QuartzCrystal is an offline renderer that turns Quartz Compositions into portable QuickTime movies. It supports 3rd party plugins, as well as patches that do not work in safe-mode-only environments (such as QuickTime Pro). It also supports software scene antialiasing, so if you have a Mac with plenty of RAM and a hard-core video card, you can make spectacularly beautiful renderings of your plugins, effects, and compositions.

Beside QuartzCrystal, the only other product that renders and encodes compositions to movies is Apple’s own QuickTime Pro, which doesn’t support plugins, unsafe patches, or antialiasing.

I have an Apple product once again. 黒林檎（くろりんご、kuroringo）is born!

Two weeks ago I committed myself to purchase a macbook to replace my aging IBM Thinkpad X31. The X31 had served me well for more then 4 years. Over the past year I had debated what laptop would best fit my needs. Although I quite liked the macbook I was put off by the increased weight. I briefly considered the Macbook Air only to conclude that the decrease battery life was not worth my time. In the end I decided to eat the weight and possible battery life restrictions of the macbook for the power and ease of OS X (not including not being able to print to a Sharp copier).

In any case after a false start whereupon Apple did not have a black macbook in stock despite listing it on their refurbished section. However I checked on 2008.07.09, and a sexy black 2.4ghz core 2 duo macbook was listed. I decided to go with regular shipping hoping it would arrive by the 11th. Hah! The 15th rolled around, and FedEx delivered the laptop about an hour before my peers would arrive up north.

So I concocted a devious plan to lure them into a false sense of security. I set this ebony beast of glory onto the port replicator of my X31, propped a Dell 5310n product info. sheet over the back, and then a white piece of paper over the keyboard.

After a delicious lunch an Pizza Hut we returned. Chris was the first. He passed right by, sat down, and opened his macbook. I sat down, turned on the power to the hear my blackbook chime for the first time. Chris mentioned, “Oh did you change your out-of-sleep sound to that?” Mission accomplished.

Steve walked in a little later. At this point I had taken no measures to disguise my macbook. His mind was pre-occupied with other matters, and he missed the white logo in a sea of black directly across from the office door. Over by the refrigerator I said, “Hey dude check it out…”

After a few moments of shock or disbelief came the inevitable, “Woah…”

They also missed the list of names that I had jotted down (descriptions added with my thoughts):

• obsidian: sharp, rock, sexy, and black
• fruitbat/okomori/ookoumori: sillier, but black and mobile.
• raven: meh…
• shikkoku: too phallus-y
• kuroringo: I had thought up kokuringo too with the same meaning, but see above.
• blacksheep: I liked this one along with obsidian.
• kurome: black eyes, meh…

Conventionally, a storage medium will report its life expectancy in terms of MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failures. This is often measured in hours. However, it’s not always this simple. Usage patterns and environmental characteristics take a heavy toll on how long our storage devices last.

One fun experiment I unintentionally tried this afternoon helps provide one data point that goes above and beyond our classical MTBF estimate, and into the realm of — shall we say — aquatic endurance?

Several months ago, I purchased a SanDisk 1.0GB Cruzer Micro USB flash drive. I used this as spill-over when I took too many videos without flushing the data off of my camera while I was in Utah. Since I didn’t have a personal computer, and only had limited computer access, the best I could do was shuffle data between various solid-state devices. So this device has been filled to capacity a couple times, and has been completely erased a couple times, and has had various data-shuffling jobs in between for the past 9 months or so. Despite being dropped, being X-Rayed at SLC Airport, and being kept in pockets for long periods of time in various weather extremes, it has held up like a champ. I’ve not lost anything, nor have I had any problems shuffling data between my laptops and desktops, as well as other machines.

This experiment, however, was above and beyond the typical environmental exposure these devices normally take. Today, my little USB drive got to take a swim through our Frigidaire Washer and then through our Whirlpool Dryer. For what it’s worth, the Washer is a sideways one, so it uses less water. This might have been the show-stopper in disguise.

The reason this all happened is because I normally hold all of my belongings in my pockets. That’s what they’re there for, after all. Because I was shuffling data around last week, I must have left it in one of my pockets.

Upon finding myself nearly out of clothes for the week, I opted to do laundry. My work clothes were especially dirty (landscaping tends to get lots of dirt on your hands and clothes) so I opted to wash with the Heavy Wash Cycle, which takes about 25-30 minutes, to get my clothes all clean and ready for the coming work week. It was a fairly large load; several (4) pairs of jeans and many (5) shirts. No socks.

After washing, I like to get my clothes into the dryer as soon as possible to avoid the mildew smell. I’ve never had much faith in the “automatic” setting on dryers, so I put all the clothes in for 60 minutes. Since I had more than 2 pairs of jeans in there, I also extended the dryer time an additional 20 minutes once the first 60 expired because my jeans like to hold irrationally large quantities of water and are never dry after a mere 60 minutes of high heat. After this duration, I removed my clothes, and discovered my flash drive sitting comfortably on the bottom of the dryer cylinder. This, of course, made me a bit downhearted. Cellphones can’t endure this kind of rough treatment. Palm Pilots can’t either. I wouldn’t dare try it on a camera, CD player, or Social Security Card either. From past experience, things were looking grim for this little data carrier.

As with any storage medium loss, the first thoughts through my head were “What did I put on that device that isn’t backed up somewhere else?” Thankfully, I couldn’t remember anything. This was in part because I haven’t explored it much in a long time, making me likely to forget. It’s always easier to lose data if you can’t remember what it was anyway.

Deciding to test it out and see what I could salvage, I decided to plug it into my laptop and see what would happen. I was partially expecting it to cause my laptop to reboot; I’ve seen computers where shorting the USB +5V and Ground pins acts as a poor man’s reset switch. If that didn’t happen (I’ve also seen where my MacBook is engineered to be at least a little more resilient than that), I figured it’d leave some fun console messages, do nothing, or have tons of data errors.

Much to my surprise, the disk lit up when inserted. It also blinked a couple times, characteristic of OS auto-mounting. This was good so far. The mounted volume showed up on my desktop, and lo-and-behold, all the data was there, intact. Currently, I have about 450MB of data on it. Disk Utility didn’t find any File System problems, and inspection using Finder didn’t either. The pictures show up fine, the MP3’s sound fine, and all the source code is intact. Since JPEGs and MP3s will be essentially useless if even a few bits are toasted, I find these to be handy metrics in the event of suspected data corruption.

So, when looking for devices that retain data above and beyond the call of normal duty, look no further. This little Cruzer took a licking, and has kept on ticking.

In the past couple of months I thought about spending some money on either a Nintendo Wii or a multi-purpose media box (not to mention my anxiety over buying an unmodifiable blackbook). Over the past 3 years I’ve looked at smaller cases as “better”. Before that it was always the full tower case that provided more room and ease-of-use. In this vein I’ve been looking at the world of mini-itx for the past several months.

VIA created the mini-itx specification for itself, but since its creation other companies started creating motherboards with this spec and recently so has Intel. The spec allows for a low-power consumption CPU, which is great for point-of-sales machines, thin clients, and more. The other use of mini-itx, popular amongst personal users, is as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) or media center.

There are several solutions available in this market. By far the most popular media box in the past few years has been a Microsoft product, the XBox. You can slap on an open source GPL media player onto the xbox - XBox Media Center (XBMC). This was great as a video, audio, and game machine for dvds, mpeg4 (xvid), and various audio formats.

Alternatively Apple sells the Apple TV, which not only plays movies, but can connect to your shared ITunes library. However as with many things Apple (and not-Apple) it has limited uses even with the hack to allow xvid and DivX support. Author’s Note: I first wrote this before Mac World Expo January 2008.

The two products mentioned above are limited by their age. Both are not powerful enough to decode h.264 matroska encapsulated video or HDMI video input. This is the problem. Would I be able to build a mini-itx machine capable of doing what these once-awesome products do not? My requirement was pretty simple. I’ve dealt with TV Tuners and HDTV before, and I’m not interested in building a true “HTPC” or personal video recorder (PVR). That ship has sailed. Not to mention all the hullaboo about DRM in bluray/hd-dvd, hd capable monitors, video cards, etc…

After investigating hardware articles and reviews of the boards on mini-itx.com I narrowed down my search to the VIA Epia EX 15000G. This newer board offered a “fast” 1.8ghz VIA C7 processor. A PCI slot would take care of a wireless card as I wouldn’t be dragging cat5 down from the router upstairs to the TV. It seemed to offer everything that I was looking for. It even had an on-board graphics chip with a mpeg2/mpeg4 hardware decoder though underpowered in 3d acceleration!

The VIA Epia boards are also highly compatible in linux so that’s a plus. I delved deeper. I wanted to make sure that this board would suffice. After all I’ve never touched a processor other than AMD or Intel.

However I’m afraid to say that the Unichrome Pro II mpeg2/mpeg4 hardware decoder is not usable at the current time. There have been numerous complaints that hardware decoding doesn’t work for .mkv files and even in Windows! Surprisingly the only h.264 playback possible was in linux with the now seemingly defunct Via enhanced MPlayer.

This was the nail in the coffin. I’m not going to buy a board because it *may* work in linux with the supposed mpeg4 hw decoding support (and not at all in Windows). What does this leave us with? Software decoding? The C7 processor is not powerful enough to decode 720p let alone 1080p content.

The cost of this machine and project will significantly increase switching from a mini-itx C7 processor board to perhaps an intel mini-itx core 2 duo mobile board or switch to micro-atx (about $150-$200 increase in budget with a core 2 duo mobile or desktop).

The smallest really isn’t better.

With the release of Leopard, I discovered the need to migrate my existing Tiger system onto an external drive. I needed it to be bootable, and I wanted to have a little discontinuity as possible. Apple generally makes this pretty easy, but it’s still a bit involved. I write this article from my migrated system, currently booting Tiger off of a USB drive.

The mechanical process of getting an installation working on a USB drive is fairly well-documented by now. I’ve had much success following Evgeny Myatin’s tutorial, found here. However, like many similar articles, it has one major weakness: It attacks the problem with the assumption that you’re trying to squeeze OS X on to some microscopic medium. Because of this, it skips many steps to produce a full-featured system when such a constraint is not in effect. Since I chose a 250GB harddrive as my target, I had no such enforced limit.

After following the above directions, here’s a list of things I did to flesh out my system to get it back to normal.

0. Before anything, I copied my internal drive’s /Applications folder to my new bootable one. This filled in most of the applications that I need. It also filled in /Applications/Utilities, which comes in handy in short order.

1. SystemUIServer crashed incessantly for some reason right after installation. This meant no clock, no spotlight, and no networking (setting it in System Preferences didn’t work). It also meant no Menu Meters and no Synergy. Using Console.app (from /Applications/Utilities), I was able to find that dyld was having problems finding a symbol in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ICANotifications.framework. I don’t recommend tinkering with stuff in System too often, but the fix here was pretty simple: copy my old framework into the new place. Actually, I just copied the file inside the framework, but I imagine copying the whole thing is cleaner. This immediately (literally) stopped the crashing without a reboot. The clock and spotlight popped into place, as did the airport icon, the battery icon, and the bluetooth icon. Nice

2. I installed the Developer tools from the Mac OS X install DVD. I don’t trust simply copying /Developer, since that’s only part of the package.

3. I booted into my old installation again, and copied /Users/cwright/ to the new installation. I suspected that this would cause unimaginable problems, but it actually didn’t. I took a long time (it’s over 25GB), but everything appears to be undisturbed. iTunes worked without a blink, as did Firefox, Xcode, Adium, and other frequently used programs. Menu Meters and Growl even worked without reinstalling them. This still impresses me, honestly, especially after doing user migrations on Windows 2000/XP earlier this year.

4. With my new settings in place, I noticed that I had no desktop background. Copy /Library/Desktop Pictures/ to restore them

5. No screen savers either. Copy /System/Library/Screen Savers/

6. Fink had a hard time installing. Apparently /usr/bin was pretty sparse. Copied that (this is extremely dangerous. At first, I just copied programs that weren’t present, but I got tired of that after a while).

7. /usr/share/misc/ was missing some programs too (showing up in console). Copied the absent utilities.

After the above tweaks, everything seems to be working fine. There’s probably a more official way to get this (and any other missing parts) put in place by default, but this can help in a pinch.

Good morning gentle readers. I opened up my craptop this morning to witness the struggles of what seemed to be a laptop battling cancer. No, this was not another case of opteron cancer. Instead I found that Windows, unable to cope with my Cisco Aironet 350 wireless card, was creating network connections one after another in the system tray.

Recently I have been taking out my wireless network card while at work, which used to always reside in my laptop’s PCMCIA slot. At the end of the day I’d plug it back in usually either before or after I had sent my laptop into power save mode.

So this morning like all mornings I take out my laptop, set it up, open the lid and log in. Within seconds I notice my system tray bombarded by a new wireless network connection appearing once every second or so, enlarging the system tray beyond its normal size (note the arrow to the far right of the screenshot). My esteemed colleague Chris Wright and I were both disappointed that the info bubble did not in fact pop up for each of those connection icons. Luckily this cancer seemed benign, and within a few seconds Windows realized there actually was only one wireless networking device.

Though it seems this all boils down to the lesson: never mess with an IBM trying to get some sleep. Whether it’s not waiting long enough for a print process to get out of the queue causing endless beeping or windows self-replicating wireless network connections, you’ll face the seemingly impossible behavior of a laptop pushing the boundaries of sanity.

I thought to myself this morning — I want an Eggo Waffle. You see, I have never had one, but have always been interested. There were some in the freezer that Robert had bought, removed from their packaging because of his space-saving ways.

Naturally I found the need to prepare an Eggo Waffle to the correct specifications as I wanted to make sure that I was having the correct Eggo experience (microwave, toast, pan fry, what?). To my surprise the feast was ruined (credit for the title), and breakfast was not magically delicious.

Dear Kellogg’s,

I thought to myself this morning — I want an Eggo Waffle. You see, I have never had one, but have always been interested. There were some in the freezer that Robert had bought, removed from their packaging because of his space-saving ways.

However I could NOT find any directions on how to actually make an Eggo Waffle. So I thought to myself — Hey, Eggo’s web site might have this pertinent and useful information! To my surprise I found that the Eggo web site was designed like shit.

No, I cannot enjoy an Eggo waffle for the first time because I simply do not know the proper instructions. This information is surprisingly absent from a web site. Instead I have useless information thrust into my vision in a flash animated piece of shit.

My breakfast appetite is ruined. I am no longer interested in having an Eggo Waffle because your shitty web site design team put me off.

This might be humorous to you or your team, but this is no laughing matter to me. I think I will have some General Mills Cheerios instead.

Love mradcliffe

You might be amused to find my difficulty with preparing an Eggo Waffle. In my search for deliciousness I did come across one link to enjoy Eggo Waffles, which I admit did look interesting. However I wanted to pursue slightly more official instructions. And I did receive an update from Kellogg’s though it came into my inbox a bit too late in the day for breakfast.

Update: Kellogg’s responded! I bet I made someone’s day.

Thank you for contacting us regarding Eggo® website.

The feedback you provided on our website is valuable to us. We will pass along your comments to our advertising and marketing departments. As you know, things change quickly on the web, so we hope you will visit us again to see what’s new!

We hope you give our product another opportunity. For future information you can contact us toll free at 1-800-962-1413 so one of our service representatives could answer your questions.

I am quite surprised that Eggo has a toll free number. So whomever comes across this post — if you need to learn “How-To Make an Eggo Waffle” because you’ve never had one before you can call 1-800-962-1413.

Operators are standing by to assist you with your breakfast endeavor.

The final lesson to be learned is that I am grumpy in the mornings. Never get between a Radcliffe and his breakfast.

Flash forward to August 2007. project ruori has just completed its first “real” album, and close friend and talented acoustic guitarist/singer/songwriter Tarvis has just cranked out not one, but two new records of his own. In record time.

So, how to pump all this new material into the stream of commerce, send it off into the world, get it out there?

After finishing the cover art and sending the whole bundle off to be manufactured, and heading to Burgerville to celebrate, we (now wearing our Kosada hats) immediately got to work on the new website and released it less than 48 hours later.

Dear reader, we give you:
Paper Is Bad Records, Inc.

Along with the new site, a few new patches are available as well based on requests from users.

After my October escapade in Boston — with a brief layover at Yon Reptile Campaign — Life™ decided to shine a ray of hope in my general direction, after Thanksgiving. However, quick to grant me access to enough income to pay rent, Life™ viciously raped my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and I was unable to use MPlayer to play movies, use GL to play games, or whatever else we non-Apple people do with our video cards. With a hole in my pocket called “month-to-month” Harmless lay infected with a Savage 2000 card that I bummed from a co-worker while working for JP Morgan Chase. Luckily I began a more permanent presence at Yon Reptile Campaign helping cope with a couple of rambunctious Windows servers, and so I can begin this tale of…

“Project Hayate - Prolonging the Inevitable Shaving of my Metaphorical Neckbeard, Part One”

After a few months of researching I decided that my best choice economically would be to go with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83ghz. However with the Intel price drop on April 22nd I, being the simple-minded consumer that economists & marketing analysts love, bought the new Intel Core 2 Duo e6420 2.13ghz instead. Not that I needed a 4mb cache anyway. I quickly found the Gigabyte 965p-DS3 as a relatively compatible motherboard for Linux, purchased 2gb of ddr2-800 from Corsair, a 250gb Western Digital SATA drive, and of course a video card, the XFX Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS PCI-E (so long ATI!). Although if I had more available funds it would have been best to purchase the latest and greatest of Nvidia 8xxx series, but alas that will have to wait.

I returned from my usual weekly business trip in a state of panic. FedEx no longer requires signature by default, and they had most likely left this precious package on my doorstep where no doubt Life™ would have snatched it away and into the hands of some bastard. Despite the 9:34am “delivery time” and confirmation of no package on my doorstep at 10:30am I came home to a package on my doorstep. My descent into emo would have to wait for another day.

I shut down Harmless for the last time, shed a tear of sorrow for the lost, and took its shell (and my BenQ DD DVD Writer :).

With surprising ease I slipped the new power supply and motherboard into the mid-tower case that once housed Harmless. I made sure to put on one drop of Arctic Silver Thermal Paste, and dabbed it evenly over the clean face of the Core 2.

It took a few minutes to learn the essentials of Socket LGA775, but I found it much easier than messing with those damn clips from Socket 478. I was amazed that the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Heatsink even fit in the case. It was a close fit, but damn that’s hot (no pun intended).

And the fan, that’s hotter. And fast forward to everything in the case.

… I stood flabbergasted. Was it really that easy? No, the hard part was yet to come — full of doubting Slackware, my sanity, aggravating search queries on Google for pages you knew existed, and fun kernel messages like the one to the right. The night was far from over. However I’ll spare you gentle readers until another episode.