Software Development and Other Stuff
This is by far the shiniest, jangliest gadget I’ve played with for a long time.
It can play games (MAME, squillions of other emulators, and also full SDL). It can play your movies (DivX/Xvid/OGM). It can play your music (Ogg/MP3). It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries – And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen.
As I may have mentioned in previous posts, I really like my new Macbook (initial hardware teething troubles aside), but one thing has been bugging me. I’m a programmer by trade, and simply because I’m always on a keyboard, can touch type very well. On a PC keyboard.
I’ve been running Firefox 2 on my Macbook at home, and on Windows XP in the office (where I don’t have a choice of OS). Today I noticed something odd on the Mac – neither GMail nor Google Calendar would display…
Continue reading “Firefox and GMail / Google Calendar Blank Pages”
I recently bought an M-Audio Keystation 88es MIDI keyboard (I’ve wanted to learn to play piano for years, but strangely have always been drawn to strings – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, violin, and, for a short while, cello).
It works brilliantly with Garage Band, but the speakers in the Macbook are small and tinny. So I plugged it through the hi-fi. It sounds fantastic. However, I really wanted to leave the keyboard set up in the spare room, where there’s no hi-fi. So I started to think about getting some computer speakers…
Well, my Macbook has been behaving impeccably after the repair. The other day I upgraded the hard disk… here’s how easy it is…
Much as I love my new Macbook (I write this as a diehard Linux user), there’s something that’s soured my burgeoning new relationship with the thing over the last few weeks.
Google for “Macbook Random Shutdown” and you’ll see what I mean. There’s a fairly large section of the Macbook owner population that are having some odd problems…
The latest “beta beta” can be found at http://www.marengo-ltd.com/map/development.html
The new features are fairly minor: there are options (under Tools) to change your units (miles/Kms) preference, and to quickly go “home”. The “Help” box now contains a link to the GPL, and there’s a nice “Paypal donate” button unobtrusively placed in the top righthand side of the screen (I can’t believe, considering the interest this has sparked, that no-one’s bought me a beer yet…)
We’ve had record heatwaves here in London, apparently even beating the droughted summer of ’76. This sparked some pretty ferocious thunderstorms on Thursday evening, which caused me to get soaked to the skin on my 26km ride home from work (I was also worried about getting hit by lightning in Richmond Park). When I got home there were house alarms going off all over, and in my house half the circuits were blown. And worst of all my ADSL modem was fried. No internet! Continue reading “The Outage – and a Rant”
For the two of you out there who use Opera, I just gave it a cursory test :)
It seems to work fine, the only weird thing is that the Google Maps markers seem to appear a little to the right and down of where you think you are clicking. Once you realise this is happening it’s fairly easy to account for this when you click. Also, of course, as you can drag markers, you can always drop them roughly and then drag them to the exact position (this seems to work fine).
As a victim of the iPod “Halo Effect” (see previous post regarding Nano), I just had to go out and buy a shiny, jangly new Macbook. Ostensibly, of course, so I could test the Route Planner on Safari and figure out how it all works on a Mac. While there’s no way you are going to pry my Linux machine away from me, I am very pleased with the Apple.
So, how do you get it working with your Garmin Edge (or other) and the Route Planner? Continue reading “Getting it Working on a Mac”