Another lame Microsoft video..
I think Microsoft is having a real crisis with their advertising team. I saw another one promoting Microsoft PDC…. uh…. I can’t really explain it. Go and watch the video.
Incredible photos
I strongly suggest to check out James Nachtwey’s photography. Haunting…
MP3 vs AAC vs FLAC vs CD
One of the most technical read about the music format on the web today. It also brings up the question of how well you can hear the difference between MP3, AAC, FLAC and CD.
Link.
New Photo - Brighton Pier
Link.
A Memo Found In The Street of Washington D.C
New Photo
Short Words Poetry @ craigbutcher.net
(fixed the link… never do things when you’re triple tired!)
Muxtape - The explanation
“On the contrary, every artist I heard from was a fan of the site and excited about its possibilities.”
Read it all about it over at Muxtape.
The Day There Was No News
Haunting. (flickr video)
Boot Camp Assistant Says No and How I Managed To Make It Say Yes.
I would like to explain what went on about why Boot Camp Assistant refused to create a partition for me so I can install Windows XP and the new online game Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning. I am using a white Intel iMac from 2006 (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16ghz, 2gb ram, 250gb hard drive, ATI X1600 256mb RAM graphic card) and Mac OS X Leopard has been installed for 11 months or thereabout so a lot of data came and went.
It started off so innocently when I loaded Boot Camp Assistant, set a partition and then waited for it to do the business (it’s business time!). About 5 minutes later, the application decided to roll out the window saying:
What the? Back up, restore my information and try again? This is like getting up in the morning and having to be denied not to have a cup of tea (milk and sugar thank you if anyone is offering) at the first instance. I did some research online and I have found 2 brilliant applications that should at least been in Mac OS X installation DVD.
What are the brilliant applications that has aided me to get Boot Camp to work?
Disk Inventory X
As from Disk Inventory X website:
“Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called “treemaps”.
If you’ve ever wondered where all your disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X will help you to answer this question.”
Here is a screenshot example of what Disk Inventory X does:
My Aperture library (single file) was taking up at least 25GB of space, 20GB went to VMware virtual machine of Windows XP and 40gb was gobbled up by iTunes. The rest was system files, developers tools and so forth. With this in mind, I decided it was time to do some major housekeeping by shifting all my iTunes music to the external drive (link), deleting VMware virtual Windows XP as VMware will use the Boot Camp Partition and minor other files to be shifted to the external drive. De-cluttering is great fun and I suggest everyone to do it for themselves.
(How did I move iTunes library to the external hard drive within ease? Check out Apple’s excellent moving guide)
Now, I was all set and it was back into Boot Camp Assistant to try again. Things was promising until…
Definitely no change… With more researching, Boot Camp Assistant doesn’t like to handle large files to shift around and that was Aperture Library (25GB). Now *that* went onto my external drive and once again, Boot Camp Assistant says… no. I was hugely perplexed at this point and researched over at Google and it appears that my files could be fragged all over the file system. If you think of a circle, now ’smash’ that circle up and you have bits all over the place. That was my poor file system! How am I going to fix this mess? No fear! We just need…
iDefrag, the missing Mac OS X utility
iDefrag is a great application to have and basically it defrags your file system. That’s it! Word to the wise about what Apple stated from their support article that “… you might benefit from defragmentation”. Let’s ignore that aside because iDefrag actually works. It requires you to make a CD boot image which CDmaker will make for you and you boot to the CD to start using iDefrag.
When booted to the CD, I have set iDefrag to ‘optimized’ the hard drive and let it do it job of defragging the filesystem. This took around 2 hours or so due to the files scattered throughout the file system. Was the wait worth it?
It is. It is like having a new mac all over again!
With all this working perfectly, Boot Camp Assistant decided to say:
Yes.
Bingo!
Heroes Season 3 - First episode
It’s that good.
That is all!
BBC iPlayer subtitles sucks.
The BBC iPlayer is a brilliant software that allows you to catch up on TV shows that you have missed or you just want to see it once again. The history about the server can be found here.
I love it when subtitles are actually loaded with the TV shows.
I have complained numerous times to the BBC about their subtitling issues and I get a half baked excuse from them saying:
Dear Craig
Thank you for contacting BBC iPlayer support team.
I understand you have questions regarding the availability of subtitles for some of the more popular BBC programmes.
I’m afraid that the technical problems you were informed of are ongoing. We are aware of the issue and are currently working on reinstating subtitles for all programmes that previously had this option.
I appreciate that this must be very frustrating and we fully apologise for any inconvenience caused in the interim.
Once again thank you for contacting BBC iPlayer. If you have any further problems or enquires please do not hesitate to contact our team.
Regards
What now? Waiting isn’t an option because there is a 7 days limit on those shows.
After all, how hard can it be? (Clarkson says this on Top Gear when it comes to challenges 
)
Heroes Season 3
Check out the villians!
They are broadcasting the show on 22nd September in the US, where the UK will show it on 25th September. How about that?!
(PS. Check out Fringe. It is a cross between X-Files and LOST and J.J Abrams produced this.)
UK CCTV Nation
Atari Modern Classic
Amusing to see the modern games converted to the Atari’s classic box art.
Apple iPod Nano
I have read the following article about the supposely iPod Nano 4/8gb to be launched where Microsoft bumped up their Zune… Zune… small or something they call it to 8/16gb.
If Microsoft didn’t bump up their Zune’s storage then we could still be using 4/8gb, which is pathetically small nowadays and Apple would have been criticized for not updating the storage range. 16gb is where it is at!
That wasn’t a close call for the company, it’s a frickin’ wake up call.
On a side note…
How about boosting those graphic cards in those iMacs? Ditch ATi and switch to Nvidia so they will make sweet starter gaming machines? Crossover Gaming would really love this (fantastic product by the way which I should write up a review on soon). What about the MacBook range? Those Intel graphic chip aren’t decent than I thought, surely you can stick Nvidia graphic chipset on those as well? Come on, play nicely!
App Store Banning
This got my attention today and nobody knows the secret rules that Apple dishes out at all.
It reminds me of Mornington Crescent game where rules are unexplained, complicated, debatable and among other things (trying to win the game would be a miracle).
We should form a game similar to “Mornington Crescent”. I wonder if anyone should do this? And, of course, we don’t know what the rules are at Apple so we just have to make it up along the way.
Anyone up for this?
New Photo
Hack your way out of a photography block
Having a creative block is perhaps a good thing because it provokes different ways to get out of it. Here are my suggestions:
- Clean your camera, lens and equipment. It’s therapeutic.
- Get a pen and paper, write down what you like to shoot.
- Got any photography books? Go through them , don’t analyse it. Just look at what will inspire you. How about reading “Ways Of Seeing” By John Berger?
- Go through your photo collection, see what inspires you. Be positive!
- Work on a title/project. Make one up and do a photo to match it. We normally take photos and then assign a title to it. Try it the other way round!
- Want a challenge? If you have got digital, restrict yourself to take 36 photos and don’t delete your photos. This will slow you down to compose the photos, timing it correctly, etc. Digital does not in a way make your life easier as you end up with too many photos.
- Check out flickr, fotolog or similar websites to try and get inspiration.
- Check out flickr explore pages or interestingness for ideas.
- Keep it simple stupid
If that all fails, get out there and shoot!