Archive for computers
February 6, 2008 at 9:58 am · tag/s : computers, melbourne, software, writing
and so we write and that is all we do. and there is nothing on the screen except our writing. in fact the only pixels that are switched on are the ones necessary to show the writing and as i type, more pixels switch on to show the new words and they’re green and that is kinda cute, and somehow it is much more relaxing to see just the words on the screen and none of the other distractions.*
and so write is all we do. that is the default position. and none of it is of any interest to any one else. at least not yet. or maybe it never will be. and maybe this doesn’t matter.
essentially i have bought a year to write. there is just a little bit of this and that, here and there. but minimal. so a miracle : i have time. to write, two more things are needed : a method and a rhythm. oh and rain helps. thank you. but it is not essential. and if the greek next door would shut the fuck up as well and people would stop slamming their doors and cuntface upstairs would stop dropping marbles on the floor that would help. but it is not essential. all i need is time, method and rhythm. and it seems i have them. now and now and now and now.
and now it is raining too. bucketing down as it happens. at last. and cuntface has gone out. and the rain is masking the sound of the greek next door.
it seems in this new life that i go to bed grumpy when the feature creature is away, except this morning i have woken up grumpy too and after an hour or two of grumping around i realize/decide that i have a headache and that a pain killer is appropriate, and some toasted grain bread from dench (have you tried their donuts?!) with peanut butter and some of that nice french cherry jam and a big pot of strong tea.
oh yeah.
and so i can write. and that is all i need to do. and the second cup of tea is nice and strong. that’s the advantage of a smaller cup : by the time you get to the second cup it is nice and strong.
ss officer to the jew : i will release you if you can guess which one of my eyes is made of glass.
jew : it is the left one.
ss officer : correct. how did you know?
jew : it looks more human than the other one.
renowned holocaust historian yehuda bauer told a version of this story in his speech to the german parliament on 27 january 1998. one of the roles of the historian he says, is to tell true stories. (i had been wondering about the use of fiction.) but he prefaces the glass eye story by saying that he doesn’t know if it is true or not. it is worth telling anyway, no? one wonders where it came from. is it at all possible that it is a joke? told by one jew to another? in the lager?
* ok. so i am a slut. after i wrote my daily 500 words today i discovered that jesse, the ceo of
hogbay software and the developer of
writeroom which i am testing and which gives me the clutter-free screen described above, will give
a free licence to people who post a review on their blog. so i thought why not post them? but since i didn’t write these words
in order to get the free licence and he may well have judged this post to be too crude and rude, and too vague to qualify as a review, i was well prepared to be unsuccessful. so i may be a slut but i am not a whore. :p anyway i did get the free licence. thanks jesse. if you want to
try writeroom gentle reader you can use it free for 30 days. if you want to keep using it after that you’ll have to
pay $25… oh. you’ll need a mac. is it even necessary to say that?
January 4, 2008 at 8:18 am · tag/s : computers, software
if i thought i still need my hideously overpriced and under featured dot mac account for file sharing, it appears that i don’t : quickshareit is the easiest simplest file sharing utility ever and it is free. drag a file onto the icon and quickshareit uploads the file and gives you a URL where it can be downloaded. drag a bunch of files and it zips them first. drag a bunch of images and it will create a gallery. file size up to about 100 mb. your files stay online for about 3o days. completely anonymous - you don’t even need to register or sign up. and … not an ad in sight. (not yet anyway…) for example here is a link to another favourite freeware mac app which does exactly what its name implies lockdesktop
November 19, 2007 at 7:59 pm · tag/s : computers
since i read that it is possible to install the mac o/s onto it, i thought that i wouldn’t mind getting my hands on an asus ee pc. they are really aimed at primary school children :p but at 400 dollars (at least in the usa) this 0.9 kg baby laptop would be just what the doctor osteopath ordered for when i am commuting between melbourne and wagga next year.
as it has no hard drive and a tiny screen however, i would have thought you’d get a bit more than three and a half hours out of the battery but this is all, the manufacturer says, that it will give you. since i am also not a big fan of fan noise, it looks like i’ll have to wait for the next iteration of the ee pc which will be built around a different, less power hungry chip also allowing the removal of the cooling fan, thus further extending battery life - according to apc mag. by that time the long rumoured ibook mini will probably be taking the world by a storm. or not. one thing is for certain though : steve will be pricing it a little higher than 400 bucks!
November 5, 2007 at 10:59 am · tag/s : computers
dear Cocoatech
i have been using the demo of Path Finder for three days now and i don’t mind telling you i nearly cried when i began using it. what a stunningly beautiful intuitive and humble piece of software. everything you have ever wished the mac os finder would do and a whole bunch of other things you never thought of, and if whilst using it you happen to think : i wonder if Path Finder can do this - then i bet you it can. the years of my life i have wasted trudging through folder after folder to find, move and copy files, this is where my tears actually originate i think. oh and all the time i have wasted downloading and installing launchbar, quicksilver, defaultfolder and a bunch of other pieces of software that either slow down to a crawl or crash, or fail to live up to their wildly exaggerated promises, or are so mindbogglingly complex that you need a spare lifetime to learn how to use them.
so thank you, and thanks for providing a 21 day full (that, software developers please note, means : not crippled in any way) demo of Path Finder so i can really put it through its paces before committing my hard earned which usually leads to being disappointed by a buggy program not fit for beta made by halfwits.
who needs leopard? Path Finder earns a perfect score of : 100 99/100
stop press : i have had to take back one mark because it transpires that whilst i can open a file from an ftp server straight out of Path Finder i can’t save the file, nor upload files to the server. :| (i had almost trashed my copies of fetch and textwrangler.) apparently this is a mac os finder limitation, but surely you can add this functionality? that would make Path Finder perfect! thank you.
July 31, 2007 at 7:59 am · tag/s : blog, computers, people, travel
aargh i wake up and find that all my styles and other carefully wrought plaintext theme mods are stuffed since i upgraded wordpress to fix a problem blogging from within macjournal that had developed. and this is at a time when i am in the last days of my gig as artist and writer in residence at ashfield in sydney : i am on dialup and i have neither bandwidth nor time to fix it … even the stupid default sponsorship message the plaintext theme puts at the bottom of your page is back … scott you know i love you but … ah well a good excuse to link to a much more interesting blog : ryszard dabek is writing from paris in modulation ….
edit : fixed … i can do css :p
May 21, 2007 at 7:13 am · tag/s : art, blog, computers
apple is 30 and macworld is running a feature on the 30 best mac products ever. i was relieved to find that my old friends hypercard, the powerbook 100 series and system 7 (just) made it on to the list. although the mac plus missed out. (come on guys a mac with a scsi port and a whole megabyte of ram?) these were truly revolutionary tools. i felt like an explorer in a strange and wondrous land, and no one knew what i was talking about. i would wip out my powerbook 100 on the long commute from newcastle to sydney and my fellow passengers would stare, and sometimes one would venture : what’s that? - it’s a computer. really? and they would shake their heads and go back to their newspapers. little did we all know.
later : i had been turned down for a place in the postgraduate programme at the newcastle university art school because they didn’t have any computers, so the next year i showed up for my interview with my powerbook 100, put it on the table, opened one of my hypercard stacks and said : this is some of my work, and i don’t need you to provide me with a computer. they offered me a place and a job. i changed my name to dan zero and the rest is history.
May 12, 2007 at 6:41 am · tag/s : blog, computers, doubt, strange, web
for some reason sometimes when i ask google something it thinks i am a virus, and once it is in this loop, it stays there. this precipitates a significant identity crisis. in fact it has an alarming general effect on how i feel about myself and my place in the world - worst of all : there is no box i can tick to indicate that i am not in fact a virus or a spyware application … i am real! dammit and i want to google something. now. please?
also : they don’t know how to spell “receive” and yes i would be available for employment as a proof reader at google in manhattan - but i don’t come cheap.
April 29, 2007 at 7:51 am · tag/s : blog, computers, experiments, pain, research, web
is it just me or do other people get that sinking feeling when they go to a website to get some information and the dreaded flash loading bar appears in the screen? according to some marketing company 80% of web users hate flash intros (and they want my creditcard details if i want to find out more, so they’re probably lying) - but i am one of them. in fact i hate all flashy flash websites in their entirety.
yo : web “designers”, be ye professional or enthusiastic amateur : when i see your stupid flash intros i immediately close the browser window and go somewhere else, because i hate flash. in fact, spare me your cascading style sheets and the rest of your fledgling “webdesign” skills altogether : just give me some good old html, or better still : a full rss feed since i just want the text. and i doubt if i’m alone…
read more »
October 23, 2006 at 6:52 am · tag/s : blog, computers, doubt, film, love, pain
someone somewhere once said : everyone has one book in them - maybe we should add “or film” to that…
yes, somewhat belatedly, ephemera has finally caught up with that powerful, haunting document called tarnation
note : i am almost reluctant to call it a film because, although it was shown to great acclaim at cannes and was seen in cinemas and is a more or less conventional film length, it is not a film in any conventional sense of the word - rather it is a complex collage of sound, text and image, which tells the story of the troubled life of jonathan caouette, and was shot and recorded using a variety of cameras and media over 20 years, and edited by him using imovie
so now i finally have an answer to those people that ask : what is multimedia? only i would like to be able to hand them the original three hour cut - the fact that it is 88 minutes long is due to the executive producers, namely gus van sant and that hedwig and the angry inch guy, who persuaded caouette to reduce its length to something more palatable to cinema audiences, which seems a pity (i also wonder which copy writer should be sacked over the tacky tag “your greatest creation is the life you lead…” and all the other gushy stuff on the wellspring media website)
i guess, if pushed, we could call it an an autobiographical documentary, but conventional genres really do this work an injustice - thanks to mobile phone video cameras and web cams there will soon enough be a flood of autobiographical documents, and more than likely they will appear on youtube or my.space and feature product placement - but it is most unlikely that any of them will leave such a strong impression on the retina and the mind as tarnation
it is the harrowing story of one person’s life and growing up and living with insanity and abuse, and the most powerful and confronting scene, for me is at the end : we are in the present, and caouette at the age of 31 turns the camera on himself, and with his schizophrenic, brain damaged mother alseep downstairs, talks about his doubt, and fear, of becoming insane like her…
this is a disturbing multimedia document and a significant achievement - it demonstrates a naive, almost narcissistic, disregard for convention and genre, and why shouldn’t it? i would like to see the original three hour cut… and true to the multimedia form, i imagine myself the executive producer … what kind of film would it be if it was simply a humble documentary about his mother…? which it already is to some extent … and what is next ? tarnation the game…?
assemble your own version of tarnation on your imac - the ten dvd set includes all the original 160 hours of super-8, betamax, vhs, hi-8 and mini-dv, and the still photographs, answering machine messages and audiocassette diaries… and a free copy of ilife06…
(* with thanks to poo-tee-weet? for alerting me to tarnation and lending it to me)
October 5, 2006 at 7:11 pm · tag/s : blog, computers
That’s me! Luckily, to get rid of them is easy.
MacWorld explains how.
