by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
I’ve previously blogged about Librarything and said I quite like it.
Feature wise it’s fine, I would have liked to also include my DVD’s etc but mostly I just want the book feature to work.
The authors have been introducing all kinds of new wonderful features like groups etc, but the site is incredibly unstable. Each time I want to go add a new book, I am subjected to 2 hours of downtime, maybe I just have bad luck, but tonight I wanted to add 2 books again and the site was down for a hour again.
No planned notices on the blog (ever) no explanations afterwards, its just down indefinitely. This time it lasted an hour or so. It’s like the image above is their actual home page and the working one is the exception to the rule.
Anyway, other things that annoy me, they have these blog widgets, for putting in your site, but they don’t have a API that has enough features, so I parse the blog widgets to build my current reading list, of course they can’t stop messing with the HTML in these widgets so things keep breaking. I know this isn’t really something that will affect someone who use it on their website, but still it’s irritating.
In that hour I used my backup that I made a while ago of the data (librarything have previously had a disaster where their machines failed, their backups failed and they lost data!) and just imported it all into Delicious Library. It cost me more, but it indexes books, DVDs, games, CD’s etc and it actually works. I guess you get what you pay for and it seems $10 or whatever I paid for Librarything just isn’t enough to actually get a working site.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 6, 2006 | Uncategorized
I’ve heard about AppZapper from Mike and had a look at it but wasn’t quite sold on it.
Today I got the latest release of the Neat Little Mac Apps podcast and it reviewed this app, it also includes a promo code for the next 3 weeks which gives you $3 discount. For less than 6 pounds how can you say no after listening to that review? I grabbed a copy and really like it, if you’re into installing and uninstalling apps a lot on your mac, you should get it too.
The basic idea on a mac when it comes to installing and uninstalling software is simply to drag the application anywhere you want and thats all. When it comes to uninstalling, just drop it in the trash, simple. Unfortunately most applications have a lot of support and related files, things like preferences, logs, caches etc and the typical uninstall method does not get rid of these.
This is where AppZapper comes in, it hunts down all the crud that an app puts everywhere and deletes those along with the app, neat. Using the example in the image above, if I had just done the usual drop-in-trash method of uninstall I’d have left on my drive 57MB of crap.
My home directory is full of junk, should have bought this app ages ago.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 5, 2006 | Uncategorized
It’s simple, the community around it are a bunch of bigots. See this post on macslash.
The poor guy asks for something simple and gets flamed to death by a bunch RoR idiots who are acting like they need to justify their choices, no thank you. You’d swear its the new third reigh.
There are countless reasons why someone would want to stick to PHP, why does he need to face up to this kind of abuse just because he made a choice?
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 1, 2006 | Uncategorized
Spotlight is the supposedly all-singing-and-dancing desktop search tool from Apple, it is pretty neat and supports a ton of useful things relating to meta data and so forth, I’ve blogged about it before showing how you can use it on the command line to gain access to these functions.
On the GUI side of things it’s a bit crap, you have the top-right spotlight box that you can type into and it features a pretty dismal command language for doing power searches. You can also use Finders tool to do finds using Spotlight, it’s OK I guess but not kewl enough to convince me to actually integrate Spotlight into my daily life.
I toyed with writing a GUI frontend to Applescript this last weekend and got pretty far, you could restrict searches, do AND or OR searches, date matches and the like, and it would open the results in the Finder find interface but coding Applescript GUI’s doesn’t really excite me so I didn’t go further with it.
Today over at FreeMacWare.com I saw mention of Spotlaser and it’s pretty sweet, its a full frontend to all the features of Spotlight and using it you can really see what is possible, hopefully Apple will soon introduce their own advanced front-end to Spotlight, till then, Spotlaser is the way to go.
Above is a screenshot of it in action, its donationware, so grab a copy now.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 31, 2006 | Uncategorized
I mentioned the other day in the comments of my Ubuntu post that my girlfriend decided to get herself a iMac, this weekend we went to pick it up from the Apple store in Regents Street.
After the traumatising walk through soho carrying a computer in my arms when we got it home all seemed fine to begin with, but then when it came time to test out the iSight the thing was dead. It produced either pure white or pure green but nothing else.
I was really dreading taking it back as it would mean she would be without a computer for a while and just general be a total pain, I searched the Apple support forums and they got me nowhere but then I searched the forums and came across someone who had the same problem, they unplugged their iMac from the wall for 30 seconds and that fixed it, I did the same and voila, one happy mac.
So not too bad, but still a bit infuriating.
While we were there I also picked up a iPod Nano for Emma, I’ve not really looked at these in detail before and must say it’s a very sexy bit of kit. Though comparing it to my 3 year old iPod I have doubts about the build quality, for example the plug where the power/doc goes in doesn’t nicely click into place it’s more a matter of forcing it in, not sure if that is normal but it sure is annoying.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jul 26, 2006 | Uncategorized
So world and dog is nagging on about Ubuntu, how great it is and how they are switching from <insert anything on the planet> to Ubuntu.
I happened to have a spare 300gig drive lying around so I gave 6.06 a go. My machine is over 2 years old, its practically from the ark, you’d expect things to Just Work.
After install, screen resolution is absolutely dismal, slow refresh rate and random crashes while trying to set to a better resolutoin. Already here you’ve lost a large chunk of users.
Anyway, so I go off looking on Google using Firefox, it opens up with the familiar look of Firefox complete with Mycroft search box, except the search box does nothing by default, you can type into it, hit enter but nothing happens, by default it doesn’t search, have to go fiddle with it to get it working.
Came across a post, that points to another post that points to Wiki for getting ATI cards going. I basically had to do this in a terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv
and then reboot.
Yes, this distro is going places if it can’t even support a crap old ATI Radeon card out of the box and require new users to do stuff in terminals just to get rid of a headache inducing low refresh rate.
Get Real, your grandmother is not going to do this. Give her a Mac and the thing just works.
