A couple more screenshots
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 31st August, 2006 @ 20:56
I feel so unsafe running IE6 'natively' in OSX...
Fortunately reboots during installation don't take long...
Crossover for Mac
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 31st August, 2006 @ 20:28
At the time of writing I've not seen this mentioned on Digg, MacNN or Slashdot, so I'm declaring it a freakymousemats.com exclusive! Codeweavers have released a free 60-day beta version of Crossover for Mac. So here's Office 2003 for Windows, running on my iMac...
You can click through to see it bigger. Gee, it really highlights how ugly Windows apps are when you put them inside a Mac desktop :)
Explanation
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 31st August, 2006 @ 01:47
Following on from my last post which ended up being just a couple of pictures of what I got up to last week I suspect I owe you an explanation for what I was up to!
My good friends Dave & Neil recently moved back to Bedford, not too far down the road from my place. Neil apparently has a little obsession about abandoned train tunnels and knew of a tunnel not far from here, near the village of Old Warden. A search on Google Earth revealed what appeared to be the north portal of the tunnel, along with a fairly clear route to walk to it. So off we went to investigate. You can read all about our 3 trips to the tunnel, along with a brief trip to St Marys Church, Clophill over here on Neil's new urbex section.
I mentioned the tunnel walk to Richard, who got very excited at the prospect and rather jealous that while I was exploring supposedly blocked-off Victorian railway tunnels, he was stuck writing a report for a client. Neil then mentioned a tunnel deep in the Northamptonshire countryside near the villages of Catesby and Charwelton, this time 2 miles long as opposed to the half mile journey through the Old Warden Tunnel.
The mere mention of this got Richard so excited that he jumped on the first train to Bedford (this being a Thursday evening) so we could go and explore the tunnel the next day. What I didn't count on was Richard's suggestion at 11.30pm or so that we go and visit Old Warden Tunnel that night. A trip to Tesco later and we were armed with torches and set off for the path to the tunnel. You can find Richard's account and pictures here.
Unfortunately Dave & Neil were unable to join us on the trip to Catesby Tunnel the next day, so we set off with a quick stop in at Tesco so Richard could upgrade the cheapy torch he'd purchased the previous evening with a more expensive superbright LED model that I'd previously bought. If you explore tunnels, it's a good idea if you each go armed with a half-decent torch! From there, to Matalan to purchase some wellies, previous visitors accounts we'd found online indicated it might be a good idea. £6 each later and we were good to go.
Despite heavy traffic getting in the way whichever diversion I tried to make, we eventually got to the small parking area next to the railway bridge and headed off down the bridleway to the tunnel's South Portal.
You can find Richard's short summary and pictures here. All I'll add is that I'm glad we had decent torches. Every hundred yards or so there was a large drainage hole that it wouldn't have been fun to fall into!
Why blog when you can drag others along with you and get them to blog it? :)
MacBook Power Requirements
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 17th August, 2006 @ 13:33
You might have seen that when Apple launched the MacBook Pro back at the start of this year, the power supply was somewhat larger than what we've come to expect from Apple notebooks. Indeed, the power supply is rated at 85W, a good rise on the 45-55W or so that came with the G4 series of laptops.
When the MacBook was released several months later I was relieved to find that not only were the keyboard and screen much better than I'd imagined they might be (it still looks a little Sinclair Spectrum to me), but the power brick was the same size as the one provided with my old PowerBook. And the reason being, this little brick is rated at 60W.
Which raised the question at the time... would we be able to use the PSUs interchangeably as we've always done before with Mac notebooks? Richard's got the MacBook Pro and I've got the MacBook, so it's often convenient when we go to the same meetings to share a power supply.
Apple's answer... yes. The only caveat being that if the MacBook Pro is under load, the MacBook's PSU might only be able to power it and there won't be enough energy to charge the battery at the same time. I'd assumed this was likely due to the larger screen, separate GPU and associated power requirements. Good news.
On to today, and I've got some H.264 video encoding to do. I decided to use a nice, high quality setting and 2-pass encoding to make a decent resulting file. I had one going on the iMac and was running short on time, so decided to set another going on the MacBook. When this thing gets busy it gets very hot! So, having read one of the biggest causes of Li-ion battery charge capacity loss is heat, I decided to remove the battery while it was encoding the video.
And to my surprise the fan never kicked in once during the encode, which I thought was a little strange. So I looked at the CPU speed and it had been speed-stepped down to 1GHz (it's the 1.83GHz model). I didn't really think much more of it.
Then I decided I actually wanted to use the laptop and thought it best to put the battery back in, otherwise accidentally knocking out the power lead would produce a rather annoying result! And within a minute the fan kicked in and up to a massive speed.
At first I assumed that the battery charging circuitry might perhaps produce an amount of heat that needs to be dissipated, which combined with the high CPU load made the fan necessary. Then I checked out the CPU speed, and it was running at 1.83GHz (and 73 degree Celsius, over 10 degrees hotter than before).
So it would seem that the MacBook power supply alone can't provide enough juice to run the machine at full speed. Which leaves me wondering (as I tend to destroy notebook batteries within 18 months), when this battery is on it's last legs and gives me 10 mins of use between charging, will my MacBook be able to manage full speed, even when plugged in?
Still Alive
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 08th August, 2006 @ 14:47
Wow, it has been a while since I posted, and after my busiest month of postings in June, July somehow ended up being the quietest. Though that doesn't mean nothing's been happening. There's lots of stuff I want to write about, but whether or not I get around to it is another matter. In the mean time here's a roundup of what's been going on...
- Lego Mindstorms NXT is out in the US and is being released here at the start of September. I want it, I want it now! And it's even Mac compatible.
- I've been back east and collected my Amiga 500, Casio keyboard and an array of school books (which I wasn't expecting) before our old house is sold. Amazingly the Amiga still works almost perfectly (with the exception of a leaking battery destroying the 512Kb memory upgrade and RTC). I also found my old Switchport which exposes the Amiga's parallel and joystick ports for digital and analogue I/O. This led to...
- I found Modtronix and now want to buy one of their single board computers that gives a network a convenient interface to regular electronics. Chris has ordered one, so I'll see how his adventures with it go. And in the mean time work out what I'd actually use it for.
- Regenology has scored some more work, which is good news for my mortgage and fun for me. Playing with Asterisk, voice recognition and IVR systems right now.
- Django 0.95 has been released and marks the first formal release of their magic removal branch. Developing with Django is becoming less of a moving target and my two current Django sites worked with very little change on the new codebase. Future Regenology projects will doubtless be Django powered.
- Apple (no link required, presumably) gave us Steve Jobs for 90 mins or so yesterday to show us the new shiny things. Mac Pros and Xserves look all very nice, though I've got no particular strong desire for one. Leopard looks excellent and I can't wait to get my hands on it. Again I find myself asking why does anyone use Windows these days?
Lots of other stuff has or is going on too, but I can't remember it right now, so clearly the most geeky stuff is the most important.
Must. Post. More.
