MacBook

Working with music technology I am used to cables. I don’t mind the cables themselves, since cables are in general much less pain than slow/unreliable wireless solutions. However, I do mind unnecessary long cables. Therefore I love the MacBook power adapters (which are even better in US version than the EU). I also love the retractable iPhone cables and short USB cables (which even works with my small USB-powered hard drives) they sell on Dealextreme, which make my setup very cable-friendly: ...

While debugging some Max/Jitter patches, I just noticed that the built-in iSight camera in my aluminum MacBook only returned 15 fps. I have always imagined that it was running at 30 fps, but turning on the “unique” attribute in jit.qt.grab showed that 15 fps is what you actually get. Looking around the web I found a post that the camera runs at 30 fps when there is good lighting, but drops to 15 fps when the lighting is low. So here in normal lighting in the office it gives 15 fps, but when pointing the camera at the window it gives 30 fps. ...

I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use. I have been a Unix/linux users for years at the university, but have given up every time I tried to install it on any of my personal computers. Ubuntu is the first distro that actually managed to install without any problems, and which also managed to detect most of the hardware by itself, at least enough to actually work on the system. ...