I just got Byword and Marked from the Mac App Store because I’m totally addicted to writing in Markdown. I didn’t like the predefined fonts, but found a great typeface called Droid Sans that you can download here.
My blog has been down for almost a year. But now I’ve moved it to a new hosting service that looks good so far. The blogs theme is plain vanilla until I have the time to fix it up. But all old information should be here.
After buying my 32G 3G iPad I was a bit worried that it would become yet another victim of my impulsiveness. The first day with it, I was convinced that I’d get bored within the week and having it ending up on my mountain of cool but never used electronics. But during the weeks I’ve used it, it’s becoming indispensable. Checking out Twitter with Twitter for iPad. Reading news on FlipBoard (which has the most beautiful design of all news readers), answering mails, making plans with OmniFocus for iPad, chatting with IM+ and using the calendar (naturally synced to Google Calendar) for booking appointments. It’s now an essential part of my daily life. I’m also starting to hate the noise of my Macbook. With the iPad, it’s really quiet.
Here’s some additions to my .bash_profile for making life easier. I especially like that completion now ignores case. Makes navigating the file system so much faster. Givem a spin.
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups export HISTSIZE=10000 shopt -s histappend set completion-ignore-case on
I’ve had problems with my new iPad, where the screen would flicker when the brightness was set to a low setting. Very irritating. My first fear was hardware problems but after upgrading to the latest beta version of iOS, 4.2 beta 2 the problem is fixed! Yay! No need to replace my beloved iPad.
Update A bit too fast, the problem remains.
I just bought myself a Western Digital WD TV Live
The picture quality is excellent, especially when viewing 1080P material. No lag or stutter (this is on a wired ethernet connection). There’s an optical digital out but no RCA which I would rather have. And the box is small!. The remote is small and responsive.
Would I use this box to listen to music? No, the user interface is too rudimentary, but using it as an easy way of viewing transcoded or downloaded films it’s excellent.
Upgrading from the Canon EOS 20D to the full frame camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II has really changed which lenses I like the most. When using the 20D, I used to have the Canon EF 17-40mm f4L lens on as my standard lens. But the full frame really makes it to wide for my taste, and the 17-40mm is a bit too soft at the edges. Now I usually have the Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM lens as my standard lens and use the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L a lot more than before. The high resolution of the 5D shows every fault with the lens. The 70-200mm shines as the best zoom lens I ever had and is perfect for portrait photography.
My next lens will be a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM lens which I think will be the perfect all-round lens. I just wish there was a way to try out a couple of lenses to find a sharp one, because my experience with Canon lenses is that there can be quality differences between them. With some luck I’ll find a dealer that let me test before buying.
I just wanted to be able to record some TV shows from my DVB-C (ComHem) so I got myself a TerraTec H7 USB DVB-C/T receiver that supposedly works with EyeTV. I already had EyeTV, and the box contains a CI module so I could receive coded channels as well. But talk about a flaky product. The picture pauses every 10 seconds, both in DVB-T and DVB-C mode. When changing channels in DVB-C mode the program info shows up, but when checking the listings, no EPG info is available. I tried to reinstall (and delete all preference files), but the problem persists. I tried it on two different machines, so it’s not the machine. So now I have an expensive USB paper weight.
Should have checked for MythTV support before I bought it. But no…
Update
I’ve just booted my machine in Windows 7 and used Terratec’s own software. Works without a problem, so the fault is ElGato’s EyeTV software.