War — Page 16

So not much

August 11, 2000 by Michael Boyle

writing today. I’ve been finishing a long net research thing at work, though I did come home to work on it. So I could play around on this new machine, mostly.

The observant will notice it’s not the most recent generation – it’s a couple months older – which is cool, cause it was a bargoon. But I got the stinking hockey puck mouse, not the new optical mouse. I lasted one day with the damn thing – and picked up a Logitech wheel mouse to replace it. I think it’s better than the Apple mouse – I’m used to two buttons and use contextual menus all the time when I have one (like at work).

I’m sure that’s more detail than anyone needs about my computer hardware situation… but it’s already got me thinking of things I’d avoided doing just cause it took so much longer before!

My friend Lyle Stewart

August 11, 2000 by Michael Boyle

takes a look at the Philadelphia protests during the Republican Convention in his column this week. Lyle’s been working the protest beat for years now, and doing so very well at newspapers across North America, so he has an interesting perspective. The long view, maybe.

So the new machine

August 10, 2000 by Michael Boyle

is home and all put together. I’ve been playing around with different things for a couple of hours now actually – the whole thing took less than an hour to get up to speed – software installed, the ATA drive from my old machine put in, video, SCSI, and more RAM installed, etc. What they say about G4s is true – the easiest case to crack of anything I’ve seen. It took me longer to open my old machine to grab the HD out of it – that was actually the most time consuming thing of all.

There is one problem though – my old old 2nd video card doesn’t seem to be working. It’s an old ATI VR card with just 4Mb of memory – but it should be enough to drive my second monitor. But alas it may not be compatible or something (which is a bit weird cause of course it fits in the damn PCI slot). Anyhow – should be solved soon.

From the “Blast

July 27, 2000 by Michael Boyle

from the past” department, Apple is working on bringing their handwriting recognition software to the Macintosh. The technology was used in Apple’s Newton, which, though a failure as a standalone product, featured excellent handwriting recognition. The important variable was memory: a desktop implementation should be pretty good on a fast G4 with lots of RAM. Cool.

There’s a new blog

July 26, 2000 by Michael Boyle

in town. A friend of mine has put up his new site, for now (forever?) called jamessstreet.ottawa.on.ca. It’s still in need of some filling in, but I am really looking forward to the site.