Sam Miller

I’ve posted some pictures from our trip to London last week on flickr.

I purchased a new mac mini last week, 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive.  It should arrive early this week.  Interestingly enough, I also bought a wireless keyboard and iWork ‘09 from Apple.  So far the mini has shipped from China, the keyboard from a different place in China, and iWork ‘09 from California.  Guess I got my $14 worth out of the shipping costs.

3 liters of Chimay Blue

I won it in a silent auction, just need to find an occasion to drink it now.

The bulb in my Samsung HLN567w has been on its last legs for the last 6 months or so.  Last I checked, it had around 4500 hours on it, which is about at the end of the line for a 5 year old tv.  I recently ordered a new lamp and enclosure from discount-merchant.com and took some pictures detailing the installation.  Overall it took me around 5 minutes, all you need is a phillips screwdriver.

My MacBook Pro died about a week and a half ago.  On Tuesday, the day of the MacWorld keynote, I used it at work the whole day without problems.  When I came home, I ran software update to get the new version of iTunes.  After installing it, I shut down.  When I came to work the next day, it wouldn’t turn on.  The power adapter light was green when plugged in, and the battery had a full charge.  Unfortunately, it was out of warranty (purchased in October 2006) and I did not buy the extended warranty.

After searching the internets for a reputable repair shop, I decided wait until the weekend and drive to an Apple store to see what a mac ‘genius’ had to say.   When I arrived, the genius plugged in mbp into their power adapter and noticed the green light was actually blinking very quickly.  Something I hadn’t noticed previously.  He tried my power adapter as well, it did the same thing.  After some searching, he diagnosed my problem as a faulty left I/O board, and quoted me at $310 to replace when 4-7 days turn around time.  Google reveals this part consists of the power connector, airport slot, and some other (USB?) ports, and costs $149.

The DHL delivery guy stopped by yesterday morning and delivered my now healthy MacBook Pro, 6 days after I dropped it off at the Apple store in Minneapolis.  So far it seems to be working just like new.

Most of the rumor sites are predicting iTunes store video rentals to be announced at Macworld on Tuesday January 15th.  I’ve seen some reports that rentals will cost between $2 and $5 and be viewable for 24 hours only.   If/when this rental service materializes, my list of requirements for it to be useful is fairly short:

1. DVD quality, which should be a given since existing videos that are purchased from iTunes look fine on my TV.
2. purchase directly from Apple TV.  Just like an iPhone can purchase songs via wifi, an Apple TV should be able to rent movies via wifi/ethernet.
3. 24 hour rentals are fine with me.  The few times I’ve purchased a movie from our cable company using their OnDemand service I’ve never watched it again during the 24 hour viewing window.
4. closer to the $2 or $3 range for price.  At $5, that’s only 3 movies/month before it starts costing more than NetFlix.

Some stuff that would be nice to have:

1. High Definition video 
2. sync to iPod/iPhone

That’s my list.  What does everyone else think?

2007 is almost gone, it’s time to write a brief summary about what happened over the past 365 days.

1. Sam, Ben, Erin, and I started 2007 by driving down to Kansas City in January for the first and only KCFEST.  It was a very successful trip and featured memorable moments such as a snowball fight and Ben eating chicken incorrectly.
2. I traveled to Arizona twice to see spring training and some regular season baseball games and visit my parents.  Despite playing well in March, the Giants managed to finish dead last in the NL West this year.
3. I presented a paper about BlueGene/P at a conference in Long Beach, CA in March.
4. Steve Jobs blessed us with the iPhone, which I waited in line for on June 29, and paid an extra $200 early adopter tax.
5. Erin and I went to Milwaukee in July to see the Giants play the Brewers.  We also met some friends at The Safe House.
6. wikipisser still sucks
7. Steve and Andy flew into Minneapolis in November as part of the inaugural MPLSFEST.
8. ISU Football stooped to new lows by losing to Kent State and UNI, both home games, to start the season.

My copy of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard arrived via FedEx last week. I chose to do an upgrade install, though in hindsight I should have done archive & install. Upon my initial reboot after the ~90 minute install finished, I was greeted with a grey screen that I traced down to faulty kernel modules from APE (application enhancer). After rebooting into single user mode and removing them, everything worked fine.

After using Leopard for a week, I can soundly say Spaces is the coolest feature to me. In the past I’ve used various hacks such as virtue desktops (which is now defunct) to achieve the same effect, but having Spaces built into the operating system is much nicer. Time Machine is very promising, but I really haven’t had the need to use it much.  I honestly don’t store a lot of files aside from my iTunes library on my laptop. Though it’s nice to know everything is being backed up silently in the background, which is a big improvement over my previous once every couple of months backup routine with Super Duper.

I still prefer Adium over iChat 4.0 by far. The new tabbed chat window in iChat is nice, but I don’t use the video or audio conferencing features enough to prefer iChat over Adium. I haven’t really explored the other new features in iChat yet aside from the video-overlay backgrounds that didn’t work too well in my home office. Perhaps the lighting was bad or something, but you couldn’t really see anything aside from my face… As far as the new Mail.app goes, it seems much faster when searching my huge mailing list mailboxes. The RSS reader and ‘personal notes’ in seem a bit gimmicky, but it will be nice when we get an iPhone firmware update that allows syncing of these notes.

I’ve only noticed two applications that are horribly broken in Leopard. Since I never upgraded to Parallels 3, I expected my version to not work in Leopard. I haven’t had a need to use Parallels for a few month, but it’s nice to boot into a Linux VM every now and then to test stuff. I’ll probably fork over the $50 to upgrade to Parallels 3, or see try VMWare Fusion. The other broken app is Lotus Sametime 7.5. If you’re unfamiliar with Sametime, it’s a corporate instant messaging product offering bells & whistles like VOIP, screen sharing, and other gimmicks. Personally I prefer a minimalist approach to IM and use Adium with the meanwhile plug-in, though I’ll probably switch to Sametime when they release a working Leopard version just to file bug reports against the developers.