baratron: (octopus!)
Yesterday my Mac suddenly lost the ability to connect to the internet. I thought this meant that our ADSL was down, or the router had crashed (we've been having fairly lousy connectivity the past few days), but rebooting the router didn't help. It later transpired that I had perfectly fine connectivity from the eeePC. After trying various sensible things myself, I waited for Richard to get home - and it turned out the Mac's keychain had randomly corrupted itself. People who know about Macs say this is a Bad Thing.

The thing is, I'm sure that usually when users go to tech support people and say "I haven't done anything to the computer, it just stopped working", usually they have changed something and forgotten about it. In this case, I hadn't done anything at all. Half an hour previously, it worked. Then suddenly, it didn't. Huh.


I really need to clear out some of the tabs that are sitting around in my browser waiting for me to write about them. But I still don't have a lot of energy, so anything I say will be brief.

Videos:
Topless Robot: I Would Not Like to Fight 300 Naked Orcs, Personally. A load of level 1 characters in World of Warcraft teamed up to attack one of the toughest bosses in the game. The video is hilarious even if you don't know anything about WoW (as long as you're vaguely aware of video games in general, I suppose).

Sparkfun: Yarn Monster. Richard found this on Sparkfun's site and told me I should link it for all my knitting friends. It's a robot that turns messy yarn into neat balls. Awesome!

Storycorps: Q & A. Animation drawn over a real-life soundtrack of a 12 year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome interviewing his mother. May require tissues, may be triggery (e.g. if you are on the autistic spectrum and do not have such a loving, accepting parent).

Top Five Panda Cheese commercials. Very odd TV adverts for an Egyptian cheese, featuring an utterly adorable panda. Or is he?

Articles:
Fire and Ice on a Platter. I can't remember quite how I found this, but it's an article about the science behind the dessert Baked Alaska. It's very interesting for cooks and science-types alike.

Autism's First Child. Article about/interview with the first person ever to be diagnosed as autistic.

BBC News: A Real Good Samaritan and Your Good Samaritan stories. It made me cry.

Bad Science: Putting a number in its context. The rebuttal to the rather scary recent news story that 600 women had become pregnant despite the contraceptive implant. On a similar note, A new and interesting form of wrong. What's wrong with the recent Stonewall report that “the average coming out age has fallen by over 20 years”.

Silliness:
WALRUS ALLERGIES ARE A SERIOUS ISSUE. From [livejournal.com profile] sherlockbbc_fic.

Muahahaa!

Jun. 14th, 2010 07:35 pm
baratron: (science genius girl)
Currently, I am sitting in my office at college, with the big shiny computer in front of me, and my MacBook Pro next to me :D

I have GOLD running on the shiny computer, and PDB searches & journal articles on the MacBook. Grabbing articles from the college internet when I'm physically here is so quick that I barely even notice a delay - whereas the hassle involved to authenticate from home is unbelievable. Here I just click the link and the PDF is there. From home, it takes minutes for each article, and having to enter usernames and passwords multiple times (even using the Virtual Private Network, which is supposed to remove such obstacles).

Now, if only I could find a second browser that I like as much as Windows Opera or Linux/Mac Firefox, I'd be all set. (Mac Opera seems quite nasty in comparison, really nothing like as neat as it is on Windows (also, I feel Opera 10 is a downgrade from 9, on Windows too), and Safari is SO SLOW. Haven't tried Google Chrome yet.) I want a second browser so that I can have two livejournal sessions running from different accounts (this one and my sekrit squirrel anonymised fiction-posting account).

Hmm, I think I'm in the slightly manic phase of my mood cycle. Well, whatever :D Work is happening, for once.
baratron: (baratron again)
I'm having a great degree of neophobia because it's all new and strange, so I've been downloading Mac versions of all of my existing software. OpenOffice for Mac turns out to be absolutely identical to OpenOffice for Windows and for the eeePC (whatever linux that is), so I'm delighted with that. Firefox too seems identical. Less happy with Opera, which doesn't quite behave the same way - that could be an Opera 9 versus Opera 10 issue, though.

I can now GET WORK DONE from home!! I actually logged in to the server at college and dumped X windows back onto the display here, and rotated molecules about on the screen. Oooh. Actually doing work would be easier if I had a mouse, however. The mouse that's supposed to be provided was out of stock so I've got to wait for it to turn up.

Also, there is a video making program called Photo Booth which could well be the biggest time sink EVER...



The subtitles on that video get out of sync with the speech in the middle but then sort themselves out again by the end. Very odd! I did them using YouTube's automatic English subtitler, and I guess I should have inserted a few more line breaks when I was going 'Er' and moving around. Not bad for automatic though, is it?

Wish it was possible to customise the GUI of a Mac like you can other unix-based OSes. I'll get used to it, of course - it'll just take more than a couple of hours to get comfortable.

Profile

baratron: (Default)
baratron

March 2022

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
1314151617 1819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Dec. 26th, 2025 05:07 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios