True Stories

156 days.

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 23:31:12 -0600

Wolfram Alpha says it’s been 156 days since my last blog post. I think I might turf the blog and replace it with a set of how-to’s for the family, now that more of you have Macs, some of you are just getting in to computers, almost none of you seem to get all you can be getting out of the darn things. That and I may post a set of Really Bad Lessons in Graphic Design because the tools are getting cheaper, and why should I be the only one in the extended family who can doctor photos of Niagara Falls, right?

iBook Upgrade

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:19:18 -0700

The hard drive in my sister’s G4 iBook died, which is kind of cool because I finally got to try cracking open an older iBook to do a hard drive swap-out, following one of the half dozen or so tutorials on the web.

Five. Million. Screws.

The lock does something now.

Fri, 5 Dec 2008 08:06:24 -0700

Safari is better than Firefox, except when it isn’t.
For a while, Firefox had this little edge over the Better Browser thanks to some security eye candy in the address bar. When you visit a secure site with Firefox 3, the icon in the address bar becomes clickable, and when you click on the icon a little sheet slides out with the site’s security credentials. In Safari there was nothing but a little lock on the top corner. For 99.99% of us, the lock was enough because that credentials information was a bunch of techno lawyer babble anyway. But the point was, Firefox had that techno lawyer babble and Safari didn’t—and that felt wrong. You know that feeling you get when you’re in a friend’s 1985 Yugo GV and you notice it has a better looking latch on its glove box than you have in your 2008 BMW 323i*? It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t leave you with a scratching static electricity sensation in the back of your mind. But it does.
Well, today I noticed that somewhere along the way, Apple added the same credential-check feature to Safari. Click on the out-of-the-way lock and up comes a sheet explaining who certified your favorite website and when. So Safari is better, again.
*No, I don’t have a 2008 BMW 323i, and yes, the cartoon is a reference to a gag in When Harry Met Sally.

Slide rules are fun!

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:50:29 -0700

Last week I discovered slide rules, and man, they’re fun.
This is my (cheap cardboard) E6B “flight computer” circular slide rule for solving all kinds of quick airplane-math like your range given your fuel capacity and distance travelled, or complex calculations like wind correction angle given your true track and the reported wind. There’s just something really retro fun about using an actual slide ruler in 2008.
It’s also comforting to know that I’d be able to plot (and fly) a safe visual-rules (VFR) course without having to rely on anything digital if I had to. I have a stack of iPod and desktop aviation apps (I’m working on a few myself and needed to size up the competition) but honestly, I think that given the time, I’d probably stick with the analog approach just for the novelty of it all.