 22
• V sync – 5
• V back porch – 36