I made an excursion to the tar pits of Rancho Labrea this week to gain education into the region’s past. I’ve posted some photos of what I saw!

If you are concerned about the battery in the iPod, head over to the iPod Battery FAQ for a great collection of information. Now those cheese head brothers can stop whining and spreading false information about the iPod.

This Apple Discussion tells how to fix the slow boot issue. Copying the text from the web page may introduce odd spaces, so you can copy from here:

sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext/Contents/Resources/BootCacheControl /usr/sbin

Then reboot twice.

I’ve posted some pictures from the fun evening at Haunted Mansion Hollywood!

The event was a lot of fun and as soon as they get around to sending us our photos, I’ll have one of me as the Bride!

“PC Only” “Windows media Player”

Damn, talk about selling out. What crap!

Screw em.

Can I just ask why oh why does Installer Vise’s installer for Photoshop Elements take ONE HOUR to install on my G5? What a lameo installer.

Don’t engineers use their own software?

Yep I’m still here, single, geeky, same old me. I created a DVD for my brother’s birthday – that was fun. It involved some lip syncing to a couple of tunes and some special appearances by Bozo The Clown. Seeing as I had never used makeup before, that was an experience. Rit dye is also fun stuff, unless you are the washing machine.

I’m enamored with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, and with the latest updates, they are better than ever. LiveType and SoundTrack rock also!

My group of friends is growing – Work is going along swimmingly well, though slower than I had hoped for. I’m really excited about the ideas I am having.

I’m starting to be able to make the hard self-discipline decisions for myself I’ve always needed to make, so that is a good sign. The weight is beginning to come off slowly, which is better than continually skyrocketing, so I am super pleased about that!

I’ve had some achy ears, but the doc says it is just a little blockage in my Eustachian tubes, so we’ll see how the OTC clears that up.

I can’t wait to see my family and friends! My brother is building a new arcade cabinet, so will be neat to see how that turned out.

That is about it for now, back to more reading on ripple vs. roll vs. slip editing!

Congratulations to Jen for her wonderful performance in Santa’s Workshop, the first ballet i have attended! I am sure hubby Lucien is very proud!

The children were so darling – I’ll post some photos tomorrow.

The ballet was about Santa’s toys waking up to play after Santa had gone home, sprinkled with other dances to bookend the story. It was especially delightful to see children react positively to the theatre!

You won’t believe this!

I am using a Belkin Auto Kit to power my 3G ipod and get audio out. I was getting alternator noise in the signal though. Cure? Had a local deal re-wire my Magellan GPS. Apparently the original guys did a shoddy job and wired it through the fuse box instead of the battery. Now, all is clear

Steve

Or the art of sending someone a message to their phone via anonymous bluetooth. Spam or sexual harassment is on its way. ugh.

BluejackingQ

Followup: This sends a vcard to the remote phone, so putting the text in the name field makes it seem like a message to the receiver. I was able to do this to my G5!

And people say I have too much time on my hands, check out the latest craze:

Hold on, I need to stop my car!

Thanks to Roger for This gem

Found this on the Apple Discussion Board, thanks to Ron for this! Somehow the line out rate got st to 32,000.

“I found this in the Panther forum, and changing my sound out rate WORKED!

“Find your way to the Applications folder and open “UTILITIES”

OPEN THE AUDIO MIDI SETUP APPLICATION

SET YOUR LINE IN AND LINE OUT TO 44100.0Hz (mine was at 32000Hz, and I didn’t set it there).

ALSO MAKE SURE YOUR SOURCE IS SET TO LINE-IN AND LINE-OUT RESPECTFULLY, NOT DIGITAL.

Go to the Sound Pref Pane and slide your balance controls, this is when I finally got my audio back.

I use Sony SRS-0313 Mini plug speakers, nothing special but at least I can hear things again.

If anyone else has had the same problems, and this fixes it let me know I’m not losing my mind.

Ron “

A friend and neighbor of my parents and friend to me passed away this evening from a sudden, seemingly family related heart failure. He was in his early 40s and leaves behind a wife and two children.

Don’t take today for granted.

Update: Alex’s scouting troop put up a tribute.

I bought a Apex AD-2600 DVD Player for $60 (shipped) because a site said it could play DVD-RWs and my $1500 Toshiba SD-9100 could not. Not only can it play DVD-RW, but it plays DVD-RW with video and data on it, something my Toshiba choked on with just DVD-R + data.

There is a tad bit more video noise, but not much really – Certainly not $1440 worth. The audio does not come in right on a chapter skip – there is a little lag while it gets the digital optical going. But it does support widescreen, progressive component. You have to set these up in the menus, they default to Pan and Scan Interlaced.

The remote is crap, but I’ll just be programming my Pronto with it. For now, it is $60 + a new Toslink cable, as the ports are on the left-center and my component cables won’t reach. So I elected to move the player and get a longer audio cable.

Maybe coaxial digital will have a faster response time?

For the $60, this is an awesome deal.

Steve