Archive for the 'Technology' Category
My First Apple!
August 7th, 2004
I bought my first Apple computer ever today…a 12-inch iBook with a 1GHz G4 processor! Having bought PC’s my entire life (and also having said in the past that I’d never be a Mac person), this is serious news here.
I’ve played around with Mac OS X in the past and have already been impressed by its features and performance, more than I’ve ever been with Windows. So when it came time for me to buy a laptop, I figured this was my chance…and it’s definitely been worth it so far.
Attention has been paid to every detail of the laptop (as expected with Apple), with my favorite being the slot-loading CD/DVD player that is located on the side of the machine. And OS X is even cooler than I originally thought. It’s easy to use, it looks slick, it makes customizations very intuitive, everything (including wireless networking) worked right out of the box, and it has tons of built-in applications. My favorites applications/utilities so far are:
- Expose — a utility that with a single keystroke either minimizes all windows, brightens all the active windows while dimming the inactive ones, or shrinks all open windows to miniature sizes so you can see all of them at once. It sounds boring, but if you try it you’ll be amazed too.
- Terminal — nothing like a terminal window to make working more efficient (remember that OS X is based on FreeBSD).
- Sherlock — the greatest application to seamlessly use the internet to retrieve information. If you need to check out movie times, look up someone’s address or number, search the net for an image, look up the definition of a word, check up on stocks, or anything else…just start Sherlock. This single application makes all these tasks super easy.
That’s about it for now…I’ll post updates when I figure out more. Till then, I gotta go get all my documents from my PC…damn, I sound like I should be on one of those Apple “switch” commercials.
P.S. I also bought an iPod too (a 4th generation one with a 20GB drive), taking advantage of a $200 rebate Apple offers to people buying laptops and iPods at the same time. Once I open that, I’ll write about that too. I hear they’re cool.
OS X Additions
March 2nd, 2005I’ve been customizing my Apple a lot lately, trying to take advantage of OS X and the fact that it has a Unix kernel. My original goal was simply to be able to process LaTeX files on my machine, and after a quick search I realized I could either go with a light-weight Mac based program or a setup that is powered by teTeX, a complete distribution of the TeX processing system.
I decided to bust out the big guns and go with teTeX. Coming from a Unix background, I was hoping to run utilities (text editors, etc.) that were as “Unix-like” as possible. After hours of searching for the slickest, most efficient solution, I settled on the following set-up:
- fink — if you enjoy Open Source software, get fink. fink is a software project that ports many Open Source packages to Mac OS X; essentially, that means they take Open Source programs and modify it so that it compiles and runs on OS X — even X11 programs. Since I wanted teTeX, I needed fink. The best part of the way fink works is that the ported programs fit seamlessly into the operating system. For example, with teTeX installed (see below), I can just type “latex myfile.tex” from a Terminal window…and it works!
- teTeX — install this once you have fink set up. It includes TeX, LaTeX, and a variety of conversion utilities (dvips, ps2pdf, etc.)
- Enhanced Carbon Emacs — an old friend! No system is complete without emacs, and this version for OS X is even better since it comes in with a very easy-to-use LaTeX editing environment (that depends on teTeX). Also, Enhanced Carbon Emacs doesn’t require X11 — thus no need for fink — so if you’re craving emacs on your Mac, just download and use immediately! If you use emacs, get it from here now.
These programs have worked great so far. This adventure has also made me eager to find more useful and cool additions to my Mac, so once I find more I’ll post.
Mac Backup
March 22nd, 2005
First…I’ve had a 120G Western Digital hard drive sitting in my room for more than a year now. This hard drive was only $60…actually, it would have been $60 after an $80 mail-in rebate, but unfortunately I never mailed it in, so now I own a $120 hard drive that’s still sitting in its box.
Next…as of the past few months I’ve been using my Mac iBook almost exclusively (so much so that I took down my FreeBSD machine and put it in storage) because it’s pretty much the perfect operating system.
But now I worry about losing data. I’m working on a few important projects on this laptop, and if I were to lose the laptop (or have it stolen), that would be the end of my project since that data isn’t backed up anywhere else.
So I gots me an external hard drive enclosure, the AMS Venus DS3, which I bought from Newegg.com. It installed in no time and connects via Firewire. This is my first Firewire device, and it’s pretty damn fast. Now I just copy my important files to the hard drive every few days, although it’d be nice if a program existed that would automatically back up the files and directories that I wanted. I should look around.
That’s it. I highly recommend one of these (or an external hard drive) to anyone with a laptop.
How to Turn register_globals Off
April 3rd, 2006For those of you trying to install Gallery 2 onto your webserver to display your photo albums, Gallery will complain if a certain PHP variable, — named
register_global
— is not disabled, for security reasons. When I encountered this, I was about to email my web hoster to ask them to disable it, but then I found out how to do it myself. Here are two options:
I have to give credit to this site for telling me how:
1) You can turn off register_globals on your account. Create a file named php.ini that includes this line:
register_globals = Off
and dump it into your root folder
2) If that doesn’t work, try the .htaccess way. Simply add this line to your .htaccess (create the file if it doesn’t exist):
php_flag register_globals off
Which method works depends on how your host sets it.
New Laser Printer
April 23rd, 2006
No longer able to tolerate the inkjet printer at home, mainly because of its runny ink, I decided it was finally time for a laser printer. I went to CNET, the best place for reviews of electronic products, to start an extensive search of laser printer reviews. But then I remembered I didn’t have the luxury of picking the printer with the best reviews, since I was limited by money and by what local stores carried. In the end I chose the HP LaserJet 1022. Once I’ve had a chance to use it more, I’ll write back with a slightly more detailed review.
***REVIEW UPDATE***
This LaserJet is actually a great printer. First of all, it’s fast. It takes less than 8 seconds from hitting the “print” button to having the document in your hand; the paper just flies from the tray! The output is excellent, especially with text. I haven’t printed many graphics-heavy documents, but ones with mostly text and some graphics will come out great. Its low price tag (<$200) makes it even better.
The only downside I can think of is that it is slightly noisy, which for me isn’t an issue, but I can imagine it being a little annoying for some other people.
So unless you place this printer next to the head of someone sleeping, the HP LaserJet 1022 is a great low-cost laser printer.
Filosofo Home-Page Control Plugin for WordPress
May 29th, 2006I came across the greatest plugin for users who use WordPress to power their blogs and the rest of their website, like myself. It’s called the Filosofo Home-Page Control and it allows you to put your WordPress blog and WordPress Pages on the same level.
In other words, you can have your main site at
http://yoursite.com
and your blog at
http://yoursite.com/blog
and your Pages (e.g. “About”) at
http://yoursite.com/about
and NOT:
http://yoursite.com/blog/about
which is where WordPress likes to put it. I’ve been looking for a plugin or hack like this for a long time, and I’m glad someone finally wanted the same thing I did — but had the technical skills to make it happen. Go check it out.
Comcast DVR: A Piece of Junk
November 19th, 2006
People have long recommended that I get a TiVo because it’s awesome and has revolutionized the way they watch TV. I ended up making my own TiVo and realized that they were right…but my box ended up crashing after a few months (it was an old computer).
So I ended up buying what I thought was the same thing as a TiVo, the Comcast DVR. People were quick to tell me that they weren’t the same, and that Comcast’s DVR was a poor alternative.
At first I didn’t believe them, but now I do.
This Comcast box is a piece of junk. It barely does the one job it’s supposed to do — recording programs on time — and it doesn’t have any nice features or frills.
My overall biggest complaint is that it has a lousy user interface that is very difficult to use. It’s very cryptic and not at all user-friendly. Here are some more specific complaints:
- The box is not able to handle shows that start at unusual times. For example, many networks now start or end their shows a few minutes late (to keep viewership or something). Comcast’s DVR cannot deal with that at all, so what does it default to doing? Nothing. It just does not record the shows. It kept me away from the last episode of The Office, so it’s walking on thin ice.
- There is no easy way to transfer recorded material to another computer or media. If you record a TV show or movie, there is no convenient or built-in way to send it to your computer, copy it to a portable hard drive, or burn it to a DVD. It’s funny because there are plenty of connectors on the box (e.g. Firewire, ethernet, RCA jacks), but none of them are activated; they are all dead. Nice touch.
- Worst of all (almost) is that the Comcast box doesn’t display the time, just the channel. This is very annoying. There have been many nights when I fell asleep in front of the TV and woken up in the middle of the night, only to be confused because the “time” was 67.
I think it’s about time I got a TiVo.
.htaccess Tutorial
March 28th, 2007The .htaccess file is a powerful way to improve your website. If your website runs on an Apache webserver (or if you’re running your own Apache webserver) you might want to learn about it.
I found this .htaccess Tutorial to be very helpful and easy to understand. Read it and learn how to take advantage of this important file.