Archive for the Mac Tag

Rainy afternoon Robotics, or the “Frankentruck FT-5”

So, the day turned rainy and there is a somewhat rigorous moratorium here on desktop computing.  I decided that didn’t include supervised robotics.  Full details, more pics and movie mayhem after the break.

Regex for Java in Unicode…

Think The Producers‘ “Springtime…  in Germany” when reading the title, it might make slightly more sense… A friend of mine was recently posed a challenge by hir instructor in an introductory Java class.  The challenge was (sic.) “I was recently writing a program to generate usernames from the first seven letters of a student’s last name and their first initial,
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A UNIX Wizard…

So, I heard “Pinball Wizard” on the radio the other day and it reminded me of a parody (author unknown) called “UNIX Wizard…”  While googling for the text for all of you, I also ran across this “UNIX Heirarchy,” which explains the difference between mere mortals and sucessive progress towards enlightenment.

Integrated Gallery While You Post…

I wanted to use Drupal to post pictures, much as LiveJournal can.  However, I already have…  an image gallery.  And, while it is a good and wondrous thing to have the gallery integrated with Drupal, what I really wanted was to be able to nicely choose images mid-post, without having to do crazy things like write my own <IMG> tags. 
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USCGC Mackinaw

The USCGC Mackinaw pulled into the bay this afternoon, shortly after lunchtime.  What she was doing, exactly, is anyone’s guess, but she appears to be capable of tending buoys, and that seemed to be what she was doing.  After work, she still hadn’t left, so I lugged the telescope down and started getting insane with optics.  I first tried just
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Lego Star Wars II: Stuck at Echo Base?

So, the Wee Lad got this rather fun, puzzle-oriented game from his uncle (my brother) for his birthday, and we’ve been having a lot of fun with that. He gets to play it as time allows, but if he has a particularly good day at school, I reward that by setting aside time that night to specifically work with him
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Office 2007 / DOCX files got you down?

Recently a few people have asked me how to open DOCX files, which are created in Word 2007 / Office 2007. I have found 4 solutions so far: Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is perhaps the canonical solution. It won’t make new Office 2007 documents, but I haven’t tried doing that in the other solutions either.
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Leopard!

So, after much deliberation, I have installed Leopard. So far, I am quite encouraged. It “feels” a little zippier. It looks a little better (Apple has been slowly re-vamping the look since at least the release of Panther, and it’s finally beginning to look consistent again.) This is the ongoing checklist of things I need working under Leopard (Mac OS/X
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Intel Macs Today… My predictions through 4/1/2007

So, I was a bit surprised at the choice to release a 32-bit iMac to succeed the G5. Most experts seem to be saying this won’t matter for most people, but I disagree. The 64-bit capabilities of the G5 are pretty important for editing home or professional video, and that is one arena where the Mac is competing very well
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Taming the beast – Part 3

As a brief follow-up to my experiences with the Tiger upgrade, I have some news about my iFruit. As you may recall, I had trouble syncing my PDA after updating to Tiger. The fine people at Mark Space made a valiant effort to walk me through isolating the issue, with little success. However, their 4.0.5 “final” update to the Missing
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