unixwiz

It seems that Elgato has 2 different EyeTV Hybird USB Tuners for the Mac.. The one you can find in the stores is NOT the one advertised here. The one in the stores does NOT do Clear QAM. They decided to add Clear QAM support to the “2008″ version but kept the name and model the same. So to those who want one that does QAM you need to buy it directly from Elgato and not from a local retailer. Only get it from a local retailer if it has on the box “Clear QAM” in green listed some place. The others will not do QAM at all, which means if you bought it to watch HDTV via Cable it won’t work. This information the last time I looked was not clearly visible and was buried deep in their support forums.

So to sum up, if you want a TV Tuner for your Mac and you want to watch the Digital Stations on Cable that are in the clear, you need the Tuner that does Clear QAM. The 2007 version will only do over the air HDTV, which in my area means 1 PBS station.

Went and picked up MacOSX Leopard today… I decided to do a fresh install instead of trying to upgrade my current Tiger installation on my MacBook Pro. Well after backing up my entire hard drive to a external drive. I started the Installation. It took about an hour for it to install. The funny part is 30 minutes of it, was the installer verifying the integrity of of the DVD. First time I have seen an OS verify the entire disk before it started to even do an install to the hard drive. Anyways, 30 minutes after the verification was done, it was installed. The opening video is pretty cool basically flying through space. I then started the restoration of my files from the external USB Drive. Funny thing was as soon as I plugged the drive in to the MBP, time machine kicked in and asked if I wanted to use the external drive as a back up device. So I said yes and it started backing up what I had just installed while I was restoring files from the same drive.

Some little things I have noticed now:

1. If you leave iCal on the Doc, it now shows the current date, unlike Tiger only showing it if you had it actually running.
2. Everything seems a lot quicker than Tiger. But it could also be that I had not reinstalled Tiger since I had bought the MBP.
3. Coverflow in finder. It is cool for going through my documents folder.

I also picked up the new iLife 08. I like the new iPhoto. Now to just get everything set back up the way I had it before.. So far I like what I see, and like the new speed..

Why does MS Windows still use drive letters when every other OS in the world does not? I don’t have a clue, but it made me lose EVERYTHING on my iPod tonight.. I went to sync up some new songs to it and to charge it up (havn’t done it in a while) and every time I connected the iPod, iTunes would say that it detected a iPod in recovery mode and that I needed to “restore” it and update the firmware. What is weird is it played fine, so I could not figure out what was wrong, but since it had been in my bag for about 2 months with out any attention maybe something got borked so I said what the heck and told it to restore it. (Which wipes everything off of my ipod.) So I finish the little process and now iTunes still says that the iPod is in restore mode. So I went to google and looked around and found This Apple info doc. The key and what pissed me off the most is this:

If after restoring your iPod, the message described above reappears, the iPod drive letter may need to be reassigned.

See the “Change the Drive Letter” section of this document for steps to assign a different drive letter.

Why on earth couldn’t they have made their error message a little more descriptive in iTunes.. So I go in and the iPod wanted to use the H drive for some reason. That drive is in use by a network share from my Solaris 10 machine. So I changed the iPod to use I drive and now it works fine.. What sucks is now I have to reload all my music on to it. So I guess what this is about is, if you have an iPod and are using iTunes on Windows and get that error. Check your drive letters before you restore it, it might save you a ton of work. The other thing, drop windows and just move to a mac, which is what I am going to do with my iPod now.

I found this program last night Delicious Library, it is for Mac, and is really neat. What it does it creates an inventory of your DVD’s, CD’s, Games, and books, but the best part is you have to type next to nothing. It uses the bar codes on the items and pulls the information from the Internet. It uses the iSight camera (which is built in to all the new Intel Macbook/MacBook Pro and iMac’s). I used the demo version and it got most everything I put in front of it, even my Sun LDAP blue print book.

If you have a mac and an iSight camera, you should check it out.. Now if I can just get it to do some other things as well..

So for the past couple of weeks everytime I tried to start Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2.0 (yeah I know it is old but it came with my Wacom Tablet) on my MacBook Pro, it would hang for ever trying to download some update from adobe. I went searching for the solution tonight and found it: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/328333.html.

Needless to say, I turned off the Airport connection and then Elements would start. I disabled the Auto update and everything is fine now.

Here is the content of the page:

Message “Updating AdobeOnline components…” when you start Photoshop 7.0, Photoshop Elements 2.0, or InDesign 2.0 (on Mac OS)

Issue

When you try to start Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Photoshop Elements 2.0, or InDesign 2.0, the application returns the message, “Updating AdobeOnline components from Adobe.com” and then freezes.

Details

The freeze occurs when the application is trying to download the AWEXFiles.txt file.

Solutions

Do one of the following solutions:

Solution 1: Backdate the system.

1. From the Apple Menu, select System Preferences, and then select Date & Time under the System category.

2. Select a date in the past, for example a day from the previous week when your Adobe application started successfully.

3. Start Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or InDesign; no update check will occur.

4. From the Help menu, select AdobeOnline, and click Preferences; change the Check Update frequency to Never.

5. Quit Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or InDesign, and change the System date to the current date.

Solution 2: Unplug the network cable.

1. Unplug the network cable.

2. Start Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or InDesign; no update check will occur.

3. From the Help menu, select AdobeOnline, and click Preferences; change the Check For Updates frequency to Never.

4. Plug the network cable back in.

Background information

If your Internet connection goes down while you are downloading AdobeOnline files, then the next time you start Photoshop 7.0, Photoshop Elements 2.0, or InDesign 2.0, AdobeOnline immediately attempts to download the AdobeOnline files and freezes. Changing the Check For Updates frequency to Never prevents this freeze. You won’t miss out on any updates because Adobe is no longer developing updates for these older product versions. You can check for and download any currently available downloads from the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/ .