iTunes 8 and the ridiculous hardware requirements
I knew Apple hated you if your hardware was old, but I didn’t think iTunes hated you too! Apparently, if you want to watch HD TV shows using iTunes you are going to need at least a 2.0ghz Core 2 Duo processor. Now I don’t know about you, but 2 of my 3 Macs (purchased within the last 2 years) do not meet this requirement. And to be perfectly honest, I’m a little offended! One of the two is a 2-year old MacBook PRO. The Applecare hasn’t even expired on that bad boy and already I need to upgrade if I want to watch HD on it. Wow.
I plan on doing some further testing of this to verify, hopefully the dire warning is all smoke and mirrors. If there is a true limit I may need to go ape on somebody’s face.
UPDATE: News of iTunes 8 ridiculous hardware requirements were greatly exaggerated. I tested HD TV shows on a 1.83ghz Core 2 Duo Mac mini and a 2.0ghz Core Duo MacBook Pro and in both cases the episode played without issues.
Google Chrome brings excitement for all
The early announcement of Google’s Chrome project details have brought tears of joy excitement to the World Wide Web. I am extremely intrigued by the idea of a multi-process browser; I cannot express the frustration I have when FireFox crashes because of some rogue website or Safari slows to a crawl because of all of the tabs that have been opened and closed. Google’s Chrome hopes to solve many of those problems by bringing a new open source game to the playground. Many of the exact details are pretty scarce so far but what is known is brought to us courtesy of a 38-page comic created by Scott McCloud. I’ve posted a link to my hosted version of a PDF containing all of the pages. Enjoy.
Now Featuring Pretty Permalinks!
In case you weren’t already aware this site or blog, whichever you prefer, is running on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 (not server) and is powered by the Wordpress blogging engine. Because this site is running on a simple Mac mini with Apache enabled the project is extremely “DIY” and as such I have had to figure it out as I go along. No fancy hosts or one-click installs here, everything has been extremely manual; except, of course, the Famous 5 minute Wordpress Installation!
One hurdle I have had to overcome is being able to use pretty permalinks to make my site more friendly. Permalinks (short for permanent link, get it?) is a static URL to some content on a site. That content can be a specific page, a particular article/post, or a collection of posts within a certain category.
By default Wordpress’s permalinks follow this format: http://somesite.com/index.php?p=1 and unfortunately that format is just plain ugly. Having a pretty permalink like this: http://somesite.com/2008/01/01/sample-post/ means hyperlinks on your site and around the web will be more attractive and usable to others.
Read on if you want to know my story about the trouble and success I had with getting pretty permalinks working on my site.
FancyZoom really rocks my socks (and my site)
FancyZoom 1.1 (released in February) from Cabel Sasser is a bit of JavaScript used on Cabel’s blog and later rolled to Panic’s site is a very attractive way of implementing thumbnail viewing on your site. From the site, It is “Designed to view full-size photos and images inline without requiring a separate web page load” and a wonderful job it does at that!
It is a breeze to install for anyone running their own site with instructions that are easy to follow. When I ran into a snag and emailed Cabel he responded with the help needed to realize it was my own fault. This alone is quite a feat considering I’m not a commercial user.
According to the site FancyZoom is free for non-commercial sites; however, if your site is of the revenue-generating sort Cabel requests a one-time fee of $39 / site.
Feel free to peep the demo (click the thumbnail) I have set-up below or visit Cabel’s site here to intall it yourself!
