January 2006 Archives
In the ongoing quest to find a functional heater that meets my needs, I replaced my 100 watt Top Fin Submersible Heater with a Rena Cal top Light Excel Heater, also 100 watts. The former was just not cutting it. It couldn't heat the tank at all. Even set on high the tank stayed down at about 61ยบ Fahrenheit. Judging by the blinking light and the tingling I felt when putting my hand in the tank, I made the leap that there was probably a short. Given Rena's reputation, I made my choice and stuck with it.
Today I checked out the local aquarium store. It's got the best selection of salt water stuff that I've seen, but I have to say I was significantly less than impressed by the fresh water selection. Chain pet stores seem to have better. I was especially dismayed when I saw oscars - huge and almost full size - in what looked like 5 gallon tanks. They didn't even have space to do a 360 turn. Poor fish. I doubt I'll frequent that store unless I suddenly decide to go salt water. Even then, probably not.
Thus far the heater's doing alright. We'll see how it holds up over the next few days.
As it was with most sysadmins, for years my biggest hobby has been messing around with unix systems. When that became a real career for me the hobby lost its luster and I started craving something else. I've found it in fish keeping. Although I'm not too far along in the hobby yet, I'm finding it very rewarding to read about and take care of and aquarium. I'm learning a lot, and feeling like I can be somewhat creative with it while still having some set of rules and guidelines to follow.
At the suggestion of one of my readers, I'm going to start discussing stuff here. Some of it will make sense and some won't. I'm open to advice here. I'd like to learn.
A few days ago Microsoft discontinued its mac version of Windows Media Player, instead teaming up with Flip4Mac to provide WMV playback within Apple's own Quicktime. This is excellent news as the WMV player is a free download available on Microsoft's site! Flip4Mac still sells an advanced version for manipulation of WMV files. Check out what Microsoft has to say about it here.
It's that time of the year again - Macworld! There are so many accounts of the latest announcements from iLife to Intel and beyond, but I think the best thing to do is watch it yourself. That being said, I'm pretty impressed by TUAW's coverage of the keynote and will simply link to some of their pieces because anything else would just be repetition.
Let's start with the Intel machines. Apple has announced their new line of laptops, which will replace PowerBooks ultimately. They're called MacBook Pros. Does that mean iBooks will be replaced with MacBooks? I have to be honest - I think the name is awful, but they boast four times the speed of a current PowerBook. How can that be bad? So we have our new Dual Core Intel laptops and iMacs, among other machines. Soon there'll be more there.
Apple also announced iLife '06. The biggest feature for me here is Photocasting as it lets you publish photos and an RSS stream to the web. It strikes me as an answer to Flickr, but more importantly a stab at Yahoo!. I'm guessing this because Yahoo! owns Flickr and also purchased Konfabulator - er, excuse me, Yahoo! Widget Engine. Since there were headaches over where Apple picked up the idea for Dashboard and all it doesn't really surprise me to see a passive stab at another Yahoo!-owned piece of software.
Oh yeah, and there's also iWork '06 which I have nothing good to say about.
There's much more, too. I suggest you just watch the presentation.
I'm sure this is all over the web but since it took me a while to hear about it I thought I'd write a little something.
The United States Postal Service has increased the rate for first class mail to $0.39 from $0.37. The Burlington Free Press has as good a summary as any about what it means here, so I'm not going to bother writing more than that. Just remember this come time to mail in your bills!
Score one for KDE! I'm a Gnome user, myself, but when I hear things like this I consider a switch. KDE developer Zack Rusin posts that he's got most of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. This brings to mind a question - will we be looking at a Dashboard-esque interface in KDE 4 or will we see something more akin to NeXT's dock? Dave Caolo of tuaw ponders the widgets that depend on Applescripts. My immediate guess is that those won't function, but that there aren't a lot of them. More important to me is the ability to see a standardized widget format which can be imported into things like the Yahoo! Widget Engine for Windows and OS X, KDE, and Dashboard. Standardization would be great.
[Via TUAW]