told ya’

See you in two weeks.

Fingerworks

I did a recent comment on Mac2‘ regarding computer mice.
I never liked them. I mean…they are ok to play quake but other then that I’ve always found them a bit…over-used, I guess.

A few years back I came in touch with an igesture pad, and the point and click world made sense for a wile. Imagine a track-pad on steroids. Imagine clicking with both fingers to get a right-click. Imagine pinning your thumb, dragging an icon with index and middle finger and that would be a “move” imagine just the index and middle finger dragging an icon and that would be a “copy”, imagine clicking on a icon with all 4 fingers (no thumb) and releasing them all at the same time to send the item to the trash. The chords were vast and there was a learning mode so you could make up your own.

Fingerworks closed up a long time ago. I never heard from them again. bankruptcy, fleeing CEO’s…I don’t know. I was sad because a) they made great devices that suited me (and not the other way around and b) once again I failed to spot a dead horse. A project I liked was really not meant for the mass market. my bad. again. I had my hopes up for this one.

I uttered a “liar liar pants on fire” wile watching the last apple keynote as Steve Jobs demonstrated the “pinch” gesture on the iphone and sold it as “never seen before” or something in that fashion. fingerworks were doing that 10 years ago. not on a screen, granted. but the concept was there.

The other day, by complete accident on flikr I had a little “comment-chat” stravaganza with another user, he apparently had a Touchstream keyboard (fingerworks’ flagship product) and informed me that it was Apple who ended up buying Fingerworks.

I’m slightly excited about the rumors that the next macbooks will have features like the pinch. People are talking about a touch screen but I’d rather have the igestures built into a slightly bigger track pad. Sure touch screens are fun, but between igesture or and etch-a-sketch in a real world scennario…
For my needs gimme the igesture any day of the week.

So I discovered the unofficial figerworks forum and in the buy/sell area there was a link to an auction on ebay. I was amazed, repulsed and startled all at the same time. See for yourself:

How is this guy going to explain this expense to his wife?

…just wondering.

It Lives! It Lives!

well… I’m posting from the mac. : )

it’s got some scars here and there…but hey, para-phrasing Tyler Durden “who wants to die without scars?!” and a few less screws here and there…

welcome back to life my friend.

Rise Lazarus!

Anyone who knows me can vouch that I never give up on a friend.

So I skipped lunch and went home, I decided to be a bit more rough this time. Imagine looking at the ibook from the back, there’s a pair of cables coming from the left and right of the display, from what I’ve gathered the left one is all the power related cables and the right the cables analogue to the VGA’s on regular pc desktops. It was a bit hard but it payed of…for the first time I noticed that twisting the cable got the display to power up, then out of the blue it was just out. no twists or turns would make it come back again. So it had to be a loose cable somewhere. (yes, the ibook as stripped open and I ran power through it…Oooopsie, not a best-practice thing, but hey…) I got rid of the insulation on that set of cables, and right there used to be the monitors hinge (that little gray thing that couples the display with the bottom side of the ibook that looks like a kitchen covet handle) the yellow cable was broken:

getting them together again results in the following bundle of joy:

Now I have to spend a bit of money on a precision soldering iron and find a way to insulate that set of cables again, I’ve talked with a former expert on the subject and was pointed in the right direction, then a way to make them pass through the same routing channels but doing more intelligently (pardon my lack of humility) then what apple is doing, especially because now that yellow cable is much less resistant to stress.

No my buddy isn’t fixed yet…but it’s getting better.

Godspeed

There are weeks…and then there are….well…weeks.

It’s not been easy, I admit it. life is killing me right now and to top it off, right this morning my ibook starting acting weird. I turned it on and the monitor was blank, soon I realized that it was all related to the display’s angle, because at some specific angles it did work perfectly. So I went to work, had a crappy day, came home and tried to hack it… the info on the web was more about FUD then anything else…”oh, it’s the sleep gimmick that’s ruined, apple requested 250 dollars to fix it” – No it’s not! use your brain! is the little light breathing? it’s not! it’s not sleeping!!!

I was suspecting some jammed display cables, maybe from flipping the display back and forth for years teared the insulation off and there was some nasty short going on (but I suspect that in that case the mac would just shutdown immediately).

So…let’s get it opened, see if I can fix my dear friend.

There were no jammed cables, nothing of that sort. everything was in apparent working order, so I opened the display case, maybe there’s something going on there (curiously it’s much more of a challenge to get the display totally exposed then the computer itself) But everyhing seemed ok.

So I get it all back together and now it’s worst then before…it only lights up the display half an inch from being closed.

Time of death…22:00

I’m going to miss my friend so much. It’s gentle 700Mhz pause, the way it sometimes quietly oozed me to sleep with it’s sleeping light, the late nights wardriving in lisbon’s suburbs. the way it sat on the library’s table and people passing by always looked with that “oooh, a mac…” expression. I will miss you very much my friend. it was a fruitful, soothing and life altering experience to work, play and have lot’s of fun with you. You made me a mac user. You made me believe it was possible to spend 16 or 18 hours a day with a computer without uttering profanities at the device. you will be terribly missed.

For the ages, and may it never be lost, your proud and loud customized apple logo that made you look even more different from the dark gray crowd:

There is no “I” in “Open Source”, but there is one in “Evangelism”

I linger about in copious amounts of tech forums around the net. I tend to be an active member of a selected couple of those forums and whenever someone call out for “the best app for <fill in blank>” I always, but ALWAYS give out something that’s Open Source. If I ever mention anything commercial I state very clearly that there is this other app, that’s free and Open Sourced.

 

In one of these forums someone asked for a Telnet client to access routers. I aptly replied “putty, all the way”, because not only putty is extremely efficient when it comes to simple telnet/ssh connectivity it has some other tricks up it’s sleeve that turn it into an indispensable swiss army-knife that no windows sysadmin should do without. Soon after a few other users replyed “secureCRT“, and I really can’t understand that. the only thing secureCRT does that putty doesn’t is client side scripting (java, VB) which I can understand why a network admin would find that useful (many routers/switches out there are dumb enough not to feature any sort of scripting capabilities on theyr own) but as a system administrator I really can’t find any use for it: Scripts should be local to the computer. sorry.

Now secureCRT also has a price tag, Putty does not. SecureCRT is closed source, Putty is not. SecureCRT accepts kerberus authentication, Putty does not…oh, crap. but hey…it’s free, right? and it does most of the things you want/will need it to do.

 

I evangelize Open Source a bit, and I understand I loose my impartiality in these matters because of it. But we really are dwelling in a culture of no-morals when it comes to software, no one is paying for anything, and everyone is sharing pretty much all they are capable of sharing. Open Source gives us the chance to do it legally and ethically, and still we shy away from such opportunities.

 

Diving into OS X has been a great experience, especially because I discovered that the giant squid of Open Source had reached Apple’s OS as well. I use two commercial apps on my ibook: DevonThink Personal and Office:mac, everything else is Open Source or Freeware (or bundled with OS X, of course). On the other side I was sad do see mozilla so far behind when it came to OS X regarding Firefox and Thunderbird. I eventually gave in to Apple’s mail.app because it’s faster than thunderbird (get a few thousand mails in there and check for yourself) and it’s fully integrated with the OS (Address Book, and such) and 3rd party apps like QuickSilver and Growl. Firefox is “out of character” in OS X, feels sluggish and awkward, Safari is it’s elegant self as always (a gentleman of a browser) and Camino is a young mozilla brat that kicks ass in a serious way.

 

I tend to make a friend each time I notice someone evangelizing like I do. I find this a task as important as the development it self. So if it’s in your heart to support open source but you can’t write a line of code to save your life: spread the word. Belive me: it’s a big enough help.