maybe it’s me. sxsw of course does not suck. But I could not find a RSS feed with media enclosures.
I can not be bothered to listen to mp3’s in my webbrowser. That’s that rss 2.0 with enclosures aka podcast
is good for. Their xml file did not work with iTunes. It was quicker to write a quick scraper than to navigate their site and make a big R&D project out of it. So here it is the homemade rss feed that will work in iTunes:
Apple tells us since years whenever it feels approiate that OS X is based on unix. They are not lying of course. But there are some nasty details. One that drives me crazy right now:
Since it’s beginnings unix always supported tape drives. All of them, sometimes there were updates needed etc etc.
But data management via data tapes was always a thing that just worked. On every unix flavor I know. Actually it worked pretty much the same and usually is very reliable once you are a couple of months away of the bleeding edge and if you don’t have to battle broken hardware.
OS X is different: The parts that make tape archiving work have been removed. OS X is the only unix system where this happened. The hardware is there and it works. The software was there and it works. Just that Apple decided “No Tapes for you”. Which is super lame.
On one side Apple wants to be in the pro market. With XSan they like to become a storage vendor, and on the
other side they cripple the operating system by not creating /dev/mt/tpsXdY or /dev/nstX devices.
This is nothing less than Microsoftesc. It really is lame to break working things, just because you have decided that a couple of tape archiving software vendors is more important than the pro market. No, I can not use “retrospect” to manage a Peta Byte for the the movie that I am working on right now. The linux boxes doing the job would have not moved into this Apple heavy environment if Apple would not have broken OS X. To me OS X is only 95% unix and 5 % got soaked in Koolaid and fell apart. Tape device support is some of that. What a shame.
Looks like an interest article about Tron.
Just that I have no time to read it right now.
I let you decide what is more relevant and more interesting.
nine million million US dollars
That’s more than thousand US$ for every person on the planet. Billions of them make less than that in a year.
turns out os x has no ‘fuser’ command. oh well. But
umount -f /your/device/path
does the trick in many cases where the pansy finder rejects to eject (aka unmount) a volume
This computer has had issues. It has been down for the greater part of March 15. Hope google picks this entry up before it craps out again.
The Prez says:
"As more capable Iraqi police and soldiers come on line, they will assume responsibility for more territory with the goal of having the Iraqis control more territory than the coalition by the end of 2006,"
Let me guess: it probably will be mostly the vast deserts of iraq that will make up those non US controlled area of “territory”.
“Mission Accomplished” it said on the aircraft carrier where he held the premature victory speach. More than 90% of US soldiers think they are in Iraq because of 9/11. Whatever happened to those change in alert states that we saw before the last election? It has been awfully quiet: Have the terrorists all been caught? Probably because they got tortured so well. At least nothing has changed in the area of Weapons of Mass Destuction: Iraq never had them, and North Korea still has. Which is -what a surprise- pretty much what their respective rulers have been saying all along. Oh, one thing changed during the last three years: The supply of cheap heroine has never been better. Thanks to the worlds number one producer: Afghanistan. The Taliban are unbelievable idiots, but they did a much better job in the war on drugs than the current regime. Ah politics, it all makes so much sense.
Sony will release a couple of blue ray movies. It is nice to hear that they set a precedence by outputing the analog signal at full resolution. How could the growing HD DVD competition not follow suit?
Having test signals as an ‘easter egg’ on the first blue ray disks makes sense: People that spend one thousand dollar for a device with ten titles instead of 300 dollars for one with 1,000 titles two years later really need ‘test charts’ to justify they purchase. This is the small, yet luctrative, market where you can sell a power cable north of a hundret US.
I am not an Apple fanboy. Really. It has been 8 months since I sent some money to the Infinite Loop. Not counting the “Ride of the Walkyers”. That one euro was an excusable exception: Imagine a middle class car car with it’s hatch open driving through a middle european middle class neighborhood, having two kids on a sled in tow blasting this song. I could not resist to put this mental image into reality. I thought this was the best way to introduce Anton and Ella to Wagner.
So today the HiFi got delivered. A couple of days ahead of schedule. “Apple Deutschland” starts to have decent service. Amazing, not how it used to be.
It’s smaller than I thought. I am a fanboy. A Dieter Rahms fanboy, ever since I saw the first brAun stereo. Logically I like the looks of the thing. The way the iPod is put in on the top I am not crazy about. It comes with lots of plastic inserts to accomodate all those different iPods Apple came out with.
Overall it sounds ok. It is very loud. From what I read I expected it to be really loud, and that is not the case.
The first song on the shuffle playlist was a piano piece by Satie. Tragically this was a very dissapointing performance for the debutant: Mid to high tones are simple not clear. Hearing a couple of more Piano pieces by now I think that the ‘Hi-Fi’ is an orwellian title. If Jobs really wants to give up his stereo for a Hifi then this can only have one of three reasons:
– he spend less than 349 US$ on the one that get’s replaced
– he has the Koolaid coming out his ears
– he tested every 1,000th iPod Apple sold personally and on full volume.
The Hi-Fi is not going back. We needed a decent looking noise maker. And it will work for that. I just had expected better sound from it.
With a fresh set of D batteries it can make for some noise open air noise. I hope somebody comes with a concept to place 50 or so in a public park: “Concerto for 50 iPod HiFis in Central Park”.
They just should not have called it ‘Hi-Fi’. My twenty five year old stereo sounds MUCH better. But that was not 349. Worked for it for months to able to afford it.