Day of Silence, a Viddler Episode

So in this exciting installment of "Chris Asks Questions", we look at the OneDayBlogSilence, and specifically do events like this actually do any good.

Drunk Sumo-foo

My only regret is that this is windows only. The physics engine looks pretty amazing from the video's provided.

Hmm... Coda. Dont think so.

New app from Panic that certainly looks shiny, but I don't think it will be shiny enough to tear me away from my first love TextMate. Most of the user interface stuff looks hot, but I am not sure how much it actually will add to the user experience. I have downloaded it though and I am going to give it a try. Check out Coda.

Another one off the lifelist

So for all of my life, that I knew what cars were at least, I have wanted a Mercedes-Benz. And not just any Benz mind you; I wanted both a 1969 300 SE and a 1989 300 SE.

Well this weekend I have achieved half of my goal. Heather and I (mostly me) have been wanting to get a second car for me to drive around town, you know back and forwards to work, to church etc. With a recent windfall of money, I had $4,000 with which I could purchase a car for said purpose. I started doing some hunting for late model, high mileage cars that would fit my budget and needs. Through this search I located an impeccably maintained 1989 300 SE in Louisville, KY around 100 miles from where I currently live. On saturday we drove into town, dropped off the boy at one of his grandparents, and went to do some shopping. I checked out a 94 BMW 500 i as well as the 89 300 SE (both within my price range) but settled on the Benz. The car is in a word, beautiful.

There are some photos over at Flickr, and there will soon be a section of this website dedicated to my Benz and all the hacking and modding I do to it. Oh, you didn't think I was going to leave it as is did you?

Run software update

If you haven't heard, Apple released 25 patches today for various holes in their products. Update people.

Ginormous SSD Drives

Both ginormous in price, as well as storage. I would love to have a 256 gig SSD to play with. Anyone want to give me one? I will write a nice review! Engadget has the details.

Recovering your resolution

So, I wrote about my fledgling media center set up before, and I ranted about the AppleTV saying I would just get a Mac Mini and call it a day.

Well that day has been called. I picked up a low end mini this week, and set it up last night. When I fired up the mini, things went bad. Real bad. It seems that the mini wanted my LCD HDTV to run at an altogether silly resolution, interlaced no less, and my TV said.. "uh, no".

The Problem

So I was stuck with a TV that said "Invalid Mode" and no second monitor to hook to the mini to reset the resolution to something more manageable. What to do? Well the first thing was obviously to break out the powerbook and ask the great oracle of goog what to do. There were many answers offered up by the all seeing goog, but none worked for me. It was time for a less conventional approach.

The Solution

It occurred to me that navigating around the Mac-OS was pretty easy with the wealth of keyboard commands at my disposal. If I could just settle upon the correct sequence I could reset the resolution on the mini, without actually seeing anything. I had my handy lappy right there, so why not give it a shot. What I came up with is a fool proof way to reset the resolution without having to reboot the machine, or actually see the UI. Here's what I did:

1. Do yourself a favor and hit enter. Depending on the circumstances, there might be a dialog that says your resolution is out of range of the attached monitor.
2. Next hit apple + spacebar. This will call up Spotlight and give focus to the search area.
3. Type in displays, wait 5 seconds and then hit the down arrow key once. This will highlight the search result you want. Hit enter.
4. Wait about 5 seconds, and then hit tab. When the displays pref pane loads the search box will have focus, hitting tab will move focus to the resolutions list.
5. Now hit the up arrow and wait for around 5 seconds. Keep doing this until you hit a resolution that your monitor/tv can handle.

That's all there is to it. Within 5 minutes I had a working resolution, and I was setting up the mini as my media-center. I hope this will help other people who might run into a similar problem.

Iron Man Cometh

The first images of the Mach 1 suit have hit the web-waves. I am pretty happy with what they are doing so far. I am a casual fan of Iron Man, not a fanatic but if this is what we have waiting for us, I am excited.

Viddler 2.0

Just when you thought it couldn't get any hotter, they pull out download of your video's, RSS feeds and video commenting on existing videos. Be still my beating heart.

Quick Posts

Inline asides, whatever you want to call them, prompted by Kristin enabling them on her site, this is how you do it with Habari.

There are a couple of things to look at before we get into the actual code:

1. Habari doesn't use categories like WP or MT, we use tags.
2. We need to choose a tag that will identify our inline asides.
3. The Habari loop is much simpler than what you are used to from something like WP.

Okay, with that out of the way, let talk through what we are going to do to achieve the quickie/inline asides that you see on this site.

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