Hello everyone, I'm back from schoolies!
I'll post more later but here are some photos:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/photos/album1/
(using a dodgy buggy version of photostack, it has bugssss)
We're off on schoolies in a few minutes. So I'll see you all in a weeks time. Enjoy 8)
Weee I got an ipod today, day early birthday present. It's a 20gb model. Very funky. I also went shopping, which is very out of character for me ;)
I'm going to play around with the ipod and I'll update my thoughts on it later.
oh. What format do people use with their ipod? AAC, MP3 etc and what bitrate?? tx
added
First impressions of my new ipod.
Well I thought I do a quick run down on my new ipod. It is a 20gb Generation 4 ipod.
When first opening the package I was pretty impressed with the way everything was done. It just had a really nice touch to it. Down to the word “Enjoy” written on the outside of the drivers box. Pretty cool.
Getting the ipod to work in windows was easy. Put the disc in, install and then plug the ipod in. I was asked to restart the computer but I didn’t and haven’t had any problems.
I ipod itself is a slick little device. I love the click wheel. There are four buttons on it and a button in the middle. The wheel itself is a touch pad and it allows you to scroll up and down menus, change volume and a few other things. One thing that I like about it is that it doesn’t feel cheap; it feels very strong (the click wheel and the whole thing).
The software asked me to update the ipods firmware, so I did that. Quick and painless.
The next step was getting music onto this thing. The ipod comes with both a firewire connection and a usb 2 connection. I’ve been using the firewire.
When you start itunes it syncs all your music. I copied about 1.5gb (300 songs) to it and it was done in less than 5 minutes. Nice.
I was hoping that maybe itunes would replace winamp, but this isn’t going to happen. Itunes seems to lack some features and just doesn’t feel as nice as winamp. The program does feel a bit cheap, although not nearly as bad as other things I have used. It works well and looks okay.
The thing that I don’t quite get (and I’m hoping I find this feature), where do I copy my CDs through it? I don’t know if I can! I mean surely you should be able to do this. But I haven’t found a way to do it. Weird indeed. I think I’ll need to stick to winamp 5.
EDIT: Okay then. itunes rips from CD fine just for some reason my main cdrom drive isn't working. No problems through my burner though. Nice, now to get some more music copied!!
The sound quality hasn’t impressed me (some songs are really good, others aren’t) but I think that is more the music format I am using. The ipod supports Apple Lossless Encoder, so I am pretty interested in that. I’ll play around with that later.
EDIT2: Okay I've ripped a few CDs with Apple Lossless Encoder and it is MUCH MUCH better. Very happy. 25mb a song, so it should be ;)
The ipod itself has some cool little features. Like if I unplug the headphones the music pauses. I think that is pretty cool. The click wheel is REALLY nice too.
So far the only downside is that after every 5 or so songs the ipod needs to buffer from the hard drive. So there is a little slow down there. But it is only a small thing.
The headphones are also really comfortable and don’t sound too bad. Cool.
The ipod itself is great; itunes still needs a little work.
Oh the ipod can also be used as a removable hard drive. It just appears as another hard disc in windows. Cool.
So that is about all for now. I love it.
And here are some pictures!
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/apple.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/openbox.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/openbox2.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ipod.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ipodback.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ipodlight.jpg
I really dislike outlook 2003. It has some nice features but some of the things it does is just crazy.
When you send an email from your account (I have 2 different email addresses setup with it) all sent items appear in the local folder. So my sent items are not stored on my IMAP server. That is pretty lame. I have no idea how to get around this.
The other big problem is it has trouble if it cannot connect to all the mail servers. It will lock up and die. Then I’ll need to restart the program and it will need to cache all the headers again. Biggest annoying thing ever. I don’t like it.
Anyway a few months ago I tried Thunderbird (version 0.8 I think) and it didn’t seem all that much better, but today I decided to switch over to it. The first reason was as above, OE sucks but the second reason is a bit more interesting.
OpenPGP support. Outlook doesn’t have a plugin to support PGP (Outlook Express does, just not Outlook). PGP is a way of encrypting your data and it isn’t just restricted to emails.
You have a public key and a private key. You give your public key out to people. If they want to send you something that is encrypted they use your public key. This means that only the person who has the private key can decrypt the email or file.
Thunderbird has a plugin that you can download called enigmail (http://enigmail.mozdev.org/) that handles OpenPGP very nicely. You can sign your emails, encrypt and decrypt them automatically. Pretty cool.
So if you have PGP key email me your public key. Mine is as follows:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32) - WinPT 0.7.96rc1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=8aSi
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
My contact page (http://blog.dalegroup.net/contact/#pgp) now also includes a copy of my public key if needed.
After being told not to (http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/11/05/dont-see-hero) I went to see Hero today.
Personally I didn’t think it was that bad, although admittedly I didn’t have high expectations of it.
Although there were a few things that I didn’t like about it, firstly the whole half flying half walking thing is a bit annoying (like crouching tiger hidden dragon). I mean the movie is sort of meant to be realistic but not. It is too much in between reality and not.
I didn’t like how the main characters kept dieing but not. Oh I only stabbed you a little bit with my knife, you’ll recover. Like that happened far too much.
The movie was too long. I got pretty bored at the end of it.
Apart from that it wasn’t too bad. The movie did have some interesting features. So yeah go and see it if you like. I thought it was better than crouching tiger hidden dragon. Just get rid of the crappying flying.
Another topic. My blog site. Currently the main thing that is annoying me about the site, well the blog/cms system is that I can’t do certain html things. Like having a hyperlink with certain text as the description, so “click here” would be a link. The other thing is posting images. I’d like to be able to do that.
Both these things are a problem of the way my system handles outputting text. It just strips all html stuff. This would be easily fixed with the kses class, which can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kses/
This class just strips certain html tags etc. You have complete control over what stuff is stripped. Pretty cool little class. The thing is I could insert this class into my current system in about 15 minutes and it would work well. But I am not going to do that as I am working (slowly) on my new blogging system. If I did add this class now I might stop writing this new thing all together, and that would be bad.
The new blog system is coming along although I need to sit down and figure out how some certain stuff is going to work. I don’t see myself having time for that until after schoolies as I’ve been pretty busy lately.
Any who that is about all for now.
Now officially over. Congratulations class of 2004 and good luck to people doing the HSC next year. :)
What am I doing here? Well, Matthom has come up with this idea, WEGO. What is it? well...
[quote]
[b]The project and trend[/b]
I would like to start a trend, called "WEGO," that promotes inspirational work – whether it be people or content. In this case, it would be bloggers that would be mentioned that have inspired or influenced your own work, in some way.
The web is full of blogs that only speak of the author themselves. There is far too much ego out there, and not enough WEGO. After all, we learn together. We blog together. Let’s stop talking about ourselves, and start talking about those who have inspired us!
I would like this to get around the web, and have many bloggers participate.
All you have to do is title your headline, "WEGO – The Web Ego Project," and write your entry about a person who deserves an accolade for their web design efforts.
In fact, this could be done every few months. After all, there is not just one person who has inspired the masses. Everyone has many people/friends who help make their blogging a more worthwhile experience.
[/quote]
http://matthom.com/archive/2004/11/10/01/
I think this is a pretty cool idea. Hopefully through this we can all appreciate the work of others who have inspired us. Get a bit of humility happening ;)
What I was thinking for my first entry is talk about what and who inspired this web log. I won’t talk about a single individual, but about things that others have done to inspire me in creating this site.
[b]Let’s start[/b]
This site is fairly new and would be my first dedicated blog site. It is separate from everything else. Its purpose is to let me talk about things that I find interesting and/or important. It allows me to share some of my insights with others.
As I’ve stated before blogging (http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/81) is a very personal thing. Your blog is about you, your perspectives on life. So although it is a personal thing, others have affected this site and how it works. So it all started when….
A few of my friends decided to start keeping a personal record of events of things or interest. Josh (http://www.joahua.com/) ran a site; I suppose you could have called it a humor website. He posted links, pictures, articles about things that had interest to his year group at school and friends. There were some times where some quite interesting things were posted, such as certain details about a certain PE teacher.
The site quickly became known to many, even the non-techies and started getting regular visits. It was quite an interesting site and I would say it had quite a different focus to his current site.
After that a few different versions of his blog site immerged. The most recent “old” one would have had most affect on this current site (it can be found here: http://www.joahua.com/mid04/).
Josh and I every now and then had some quite in depth decisions about things. At the time it was open source vs. closed source. My news system was some dodgy 3rd party thing and it didn’t do, well much. It was just a long list of text with a basic php front end. No commenting or permalinks. It wasn’t good.
Josh had his cool custom written news system with commenting and everything. So I decided to write my own. I slowly added features and it grew into a news system with commenting. This old site can be found here http://www.dalegroup.net/mid04/ (note there maybe broken links on that site)
One day I decided to dump the whole site and start again, and this is where we are currently. My development of this site started when I couldn’t easily post news and after seeing josh’s system I decided to develop on his idea.
Within that time Stuart (http://smkz.is-a-geek.net/) moved over to wordpress the 3rd party blogging tool as it had more features than his news system and if I remember correctly worked without needing global variables turned on in php :p
Josh got sick of his site, like I did with my old one. He decided to jump over to wordpress as it supported more features (trackback, better archiving, better admin panel etc).
My site was pretty new and I didn’t feel like changing, although it lacked many features that wordpress had. I decided again to develop it further and now it currently supports most of wordpress’ basic features.
Since then I started visiting photomatt.net and was pretty impressed with his setup. This site aims to have the same sort of (but not) appeal that his site does. Pity about the graphics. :p
Currently I am working on a new blogging system that will replace getnews (the name of the current one) with something that hopes to be more powerful, but most importantly more flexible, with a templating system like wordpress.
This site really needs a visual update and I plan on getting around to this too. I hope to take a few ideas from everyone.
• Matthoms fantastic use of mod_rewrite as well as his news headlines and “base” page.
• Stuart’s use of recently viewed links.
• Matthew’s (http://www.ucosty.net/) use of header links.
• Photomatt’s class and style ;)
• Some general features from wordpress.
• A commenting system based on Dunstan’s (http://1976design.com/blog/) site.
• Over all better interaction between each page.
• Idea’s based around the CMS used on a site developed by josh (http://www.platform7.info)
That is about all for now. I hope this post fits in well enough to WEGO. I encourage everyone else to write a post on the same idea ;)
The ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers), the people that handle many of the domain registrations (including .com and .net) have decided to change their domain transfer policy. The new system is absolutely crazy.
A domain transfer is when you change from one company that handles your domain to another. So for most of my domains I run through joker.com, although there are many others.
The new policy allows for much, much easier domains transfers. This is a bad thing. The following is taken from the new policy:
[quote]Failure by the Registrar of Record to respond within five (5) calendar days to a notification from the Registry regarding a transfer request will result in a default "approval" of the transfer.
In the event that a Transfer Contact listed in the Whois has [b]not confirmed[/b] their request to transfer with the Registrar of Record and the Registrar of Record has not explicitly denied the transfer request, the [b]default action will be that the Registrar of Record must allow the transfer to proceed.[/b] [/quote]
http://www.icann.org/transfers/policy-12jul04.htm
Pretty crazy stuff. Luckily many domain registrars provide domain locking, which blocks this attempt. I received an email from joker the other day about it.
[quote]
Joker.com introduces Feature "Domain Protection"
The protection of domain name ("domain locking") provides an additional layer of security against unauthorized domain manipulation. It also prevents from fraudulent transfers.
This feature keeps you safe from the notorious people known as domain hijackers. They often spot nice domain names to generate profit from.
Joker.com will secure your domains - which you are the "owner" of - on November, 10th 2004.
If you decide you do need to unlock your domain (needed to transfer a domain to another registrar), simply log in to your account at Joker.com and remove the lock with the help of our 'Servicezone'.
This procedure conforms to the ICANN regulations which become active on November 12th, 2004.[/quote]
So people watch your domains :|
We all know about them, a great way for a cheap techie like myself to pickup some free stuff! It seems to run in my family.
On Monday father told that council clean up was on and that I should be on the look out for stuff. Anyway later that day he found a few computers lying on the side of the road. With screw driver in hand I went to check it out. Pity the fastest thing there was a Pentium MMX (I’ve since out grown these, Pentium 2s or higher :p)
Just as I was leaving to Matthew’s house (where I have been for the last 2 days) I saw a dell tower sitting on the opposite side of the road. So I quickly picked it up and went back home. At first I thought it may have been an older Pentium 2 but on closer inspection it had a Pentium III sticker on it so I was very excited.
I quickly pulled off the case (no screw driver needed) and found a pretty empty computer. No hard drive, no cdrom and the sound card was gone. But it did have the CPU, mobo, ram and video card. So I checked out the CPU and it was in fact a Pentium 3 700MHz. Funky! I didn’t have time to check out the rest as I was already late.
Anyway I remembered that the video card had a fan on it so I thought it may have been a 32mb TNT2 Ultra which would be nice, but it wasn’t. I did a google search for the system at Matthew’s place but I didn’t remember the model number. (Dell Dimension XPS T700r)
Anyway got back home and booted the system up. 640mb Ram!!! W00t. I wasn’t expecting that. I have since then done a search and it seems that the video card is a Geforce 256 32mb AGP (I think it is a non DDR version, unsure). Hell yeah! Nice.
So I scored myself a Pentium 3 with 640mb Ram and a Geforce 1. This should replace my Celeron 400 in my bed room.
Last week Josh decided to skip school and drop off a Voodoo5 into my place. It was running nicely in my brothers computer for a bit (until I got jealous), upgrading his Voodoo4. But he doesn’t use that many 3d games and his CPU was limiting the games not the video card (Duron 800) so I’ve since reclaimed it and am going to put it to use elsewhere. Reminds me, I need to follow josh up on the Voodoo 5.
Anyway the Lan party was good. I got a *ahem* *cough* copy of Counter Strike Source off Matthew. It is based off the Half-life 2 engine or something. But we were lucky as it even ran well on Alec’s Geforce 2 MX. One thing I must say though:
THE GAME PLAY IS EXACTLY THE GAME!!! I don’t know why they bothered. I mean, cool there is a new physics engine but WTF!? Why bother. They like to drag games out as long as possible. There is no point in buying the game. The old CS is the same thing.
Anyway I’m off to play with my new computer :)
EDIT: Matthew has posted a blog about the lan but for some reason his web site just stopped working for me. When it is up it can be found here: http://www.ucosty.net/ (with photos). I will edit in the permalink later.
EDIT: permalink http://www.ucosty.net/2004/11/09/lanning/
A laptop.....a....mac laptop?!?!
Right well I’ve been a bit absent from the old web site lately.
I had Physics last week on Wednesday which was surprising not too bad, considering I only started doing work in physics after we’d finished our school classes ;) But yeah I was fairly happy with it. I’ve been pretty happy with all my exams, there hasn’t really been anything that I wasn’t expecting and everything seems easier than the trials. Nice. My last exam is on Friday (last day of the HSC), which happens to be ITF (crappy computer course) so I’m not planning on studying until latterrrr.
Tomorrow ucosty is having a lan party so I am looking forward to that. A good way to start the holidays, even if I’ve got an exam left! :p
In two weeks time I will be 18, which is pretty scary. But birthdays are good because you get free stuff
So I’ve decided I think I’ll be getting a laptop. But it isn’t all that easy to find something that is exactly what you want. I’ve got about $AU2000 to spend. You can get a pretty beefy laptop if you spend about $2500 but that is a bit too much for me.
I am looking at two laptops currently. A Dell Inspiron 8600, a Centrino based PC
(http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_8600_au?c=au&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=mn) or an Apple iBook 14” (http://www.apple.com.au/ibook/)
Both seem to be about the price I want. I can get a student discount of about $200 so that would be good.
I just really don’t know what I want. I would be able to get a Radeon 9600 in the PC where as the Mac would only have a Radeon 9200. But I’d get a bigger hard drive in the mac. I’d also get Bluetooth in the Mac.
Both come with a CDRW/DVD, Wireless, working battery (big plus), colour screen (not used to that), 512mb Ram. The PC would be a 1.4GHz Pentium-M and the Mac would be a 1.33GHz G4.
I wouldn’t really be using it for games so I suppose the video card doesn’t matter. I’d like a Mac for OS X. It’s built on BSD plus has all the nice mac features.
But I’ve been a PC user since DOS 5.0 and the PC laptop would be able to do games (better video card than my PC).
I was talking to one of my friend’s dads yesterday and he is a big mac fan and that I’d really like it. He is a power user so he knows stuff about them, not just point and click. I also like the look of the mac better.
Microsoft is going no where with Windows at the moment. I’d probably end up installing Windows 2000 on it. I’m not a fan of the XP bloat. Apple is releasing OS X 1.4 Tiger next year, but also OS X 1.3 is really nice. I love the look of Exposé (http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/features/expose/).
Argh. So yeah. Fast PC or sexy Mac. Software really isn’t an issue. I do web development, email, music, web browsing. Both have all the software I’d need. I’m leaning for a mac just because I like change. Plus the whole niche groupie thing that comes with being a mac owner.
Does anyone have a Mac laptop? Are they funky? There is an Apple shop in Balmain so I might head over there today.