Pixel City

Oh look, another blog about design and technology.

SGI and Apple

A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive.

my new iPod

I wish Apple would name things a bit more clearly. Calling the new video-capable iPod "the iPod" makes things confusing for those of us whose job is to talk about different things and be specific. "A plain iPod that's new and plays video" doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but that's what Steve Jobs insists it is. It is not an "iPod video" like the "iPod Photo" was before it, nor is it a "vPod" even though that's what most people call it. And no one who's not a tech knows what a "5G iPod" is.

Monad: Microsoft's new shell

Before you bash (ha! get it?) Microsoft's new shell (OMG! they discovered teh CLI!!!11) take a look at these two videos. You'll see that it's much more than just bash on Win32. In fact, if it ever catches on, it'll be Unix's turn to play catch-up, because some parts of it are pretty damn amazing.

Favorite Internet Writings

I have, for a long time, wanted to compile a list of my favorite Internet writings. Not just favorite links, but long articles that take hours to read. (Mostly. There will also be some small but significant stuff, like the Tim Berners-Lee interview.) Inspired by Joel, I'm finally gonna do it.

Backups with RSYNC in OS X Tiger

OS X made a big improvement to some of their command line utilities in OS X 10.4 Tiger. CP, MV, TAR, and RSYNC can handle multipart Mac files with no problem. Read on for an awesome way to back up your files.

Colorful Terminal

I spend a lot of time SSHing to various boxes. This handy little script will set the Terminal to a certain color when I start a session and set it back to white when I'm done. There's nothing worse than being on one box and thinking you're on another. Also, this makes the minimized icons colorful.

Home Theater Computers

I want to build a media playing PC. Or Mac. Whatever. The point is, I want to have a media playing system that's flexible. This is an ongoing log of this pursuit.

WWDC 2005: OS X on Intel

What is there to say that hasn't been said by a million others? I might assemble my ideas here. I have a couple comments from watching the keynote below. Otherwise, for now, it's just a few links to bits and pieces straight from the horses' mouths.

Overlap in the Consumer and Pro lines

There is an unusually large overlap between the PowerMac and iMac lines. The midrange iMac seems to be everything the base PowerMac is, and more. (Minus internal expandability, of course.) Update: The single-CPU PowerMac G5 is no more.

Getting Started with Web Applications

The information here isn't specific to OS X, but OS X is in fact a great development platform, and added to the fact that this is the easiest place for me to post this, here we are.

sample