The Author – Bart Busschots
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Aug
16
My Very First Thoughts on iLife ’08
Filed Under Computers & Tech | 1 Comment
I literally just installed iLife ’08 an hour or so ago but already I’m happy with what I’m getting for my money. I would consider myself a power user of two of the iLife Apps: iPhoto, and Garage Band (but only for creating podcasts). I don’t have a video camera so I have no real use for iMovie or iDVD. Since iTunes is now updated separately from iLife and free I don’t consider it part of iLife any more. I was a very happy with the previous version of iLife, it worked very well for me but there were five things about it that annoyed me a bit. Even at this early stage I can see that at least four of those have been fixed. Those four fixes alone make me very happy but on top of that the whole suite has had a face-lift. It looks even slicker than it did before. There have been a lot of subtle UI tweaks which make things simpler and clearer as well as shinier. The bottom line is that my first impressions of iLife ’08 are all good, no nasty surprises, and no major disappointments. That really is the bottom line. If you want to find out what the four fixes are I’m so happy with read on, if not, you’re done 🙂
[tags]Apple, iLife[/tags]
Aug
14
I was listening to the Mooney Show on RTE Radio 1 this afternoon when a chap called Vincent Byrne was introduced as a man who “knows everything about computers”. Unfortunately, it appears he doesn’t know nearly as much as RTE think. Perhaps he was relatively knowledgeable a few years ago but now he seems uninformed about open source, security, hardware or anything beyond the world of Microsoft. He said too many things I could take issue with to list them all so I’ll just mention the four that annoyed me the most.
[tags]RTE, Radio, Ireland, Computers, Mooney[/tags]
Aug
13
A Rare Personal Post – My Brother’s Wedding
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | Leave a Comment
I think my brother’s wedding is a good enough excuse to indulge in a rare personal post. Last Friday was the big day for Koen & Pam. Although the weather was on par for this terrible summer we still had a great day. The mass was very well done by Fr. Paul, it was the perfect balance between seriousness and fun and full of nice thoughtful touches. I’m not a fan of organized religion but credit where credit is due, it really was a great service. The rest of the day also went very well and all the speeches went down well. I hope Pam & Koen enjoyed their day and that they’re having a great time now on their honeymoon. Since I had the honor of being a groom’s man I couldn’t take any pictures myself but the better half was good enough to take a few. You can see the results here.
Aug
6
So my new toy finally arrived. It’s taken me ages to get my hands on one of these lenses but since Allison has the same one and is really happy with it I wanted to get one too. My very first reaction was one of disappointment. This lens doesn’t do auto-focus. Mind you, had I actually read the spec properly before buying it that wouldn’t have come as such a surprise 🙂 I was a bit worried about the lack of auto focus for about 5 seconds, till I gave the lens a go! I’ve been using manual focus for years on my old Olympus OM1 so it’s not a problem to use it again. I think I’ve been a bit spoiled by the great 18-55mm zoom that came with my D40 though.
[tags]Nikon, Zoom Lens[/tags]
Aug
1
A Glut of Mac Related Updates
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security | 2 Comments
I’m not really sure what the collective noun for releases is so I’m using glut 🙂 Anyhow, I seem to have done nothing but update stuff in the last 24 hours. First FireFox and Thunderbird from Mozilla, then an Airport patch and an OS X security update from Apple, then a new Mac RDP client from Microsoft, and finally, an updated version of JellyfiSSH. Apart from the last two these are all security updates. I don’t have much I want to say about the security updates but I do just want to mention two important fixes which seem to be included. Firstly, there is a patch for mDNSResponder which should plug the hole which the rumoured Mac worm which was never released supposedly used. Secondly, there are a few patches for SAMBA so it looks like the SAMBA flaws I recently gave off to Apple for not patching promptly have finally been patched. Mind you, the descriptions on the Apple site are none too clear so I’m not really certain these updates really fix either of these holes. Anyhow, the real reason for this post is to have a look at the new RDP client from MS and the update to JellyfiSSH.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Security, JellyfiSSH, Microsoft, RDP[/tags]
Jul
31
The Wonderful Barn
Filed Under Photography | 10 Comments
Continuing my efforts to photograph historic buildings in the Maynooth area I set out to visit the Wonderful Barn in Leixlip (it’s about 6km from Maynooth). When I set off the weather was good but by the time I arrived it had started to rain a little so the pictures are not what they could be. However, they are still better than nothing.
You can have a look at my pictures of the Wonderful Barn in my gallery. The rest of this article contains more information about this very special building and some related links.
[tags]Photography, Ireland, Leixlip, Wonderful Barn, Granary, Dovecote, Famine Relief, Folly[/tags]
Jul
30
I regularly have a go a Microsoft for not patching vulnerabilities quickly enough. The recent shambles with the animated cursor flaw proves that MS still have a long way to go in terms of security. However, they are a not alone. Apple have a definite advantage over MS when it comes to security, they have built OS X on top of the very robust and security conscious FreeBSD distribution of Unix, while MS are building on the shoddy foundation that is DOS and early versions of NT. A lot of current Windows vulnerabilities lie in this very old code, the Animated Cursor flaw being a good recent example. However, Apple are being complacent. They seem to be drinking too much of their own cool-aid and are acting as if OS X really is immune from attack. It is of course not immune, and with Apple TV and the iPhone now also running OS X it’s becoming a bigger target every day. When vulnerabilities are reported Apple have to respond promptly, unfortunately the current SAMBA flaw in OS X proves they are not doing this.
[tags]SAMBA, OS X, Security, Apple[/tags]
Jul
29
The Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been notoriously tight lipped while she was writing the Potter Books. She said very little and when she did answer questions she always chose her answers very carefully. Now that the final Potter book is out we are getting to see a new more open JKR. She now seems happy to share what ever other information she has about Harry and his world with an eager public.
WARNING – the remainder of this post contains Harry Potter 7 spoilers!
Jul
22
The Deathly Hallows – Initial Thoughts
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | 28 Comments
Well, it’s over. The Seventh Book is out and I’ve finished reading it. This post contains my initial reactions and a rundown of how many of my predictions from almost two years ago came to pass. To protect people who haven’t read the book yet from spoilers I won’t be putting anything else here in the preview, you’ll have to read the article itself to see more.
[tags]Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows[/tags]
Jul
20
Figure Out Where All Your Disk Space Went With Disk Inventory X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration | Leave a Comment
Although we should all be very well organised and we should never forget about files on our disk, we all leave files lying around where we shouldn’t. Then we forget about the files, and a few months later we’re wondering just where all our disk space has gone! Ideally you’d want to be able to get a visual representation of your disk where large files stand out no matter where they’re hidden. Windows users have had a solution to this problem for a long time with WinDirStat. There is now a port of WinDirStat for OS X called Disk Inventory X. This is very simple and very intuitive program and what’s even better is that it’s free and open source! Although it’s a port of a Windows program the port is well done so it looks like a proper OS X application.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Disk Inventory X, WinDirStat, Freeware[/tags]