Last summer we bought an LF Front Loading washer which we absolutely love. The only downside was some vibrations through the house when it got into the top spin cycle, around 3100rpm.

It was fairly loud but still, it did such a great job at washing, we didn’t care.

A few weeks ago I googled around and came across some foot pads designed to reduce vibrations from GVI Inc called Good Vibrations.

Let me tell you – These things work amazingly well. The machine is currently in full spin and while we can hear it, there is very little thumping going on. The vibrations are dampened at least 50%, if not more. The first time I ran a rinse to test was so quiet with guests over I didn’t even realize it was done.

The other advantage to these feet is that they raise the machine about an inch off the floor, which makes getting a drip pan underneath much easier when we clean the trap.

Installation was easy; One person tilted the machine forward while I slid the feet into place. Once they were in the proper spot, then we tilted it back for the front feet. 5 minutes to install.

Check this product out if you have a second floor washing machine. They also donate a portion of the proceeds to the Lukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Faces completed scanning my library in about 90 minutes.

The first photo I opened, one of my niece, was not recognized as a face. Odd because it is a fairly clear shot of her, but maybe the face is too small or blurry.

There is a button labeled “Add missing face” which I clicked. You get a bounding box to put around the face. I resized the box and then named her. A popup appeared enticing me to click “Faces” on the left side to see more photos of her.

I clicked Faces and double clicked her corkboard photo. No other photos of her were found, so maybe it has issues with children. I’ll find more photos of her myself……..

I chose a picture of my brother and her at Disneyland and it recognized the faces. I named them both and exactly what I was hoping for happened. As I typed my niece’s name, a list showed up with matching names, of which there was one. I was able to teach iPhoto that the other photo and this one are the same person!

I’ve played around with Faces for about 45 minutes now and I am very impressed.

As you start out, Faces makes a tremendous amount of accurate guesses and also seems to get some terribly wrong, presumably because the data set is limited. As you confirm or reject photos, the accuracy gets better.

One missing feature is the ability to look at a photo while in confirming mode. iPhoto shows you a zoomed in face but you can’t see the entire context of the photo, which would be useful for some photos were the face is not well in focus or the person is in costume.

I’m going to keep training iPhoto to see how accurate it becomes over time.

Thanks go out to Charles at the Beaverton Mac Store for letting me know that iLife was in stock!

I picked up my copy (and iWork as well) and have it fully installed.

iMovie won’t import the MPEG-2 movie files our team’s HD camera generates without a component from Apple, so I converted the file to H.264 with HandBrake. That file plays in QuickTime Player but iMovie would not let me select it for import either.

I imported the entire folder of one movie and iMovie has been doing something for about 5 minutes now. The video file was 834mb and 90 minutes long, so maybe it is making thumbnails. All I see is a spinning cursor, so I am just guessing.

iPhoto upgraded my library (yes I created a clone and a time capsule backup first!) and it is now scanning my photos for faces. Initial estimate was 140 minutes. 10 minutes later that is down to 83 minutes left.

iPhoto remains usable while the face detection is going on. I’m looking forward to see if people I know are in photos I didn’t know they were in, for example random shots of crowds at Disneyland. That would be fun eh?

iPhoto said I could continue to use it while scanning faces. I tried to see if my iPhoto export plugin BetterHTMLExport still functioned and current it is not loading, so I’ll look into that. I clicked the new Slideshow tab and that stalled iPhoto for about 40 seconds. I am not sure what it was doing as my event only had one photo

Ok iMovie is done doing whatever it was doing. That import process needs some user interface

Sweet! I really put iMovie though the ringer with a 90 minute, 845mb clip. I have a quad core Mac Pro and the editing was a little jumpy but still totally usable.

I chose a comic book theme and it added a opening template to the video and a closing credits template, which had the video rotated and inset.

I tried to add a lower third text overlay to the clip but that just didn’t seem to want to work properly on a 90 minute clip. I broke the clip up with a smaller 1 minute subclip and then the overlay worked fine. What is cool is the text overlay was animated. It popped and rotated onto the scene, then did the same at the end of the text overlay.

The comic book theme has many overlays, scrolling credits, etc all designed to work together.

I am now exporting the entire video in large format to see what it looks like. Estimated time is 5 hours. Handbrake converted the entire thing in 30 minutes so we’ll see how well iMovie holds up.

Back in iPhoto, faces says it has 66 minutes to go.

Trying to debug my plugin issue, I noticed that iPhoto is complaining in console about a plugin:

1/27/09 5:03:22 PM iPhoto[227] Not a valid plugin: /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/PlugIns/Facebook.iPhotoExporter

iPhoto supports Facebook, but this plugin might exist from Facebook themselves; Their exporter should have been installed in Library, but some developers are still installing right into iPhoto.

I opened up the iPhoto application and the date on the Facebook Plugin is from August of last year, while every other plugin is from January 14 of this year. So I’ll move it to the desktop and relaunch iPhoto….

At the same time I noticed BetterHTMLExport is nowhere to be found, so I’ll investigate that next.

Quitting iPhoto goes through a process of backing up meta data which is nice. Another thing to look into later……..

Ok reinstalling BetterHTMLExport restored the plugin to /Library/Application Support/iPhoto/Plugins/ I guess the iLife installed deleted existing plugins without warning. How rude!

I am happy to report that iPhoto 8.0 (iLife ‘09) and BetterHTMLExport are compatible!

Upon relaunching iPhoto, Faces picked up scanning faces where it left off, so that is very nice.

I’ll report more later!

It was 24 years and 10 months ago when I got my first Mac. Here is my story:

My First Macintosh

I’ll never forget it. I had seen a Lisa in January of 1983 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The graphics were fantastic, unlike anything I had seen before. The Lisa was from the snobbish Apple Computer, Inc (I was an Atari guy) but this machine seemed to have personality.

In early 1984 I learned of the Macintosh. I had missed the infamous commercial during the Super Bowl, but I had picked up a copy of Byte magazine which had a cover story of the Macintosh. It showed a 1 bit digitized image of the Macintosh team, including Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. It talked about the hardware, the software, the memory and the fact that the inside of the case had the signatures of the team inside. How cool was that!

When I came home from boarding school for spring break in March of 1984 (I was a senior in high school), my grandfather asked what I wanted for graduation. He knew about my successes writing software and was interested in helping my career. Did he ever. I said, “Well this new Macintosh computer is the future of computing! It will change how we interact with computers and I bet will become something of a legend. However, even at 1/4 the cost of a Lisa, it is too expensive at $2,500.” My grandfather disagreed and that week I had a brand new Macintosh!

I was so excited when I got home I couldn’t move fast enough to unpack it. However, Apple’s design sense slowed me down. The box had this fantastic picaso-esque Mac on the side. The manual was ring bound and looked gorgeous.

Then there was this little beige mouse and a cassette tape. A tape? What was on this, software? No, it was a tutorial.

I inserted the “Getting Started” floppy disk and heard my first “boing.” The disk whirred and churned and finally “Welcome to Macintosh” appeared on the screen. Personality! I wasn’t in love with a computer but I was sure enamored with it.

The tutorial worked like this: You would play the tape and it would tell you all about your new Macintosh. There was this fantastic guitar music and it just felt, well like nothing I had experienced with my Trash-80 nor my Atari 800 that was for sure!.

After a bit, the tape would instruct you to interact with the computer and pause the tape. You would do a task on the computer, such as moving the mouse, or even the concept of picking it up and noticing the cursor didn’t move while the mouse was in the air. Then the software would instruct you to press play on the tape deck and the next section would begin.

This was the most reassuring, comforting initial experience I had ever had. To say it was profound was an understatement. I believe to this day that these first few hours with the Macintosh cemented my life long affinity for the Apple brand. These people were not snobs; They just wanted to do things right.

Over the next week I learned to use MacPaint and MacWrite, as well as spending far too much time organizing documents with folders. I spent money on more floppy disks, which were about $15 a piece at the time. I took the disks to the store to print them out.

Back at school, our computer “lab” (which was a closet on the boy’s upper north hall) became well known. We had a Commodore 64, an Apple II and an Apple Macintosh all crammed into an 6′x5′ space. Of course mine took the least amount of space of all

I was only able to write documents as I could not afford a printer, so using the Macintosh was more of an experience in learning why this machine was so different in terms of user interface and design. Upon graduation, a good friend of mine wrote a story in MacWrite and saved it on my original floppy. I still have that floppy and story somewhere.

I purchased a copy of Microsoft Basic as it was the only thing I could afford to write software with. I wrote a music program and a simple spreadsheet application to track gas mileage. That summer my family headed out on a 2 month trip across America in our motor home. I brought the Mac along because it was portable and could operate using the power in the motor home. I used it to track the mileage of our trip as well as our friends at every stop.

Halfway through the trip we arrived at my grandmother’s farm in southern Missouri. I left the Mac on the driver’s seat of the motor home as it was safest there.

Three days later a tornado hit within 4 miles and had the motor home rocking and the rest of us in the basement. When the storm had passed, I rushed out to great relief to see not only the motor home safe, but the computer still resting on the front seat.

Then I picked the Mac up and out from the vents poured seemingly buckets of water! Apparently the window for the bed above the driver’s seat had been left open and the front of the motor home was drenched.

I panicked at first; my 6 month old $2,500 computer was full of water! I then realized that because it was simply rain water, from the middle of nowhere Missouri, it likely had a low sodium count. I could not open the case because it used a crazy new “torx” screw which nobody I knew had seen, so I got the hair dryer and for 3 hours I blew air through the side, back, top vents as well as the floppy port.

Finally, I figured this was as good as it was going to get and powered the Mac on. “Boing!” it said as it welcomed me once again. That computer never failed and ran perfectly for another year until it was stolen, but that is another story……..

I downloaded the Windows 7 beta (32 bit) in about 12 minutes today and installed onto VMWare 2.0.1 (choosing Windows Server 2008).

The install took around 15 minutes and went smoothly. The OS is zippy I must say. Chrome launches about as fast as you could expect, well under 1 second.

Some games crash the VMWare video driver, which is to be expected, VMWare knows nothing of Windows 7.

The security dialogs are nice and fairly understandable. When I launched Chrome, a dialog had a checkbox labeled “Do this for all software and games,” which struck me as odd. Aren’t games also software?

I am told there is no Aero support under vmware, so I am not getting the full Windows 7 experience.

The music icon looks a lot like iTunes.

The painting application opens quickly and is fairly featured for being free. Apple needs to bring back MacPaint.

The games section has about 12 games, which is nice. Apple could improve here as well.

In a quick 30 minutes of usage, it seems as though Apple will finally have some competition in the OS space. Speed is where Apple could really improve upon and if the reports of Snow Leopard only being 20% faster, that won’t cut it.

Microsoft seems to have done a nice job. Time will tell how well Windows 7 machines are running one month after installation. Does the registry corrupt? Are people still easily getting malware and viruses? We’ll find out!