Don’t even bother to read my post on Firefox 3.0, go read Andy’s post from the Chicago Sun-Times. Hell, go bookmark Andy’s column index over there, he’s a better writer then I’ll ever be (and certainly dig out out his blog from teh sidebar on the right). Worth a read if only for the last 3 paragraphs, which sum up much of tech writing and all the hype on Firefox.
Archive for the 'Reviews' Category
Contrary to most reviews, this isn’t a minor update with only a few significant features, but a major overhaul from the top to the bottom. If you have an Intel mac, it’s also a major speed up. But this operating system craves ram, I wouldn’t try to run this on less then one meg. I’m stupidly trying to do so, and I gotta tell you it’s a dog. So up ram before the uprev.
Ok, they have google streets for Chicago (and a handful of other cities now). Just use Google maps, and you get a new tab button to give you an actual street level photo of the location your looking at. And if you are looking carefully you may find your self. Or me, standing with my back to the camera just next door to a certain Pilsen cafe. Or the Burning Man Fire Truck parked along side Kenneth’s. You never know. Truly cool.
UPDATED: got one, added mini review, edited for clarity.
This is the single best bit of the MOLLE II system, the sustainment pouch. Just enough PALS webbing to attach other pouches to, or attach to a larger bag or pack, and D-rings for attaching a shoulder strap. Also good for throwing into a big pack for organization. Has a gather cord at the top, pass threws for compression straps. 1000D Cordura. I was going to retrofit this to the Bergen, if I could make the Bergen work for me (the Bergen was DOA, and unsalvageable). These are large enough for throwing a pair of shoes in with room to spare, and will easily replace the old swiss gas mask bags that everyone used to use for camera bags. Good for E and E, good for every day carry, good for organization. Only downsides: the horrible woodland camo pattern, and the usual crappy SDS construction. One of them at least can be fixed with spray paint 
WOW. I just got another one off the wishlist, and the construction is even worse then my original one. this one was sold as new, lacked a NSN tag, and seems to be made of an thinner material. I’m going to visit my old one later this week, and will compare and contrast. But I stand by most of my original thesis: this is the single most useful bit of MOLLE gear. The one thing i misremembered is that some of the PALS webbing was actually the compression straps from the MOLLE II pack. Easy enough to remedy with a bit of spare webbing. I fear I’m going to have to write an article on garbage can modding PALS/MOLLE gear…
After spending a week on the 13″ widescreen white plastic MacBook, moving back to the 12″ standard screen PowerBook leaves me feeeling like someone has drawn the shades over part of the screen. On the other hand the PowerBook doesn’t lose track of the mouse and hang every so often for no reason (is this happening to any other macBook users, or is it just a glitch of the machine I was borrowing?).
The MacBook is freaking fast. The PowerBook looks better dirty.
There’s this nice neighbor of my parent’s who sometimes clears their snow when they’re out of town. Really nice guy, always working on a car or bike in his garage. He has the best restored Corvair I’ve ever seen, and I know my Corvairs–grew up in two of them (and almost died in one of them, but that’s another story). I lust found out he’s the owner of Chi-Town Cushman. They make custom parts for Cushman Scooters, build custom motorcycles based off of Cushmans among other things (check out their services link, they’re not just for Cushman). I’ve seen their work first hand, and it’s amazing. Check them out, they get the FFEJWORLD seal of aproval.
Cushman was the Nebraska based company that made scooters until 1965 and until very recently the meter-maid 3 wheel carts, groundskeeper carts, and factory parts picker carts. After 100 years their current owner, Textron, closed the factory and folded their line into two other divisions (one being their former number one competitor).
The vest John got me was delivered yesterday. Like all good nerds, I immediately put it on and failed to remove the tag until 2am. The color has nothing to do with the pinkish image on the website, it’s more of a khaki with darker digital blotches. It’s still kinda ugly, and I’ve gotten a few stares. This thing rocks. It’s quite robust, made of a heavy-ish cotton canvas (8.5 oz. 100% cotton canvas). It’s much better made then the last 2 Campco/Humvee Photo Safari Vests, better made then the four 20+ year old Banana Republic/Campco vests I lost in the eviction, better made then all the other vests I’ve ever owned or tried on (i should point out that I have never tried on or held Jerry Boyle’s Willis and Geiger vest, of which the Campco is a clone–I imagine for what W&G charged before they went under it was built like Fort Knox, but I could be wrong). Some seams are quad stitched. It makes Jeff Mickey’s Doemke look like a piece of kleenex. Ok, so much for first impressions.
First off, it’s vest of pockets, not one where you can add your own pockets or pouchs via a PALS or snap mattrix. It’s pocket layout is similar to the Campco vests, although the layout is flipped. You have 2 clip bellows pockets on the bottom left, one bellows on the bottom right, one smallish zippered flat pocket center left, one similarly sized velcro flap pocket center right, and two open topped patch pockets on top, although the one on the left has a sewn divider to make it a pen holder. The outside back bottom has two elastic gathered drink holder/overflow pockets each rated for one liter bottles and a velcro flaped patch pocket between them. The inside back bottom has 2 pockets. The inside front left has one document pocket. And there’s one hidden pocket, with two openings. The bellows pockets tend to be slightly smaller then the Campco, and it lacks the supersized front center bellows pocket. But the pockets are more robust, the flapped ones have longer flaps, and the small ones are still big enough for your hand to fit in. Where it excels is the pocket placement: the water bottle pockets are perfectly placed for me to actually use, as is the back pocket the back inside bottom pockets are as worthless and unusable (unless you take off the vest) as they are on all other vests). Yes it has the mandatory hand warmer pockets. Then there is the centerpiece: a large interior hidden pocket, which takes up the entire interior of the vest between the lining and the vest front and which is fitted with removable velcro panals for adding their line of pouches or holders or making your own. I plan to use double sided velcro tape to fill the interior with custom holders and cases. If I lost some weight, I could fill the interior pocket with a few days clothing.
It’s missing the two filer pockets behind the large bellows that I use on the Campco for kleenex and odd shaped items. It has a single d-ring in a weird place for carrying your keys, instead of the 2 d-rings and dedicated key keeper. It’s missing one interior doc pocket, and the “hidden” slash wallet pocket. Unlike the Campco, none of the pockets are lined.
Next up is what they left off that I won’t miss. No epaulets (remind me to write a rant on the worthlessness of these things). No filter pocket. It has an open back panal, but no mesh. All of this sames some weight and should make the vest wick moisture better. We shall see
It’s about 3 inches shorter then the Campco, which means it looks better on shorter or normal sized people (the proportions are really good: the Campco always felt like it was designed for a 7 footer, wore like a skirt, and left my arms swimming in the huge snag on everything armholes). It also means little or no pocket bounce when you peddle a bike, and little chance of the vest lifting off your shoulders when you sit down with over sized pockets.
It’s got a velcro closed badge/radio holder that I’m experimenting with holding my sunglasses. Then there’s this wonderful sewn loop just below the back of the neck. That’s where the bike light is going 
Inside the a main bellows pocket is a sewn in strip of divided elastic for retaining/positioning odd shaped or cylindrical items. And there are two belt loops built inside the vest so you can use the vest as suspenders to hold up your belt and the pants attached to it ofcourse. Great idea, but i wish you could adjust this to account for different waist heights (maybe you can, I haven’t spent all that much time with the vest off since i got it).
15 pockets. Built like a tank. Great layout, again this is the first vest I’ve tried that I could get to the back pocket without dislocating my arm. 2 liters worth of drink pockets. A cavernous modular interior pocket. Ugly color. Great vest. I’ll post a follow up later this week, and some pictures when I get a hold of a camera. Now back to main task of figuring out what to put where. Thanks again, John!
(4:30 this morning a guy approaches the bus shelter wearing the same hat as me and a Campco style vest. I move the bag containing mine, he sits down and looks into the bag. after a while I realize I’m grining like a maniac: despite being 6 feet plus tall, when he sat down the stuff in his pockets caused the vest to lift off his shoulders. It also struck me as funny that two guys with cheap boonie hats, vests o’ pockets, beards, and large shoulder bags should share a bus shelter in the early am…)
UPDATED:
I had to back up and rebuild my PowerBook this weekend. I’d run out of hard drive space, and the machine suddenly began misbehaving: losing network connections, applications freezing and becoming corrupt, scrolling and saving not working. Some of this was due to lack of drive space, some due to almost five years of using the archive/save settings method of updating OS X. My machine was carrying chunks of the operating system necessary to run the previous iBook, which ran on a different CPU, no longer supported config files, and other cruft and hairballs. It took forever to boot, what with it looking for hardware that wasn’t there and tripping over old configs. No matter. I juggled the available space on my external drives, backed everything up, and erased the hard disk and did a fresh install. Only a few apps got lost in the shuffle mostly because i had to back up over multiple hard drives and cds. The machine runs so much better now.
Unlike 2001, I no longer have the time, network connectivity or focus to keep up on fresh updates to my utility software. So I used the fresh install as a catalyst to updating the things I can’t live without. Some of them are set and forget, some are use everyday, but either way I can’t live without them. These are all free, most of them will except your donations.
First up is TinlerTool by Marcel Bresink. A lovely GUI to turn off the animations, show hidden files in the finder, add quit to the finder menu, turn on hidden features, pin the dock position and so much more. Killing the GUI animations improves performance and the other customizations just make OS X work better for me.
Next is Shadowkiller from Unsanity. It does one thing, and one thing right: it removes the shadow that OS X draws around open apps and windows. On older machines, this speeds things up considerably.
OS X has lots of plists, barely human readable XML configuration files, not all of which are adequately documented, and all of which are subject to change. I could spend all my time opening plists up to find out what they control, or I could just get these apps. For some things you just have to open terminal and type, like for disabling Dashboard. Dashboard is just a waste of memory and processor power for me. Get the simple instructions to turn it off here.
iTerm it’s better for me then the included OS X terminal, and has tabs. Plus I never have to remember to change the term type to talk to SGI computers. Since I no longer have to have a dozen terms open at once it’s a lighter load then running the OS X X11 subsystem and running RXVT. If i was still doing hard core admin, X11/RXVT is the way I’d go.
There are times you really don’t want to open up Photoshop, like when you have 30 apps already open open or your just have to resize an image. Sometimes Preview just can’t do the job, or you just don’t want to go digging in it’s image processing menus. For lightning fast image editing, cropping, resizing, captioning and mangling there is ImageWell. It crams lot of power in a small space.
If you need a graphical FTP or SFTP app, you need the free and open source Cyberduck. Not as powerful or as fast as Transmit, but close enough for casual use and you can’t argue the price.
iStumbler helps you find wireless networks. Much better then the OS X Airport menubar icon, which is much better then MS windows.
iSquint takes those YouTube and Google FLV videos and other odd video formats to something Quicktime or your video iPod can see. It’s optimized for iPod and TV sized videos. Doesn’t need Quicktime pro!
Service Scrubber removes all those worthless items like “convert to Chinese” from the Services menu item that eat up your computers memory and processor time.
Quicksilver. What if Spotlight actually worked? What if the OS X services menu item actually worked (I’ve been highlighting words and trying to use the dictionary item to no avail)? What if you wanted another religion to follow? Quicksilver lets you launch apps by key strokes, and so much more. I don’t use 1/3d of it’s power, but once you wade through all the support sites for it, you can get this app to trim your workflows, it really saves haivng to toggle up a finder window and go hint for a file or app. Again, thats not the half of of it. If all you want is a menubar application list, got get Tigerlaunch.
I can’t survive without a RSS feed/news reader. The two free ones I recommend are Vienna and NetNewsWire Lite. Vienna is open source and a work in progress, NNWL is a feature chopped version of it’s legendary big brother.
Which brings us finally to Firefox and it’s OS X optimized offspring, Camino. OS X ships with an adequate browser (Safari), one that is making a serious effort at standards compliance. Firecox and Camino are mostly there already. They’re fast, extendable and open source. I still keep Opera around for sentimental reasons. It’s taken it a while to find it’s legs on OS X, but it’s currently fast and free. Like Firefox it runs great on MS windows too.
Flock is the browser for blogers. It’s geared towards the mythical everyman. It’s open source, built out of Firefox, has a built in news/feedreader, bloging tool, social bookmark sharing support, photosharing support, photobloging support and is extendable with extensions already availible. It’s really simple, really easy, drag photos into it to upload them to Flickr or Photobucket, drag them into the blog editor to upload. It autodiscovers your blog settings. Everything is simple and smooth, has one of the best setup wizards I’ve seen to date, the level of integration between features, the online services and bloging software supported is amazing. And frustrating as all hell to a power user, frankly this early in the adoption curve only power-users are doing RSS, bloging photosharing and social bookmarking. Some of the gotchas are deal killers for me. You can only set one category for your post, you can’t edit previous posts-except to replace a previous post when you publish your new post. Likewise you can only assign one photo sharing service or one bookmark service. Firefox plugins don’t seem to work. One or two of the default settings are weird and insecure. It tries hard, it really is simple enough for the layperson to set up and use (but turn off history sharing). With a little bit of work it would be killer for the early adopter crowd as well.
With the recent (as in don’t tell me Google is a platform when the Mac version ships 2 years later and their ain’t a Linux version) release of the the Mac version of Google Earth, the fun things you can see with it has come up a few times in the past few days in conversation and email. Remember of course that the pictures weren’t all taken onthe same day, so it is possible to see your self in multiple places, if you are large enough and a good color to be seen from orbit (grey volvos blend in, burgundy ones stand out).
Here’s the Register’s Black Helicopter contest winners from last year, which include everything from a U2 in flight to a couple of Blackbirds to Black Helicopters. Make sure you go through all the pages. And here’s there the WW2 bomber in flight.
