How To Hollow Out A Book

How to make a hollowed out book safe. I actually did this back when I was in high school, although it wasn’t as clean, and saved my tip money and extra cash in it. (via)

Panosaurus

I ordered the Panosaurus panoramic tripod head via Paypal this morning. It’s (from what I can tell) the most affordable panoramic tripod head available on the market, and it’s got some pretty good reviews. When it arrives, I’ll write up a review and post the results here to see—I might be doing a lot of panoramic photography in the near future.

It Is Alive

Last night, after much wrangling, reading, dissecting, and cursing, I finally got a working copy of OS 9.1 on my Powerbook 1400. Bored readers may recall that I was having problems because the machine didn’t come with a CD-ROM drive, so anything I was installing internally had to come on floppy discs. Thus, a long process of pulling the hard drive and putting it in a FireWire enclosure, then swapping it back into the machine or testing began, always resulting in a flashing floppy icon (OS 9 speak for “I can’t find a System Folder.”)

Last night I finally had my eureka moment: for whatever reason, after installing the OS, the system folder wasn’t “blessed”, and therefore not viable. I read up on blessing system folders and followed the proper proceedure while booted into OS 9 on my old blue and white tower, and then swapped out the drive one last time: Success!

After that, it was frighteningly easy to get it on my wireless network: I have an old Lucent silver card pulled from a dead AirPort Base Station, and Proxim still has working drivers (behind a login/password, unfortunately) that install quickly and painlessly—I was up and running in minutes. Because it’s a newer, larger hard drive, response time is much zippier.

Pageloads are painfully slow, but I wasn’t expecting lightning speed. My MacBook Pro can see the drive when it’s shared and I can dump files on it (Photoshop 3! Illustrator 5.5! Streamline 4!) so that it can back up my emulated copy of OS 8.5 here on the MBP. I have yet to test out webmail or Movable Type yet, but that’s coming.

I have a perverse love for old electronics, and an even stranger love for fixing them. This old Powerbook was giving me fits because every ninja method I tried to get around its limitations (and believe me, I was ninja) failed for some reason or another. I’d all but given up on it until some spare brain cells began firing in a different way, and once I’d given it some time and thought, a simpler, easier solution presented itself. One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn as I’ve grown older is to be patient and wait for solutions to percolate, instead of rushing ahead and getting myself into more trouble down the line: I was the kid who put my plastic models together way too fast because I wanted to play with them NOW, not wait for the stupid glue to dry. This seems to be my M.O. as I get older, from everything to mantle construction to website building to illustration concepting— a little time, patience, and waiting for the tinkering part of my brain to come up with alternate solution usually pays off in the end.

Parallels Desktop update available

Parallels released an update for Parallels Desktop today, which is great news. I hope the update is more stable than the beta I’ve been running (I get one good crash per session, usually), but overall I have nothing but good things to say about the app. As of 3:30EST, the server is not responding—they must be getting hammered.

Snowy Cardinal

Yep, more snow. We celebrated by having steamed mussels and homemade cornbread.

Article on icon design

Oh, jeebus, does this article on icon design ring true. I’ve spent more time than I care to explaining the reasons it takes more work than just creating one icon and sizing it down: usually this is when I’ve got the smallest size of the icon on the screen and I’m cleaning it up pixel by pixel.

iPod repair links

Also on the radar: fixing Jen’s old 1st generation iPod for a reliable backup drive. This is the first link a google search brings up: about $110 for a new battery and a FireWire repair. Here’s an illustrated disassembly guide.
Further: How to run OSX off your iPod. This seems to shorten the life of the iPod’s hard drive, however. I think I’ll just stick with using it as a backup drive.

Tulips

One of my favorite things about late winter and early spring is fresh tulips.

Don’t Get Involved.

I’m struggling to figure out what bothers me most about this news item. Go read it and come back.

OK, so you have the basics. Here are my issues.

• I’m troubled by the fact that the cops are charging him for this; this makes me think of the Kitty Genovese story, and the don’t get involved mindset many people have in these litigous times. I’m actually kind of happy the guy ran upstairs to see what was going on; as I was telling Jen, I’d probably grab whatever was handy (baseball bat, 2×4, steak knife) and do the same thing myself.
• I’m a little wierded out by the guy, though. His eyeballs in that mugshot say “tweaker”, but that could just be me. The fact that he’s 39 and living with his mother is a little Norman Bates-ish, too.
• That must have been some kind of pr0n to warrant that kind of response. Usually it’s pretty easy to tell by sound what’s going on, but the actress must have really been convincing. (is that wrong of me to say?)
• It’s kind of sad that the guy who tried to do right gets popped and winds up on CNN, while the guy watching the movie remains “the neighbor”. Everyone inside the bustling metropolis of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin probably knows who the guy is, but to the rest of us he is a mystery. (Jen sez they had the guy’s name and picture written in that article earlier today, but it’s gone now. Hmmm.)
• Antique sword. Lives with Mom. 39 years old. Not clued in on the sounds of a woman in distress/pleasure. Any red flags coming up for anyone else besides me?

Sucks for that guy, to be sure.

Kodak DC3400 Legacy Support

This is a link to Kodak’s legacy support page for the DC3400. At some point, I’d like to hook this up to an old iMac and set it up to take time-lapse photos with Boinx iStopmotion.