MAMA's Techno-Geek Thread

[GadgetGav]

Here's an odd thing...
I charged my MacBook Pro the other day and thought it was about time to 'condition' the battery by using it off AC and letting it run down. When I unplugged the AC, the time remaining indicator said 'calculating' for a while and then read '42:42'... Now, I'm pretty sure there's no laptop battery made that can last nearly 43 hours, so was it the ultimate answer to the ultimate question : "how long will my battery last?"
After a while (I can't remember if I clicked on it, I think I did) it reverted back to a more normal figure. Do you think it was coincidence, or Apple engineers having a laugh when it can't work out a real number..?

[Pamlico]

Did you get the "nucluar " battery option?

[jwardell]

It was simply giving you the answer to Life.

[GBMINI]

Life,
Don't Talk To Me About Life

[jwardell]

I just kicked the whole kite thing into gear, hopefully not too late. Gave up on finding a cheap pre-made timer. Researched some easy 555 circuits and realized it will quickly get too complex, and my mcu experience tells me a simple microcontroller and a few lines of code will do all I need (the same way that Ian thinks). So I just ordered some pic 10f200's and solid state relays from digikey. Hopefully they'll get here in time. In the meantime I need to *HOPE* that I can find my programmer and it works inside parallels. Considering the software couldn't even handle a dual-processor PC back in the day, I'm a little worried, but I need to at least try.

[benzamg]

If you need an old PC .. I've got a few circa 199x machines laying around.. :P

[snid]

Well, I've exceeded my bandwidth limit on my .mac homepage. 5GB since the begining of the month, and I only get 5GB for each two weeks. Of course, .mac doesn't provide a way to find out which page(s) are causing the most traffic. I guess with my Lime Rock video being 47MB and that page having 131 views since 5/21, enough of those views might fall into this week to eat up a good chunk of 5GB.

I guess I should continue moving my videos to google video.

[jwardell]

Blah google and even worse youtube have such horrible quality. They're great for people who don't know what they're doing.

Not that I could imagine hitting the bandwidth limit I have on site5, but it's nice to know I have 1&1 with a limit 10x that too. 5GB is a lot, my old host of a year ago I had 2gb a month and never used more than 200MB. When my aquapel video hit autoblog, I was doing 2 gigs a day, but that's no problem with my site5 account. (when the server is up, anyway)

[snid]

Quote: Originally Posted by jwardell

Blah google and even worse youtube have such horrible quality. They're great for people who don't know what they're doing.

Wah! Josh is being mean!

Have you downloaded any of the videos from google video and saved them locally? Recently? Really recently, like yesterday or today? For their Google Video Player, not the mp4 format that you get when you download for iPod or PSP?

They just released the Google Video Player stand alone app for MacOS a few days ago, and I thought the quality of the video you get using that was pretty darned good.

Of course, I'm sure Josh won't like having to use a proprietary video format, so why do I bother?

[jwardell]

I was just about to point that out.

[Aqualung]

hey Josh, my son (heading to college) really wants a Mac, as he's a musician and wants GarageBand, etc. Like I've seen above, I'll probably configure the white MacBook 2GHz and save $$ for some add'l RAM...(budget won't allow the MB Pro).

a) what min RAM do you recommend, 1GB? or more? I was going to go to Crucial and get it there.
b) what's the min HD, 100GB?

Also, I didn't realize until lately that the MacBook's video RAM uses shared memory out of the main bank, not dedicated. What's your take on the performance impact? Only for heavy gamers (which he's not, but could evolve to) or is there an impact on other apps as well? Guess it impacts the answer to a) above.

[Pamlico]

There are a couple of offers in place right now at the Apple store near us. You can get a "free" (actually mail in rebates) printer and IPod Nano when you purchase a MacBook.

[GadgetGav]

Check out datamem.com for memory too. I always use them and they have great service and prices. With any computer, the more RAM you can put in, the better it'll run so put in as much as you can afford. I don't know exactly how the shared memory works but I think the video takes a proportion up to its maximum. If you get into video or RAW format digital photos, hard disk space will go quickly, but it's pretty cheap to get external storage these days. I just got a Sony HD camcorder and HDV records at 24Mbit / second..! That eats disk space in a hurry!!!

[m2smith]

Quote: Originally Posted by GadgetGav

I just got a Sony HD camcorder

Cool!

[GadgetGav]

Yeah, very cool. But I'm sending it back... for a better model..! I thought I'd researched the HC1 and the A1 and concluded they were basically the same camera, the A1 having a few more 'pro' features that I probably didn't need... Turns out, if I want to take it underwater (and one day I will) the A1 has one big feature that I need - an assignable button. What is the flash button on the HC1 becomes a software settable button on the A1 allowing you to do white balance when the camera is in a housing. The HC1 can do white balance (so it looks the same on the spec sheet) but it's accessed through the touch screen LCD, which you can't get to in a housing..!
Still, the A1 comes with an external mic which I would have ended up buying and there's a $500 rebate on it, so really, it's not that much more... right..??