RejectReality

I’ve officially joined the ranks of Switchers.

My new Macbook (finally) turned up yesterday. I’ll be posting some more down the track after I learn how it all hangs together, however my initial impression is it’s a damn nice piece of kit.

The hardware itself is well designed, well put together (much more solid than my Toshiba), and (most importantly) it’s fast. The only issue I have with it is a slight buzz when running on battery power and the CPU’s are idle, which (unfortunately) is well documented - hopefully this won’t take too long to fix.

Software wise, I’ve already found a bunch of cool apps and utilities to play with; Quicksilver, NetNewsWire, Connect360, AdiumX, Google Earth, GimpShop, OmniOutliner and Apple’s recently released Boot Camp are currently on the top of the list.

More to come when I find some interesting stuff.

Technorati Tags: macbook, quicksilver, netnewswire, connect360, adiumx, google earth, gimpshop, omnioutliner, boot camp

Recently, a fellow blogger requested some assistance from her loyal readers in some various web hosting matters. After living in the web hosting world for a few years, I figured now was a good a time as any to put my hand up and see how much damage I could cause

The work itself was quite interesting and provided a perfect excuse to flex my old web hosting muscles to see if my sieve of a brain was still working. Also, assisting someone who was rather interested in the what, how and why of the issue, not only in the solution, was a real treat.

A few days later, a bunch of emails, some redirection rules and assisting in dealing with one of the most unsavoury remote monitoring applications that I have ever bumped into and we have another happy customer.

In this case, the happy customer was the stunningly famous Cindy the Squipper. For those that do not know Cindy, she is one half of the Ken and Squip Show (personal favourite: the show released March 21, 2005) and is responsible for the general malarkey that is Dusting My Brain.

Incidentally, she is also pretty damn good behind a lens. If only she considered selling some prints (I’ll admit that last one was a tad ugly, but I know someone that has a soft spot for those things ).

I can highly recommend heading on over to her sites to have listen, a look at her photos and a read of some of her brain dustings when you’ve got an afternoon to spend.

Cindy: it was a good experience working with you, grasshopper. Give me a yell next time you need a sysadmin or some more dust for your brain.

Technorati Tags: cindy the squipper, dusting my brain, ken and squip show

A week or so ago, I mentioned a multi-touch screen UI that I would like to play with at some stage.

Whilst I suspect that this might take some time to filter through to consumer devices, a similar device has been been created using LED arrays as a touch receptor. There’s a very interesting video on it’s utilisation available here.

For those that like hacking hardware, this looks like it would be a fun project.

[via MAKE:Blog]

Technorati Tags: multi-touch, ui, led, make

As I’ve mentioned previously, my laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth. Given the success of my Mac Mini experiment and the recent release of new Apple hardware, I’ve decided to give the Mac platform a go for my primary machine.

To this end, a couple of weeks ago, an order for a shiny MacBook Pro was submitted.

During this time, I’ve been reading up on the hardware, the OS and some applications I would like to try out like Coverflow and NetNewsWire (and I found a place to find more)!

It’s amazing how quickly the internet community has moved on this. I’ve already witnessed the unboxing and the disassembly of one of these things - they’ve only been shipping for around a week.

Now all I have to do is wait for mine to turn up so I can finish the Switch. Any pointers to interesting software, stuff or tips are welcomed

PS - I wonder if this will be me in a couple of weeks….

[via Engadget and Dan]

Technorati Tags: netnewswire, coverflow, apple, osx, mac, macbook

Update: Looks like a better MacBook disassembly guide has been published. I can’t believe how small the motherboard is!

Something tells me this would be fun to mess with.

Minority Report, eat your heart out!

[via Vic Divecha's Official Tech Blog]

Since Adrian decided to waggle his Blogger’s Prod in a rather threatening manner, I figure a small update would probably be in order.

As you may have noticed (or not, if your aggregrator is somewhat intelligent), RejectReality now has a new home. Along with a change of domain name, some space on shiny new hardware has been obtained also.

I’ll be discussing migration of services, hosting and common pitfalls sometime in the near future, however you are welcome to think about this to see if there is any topic regarding migration or hosting you would like covered:

After researching web hosting providers and plans for quite a while, I finally decided to give Dreamhost a go. Their plans seemed good value at the time of signup, and within a couple of weeks became somewhere between stupidly good and how-the-hell-are-you-guys-doing-this good (as an example, I have no idea how I’m going to use twenty gig of disk space and a terabyte of traffic a month). It definitely makes the monthly service announcement emails worth reading, even just to keep an eye out on the goodies.

Now, this just screams of fun.

Liquid-Nitrogen Ice Cream

My next obvious questions would have to be along the lines of where could cheap LN2 be found and who’s game to give it a go?

[via Hack a Day]

If you ever asked yourself exactly what it would take to tip over a cow, now you know — complete with formulae to back it up!

A cow of 1.45 metres in height pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force, equivalent to 4.43 people.

The part that tickled my funny bone was:

“The static physics of the issue say two people might be able to tip a cow, but the cow would have to be tipped quickly. The cow’s centre of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.”

Based on this, it would seem that tipping a cow is no longer just a matter of leverage; it has become a battle of wits against a rather confused opponent

[via Boing Boing]

I hate telemarketers.

I’m pretty sure I can’t get much clearer than this - as much as I try, it always seem to boil down to the same thing. Just for fun, I’ll try again anyway.

I hate telemarketers.

<shrug>

I received a phone call on my mobile at around 9:30pm advising that I was “fortunate” enough to be “selected” to participate in a “survey” for Australia’s major telco - Telstra.

As I have never provided that particular number to Telstra, I asked the telemarketer how they obtained my number, given this and the fact that it is a silent number.

His first response was an outright lie. His second attempt wasn’t much better. I’ll admit that it slightly shocked and annoyed me — “one of your friends or family have provided your name, address and phone numbers to us so that we can discuss your long distance calling plans and having a land line enabled at home”.

There are a couple of amusing things with this:

• My friends or family would not have released the details he specified
• The only way that I will be changing my long distance provider is to swap it out for a VoIP setup and an ATA so I can bypass as many of the major telco services as I can (with significant savings)
• I already have a functional land line as it’s a Telstra business decision to require a working (read: being actively billed) voice service to have DSL provisioned
• None of the land line services are in my name, so I can’t technically authorise anything like what he wanted to talk me in to
• I’m in the process of actively reducing the amount of my money that is (directly or indirectly) currently going to Telstra

These were really cruddy tactics. Especially considering he gave me a hard time when requested that I be immediately removed from all databases and call lists for marketing purposes.

All I can say is bring on the Do-Not-Call list - I’ll be the first to sign up.

</rant>

V and I dropped in to have lunch with a friend of ours on the weekend. These are normally quite entertaining events, where good food is eaten, a movie or two is watched, lots of bollocks is spoken and each other’s DVD collection is raided.

This time was no different, with one minor exception - it ended up with possibly the greatest find known to man.

I’m tragic enough to admit on public record that I am thoroughly enjoying watching one of my favourite series from long ago - MacGyver.

I mean, what’s not to like? Fairly decent plot (even if a little contrived — there’s always some explosives, duct tape or a ballpoint pen whenever they are required), a little science and physics and a lead character that can save the world with nothing more than a Swiss Army knife, a couple of magnets and a rubber chicken.

Truly classic stuff.

This post is brought you by Adrian’s obvious and significant boredom (which was not entirely fruitless - it led to the fantastic logo in the last post)