Apples – Kasperian Moving Parts

On Gaming, Highest Quality, Best Price

Tuesday September 1, 2015

I am a nerd and love video games. I looked into buying a gaming laptop, but after researching and talking to some friends who know more about this space than I do, I decided to go a different route. First, the GPUs they put into laptops are nowhere near as good as the same model GPU you get in a desktop machine. The GTX-980M GPU is nowhere near as good as the GTX-980. Second, gaming laptops are REALLY expensive. I was tempted to get a top of the line Alienware gaming laptop with a GTX-980M GPU. It cost over $2200. And that’s for a graphics card that won’t be able to handle what I want to throw at it anyway. Read more…

Apples, Desktop

Changing Background/Wallpaper on OS X With Multiple Spaces and Multiple Monitors

Tuesday September 25, 2012

There are a bunch of partial solutions and comments and questions “out there” about how to change the background/wallpaper on OS X so that you have the same background image on all of your desktops/spaces and all of your monitors. The way Apple has implemented this, at least on Lion, is goofy as heck. I’ve been participating in one of these discussions on this Apple Support Community thread and while there’s been a couple of decent hacks, I’ve not really liked any of them so far. I was playing with this again today, not really happy with any of the solutions I’ve seen. I first started looking into python/appscript, which used to expose the internal bits necessary to do this, Read more…

Apples

In Search of a Decent Bluetooth iPad Keyboard

Friday June 22, 2012

I’ve been looking for a good external Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad for a while. While the on-screen keyboard is okay for typing a couple of words at a time, it is very much not acceptable for much more than that. A while ago, I managed to find an old iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard and have been using it with my iPad for the last couple of years. The keyboard itself is absolutely wonderful. The keys feel like real keyboard keys and the build quality is very good. Unfortunately, it does not come with a dedicated number row, so to type the number 4, for instance, you have to hold down the blue function key and press “r”. To type Read more…

Apples, Linux

Logitech Marble Mouse and “auto-scrolling” in OS X

Monday August 23, 2010

I love my Logitech Marble Mouse. It’s seriously the best mouse I’ve ever owned. And it works really nicely in Linux, especially thanks to this excellent Ubuntu wiki page. And, reportedly, it works really nicely in Windows too, with Logitech’s mouse config software (which does me absolutely no good being that I refuse to run Windows). But I could not get auto-scrolling (where you hold down one of the smaller buttons and move the marble to scroll) to work in OS X. I almost broke down and bought a new Kensington trackball mouse like the Kensington K72337US Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring for PC or Mac, Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac (this one still really Read more…

Apples, Linux

VLC patch for hfsplus partitions, yay!

Monday January 11, 2010

I have a 13″ MacBook Pro that I use for my personal and non-work shtuff. I resized OS X down, installed Linux (Kubuntu), and set up a shared partition so that I can keep files there that I want to access from both OS X and Linux. Things like my music and video collection, Snooker torrents, VMware virtual machines, etc. It appears that there are basically 4 decent options for a shared filesystem between OS X and Linux, but IMHO only 2 of them are worth trying and only 1 of them seems to actually work almost perfectly: The venerable FAT32 filesystem. Yes, it works. No, it doesn’t work like you’d want a UNIX filesystem to work. You can’t store Read more…

Apples, Desktop, KDE, Linux

Having spent a few days with his MacBook Pro…

Saturday November 14, 2009

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all of the issues at hand. The impetus in this case was: Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Read more…

Apples, Desktop, Linux

Why Isn’t Desktop Linux “There” Yet?

Tuesday November 10, 2009

It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re in the mood for a good rant or are bored beyond belief or want to hear about how to get Ubuntu Karmic installed on a MacBook Pro (system 5,5), stick around. Otherwise, I’ll understand. So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do Read more…

Apples, Open Source

OS X + NFS+ OpenOffice = SUCK

Monday April 9, 2007

Repeat after me: I will never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never buy a proprietary (read: non Open Source) computer ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again, no matter how attractive the packaging is. I don’t know what from the bowels of hell itself possessed me to buy a Powerbook, but it was quite possibly one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. It has been nothing but trouble from the day I got it (though it was a nice little mental exercise and challenge for a while in getting Linux to run on it). I have given up on it for my own personal use. I’m back to using my work laptop Read more…

Apples, Google, Life in General

Apple’s Exceptional Attention to Detail

Friday December 1, 2006

My most favoritest headphones just died on me recently. They were cheapo Jensen behind-the-head headphones, but they had amazingly good sound and fit me perfectly (like comfortable, broken-in shoes). I used them with my iPod, and everything else. *sniffle* But alas, one side of the stereo headphone has stopped working entirely (which sort of defeats the purpose of “stereo”, doesn’t it?) and the faithful Jensen headphones now reside in a landfill in MA somewhere. So I was getting all ready to go on a conquest for new headphones. Then I realized that my iPod nano came with Apple-sanctioned mini-headphones that I’d never even opened. I tried them out today and was once again impressed with Apple’s attention to detail and Read more…

Apples, Google, KDE, Life in General, Linux, Movies, Music, Video Games

Warning: a brain dump followeth: Blockbuster has sweetened their deal by allowing in-store trade-ins of online-rented movies. This, to me, blows NetFlix out of the water, since NetFlix does not yet have a brick-and-mortar presence anywhere (?). And, because we signed up with Blockbuster a while ago, we still get to keep our 2 free movie-or-game rental coupons per month too. Pretty cool! As a result, we’ve been watching tons of movies as of late, including the Indiana Jones trilogy (forgot how good they were!!). I’ve been a busy little beaver over the last few weeks, OSS-code-wise, anyway. Adriaan and I have whipped kpilot into shape proper-like, it seems. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time twice now and merged Read more…