I’ve been using Desktop Manager as my virtual desktop pager/manager on Mac OS X. Problem is that it doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore (last update May ‘05) and is a PowerPC binary.
I just found Virtue last night and it’s based on Desktop Manager but is maintained, Universal binaries, and has a couple other great whiz bang features like the sticky pager by the mouse:
Now I’ve only got 2 more apps to replace from PowerPC to Universal/Intel. Ecto seems to be slow on the uptake which is surprising, and Flip4Mac which is supported by Microsoft for WMV codecs.. not surprising. Update: Antonio posted a comment saying that microsoft doesn’t support Flip4Mac and that they are close to completing their universal binary version.
Computers, Mac OS X
I started using Gizmo Project to do voice over IP phone calls with Chris in Mississippi. It was a breeze to get setup and it detected my USB Plantronics headset in Mac OS X tiger effortlessly. The only issue seamed to be that Chris’ default input volumes were a bit low and we had to play around a bit to get them set to a level where I could hear him well enough.
The quality was fantastic. Easily better than cell phones and probably as good or better than a land line in my opinion.
The next thing I want to figure out is a good way to have free conference calling with 20+ people without any silly time limits or fee’s to pay. Even if it means running my own VOIP conference server software.
FreeConferenceCall.com is one solution, but limits you to 10 and has time limitations.
I’ll keep looking into it until I find something I like. I’ll post back here when I do.
General
So my xbox 360 is pretty much toast. I called microsoft a few weeks ago and their tech support was helpful and shipped me a purolator box to ship it back to them in.
What was funny is that when I went to purolator to pick up the box which was just a plain brown box the purolator service agent asked me “Did you bring you xbox with you?” and then it occured to me that this must happen often since he knew by the box shape and size that it was for a defective 360. So I asked him how often this happens and it sounds like it’s very frequent. In fact one lady apparently has brought her’s in 3 times already.
General
Well, it was about time that I retired my aging and non-maintained palbum script which I wrote about 5 years ago. Heather and I have about 9000 photos in over 100 albums so it took the whole weekend to move them over into Gallery.
Gallery is pretty excellent though. I’d love to see some better iPhoto synchronization where I can have photo albums synced into iPhoto, not just out of iPhoto.
Anyways, if you want to check it out, you can get it at the old link (see ‘pictures’ on the right). The login and password are the same as they use to be. Send me an email if you want access and don’t have the password.
General
I got my macbook pro on tuesday this week and finally have it to the point where I’m happy with it. So far the intel transition seems great with only two problems.
- The Macbook Pro is very hot. So hot in fact that you can’t really use it like a laptop if you’re running an average of 50% or more of CPU. Because the entire case is metal it is pretty much hot all over.
- No good virtual machine technologies available yet. The best out there is Q . It is based on QEMU and it is somewhat ported to universal binaries. I say somewhat because it can’t install yet. Additionally, as far as I can tell, if you’re using Mac OS X tiger then you can’t install any tun/tap drivers to give you guest machines a real internet connection. I get horrible network performance even connecting to the host PC and with QNX 6.3.0 I have to run in ISA mode because the PCI emulation is kinda buggy. All in all I make it sound not that good, but it has logs of potential. Soon kqemu will likely be ported to tiger giving near native performance, and I’m sure that someone will get tun/tap working on tiger soon. Hopefully Mike Kronenberg of Q will be able to integrate it all into Q as a good app. kqemu is based on a proprietary no redistribution license so that may be asking for too much.
There are some things I love about this laptop.
The built-in iSight is a great idea. Hopefully at some point soon I’ll be able to get some other friends with cameras also so we can play with some video conferencing. Things like SubEthaEdit which allows people to collaboratively work on a file at the same time are very evolutionary. Heather and I did have some fun with it though today:
An no, my mouth really isn’t that big 
I really like the keyboard on the macbook pro. Very easy to use and type with. The built in backlight on the keyboard is great idea too.
Other than that, it’s pretty much just like my iBook G4 800MHz, but faster, hotter, bigger, and with more storage.
As usual, the key apps I’m using are:
Quicksilver: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/. (free, Universal Binary)
Adium X: http://www.adiumx.com/ (free, Universal Binary)
SSH Tunnel Manager: http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/stm/ (free, PPC Binary, but the source is there and I recompiled for intel)
DivX for quicktime: http://labs.divx.com/node/76 (free/trial, Intel binary)
VLC: http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/macosx-intel/ (free, intel binary betas)
New Apps I’m playing with:
ecto: http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/ (PPC Binary, not free) Hopefully I’ll blog more frequently with the added convenience.
General
