Tomorrow morning we are off to Phoenix for a much needed vacation. We’ll stay with Friends in Phoenix through December 30th, and then we all go down to Bisbee, AZ for New Years. We’ll be staying at The Shady Dell. It looks like a great place. I’ll post pictues when I get back.
Happy Holidays!
I recently finished a fun little project, for a product called Philm. The project was a video loop that plays on a point-of-sale (POS) kiosk. It’s meant to give a quick overview of the product. I worked on it with 8Speed Multimedia, and TransitStudio. The guys at 8Speed and Transit did most of the Storyboarding, and I did most of the After Effects (animation) work. All things considered, I think it came out pretty well. The people at Philm must agree, because I noticed they are using it on their site as well.
Watch Movie – 3.6MB QuickTime (requires QuickTime 7)
note: the movie has no audio… you’re not going deaf.
Are you the ultimate Star Wars collector? Than you’ll want to know about this custom, one of a kind, Star Wars Rebel Attack Cruiser made entirely of LEGO. It’s eight feet long, 150 lbs, and uses 35,000 pieces. It was built by “LEGO Master Builder”, Erik Varszegi.
The LEGO Attack Cruiser is for sale on eBay. As of this writing, the current bid is a mere $29,100.00… a small price to pay for the ultimate Star Wars collector.
100% of auction proceeds will be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s hurricane relief efforts in the southeastern United States.
found via Binary Bonsai
There’s a new trailer available on the Apple Site for The Da Vinci Code. It looks really good! Ron Howard movies are usually a little sappy, but this one looks like he’s taken a trip into the dark side… at least a little.
I’m a .Mac user, and for the most part everything has worked fine for quite a while now. All of my Apple items seemed to be syncing without problems. But, recently I discovered that my Transmit Favorites weren’t syncing. I’ve been going back and forth, via email, with Panic for over a week now trying to figure out what was wrong.
The last suggestion that Panic gave me, was to remove a folder called ‘SyncServices’ from “~/Library/Application Support”. It didn’t fix the problem, and as it turns out, this was very bad advise. After removing SyncServices, I started having all kinds of syncing problems. Keychains, Contacts, and Calendars work the best, but they only sync intermittently. Safari Bookmarks no longer sync at all. And, there is a button in the ‘Advanced’ tab of the .Mac prefs called “Reset Sync Data…” that no longer functions. I’ve replaced the original SyncServices folder, but it didn’t fix anything.
After all this happened, I discovered a knowledge base article over at Apple, appropriately entitle “Stay away from the SyncServices folder“:
“As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder in Mac OS X 10.4. Removing or modifying anything in it—or in subfolders within it—may cause unexpected issues […]”
I’ve tried everything I can think of to fix the problem. I’ve reinstalled the 10.4.3 combo updater, repaired permissions, run the daily, weekly, and monthly unix maintenance scripts, etc… nothing has worked! At this point the only option that remains is to reinstall my OS… something I DO NOT want to do.
Thank you so much, Panic, for your great advise!
Last weekend we said goodbye to Emmitt. A couple of friends came with us out to Fort Funston, one of Emmitt’s favorite places, where we laid his ashes to rest.
We got really lucky with the weather. It was a beautiful, sunny, clear day… exactly the kind of day we would have normally taken Emmitt out there for.
It was difficult saying goodbye, but we had shed most of our tears prior to going out to Fort Funston. I tried to keep the mood as light as possible. We finished off the day by going to The Ramp, a local outdoor patio bar, for beers.
I haven’t been blogging as much since Emmitt passed away. I just haven’t felt as motivated as I used to. We’ll be doing some traveling over Christmas and New Years, and I’m hoping to get some rest… and recharge my batteries.
As a special holiday gift, SendStation Systems has announced they are giving away 1,000 free FireWire PocketDocks, their thumb-sized iPod FireWire adapter. The offer is available while supplies last or until December 24, 2005, limited to one PocketDock per person. Your only cost is $5.80 (USD) for shipping.
via MacMinute
UPDATE (12.15.05): Looks like they are all out of the free pocketdocks. I hope everyone got one, who wanted one.
Back in August, I wrote about an awesome, and sometimes bizarre, online game called Somorost that I really liked a lot. I also mentioned that Amanita Design, the creators of the game, were working on a new version. Well, guess what… it’s here… Somorost 2.
I’ve only barely begun to play, but so far it looks just as cool as the first one. You guys rock!
If you haven’t already heard, Aspry has released a Mac demo version of it’s popular Lego Star Wars
In my last post, I mentioned that, unlike Spotlight, EasyFind doesn’t need to index you files first. I though this topic was worth a followup.
The way Spotlight works, is it crawls your drive, creating an index of everything on it. When you add or delete anything from your drive, the operating system updates the index. When you search using Spotlight, you aren’t actually searching the drive, you are searching the index. In theory, this allows you to search everything very quickly, but in practice, it doesn’t always work out that way. Personally, my index files seem to get corrupted fairly often… making Spotlight incredibly slow, or totally unresponsive. This always seems to happen at the most inopportune moment, when I really need to find something. That’s usually when I reach for EasyFind.
Often, simply restarting you computer will whip Spotlight back into shape, but I find it helpful to periodically reindex my drives. It’s simple to do, but depending on the size of your drives may take a a while to complete.
There are a few ways to force Spotlight to reindex. The most common is probably through the Terminal. I’m not a Unix geek, and I personally am a little afraid of the Terminal. I had a ‘mishap’ a few years back where I accidentally erased my entire Home folder while trying to delete a single file with the Terminal. I’ve been leery of it ever since.
Fortunately, there is a very simple, non Unix geek, way of doing it. Simply open up the Spotlight Preference Pane, and select the “Privacy” button. The Privacy button allows you to specify areas you don’t want Spotlight to index (like your secret stash of porn you don’t want you girlfriend to find). Using the “+” button in the lower left, add your Hard Drive to the list. If you have more than one drive, use this method to add them all. You’ve just told Spotlight to stop indexing your drive, and delete the existing index. Now, just use the “-” button to remove your drive from the list. This tells Spotlight you do want to index your drive. Since no index exists, Spotlight is forced to make a new one. At this point you can quit out of Preferences. To begin the reindexing, simply activate Spotlight (Command + Spacebar). Sometimes there is a slight lag before it starts going, you may need to activate Spotlight a couple of times. You’ll know it is indexing when a little flashing dot appears in the magnifying glass icon. You can activate Spotlight while it is indexing to get an estimated completion time.