No Content, No Fuss: Category computers

The Best of Photo Booth

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:34:00 +0100

Photobooth is a totally under-appreciated piece of software that comes with every new Mac! To show my appreciation (and answer Kieran's call for more pictures), here are some random captures from the last few months. As you can see, my fondness for a good thumbs-up has been spreading through the world. If you aren't on here, remind me to capture you next time you are at my place!

Interesting info on Tiger and QuickTime

avsm — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 05:14:03 +0100

AppleInsider has the scoop on the new features in QuickTime 7, to be part of the next major release of MacOS X. The thing I found particularly interesting is to be found at the end:

Likewise, QuickTime 6.6 with also mark the debut of an OpenGL texture context, a specific implementation of the aforementioned visual context that will provide a movie's visual data to a client applications as OpenGL textures. These textures can then be rendered to the screen using OpenGL, composited with other graphics, or run through CoreImage filters.

I played with this stuff at Fraser Research last summer, and its great to see more integrated support between QT and OpenGL. This stuff could be done before, but it was really awkward avoiding excessive data copying between main memory and the graphics card texture memory. Hmm, maybe I made a mistake ordering my new HushPC box to run MythTV on; perhaps it ought to have been an iMac instead! The CoreImage API looks pretty useful as well for processing ultra-high resolution images for SpotCode detection as well, something that takes a lot of CPU at the moment.

Return of the Mac

avsm — Sun, 02 May 2004 22:45:00 +0100

My 15" AluBook had white spots, but I wasn't Too Lazy To Phone Apple! Not updated the blog for ages, will resolve to be better about this...

Macs rule

avsm — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 00:10:00 +0000

I notice that Apple has released IP over Firewire drivers for MacOS X, so for example Nick and I could use that for fast, zeroconf transfer between our PowerBooks.

This is cool stuff - we've played games of Warcraft 3 where one laptop acts as a wireless gateway for the other one via AirPort as well, resulting in extreme comfort for all involved.

Stability at last

avsm — Fri, 29 Nov 2002 15:08:00 +0000

My new PC is finally rock solid, after installing ten fans in the case! The noise output is pretty quiet as well, thanks to the wicked noise-reduction case from QuietPC.
With that finally done, I managed to get OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows XP and Linux booting on it, and setup a nice VMWare environment to do PhD work under. Now the boring bit is done, the work has to start :-)
Fun time in college - played and won the latest badminton league match, which should cement our place in the current division, giving us good ground to work up to winning a promotion next term when we seriously start training!

Just like a bus

avsm — Thu, 21 Nov 2002 18:29:00 +0000

So my Athlon MP processors got delivered today. Well, err ... 5 of them to be exact. After waiting two weeks for two suppliers, dabs decided not to send me any at all, and simply sent me five, in addition to the one I already had. Time to do some returns, aaargh!
The computer itself seems to work pretty well, except the idle temperature of the processors is 65 degrees celsius. Gulp? Doesn't appear to have any harmful side-effects ... yet.

Computers sure do suck

avsm — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:49:00 +0000

So after losing all my money to Dave at poker last night, I figured I would remove the Duron 800 from my old machine and swap it into the new one to tide me over until the new ones arrived.
Three hours later (4am), I managed to unscrew the heatsink - unbelievably hard to take off. And then the DVD-ROM drive turns out to be broken, so I can't install OpenBSD anyway - aaargh!
Currently benchpressing: 70 kg

Processor hunting

avsm — Tue, 12 Nov 2002 15:29:00 +0000

I hate dabs! All of my new computer components have arrived except for the two Athlon MP 2200+ processors which I've been promised will arrive in '3-4 days' for ages. The components from QuietPC are amazing though - the new machine makes barely a whisper, even with five fans.
At least my systrace hacking is going well; I started hacking kern_exec.c in OpenBSD to allow applications to be run in systrace automatically without needing wrapper scripts. This will allow selective privilege elevation to eliminate the need for suid commands.
But first, off to the gym with djs to do some shoulder pressing!