Until the scrolling text to infinity starts for Star Wars Episode III for us. We have the tickets for the preview showing at 12:01 am tonight. Can’t wait…
Disaster of the Year
It seems that I always have one electronic disaster a year. In 2003 it was my PowerBook display hinge broke and required an expensive repair. Last year, it was Leah spilling water on her iBook so she ended up saving for the whole summer and got a 12″ PowerBook.
And today I dropped my Treo when I took it out of my jean pocket. It landed on the hard kitchen floor and the result was a cracked LCD screen. No dents, no scratches, everything works, just a broken screen! I am so ready to trade either of those two for a broken screen. The touchscreen is working fine though. Here is a picture of the damage.
Unfortunately I didn’t have any phone insurance for the Treo, since Cingular does not provide insurance for a fair large number of their phones including the Treo. Possibly due to their high cost? Anyhow, I was on PalmOne’s website filling out a out-of-warranty repair form (which will cost me $175 to repair the cracked screen) when I remembered that my AMEX card has purchase protection. I called them up and low and behold, AMEX covers accidental damage for 90 days after purchase! It would take them around 2 weeks to come to a decision on how to compensate me but it will be either of these three options: 1) replace my phone, 2) repair the screen, or 3) reimburse the original cost of the phone so I can get a new (perhaps better) one. I am hoping for #1 but #2 is fine with me.
In the mean time I’ll have to put up with a half working screen. Not so bad for most normal use but text messaging is a bit, shall we say, challenging since I have to guess what I type for about half of the time!
Hopefully with this out of the way, there won’t be any more electronic disaster for the reminding year. I am off to play some Halo 2 to vent my frustration…
American owned Man U?
I love my American life et al, but the idea of Manchester United being owned by an American is just absurd! What then? Is the club going to change name to Manchester (U.K.) United, just in case American football (I am sorry, soccer) fans going to mistaken Manchester as one the ten different towns in the U.S.?
Not automatically installing Dashboard Widgets
Call me paranoid but I set my Safari to not automatically open a downloaded item when downloading is completed. However, this play havoc with installing Dashboard widgets. To install them properly you need to unzip the file (if it is in zipped form, which normal it is), copy the file to /Library/Widgets/ and then either trash the zip file or archive it.
This is fine for trying out one or two widgets but after the third one, I decided to play with the new Automator in Tiger and see if I can automate this process. The result is this “Install Dashboard Widgets” Automator actions.
This actions will search for any files with file name ending with wdgt.zip and unzip it, copy the .wdgt file to /Library/Widgets/, and then move the original zip file to my archive folder. Obviously you may have a different archive folder or not even want to archive the zip file. In that case, you just need to change the last action to either move the file to the folder that you want, or swap the last action to the “Move To Trash” action.
To get this actions to show up in the Finder’s contextual menu, you will need to open the actions in Automator and then select File->Save As Plug-in… and then choose Finder for the “Plug-in for” list.
Anyway, have fun with this Automator actions!
Toy Feast
Let’s see. Yesterday I got to play with the following toys because they either arrived or I finally got the chance to play with them.
1) Tiger – Borrowed the Tiger DVD from my friend and installed on my PB (Don’t worry, technically I am not pirating because my copy will be arrived tomorrow in the mail). Took me awhile to install because I had to clone the original drive first, installed a fresh new hard drive and then installed Tiger. In fact it took most of the evening, but thankfully I did it while half-watching TV (NCIS and House). Just like with the upgrade from Jaguar to Panther, Tiger has given my aging TiBook a new lease of life with huge gain in speed. Although I think the speed gain is partly due to my new hard drive which has higher spin speed and larger cache. Oh and the new hard drive is bloody quiet!
2) External hard drive enclosure – Why waste a perfectly good hard drive? So I also bought this very nice hard drive enclosure from Other World Computing to “reuse” my old PB hard drive. Installation is child-play even without any instructions.
3) Wireless surround sound headphones – These new Sony headphones kick-ass! My friend Jeronimo has the older DS3000 model and they impressed me when I tried them out at his apartment a few months back. Mine is the newer model, DS4000, and it has a optical pass-through so you don’t need an extra optical output to hook these headphones up. So now I can play Halo 2 into the depth of night without disturbing the neighbour or the “Sleeping Beauty” (a.k.a. the “Princess”, a.k.a the wife).
4) Halo 2 headset – To go with the headphones, I bought these Plantronics game headset so it will fit my ear/head better. I was doubtful for a long time whether they will be indeed more comfortable but they are. And because the microphone broom can be bent to be closer to my face, now I don’t even need to talk as loud to be heard. The only negative thing is that the cable is slightly shorter than the Microsoft’s headset and thus I kept pulling the headset off slightly.
5) New iPod – Not for me, but for Leah. Still not sure why I have bought Leah a new 20GB iPod to replace her ancient 2nd Generation 10GB iPod 😉 But I guess having a nice bonus from work eases the wallet pain…
Lost in Colonisation 