Here at my loft, which we lovingly refer to as The Concrete Bunker, or just Bunker for short, I have a Mac Mini attached to our 46″ LCD TV via a DVI to HDMI cable.
The Mini does a fair amount of work for us, playing music during dinner parties, pulling movies off of the hackintosh in the music studio (which has a few terabytes of space on it), showing photos from the photo library, and giving us Internet access whenever we want from the big room.
The real problem is controlling this beast. A living room area offers different modalities of use than a laptop or computer desk. You want a keyboard, but you don’t have room for it. I want a mouse, but there’s no good place for mousing on the cushy velvet couches here.
Also, finding a 1/4″ mouse pointer on 46″ of space is a real pain. It’s like a small gnat on the big glowy window into the world. The mouse doesn’t move well either.
My solution right now is to use ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) on my laptop and the mini. My Macbook becomes my remote control for the TV, and once the movie is playing, I can fold up the laptop and stuff it down the side of the couch, or on the ottoman.
For the times that I need to use the mouse on the TV itself, I rely on two great tools.
To find the pointer, I use Mouse Locator. I configure this so that Control-Space activates a big green cross-hair where the mouse is.
Secondly, go into the control panel on the mini and enable selective zooming in Universal Access. This is counterintuitive! Set Zoom to off, click the Options… button, and enable “Use Scroll Wheel with modifier keys to zoom”. Set it on, and set it to the Control key.
Now, The Control key becomes your magic “Oh shit! Where am I ?” key.
If you need to see the screen, you can hold down control, spin the scroll wheel, and zoom into the point where the mouse pointer is. What a difference this makes in typing into small text boxes.
Posted by John Adams on November 9th, 2008
What a night Tuesday was - Obama won. Twitter Stayed up. OMG!
I’m in the lower left of this photo. It’s not the best, but it’s representative of our collective emotion at Twitter HQ on that historic night!
Image Courtesy of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid.
The rest of the photos and Scott’s article Lives here …
Posted by John Adams on November 4th, 2008
It goes without saying that tomorrow is one of the most important days in our country’s history. When you go to the polls, do everything you can to ensure that your vote is counted.
If you’re in California, vote No On 8. It brings hate crime directly into the state’s constitution.
In San Francisco, vote Yes on K. Sex workers have rights and need protections too.
Oh yeah, and VOTE OBAMA!
When you go to vote:
* Make sure you have proper ID
* Make sure you’re a registered voter
* Study a sample ballot, and when you make your marks on that ballot, mark clearly (and punch ALL the way through if your district uses those types of ballots)
* Vote early! (A bit late, considering today is Monday the 3rd)
* Do not listen to rumors. Research your vote thoroughly. Weigh all the options.
Some extra tips from The Huffington Post:
To avoid long lines, take advantage of the early voting option if it is available in your state.
Take your identification with you: your voter’s registration card, your driver’s license or other official picture identification, and the other documents that you gathered together earlier.
Take your list of phone numbers (hot line and campaign headquarters) and some extra paper for taking notes, if necessary.
If you vote on Election Day, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, go in the middle of the morning or middle of the afternoon if you can to avoid long lines.
Take your cell phone and small camera. Document the vote!
Posted by John Adams on November 3rd, 2008
I have a couple of interesting tools for you to use to improve links and tags with when composing your next blog post!
The first one is from Tagaroo, which uses the (Reuters) Calais API to determine tags that match the content of your posting. Like Akismet, you need to sign up to use the Calais API. It’s worth it, though. Tagaroo is a huge time saver when it comes to the discovery of relevant tags.
Next, we have Kaalga, which does for relevant links what Tagaroo does for Tags. It matches links to post content and then lets you add them. Kaalga doesn’t require you to have an API key, though, which is nice. It’s buttons come up in Livejournal and Wordpress forms like any good Greasemonkey hack.
Both of these remind me of the work by San Francisco company Triggit, which performs similiar automated linking (by attaching items to the document’s DOM model), without the Triggit dependency. If you apply links from Kaalga, they stay in your document. With Triggit, if they go down, you lose the links as the Javascript monkey-patching becomes no longer available.
All of the links in this post were provided by Kaalga. I kept trying to get Tagaroo to work, but they wouldn’t send me an API key. After about ten attempts to get an API key, their site finally said ‘access denied.’
Lame.
Thanks to Andraz Tori’s presentation, “Beyond Who else bought what…” for discovering these tools.
Posted by John Adams on October 24th, 2008
Brady just posted links to numerous presentations from Web 2.0 Expo Europe. The LolCats have taken over presentations at most major web conferences these days. Nearly every presentation I looked at had a LOLCat on one of their slides.
Those that were lacking in an actual LOLCat slide featured lots of LOLSpeak. I know we’re discussing the web, but do we have to insert LOLSpeak everywhere? (of course we do. duh.)
I urge you to check out the slides. There were many informative presentations this year from our friends across in Berlin and abroad.
Posted by John Adams on October 24th, 2008
Here I am at work, at Twitter during the 1st Presidential debates, making sure things are running and keeping track of our metrics. Twitter and Current.tv worked together to provide a live election site and placement of user generated tweets on live video of the debate. Our team did wonderfully and Twitter stayed up through the whole event. I also have to commend current.tv - the animations of user tweets were beautiful and random for each comment. It really felt as if people were participating directly in the debate, even if communication was one-way.
Photo courtesy Scott Beale, Laughingsquid.com
Scott’s original blog posting appears right here, on the laughing squid blog.
Posted by John Adams on September 27th, 2008
If your site uses common AJAX libraries like jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, prototype, script.aculo.us, or dojo, the first thing that you’ll notice is that these libraries are quite large and impact page load time.
For a browser with a completely empty cache, the browser will load the requested library (and block all other requests during the load). For every site the user visits, the library is loaded again and again because the cache does not work across sites. Loading site1.com/jquery.js and site2.com/jquery.js takes the same amount of time.
Google’s come up with a clever solution to this problem. Instead of pointing to your local copy of whatever AJAX library you want, you point to Google’s copy using their AJAX Libraries API.
There’s many advantages to this. If the user has been to Gmail or any Google property recently, the library is already loaded in their browser, ready to execute. If the user goes to other sites which use the API, their cache is already primed and does not need to be loaded again.
We’ve just put this in place over at Twitter, and it should improve page load times dramatically.
Posted by John Adams on September 22nd, 2008
You’ve probably read my other article here on the Retina blog about building a Hackintosh, and recently I made the fatal mistake of killing my machine by attempting an upgrade of the working Kalyway 10.5.2 installation with Kalyway 10.5.3. It pushed the machine into a horrible state and all attempts at recovery have been lost.
I made a backup of the existing filesystem (25 minutes for about 70GB) and began an install of iAktos v4. I’m not going to tell you where to find the ISO of the DVD, but I’m sure you know where to look.
I’d like to add some notes to my previous post, which are mostly lessons learned from this installation.
1) Be smart. Keep the OS, your Applications, and Users partition apart.
When you install your apps, they’ll go someplace other than the boot disk, and when your hackintosh installation explodes you’ll be able to recover your files and apps easily (well, mostly… you’ll need backups of Preferences, the Library directories, and the Applications support folders to make them go.)
2) Understand that making one of these work is a slow, incremental process that takes a fair amount of patience.
3) Know the rules about the way Mac OS X handles extensions. kexts aren’t loaded until the extensions cache (/System/Library/Extensions.kext) and intermediate cache (/System/Library/Extensions.*) gets removed and rebuilt. removal has to happen prior to reboot. Rebuilding can happen on startup or shutdown, depending if you have a proper restart or not.
Now, Where was I? Right! What happened during the iAktos install?
I couldn’t get keyboard or mouse to work until I’d disabled USB Legacy Storage Support. We’ll need to re-enable this on reboot, post-installation, so that my USB hard disks work.
I ran Disk Utility, erased the partition (which was MBR) and reformatted as GPT. This is the “GUID partition table” option in the advanced section of Disk Utility’s Partition tab.
I installed SS3 compatible Kernels for my Gigabyte GA-965 and allowed the installation to finish.
On reboot, I had no network. I fixed it by using the instructions here. It’s a simple edit, removal of kext cache, and reboot.
Next, I had working sound via the Realtek 883 Sound card, but I reinstalled the driver anyway (oops). LINE IN is dead. Oh well.
So now we’ve got: USB disks, SATA disks, Sound, Network, Dual-head, but limited video (no QE or CI yet.) The fix for QE/CI is in my post here. Basically, you use 10.5.2 drivers on your 10.5.4 install.
I still need to resolve my IDE problems (AppleVIA?) but aside from that, we’re up! Hey, we didn’t need that CD-ROM, right?
Posted by John Adams on September 17th, 2008
My discoveries with the Wall of Sheep at Defcon 16 and it’s application to Twitter security were mentioned on the August 12, 2008 Data Security Podcast.
They called me one of the “good guys”. Heh!
You can listen to it here:
http://datasecurityblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/data-security-podcast-episode-13-aug-11-2008/
Posted by John Adams on August 19th, 2008
As someone who takes many photographs of random people in nightclubs and at events, I’m intrigued by the efforts of Columbia University’s team to write software that performs automated face replacement in digital photographs.
The software is able to replace faces within images from a database of candidate images drawn from the Internet and other sources, and does so automatically.
A movie of their efforts exists here…
Posted by John Adams on August 18th, 2008