SuperWonderBang

I got my hands on an image of OSX 10.4.5. I then downloaded the Maxxuss patches and used all of them except for the AMD patch. That was it. The install was perfect after that. Sound and network worked fine. I didn’t test the burner, but the CD-ROM was working fine.

I did have problems with iTunes as most users have reported. I was planning on a big write-up of how I did this, but it was so easy that I don’t see the need. Below is a gallery of screenshots, including those showing the hardware the on which the system is running. I will post more tech details about the system as soon as I get a chance to copy them all down. The short tale is that it’s a Pentium4 Gateway laptop with pretty much standard features. The video card is an nVidia ATI Radeon (thanks azz!) mobile card.

Here are some links to the screenshots. Choose your favorite photo site:

• Go to Flickr
• Go to Zooomr (coming soon!)
• Go to Woomp!

I simply can’t decide which makes one of those photo sites better than another…can you?

Technorati Tags: macosx, macosx on intel, mactel

I read a lot. As an English teacher, part of my reading addiction is work related. However, since I was young I have found that reading is something that allows me to block out everything else. The only other “escape” I have found is alcohol and playing the guitar. The former was toxic to me and my well-being. The latter is a growing passion.

Anyway, there are lots of sites popping up helping you organize your stuff. The first one I tried was Listal, but I found that it was geared to organizing all kinds of media. It didn’t speak to the bibliophile in me. Then I found LibraryThing.

It’s a dead simply site with all the required Web2.0 goodies: ajax, tagging, comments, reviews, ratings, sharing, etc. I have only begun putting my books in and seem to have been limiting myself to new purchases and the few books sitting within arm’s reach at any given moment. There are hundreds on the shelves behind me and in the bedroom which need to be put into my catalog.

The site is free for a certain number of books and the pricing for larger accounts is reasonable. It seems that this is a one-man show and is not necessarily “built to flip” so perhaps it’s worthy of a purchase.

Technorati Tags: books, fiction, web technology, writing, organization, reading, collecting

I’m not going to rehash what those who are smarter than me are saying, but cocomment is pure genius. I have forever wanted an easier way to track, remember, and follow up on all the various comments that I make on blogs. With the advent of much of the blog content being consumed by RSS, there is a need for a way to track your interaction with those sites since you don’t habitually visit those sites.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, blogs, blogosphere, web, tools

The astute Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has gathered up a collection of most of the sites in the relatively new space of Real-Time aggregation of blog content. Some are focused strictly on blogs and some mix mainstream press into the stream.

It seems that user interaction with this news, either in the form of comments, syndication, voting, etc., is the real feature being developed here. Everything else is simply a sort of “vertical” (to use a pre-bubble term) search engine focused on a particular arc of sites in the ethersphere.

I have collected these links in a del.icio.us tag called “newsmass.” It echoes not only the noun form of “mass” as sin size or amount, but also the verb form indicating the gathering of content. News is perhaps a little more specific than it should be as not everything in these sites falls under the journalistic definition of “news.”

These space interests me from a democratic stance especially. It makes it easier for that small blogger to get his, perhaps, compelling content read by more people. As the government of the U.S. seems to be working to limit our civic freedoms, it’s good news that everyone’s voice can be heard more easily. That’s an idealistic view and a more visionary goal than pragmatic milestone, but I think that a driving vision along those lines could help one of these sites break out.

In the end, all of the movements so far in what I begrudgingly call Web2.0 seem to have been toward user empowerment. That’s not my definition of Web2.0, but it does serve as way to get my head around the concept. If any of those tools get the information to the masses that the mainstream media continually ignore, like the Downing Street Memo, then they could all be doing a great service.

Technorati Tags: news, blog, web2.0, newsmass, aggregator, blog

I found this fantastic new plugin that allows me to post a blog entry from right within Firefox. This has been a bit of a holy grail for me as I have tried BlogJet, w.bloggar, Post2Blog and ecto in an effort to encourage myself to post more. None of them have worked very well, but I think this could be just what I need.

Check it out: http://performancing.com/firefox