Missing Macbook - Reward

It looks awfully like I’ve lost my Mac laptop in York on the 23rd of december at 10.24pm around the front of York railway station before I got a taxi.

If by some christmas miracle you’ve got it, opened it up, seen my username, and googled me, then do email me at tom@tomoldfield.com and I’ve got a reward for you for its safe return.

It’s worth a try.

I’ve been having lots of fun re-remembering lots of classic ZX Spectrum games by means of emulation. And with this fun, I’ve been selecting oldies with great graphics to make into T-shirts.

Go check ‘em out, and see if you can find an old favourite or two - Available in all colours & sizes, and not too hefty on the wallet despite the postage from America.
C’mon Zazz, open a UK manufacturing HQ already!

You might have noticed I’m blogging lots more. That’s ‘cos I gave up on being coy and not knowing how best to present myself online: it’s myself, and that’s what it’s about. It’s time for a return to the oldskool: I am Tom. I do various stuff. I never shut up. I like a varied buncha geekery. You might too. And forthwith, This is why I blog.

Why yes.

Anyway, if you don’t know Spore, then oldskool gamers may consider it an evolution simulator - from primordial soup to advanced civilization - but when I say simulator, I’m not implying endless screens of figures, more like stomping around being a darwinian nightmare.

Spore Origins (to give its iPhone incarnation its full name) is the first steps of evolution - you won’t be building cities or making horrifying penile rhinoceros monsters, but what you do get is a taste of life in the primordial soup.

And lo and behold, my train ain’t far from home, so it’s time to pop a cap in this demireview ’til I get more time…

Just…… get Spore. Okay?

then here’s a quick little one-shot solution for you. Make a Smart Album for them. Like this:

With the camera model set to iPhone, you’ll be able to see all your iPhone shots in one long reel.

Instead, I’m currently toting my cousin’s first-gen iPhone, which is in great condition, and barring a bit of teething (because of course the infamous infinite startup bug hit me while I was a few hundred miles from my home mac ‘pon which it was backed up) it’s pretty damn kickin’.

So, being an übergeek, I thought I’d wax technical now and again, and share some tips. Nothing has quite the nerdtastic satisfaction of blogging something that hordes of iPhone forum users haven’t worked out yet!

Also, since my loverly iPhone is my first bit of decent tech which can take photos and sustain a perpetual data connection, I fully intend to spend one day a month (if possible) photoblogging. And I’m not talking about 20 shots of ambient skyline and shots of what I ate that day, I’m thinking more like one photo every 5 minutes for 24 hours. Think it’ll be a horrible endurance marathon? Think it’ll be too much of a peek into my life? Think it’ll be hideously tedious? Think it’s an excuse to get USB gizmos to keep the battery juiced? Sure, it’ll be all of those things. But since I’m an artface, and since life can be pretty interesting sometimes, it might be a groovy little experiment. Keep an eye on mah Twitter, y’all!

If I went back in time and told my 16 year old self that, in the future, he’d be using the internet to publish snippets of his songs for use as mobile phone ringtones, my 16 year old self would have been pretty mindblown. But also faintly quizzical as to why his future self would be going about such an endeavour.

Nonetheless! A couple of clipped and filtered bits of Paisley Climax. With more to come. Download and use, then quail in horror each time your phone rings.

Deep Fried Candy | Dr. Spoons

Disclaimer for the uninitiated: We were an Ironic band. Mostly.

….Get it in a basket in the pub Yeah.

Got that bit out of the way, then.

Who needs jokes when one’s own illustrative laziness is the joke?

I wasn’t too sure if I was going to make a move from Printfection to Zazzle, but having just ordered a test tee, I’m glorying at the print quality, and will definitely be using Zazzle from now on to sell my T-shirts. The whole range will be posted there soon…

Huzzah!

And so it begins: Introducing our heroes.

In the further name of having One Comprehensive Site, I’m going to use this blog for publishing my ill-fated webcomic: the imaginitively-titled Ghost Comics.

I started it months ago, meaning to accelerate to a pace of being almost daily, but generally failed to gather enough enthusiasm and/or momentum. instead, blogging jokes, sketches, and assorted comic-like crunge here, then eventually getting a bit meta and giving them a site of their own will be their inglorious fate.

So, one comic every few days for a while from my tiny archive, then I’ll see about making some more.

Everyone with Maps on their pod will have noticed that it can sometimes find your position when you’re connected to a wi-fi network, but most of the time, there’s no point in leaving wi-fi on when you’re on the move, so this has gone relatively unnoticed:

The “locate me” button in Maps  can now be toggled… and if you leave it lit  blue, and you’re walking or driving through a reasonably urban or residential area with wi-fi on, Maps will pick up your location using networks you don’t have a password for. In the car this week, in a journey of just 4 streets, the iPod picked up about 8 networks on the way home, tracking us fairly accurately, if only every hundred feet or so.

It’s not quite GPS, and you wouldn’t want to drive using it, but if you’ve got enough map tiles loaded for your town/city, you can pretty much entirely fail to get lost ever again.

Content plus confusion!

What more could you ask for?

See the photos on the right or my Flickr page…

Anyway, if you’re one of college’s denizens, I’m the one in the dinosaur/photoshop/other geek T-shirt wandering round sticking his head (figuratively) into college’s Apple computers. And seemingly scaring girl students when I walk round blind corners.

*configures iPod touch for blogging*

Anyway, if you’re in a similar boat, maybe you’d like my replacement icons for the MobileMusicPlayer app (that’s Music or Ipod to most of you…) You should be able to SSH it into mobilemusicplayer.app…. but back up your old icon.

There’s or to dig…

I don’t have iPhone jealousy, gawddammit, until a few versions on, and if I can entrust my iPod, phone and web slab to one nonswitchable battery, though.

http://lizfletcherart.blogspot.com/

I’ll be slowly adding shots of her works, so keep looking back. Maybe we’ll have postcards for sale.

I’ll be setting up a flickr gallery and blog very soon for her, and making a little web shop where anyone can buy prints; the profits from these prints will eventually be used to make her some form of nice memorial, and to make sure her works stay online to see for all forever.

I have a really rather large swathe of her works and sketches to cover, but, Fletchers & Swinbanks: I need pictures of more of her works!

I know she’d not want so much fuss over her, but those of you that know her know she’s worth it.

Those of you that don’t know her, or her works - watch this space - I’ll blog it the second I set it up.

The new tees speak thusly: One is a play on your computer’s ctrl key, and freakishness. Another makes a faintly filthy play on the phrase “four on the floor“, there’s another computer key to strike fear into the heart of hitchikers all over the galaxy, and finally, for da laydeees, there’s a t-shirt with a corset on the front and back - for those moments when a real corset’s a bit much.

Go! Look! Buy?

Unfortunately, my black Macbook doesn’t boot from USB, but most linux distros that can live on a keydrive can be booted by CD. It’s these kind of distros I want to get into - I really like the idea that lots of PCs with dead HDs sitting around are perfectly serviceable web stations/media players, and can be pressed into use with just a boot cd and/or a keydrive.

As technology pushes further, more and more of the stuff we do on computers is online, and not always stored on the actual computer the user sits at. Between other people’s computers, one computer of their own with many a HD, and some kind of portable web device, (omfg, the new iPod) a cunning web ninja can pretty much do their digital living.

Anyway, Here’s the roundup.

DSL (damnsmalllinux) Booted fast-ish from CD, but during the bios process it clearly has trouble with the USB bus. Once booted, you can’t do anything - no mouse, no keyboard. All you’ve got is the power button. I’d be interested to hear if anyone can get a desktop intel mac to boot and run properly.

Feather Linux - likewise, I couldn’t get any inputs working with this distro.

Puppy looks like a good option because of its simplicity, but it clearly has trouble with the processor, as it runs at about 4 frames per second. Otherwise, it seemed to work. Ew to its choice of the full seamonkey suite as a web browser, though. Likewise, comments from other mac types please!

Ubuntu - ah, Ubuntu. The most maclike of linux distros. The one that requires a stormingly large keydrive if you’re going to play the keydrive OS game. Nonetheless, it boots and peforms just fine on my macbook. The touchpad’s second finger operations don’t work, but a ctrl-click bacomes a second click, as all hadrcore single-button mousers should know. A comfortably predictable result, since Ubuntu also supports powerpc processors.

So, for now at least, Ubuntu seems to be the Distro of choice for my learning Linux. More bloggynews later once I can be bothered to torrent some of the larger distros.

Since I’ve been a fairly diehard Apple Mac Ninja for about 13 years now, I thought maybe it was finally time to make a blog within which to sit down and geek out.

I’ll be casting concepts and opinions around, sharing tips and links thereto, and every now and again making with a tutorial or two for aspects for all-round digital living.

‘Twill be a miscellany. But it might be useful.

There’s one with four comiclike panels illustrating a horrible night of insomnia and redeye.

The others are more illustrator-y… There’s the old Second Life favourite, “It’s not my fault your day is my night” …because an englishman online often finds this to be the case.

Finally, there’s a wise proverb of old, which old friends of mine might remember… Grow a Beard!

(Yunno, we posted it up all over the 6th form in 4-foot letters after a mad day with a laser printer? What do you mean you don’t remember?)

Since they can do shipping to the UK in just one week, not two, they seem like a fine bet - and they have a 30-day money back guarantee, which ought to assure people who fear buying print on demand products.

So far, there’s only a few due to rampant perfectionism, but there shall be mooooore.

So! go see!

New Adventures in T-Shirts…
http://www.printfection.com/newadventures

Once my MyFonts foundry page is set up, Creole will be the first to hit the shelves, so to speak.

Also, here’s Creole’s page from the little E-picture-book I used in 1995 to distribute my fonts!

What they don’t tell you is that the USB wifi adapter in the box can be any one of 4 versions. Only one of these versions has mac drivers on the belkin site, and what’s more, only for 10.3. It even says on the site: Please note that the Mac OS version is for OS 10.3 only, not for earlier or later versions of the OS. All this is despite the fact that the supplier had it down as mac-compatible, because the datasheets belkin provided them say so.

If that wasn’t enough, the router itself even came bundled with the wrong power supply. Not the wrong voltage, mind; It simply doesn’t fit the hole on the back of the router.

A not-so-quick call got me through to someone who, after as said I should get my drivers at zydas.com, which has clearly been reclaimed by its domain provider. I told them this, and the errrrred for a while before telling me I should download the lastest (Windows only!) drivers and try it anyway.

So, instead, I went forum cruising, and finally found mac drivers for it here and a manual here. But, with all that installed, and the damn thing up and running, I hit my final problem, which is the decider: The USB wifi adapter can’t see or connect to the router that came with it. Yeah, that’s right. It can see other networks, including the one 5 houses down, but it can’t see my own network, broadcast from a router supplied with it; the very network I’m using right now to blog this. From the same room as the worthless adapter.

So, up yours, Belkin; you’re supposed to like macs, not pretend you support them while pointing you lazily at the drivers your suppliers wrote, but you can’t be bothered to rebrand and distribute.

They’re even selling iphone cases on the front page of their site. I imagine they probably require windows mobile installing over the iphone’s OS, if this little performance has been anything to go by.

If I’d ran into this much hassle setting up a network for somebody on a tech consultant basis, The invoice would already outweigh the cost of the hardware. Which, incidentally, I am sorely tempted to leave out in the rain before returning.

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