Naquada

Its that time of year again, the 36th International Magic Convention and Close Up Competition. What was always known as ‘Rons Day’ is an event that I’ve not been to for many years. When I last went it was in a small theatre off Tottenham court road in london, as we spent the evening gala show sat on trestle tables that quite often collapsed on us.

In fact The International Magic Convention is as old as I am, the first one being held back in 1972, and now hosts the International Magic Close Up Competition, and a host of well known stars of magic.

This years convention looks to be a great line up again, Noel Britten, Mahka Tendo, Guy Hollingworth, Voronin, Dana Daniels, Juan Ordeix, Jade, Francis Menotti, Svetlana, Mr Daba, Anthony Owen, Just Alan (one of the worlds leading storytelling Magicians in his UK debut), Al Schneider, Darwin Ortiz, and James Long, as well as the dealers!!

International like other magic events really is an all weekend event, Given on the Friday the first event doesn’t start until 7pm, it does mean a stay away from home. The convention opens with Guy Hollingworth presenting his one man show “The Expert at the Card Table”, the 75 minute show has only previously be seen at limited performances at International festivals.

I’m actually going to be staying just at the end of the road from The Shaw Theatre, and the hotel should I’m told have wireless internet in the rooms, so I’m hopefully going to be blogging off and on during the weekend, along with the likes of JJ who’ll hopefully be covering breakfast’s in minute detail.

Of course if you see no updates during the weekend, then wireless failed and updates will come on Monday when I get back..

Till then….

InternationalMagic, Magic, convention

According to the How Addicted to Apple Are You? test I was pointed at today by Luis over on twitter..

I’m 90% addicted to Apple..

Which to be honest isn’t going to be a big surprise to anyone that knows me.. It’s not earth shattering news really..

Although I guess I did feel slightly embarrassed by answering Yes to ‘do you get a warm and fuzzy feeling when you see someone in a coffee shop using a mac’ and also having to admit that I really did stick my Apple stickers (given I have many macs that came with such stickers) to stuff… ..like a thinkpad.

Yesterday was my birthday, and Michelle got me tickets to see Monty Pythons Spamalot at the palace theatre in London.

I’ve always loved Python humor, and remember watching The holy Grail in my youth.
Spamalot itself is a comedic musical lovingly ripped off from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Just like the film, it is a highly irreverent parody of the legend of King Arthur, but differs from the film in many ways, especially its parodies of Broadway theatre, no shows as show without a Jew, and some smatterings of other Python shows (Life of Brian).
We went round Covent Garden (after a quite geek trip to the Apple Store) and stopped in at the Papegenore Restaurant in wellington street, It’s striking gold façade opens into an interior with colourful stage props, flamboyant artwork, gilt furniture and heavy drapes. Opera music and comfy sofas filled the inside, and it reminded us very much of the inside of the Moulin Rouge.

Given it was my birthday we sat with a glass of champagne each, and did a bit of people watching.

We then went to eat dinner at The Forge restaurant, just off covent garden, and the food was juts amazing. With more champagne and wine we were feeling a little pickled as we left to head to the theatre. That probably explained our slight issue with actually finding the theatre, but we managed to get there with a few minutes to spare!!

The show was great, and we had great seats with a fantastic view of the stage. The Palace theatre itself is quite small, but thats often the best place to see a show. The amazing little things you never see, but when you sit in your seat at the interval and look up, you’ll see the ornate carvings and decorations; the arches hiding the flyloft, and other parts of the theatre normally hidden from view. If you like Holy Grail you will of course love spamalot, and you’ll even get a sing-a-long at the end.
I also love stars, and myself and Michelle have spent hours looking up at the sky, especially when we were in Ireland, and Michelle got me a projector that displays the night sky, the star and their names onto the ceiling. In the dark, it looks amazing, although a bit too difficult to photograph.. Again, an amazing birthday, spent with the woman I love.. Thank you sweetheart.. x

The issue of Leopards confusing, or untidy stacks has been a questions thats ranged for some time, as I pointed out over on Andy Pipers blog; The stack itself is just a mishmash of all the icons in that folder pile don top of each other, meaning that sometimes they got a bit confusing by either looking all the same (you’d have an application icon in the download and say the application stack, or it just wasn’t clear from a first look what was what.

I mentioned on Andy’s blog about trying to trick finder into showing the last icon at the front, and I’d played a bit with using touch from terminal to fix a date in the future to bring the icon to the front. However I found a great post on XD’s Blog that discusses a japanese post about tidying them up.

The basics are, you place semi-transparent icons into the folder that you’re putting onto the dock as a stack, in my case I have Documents, Applications, and Downloads

The resulting new and improved stacks on my system now look like this;

The actual physicals of how to do this are fairly simple and for the smart amongst you.. involved terminal, touch, and a bit of cut and paste..

Get the zip archive of the icons from optica optima here unzip them to someplace (thanks martin, I’ve linked to the other site that seems now to have a number of different styles), you’ll find it contains about 20 odd icons for folders like applications, accounts, downloads etc, each icon attached to a directory. Copy the correct directory into the other directory that you want to use in your dock stack.For instance if I was going to update my downloads stack, I’d copy the Downloads folder from the zipfile into my download folder in my user account.We now need to fire up Terminal and do a bit of touching here and there.. You’ll need to replace the ” Downloads “ name in the below for each of the folders you want correctly stackable in your dock, keeping in mind that the directories in the zipfile have a leading and trailing space on their name.

cd ~/Downloads

touch -mt 202001010101.01 ” Downloads “

This will change the date modified of the icon to 1st January, 2020. Now just make sure your stack is sorting by date modified (ctrl-click or right-click the stack and Sort by..) Repeat for other stacks you have and there you go, a nice and elegant solution to the stack icon issue.

Apple, Dock, Icons, Leopard, Stacks

I decided to go an have a play with an iPhone today, mainly because though all the hype and discussions, I’ve yet to find any information on exactly how fast the device is to browse over EDGE or even if the device supports GRPS, and again, how fast that is for heavy applications like GoogleMaps..

The local Carphone warehouse is never busy (and I doubt it was busy last night either with the launch), so I decided to head in and check them out. The store had a separate desk with six iPhones very securely locked to the table. They were physically working units, which was good to find (none of these dummy cases!) so I started to play..

The units were initially logged onto the carphone warehouse access point, so I had a play on the device with that to judge speeds (given I have no idea what speed their wifi was running at, or the signal strength). The performance was pretty good, as you’d expect. Googlemaps worked well, with the satellite and normal views coming up very quickly. I then tested some websites I’d expect to use should i get a device, my own blog, which came up and showed the full web view quickly. It was very odd to see, given that on most mobile devices I’m used to that cripple view that comes from browsing with your phone, not so here.. Safari showed up a lovely full preview of the site that I could then use the finger pinch to zoom in on. After a little playing I found out how to make safari’s URL bar vanish to give me a clearer view of the site. I was however very disappointed with the orientation sensing. The device should swap from portrait to landscape when your turn the device, but it seems the device must be upright for it to notice this 100%, having the device on a slight slant seemed to confuse this particular unit.

I then moved onto some other sites, mainly forum based sites that I normally browse on a daily basis, The Magic Woods for instance, the site came up very quickly and again, the view of the site was wonderful in full web view, and pinching to zoom in and out was now second nature. I also have Flickr a whirl, and was surprised to see how well it performed, any flash based stuff didn’t however, so that counts out a lot of the nice part of the site, such as the slide show, and although I didnt log in to check, the organiser, and so on. I then remembered that I was still working on the Wifi connection. So I went back into preferences and turned off wifi (noticing also the airplane mode for ipod only access).

It’s been a pondering point for a few weeks on if the device supported GRPS, a lots been said about EDGE and O2 rolling out more, you can even now get EDGE at Backerloo underground on the platform! But nothings been mentioned about the device falling back to GPRS is EDGE and Wifi isn’t available.

An iPhone running under GPRS seemed to be fairly usable. the previous websites and forums worked fine, although viewing photos in Flickr over GPRS seemed to be a lot slower understandably. I also found it difficult to access the BA online check-in service over GPRS, on wifi it seemed fine, however I’d not checked the section where you can re-choose your seats (I have a sneaking suspicion that this uses flash, and hence wont work on the iPhone). Even googlemaps on GRPS seemed usable, it certainly didn’t fire up as quickly as on Wifi, but it was still very usable. Why Apple has decided not to support flash is beyond me, with so many web 2.0 sites out there now, and with so many sites relying on some sort of flash support, it seems a bit odd..

I was also assuming this was using GPRS rather than EDGE, as my over phone, my D900i was only showing GRPS and not EDGE support in the same location, So on the whole.. the experience was pleasant, I wouldn’t say it was earth shattering, but the device is nice, but it’s still a question as to if its that nice?

The major drawbacks are O2’s tariffs and restrictions, the fair use seems to be a bit cloudy, O2’s official statement says;

Your O2 tariff for iPhone allows you unlimited use of O2 UK’s Edge / GPRS networks and The Cloud’s UK Wireless LAN network, for personal internet use, email and Visual Voicemail (VVM) on your iPhone only. All usage must be for your private, personal and non-commercial purposes.

You may not use your SIM Card in any other device, or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio / video content, enable P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other O2 customers.

If O2 reasonably suspect you are not acting in accordance with this policy O2 reserves the right to impose further charges or disconnect your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first.

There is no incentive to upgrade for existing O2 customers (except that if you brought your phone and contract before 18th September 2007 you can swap your contract over without having to pay the remaining months of your contract (or your get out clause), although the wording was a bit confusing and used to say ‘you can swap your contract to an iPhone‘, after my long conversation with their marketing department, it seems to have now changed to ‘You can switch to an O2 tariff for iPhone without paying any remaining monthly charges on your existing contract.‘ all other existing O2 customers need to pay a £219 transfer fee!! O2 pay and Go and Simplicity customers also don’t need to pay the transfer fee.

If you exit the contract or don’t renew, your iPhone stops working full stop, you don’t just lose phone capabilities, you loose the lot. Lastly possibly the most concerning point for me is the fact that the data (wifi and GRPS/EDGE) included in your package (your unlimited usage) only extends to the UK, and given that a lot of the features on the iPhone use data (such as visual voicemail) this could cause you to rack up a tidy sum if you are abroad!! In fact even on O2’s site it states ‘You may wish to turn some of these services off before you travel, or be fully aware of the charges that you are likely to incur.’ With Apples world wide presence and the phones being so tightly linked to particular operators, it seems an oversight that Apple didn’t negotiate data to include roaming

There is also no option for free weekends, or free long weekends or anything other than the three standard packages.

Samsung announcing their new Solid State Drives in 1.8 (ipod-ish) and 2.5 (laptop) inch sizes with capacity up to 64Gb means the possibility of a 60gig iPhone might not be a far off as people think.. Turning the tables on the fact that the iPhone isn’t big enough to really hold your entire music collection..

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone

It’s been a busy week, the brand new 24 inch iMac 2.8ghz I ordered last week actually arrived a few days early, it should have been here next wednesday, but a large brown box was waiting for me yesterday at home. I’d also got hold of a copy of Leopard through Apples up-todate program, and I was quite surprised to find that they had dropped a CPU drop-in upgrade into the iMac box, which it turns out is a full DVD that is bootable, as opposed to the upgrade only DVD you get through apple up-todate.

I’d already upgraded the G5 powerpc mac, doing an in place upgrade as opposed to a fresh install, as well as doing the same for the Mini Mac, and Macbook, but I decided to do a fresh wipe and install on the new iMac after having upgraded the new iMac with the DVD initially. The speed difference seems to be huge, and I’m not sure why, but the increase in speed between an upgraded system on the iMac and a fresh install was very much noticeable.

Although I’m now 100% intel on all macs, I was very pleased to notice that the Front Row application, for running music, DVD’s, photos and movies is now available to all macs, Intel, PPC, with or without an apple remote. The applications grown up and got itself its own little .app and icon. Apple have also decided to lift out the AppleTV backrow application and make that the standard for all systems.

Backrow or FrontRow depending on how you want to look at it is a major change to the old Front Row version 1.x, firstly it’s completely independent of iTunes and iPhoto, there are good and bad points of this. Firstly Front Row can do more, and doesn’t need iTunes or iPhoto running. Unfortunately because of it’s independence from those applications, it means that if you’re playing music in iTunes and enter Front Row, the music stops, and visa versa. However there are major plus points on some of the functionality gained from AppleTV, namely in the ability to handle VIDEO_TS folders directly. On a DVD disc, DVD movie files are stored in the VIDEO_TS folder (which if your interested stands for Video title Set). There is also an AUDIO_TS folder, this is where DVD-Audio would be stored, but usually the folder is empty. If you want to pull your DVD off onto your mac you can normally use applications like Mac The Ripper to extract a VIDEO_TS folder of your required content (full DVD or just selected features) or just copy the entire DVD onto the mac.

I keep a number of DVD’s on my main mac using this method, and play them from the DVD player in OSX, I’d tried a number of options for being able to browse and play these from downstairs on the mini mac, and having a nice interface on the main mac for playing them. None of these really seemed to work successfully. However, on the new Front Row the movies menu allows access to a further submenu of Movies Folder, this looks at your movies folder on the source mac, any folders containing VIDEO_TS folders show up as DVD’s on which selecting them throws up the DVD menu and allows playing of the DVD as if it was inserted into the DVD drive of the machine.

If like me you don’t want to keep all your DVD’s in your movies folder you can place and alias in there to point to where your DVD’s are held. Mine contains an alias link off to my terabyte external USB drive. I thought about posting a tutorial on this, but it’s pretty straight forward, although it’s not mentioned in the Apple documentation as far as I can see about Front Rows ability to play VIDEO_TS folders directly.

Down sides with Leopard seems to be the large number of applications that seem not to behave that well with the new OS. So far a number of application I work with daily have caused issues. Adobe Photoshop CSx seems to have issues, I’ve never seen the point in giving adobe lots of money for upgrades, so I’ve been sat on Photoshop CS for a number of years, but Adobes statement on supported application under Leopard lists CS, CS2 and CS3 as being incompatible, with CS3 being your best bet. I did manage to get Photoshop CS working by installing a trial, and then removing it. I’m guessing it laid down some files over CS that got it working reasonably well.

Roxio’s titanium toast 7 was next to fail, although it started up, it refused to burn DVD’s, again the solution was fiddle a bit and downgrade from version 7.12 to 7.0.1, which allowed burning to work again. Twittr 2.25 also seems a bit unstable, with it refusing to quit on system shutdown, and crashing on OSX startup (although a relaunch of twittr works fine). My Wacom tablet needed a upgrade of the driver to a specific 10.4+ version and a few other applications just needed a refresh.

To be honest most of the work of moving to the new iMac was taken care of by the migration assistant (which for people who want to wipe and reinstall leopard works with a time machine backup) connecting the two machine via firewire and running the migration assistant successfully moved over 64gig of applications and user information straight over to the new iMac, in less than 2 hours the whole machine was re-setup just like the old machine, but with better hardware..

I’ll definitely be posting separately about the new iMac, but I have to admit I did do the standard unboxing photo’s last night

Technorati Tags: front row, iMac, leopard, mac, migration assistant, video_ts