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barnskiblog

Barney's blog. Just a load of old shite really.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Ninjai: The Little Ninja.
Kooky, cool little flash animation series.


The new .Mac webmail interface is live and available. Now all "Web 2.0", it looks just like the Mail app you're used to seeing on your Mac desktop.
Very slick - we like :)

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

Spangly new stuff to get:

Firefox 2.0 is out, and it's sweet (much better than IE7). My updates have all been fine, although I have a friend who had a couple of issues on Windows XP.

Fedora Core 6 is out and available for download, and has some interesting features, including Compiz/AIGLX (I've posted about this before). Might be having a play with it if I get some spare time.
Fedora site down at time of posting due to heavy load.

And finally, Ubuntu 6.10 is here. This is a weird one, as I will not be updating most of my systems that are running 6.06 (LTS) as they work just great and 6.06 will be supported with security updates for 5 years on the server and 3 years on the desktop. That said, 6.10 (the "Edgy Eft") will be given a spin on my laptop at some point soon :)

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

They're here at last: the MacBook Pro, now with Core 2 Duo.
The Apple goodness is almost overwhelming :)

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Democracy Player makes video on the internet way less frustrating and way more enjoyable. You can subscribe to channels of internet video, download videos, and watch them fullscreen, one after the other, all in one application. Internet video becomes internet TV. It's free, it's Open Source and downloads are available for a multitude of platforms (specifically Mac OS X, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo and Windows).
This is definitely something I'll be looking at / playing with / keeping an eye on, as although iTunes is cool, it looks like this is not constrained in the way that the iTunes Store constrains iTunes and will hence support way more feeds/sources. Also Open Source has benefits in the long run (support for other formats, hardware and O/S independence are a couple that spring to mind for starters). I'm a bit perplexed as to why they've chosen Quicktime over VLC as the engine for the OS X version though.

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Thursday, October 12, 2006

Apple - Get a Mac. 3 more new TV Ads - "Counselor", "Better Results" and "Self Pity".
Love 'em :)

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

I use a Mac, and I use iPhoto to manage my digital photos. iPhoto 6 now has a feature called Photocasting, which allows you to create a photo feed for other users to connect to.
If you're an iPhoto user, Photocast feed invitations work fine - you click on the link, iPhoto launches, and you can subscribe to the Photocast.
However, if you're a Windows user, the experience kinda sucks, as getting any kind of reader to subscribe to the feed is a royal pain in the arse (a Photocast is supposed to just be an RSS feed, but apparently it's not standards-compliant).
Anyway, after much messing about, I have a solution, and it's as follows:
1 - Tell your Windows friends to use Firefox as their browser.
2 - Get them to install the Sage RSS plugin for Firefox.
3 - From Sage, have them open the photocast feed, but have them substitute the word "photocast" with the word "web" in the URL (you may want to do this for them in the invitation you send).
So, for example, if my photocast feed URL was
http://photocast.mac.com/myusername/iPhoto/myphotocast/index.rss
I would send it to my Windows friends as
http://web.mac.com/myusername/iPhoto/myphotocast/index.rss
Once this is done, the photocast renders nicely in Sage under Firefox :)

Note:
a) I have only tested this with password-protected photocasts.
b) I have only tested this using the latest versions of Firefox (1.5.0.7) and Sage (1.3.8) on Mac OS X 10.4.8 and Windows XP Pro SP2.
c) The photos are not cached locally - the Windows user can only view the photos whilst they are online with this method.
d) I have also tried Photocast Viewer (poor viewing interface), dmAlbums (buggy) and Opera (poor viewing interface, not straightforward to configure).


Update: During an e-mail conversation with a good mate about this, there was a misunderstanding. Basically, he picks up the feed for this blog using Google Reader and had e-mailed me about this post. As a result of the misunderstanding, he opened one of my photocasts using Google Reader, and it works just fine!
That's a lot less hassle than Firefox/Sage!!

Friday, October 06, 2006

I love a good cup of tea (especially Twinings Lapsang Souchong) and have been drinking several cups of the stuff a day for years.
I was therefore particularly chuffed to read that Black Tea 'soothes away stress' and also several articles recently along the lines of Black, green tea may reduce risk of heart attack.
I'm off to put the kettle on........ :)
Cheers for the link Tufty