Once again, Windows Vista has been delayed, atleast partially, by Microsoft.
Just weeks after 32bit EFI support was pulled, this comes as no real shock, that the latest version of windows for consumers will be delayed untill January. Professional and Server versions are still expected to be available in November (But you don't see me holding my breath).
In other Vista related news, there are rumors going around that Microsoft has created a third graphics option that will allow OpenGL support greater than 1.4, while still keeping the Glass renderer intact. Word is that this option is not the default.
Right now, trying to duplicate my old hard drive from the AMD64 onto a second drive. its been going at it for about 14 hours now, and roughly half done. This has been a giant pain in the ass since the drive wasnt always recognized at boot. I really hope I can get the data from it.
Been trying to get a hold of UMSL, but keep getting a busy signal at every number I call, every time I call. Hopefully I can get through soon.
For the most part, things are still kind of a clusterfuck here, with a giant ass hole in my front yard for the last week left when they were accessing the water main. Some assfucker was messing around in our back yard and unlatched the gate for the turkeys, latched the chain to the fence (something we never do) and left the gate wide open. Its also been hotter than all shit, being 100+ for pretty much every day since beginning of July, with the exceptions of the days it stormed. Also, in the next week will have to be at a lawyers to do something about the neighbor who's squatting on some property at the farm. Third time since the guy has moved in 8 years ago he's pulled up the survey stakes, pulled up our fence posts, and built a fence over on our property. This time though, he's not budging, claiming his property line is like 15 feet past where the county recorder, his deed, our deed, etc says it is.So, we have to serve him with a notice that he has to remove his fence and buildings that are on our property. If we just remove his fence and barns, he could sue us, even though its well onto our property and violating Missouri state law (which says that a permanent building cannot be closer than 10 feet from the edge of the property line).
Back again.
Things have been hectic here. This week have had family from out of town staying here, and all the craziness that provides. Its not been bad though
The sony laptop I have broke, again. Had issues with its hard drive, again. Since thats been wating hard drives, and the hinge aint cheap to fix, I'm probably not gonna fix it. If I do, I might mod things, strip it from its case, come up with a better cooling system, and put it in something else.
Other projects here, I'm trying to plot what I should do with a 4u rackmount case, and baby AT 486 I have. as it stands, the Baby AT doesnt match up right with the Fullsize AT case, so probably gonna pull out the drill and my tap set and go to town. Other ideas I've had is to make a hood scoop on there, with twin 120mm fans drawing in cool air from them. Not sure what else. I also am wanting to setup a headless server for auto backup of my main desktop machines. Could that be the purpose of the 486? Maybe, if I can get it to support large drives without an issue. If I decide to drop the 1500+ I have into the 4U instead, I am pretty sure its gonna be opticalless, and use that bay for a removable drive setup. I'll be tossing up sketches later of my mod plans. What ever I do, it'll be on the cheap, probably done with some of the scrap metal I have laying around. No biggie though, gives me a challenge.
Other news, picked up Gran Turismo 4 finally. Wasn't so hot on GT3, but lets see what 3 or 4 years developement has done on it. Can't believe at the memory card requirements, I'm used to seeing 80k, or upwards of 300k, required for a save game, but 2 megabytes? Damn. New memory card definitely for me then, when I can afford it.
Saw Pirates 2 on Monday, good movie, crappy ending. Its hard to say whether to recommend seeing it on the big screen, or to just wait and watch it right before Pirates 3 next year, since its more or less a year long intermission instead of a year between sequels. If you can, wait till after the credits for another funny scene.
As most of you guys know, I like free things. Free as in speech, and free as in beer, it don't matter, they're both kick ass in my book. Today, MacZOT is giving away free copies of iClip 3.7. iClip is a little program that allows you to have multiple things copied at a time. Like your dock, or Sidenote, iClip hides off to the side of the screen and pops out when you mouse to the edge. Grab a copy.
Ok, most people who know me know that I am very disorganzied. Despite my attempts to rectify that, things always dissolve into a mess. This renders me forgetful, scatterbrained, and absent minded. There are a few cool mac tools I've run across that help with this.
First up, for games, movies, books, and music there is Delicious Library. Using this, you can easily keep a running tally of what things you have, as well as if anyone is borrowing it. The latter feature is especially handy, because sometimes when people borrow things they have it for months at a time, and then occaisionally forget they got it from you. This way, you know exactly who has your stuff so you don't forget it. Also, if you have a very large collection of stuff, its sometimes nice to have a list of stuff to quickly look through when getting more, so you don't duplicate things. Plus, you can export the list to a text file so you can send it to others, so they know what you already have. Not to mention nifty features like recommendations on similar things, barcode scanner support, etc. All in all, a really cool tool, although a bit price heavy at $40.
Next on the list is a great, free, tool for note taking called Sidenote. Basically, side note is a little app that sits off to the side of your monitor, out of sight, and when you mouse up to the edge, out pops side note, letting you jot down different notes. You can also use color codes to help show importance on the notes. Personally, I like it better than the built in stickies app, because it doesnt always have to be on top (although you can pin it out). Another nice feature is that its not on the dock, so doesn't clutter things up.
Another good app for note scribbling is Desktastic. Desktastic lets you draw, scribble notes, etc on top the desktop or ontop of other programs. Really kick ass for those with wacoms. I have a couple complaints over Desktastic though. First one is, If you have it set "Above the Icons" you can't interact with the desktop unless you set desktastic to hide, but if you set it below the icons, you cant draw on the desktop but rather ontop of all the other programs. My second complaint is that it has an icon on the dock. To me, it would be perfect, if I could hit the expose button to hide all windows, start drawing on the desktop and still interact with the icons, and not have it on the dock. Even if I had to still press the draw button (manditory if you have it set under the icons) before I could draw, but be able to work with it while using expose, I'd be much happier. Still, its $12.95, which is cheap. This is also made by the same company who does Transmit, and Stattoo, two other cool apps.
Lifehacker also has for free its todo.txt series and script which is great, especially for those who love the commandline.
