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Apple has my Macbook Pro. They haven’t computer-napped it or anything… I had to send it in for Applecare. This is the computer I bought with college loans two and a half years ago to insure that I could make media for the next couple of years. It is a extremely over used computer… I do everything with it. I have the PC server box that my house uses as the media network share and that is where this post is being written, but I have gotten really accustom to using my laptop to do basically everything having to do with media and the web.

My mac has been a fantastic machine it has been beaten and abused… I mean I don’t smack it around or anything but it has been known to spend entire nights (notice the plural) crunching MPEG2s so be I can give a client or friends a DVD the next day.

My mac has had a lot of problems. It is the first generation Macbook Pro. The main chip in my mac is an Intel core duo not a core 2 duo like all their current machines. I have few complaints with my computer other then the immense amount of heat that it creates. This has specifically to do with this chip in the guts of my machine. All of my problems can be traced back to this one heat problem. The dvd drive stopped working a month after I got it. I sent it into Applecare and got it fixed. Then it happened again and they fixed it again. This time the keys “A-L” on the keyboard would stop working whenever it got hot. So that is why it is in for more Applecare.

Apple is known for releasing very chic top of the line computers (albeit extremely expensive), but god help us all when they do major revisions to their product lines as they often end up making some less than stellar computers during the transition. This latest major transition from the old G4 chips to the Intel chip has been a revolution… and really it a contributing factor to why I bought this computer was its ability to boot Windows and OSX. But I just have to say that buying Applecare was one of the best decisions I ever made. I bought this mac from Apple’s online store in the refurbished section. I recommend doing this for anyone as it saves you money and the computer gets treated the same as if it was brand new. As I was getting the box sent to my house so it could be sent to Apple’s repair warehouse I have talked to a product specialist who has told me that if this last repair does not fix all of my issues they will send me a new computer branding my old computer a lemon (see below.) All of this would not be possible without Applecare. Lesson for today: if you are going to drop the money to buy a mac… buy Applecare too.

I am sour...

So yeah this is probably the most boring post on this blog right now (which is saying something) but I wanted to let you all know why I have not been posting for the last few days. As soon as my mac gets back into my greedy little hands I will be posting some videos of the vjing I did for the Stevedore last Friday which are pretty awesome.

It is 5:14 in the morning and I can’t stop poking at this old ibook. It was given to me to fix by a friend and I am doing my damndest to make it work again. So kernel panics galore- this is basically when a mac does the equivalent of a windows blue screen of death… it means something pretty significant is screwed up in the hardware. I thought it had to do with the hard drive as the panics would happen anytime I tried to install leopard on the machine it would get 15% into the install and kernel panic on me… So I told the guy maybe it’s the hard drive so he went out and bought a pimporific 250gd ATA hard drive from newegg. I took his ibook completely apart ala this article. After i got it all pieced back together I turned it on and it powered on! This is always the first test to be done on any electronic device after an intense tear down. But alas upon attempting the Mac OSX Leopard install… kernel panics. So I tried a PRAM reset… The magic Apple-option-p-r hold down after restart trick and…

it worked a little bit longer but still now dice.

Technology does not like me much right now. I give up for the night. Tomorrow… well today really i do vjing for The Stevedore at The Skylark in west Seattle. If you don’t have something else to do be there it should be a good show!

more video goodness for this rather geeky post… it is even weirder than the previous attached video. This one was me playing with a video glitch in a bad rip of the Mel Gibson movie Apocalypto… to quite beautiful results I think.

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So I don’t know about you but when I see something cool or different or innovative that has to do with technology I have tendency to spend weeks pining over the thing. I do google search after google search trying to read up on the item to see if this piece of tech is something I actually need (which I rarely do).

For christmas I got a ThingamaKIT and have spent the better part of a month trying to find out everything I could make it do.

What is a ThingamaKIT?

So I got the ThingamaKIT for the day little baby Jesus wasn’t born on and have spent the last month waiting impatiently to assemble the kit… but alas no time for love Dr. Jones. Until last week when I found my desk covered with resistors and capacitors and other amazing electronic bits. I was also reading every guide I could find on how to make this thingamawhatever the best thingamawhatever it could possibly be.

Hack-a-day is a beautiful blog that I have spent many a day reading and marveling at it’s sheer brazen worship of people who say fuck the manufacturers warranty in favor of technological understanding. Hack-a-day had an amazing article on hacking the thingamakit (which is highly encouraged by the people who sell the kit no warranties are being voided here). So yes go and be merry and buy thingamakits and make little noise making friends for yourself because making the things you play with is super cool!

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I will post more video of my new little bleepy friend sometime in the near future.

bought a new toy from ebay for my Canon Rebel XT digital still camera.
time lapse is amazing if done well. look to these shots from planet earth and see what cheap still cameras and time lapse boxes (like the one I just purchased) can do…

So I have been hacking my xbox all weekend long. I found this awesome link at the almighty afterdawn.com forums (place where you go to learn how to do fun things like transcode dvds and hack xboxs). The tutorial shows you how to take a softmodded (no modchip) xbox and put a much higher capacity drive inside of it. I went to fry’s electronics and bought a 500GB HD for 90bucks, followed the instructions on this afterdawn page and blamo! Now I am playing halo2 off of my gigantic hard drive… fun times in brad town.

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so i am currently deathly ill. little baby jesus has to be pissed at me cause him and his daddy are beatin up my guts. so while i sit here and contemplate the end to my life… i am ogling over a camera that i hope to own within the next couple of weeks. the canon hv20. it looks like the answer to most of my problems. a 1080p 24p camera for less then $700 dollars? I am all over it. godbless cmos chips i hope they erraticate ccds from the earth… well in consumer grade hd gear at least

One of the big reasons I am thinking about buying this camera has to do with my friend Jed who has been using this camera for his final school project. His blog has been one of the greatest places that I have been to for seeing the complete and ultra detailed process a tech-centric filmmaker’s process.

I have held this camera in my hands and felt it’s glory. there are some downside (no manual gain control, 1/8th inch audio in not xlr, possible workflow issues). But whatever like I said 1080p at 24 frames a second for under a G? Hells yes Francis!

So yes much love to jed and to the hv20.