brainscat.com

Short Version: If you are considering a case for a new computer, and value customer service, I highly recommend Antec’s P180 case. Not only is the case extremely thought out, but Antec’s customer service kicks ass.

This past year, I recently built a new computer, and chose to house it in an Antec P180 case, based upon what looked to be quality construction, and a very well thought out design. Honestly, it’s the first case that I’ve actually *enjoyed* using as cable, fan, and drive management have been easy as pie.

Though, in the past few months, I’ve been feeling the crunch of space on my hard drives, and after I tried to install a new drive this past few weeks, I realized I had misplaced the HDD screws. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big problem, as I have tons and tons of hardware from old computers, but the drive bays in the p180 are special. You see, the drives rest on these silicone grommets that isolate the drive from the metal, and consequently help keep the computer ninja-silent. This means the screws have to be extra long, and normal drive screws won’t do the trick.

So, dummy old me, who can’t keep track of his screws looks all over online, and couldn’t find the screws. In desperation, I created a service request on Antec’s site asking if there is a way to buy the screws. The customer service rep asked me for my address and how many screws I needed.
Three business days later, I recieved a priority mail package with all the screws I needed, even though I was willing to pay.

So, thanks Antec. I appreciate you spending the money to make me happy, and show me I’m a valued customer, even though I’ve only purchased one item.

Phone support clocked in at two calls of approx 2.5 hours total, only to have no Level 2 support solve my problem.

Taking matters into my own hands, and after much experimentation, I discovered, apparently, my issue with the Zune software not being able to connect to my Zune device, seems to have stemmed from the fact I had Visual C# Express installed. So, if you’re having problems where you can’t get the software to connect to the device, but the device is clearly recognized by the Device Manager… try uninstalling software you don’t need.

So, I guess it’s not Vista 64’s fault, but probably the Zune software’s inability to check certain necessities of its environment upon install.

but regular 32-bit vista loves it. Wish me luck in my future phone-support hell.

Update: Wed Nov 14th 12:37 AM EST - After a lengthy support call, everything is still the same…. but the support agent told me to call back in a few hours, after they had updated the Zune software. Awesome.

Now, I love Google Reader and I’m sure many of you do too… but I still want to be able to backup my blogroll. Does anyone know if Google offers an api or webcall to get your OPML file? My search skills have failed me, and as of right now, the only way I can seem to get OPML feed-listing is by logging in and using the “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file” link.

I need to revisit my previous post about OneNote and the MS Office blog integration…

Apparently, using lists screws things up to holy hell. There were tons of malformed <p> tags, a bunch of whitespace, as well as complete disregard for switching from numeric order lists to alpha ordered lists, when nesting lists. Manual intervention was needed to clean up the gobs of whitespace strewn about my last post on fatblogging.

So… needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend using OneNote/Office’s automatic blog posting feature for anything more than the simplest of posts.

My friend Nate insisted I post this to my site for safekeeping, as the joys of having a piece of security software share your name need to be kept for the ages. An article on slashdot maintains,

“Seems like the Storm botnet that was behind the last two waves of attacks is also responsible for this new kind of social-engineering based attacks, using spam to try and convince users of the necessity of using Tor for there communications. They “kindly” provide a link to download a trojaned version of Tor. “

So, apparently, OneNote has a feature that lets you blog something automatically. This post right now is a result of OneNote’s “Blog This” menu option. I clicked the button, it started up a cracked out version of Word that may or may not be Word 2007 (I’m an ignorant Word 2003 user). As excited as I am about more OneNote integration, because I am a OneNote addict, I’m a bit scared, as there are a *lot* of formatting options.

“Lotta formatting options?? That sounds great!” I think… but my skeptical self bets that this post is gonna consist of some crazy ass MS XML embedded into a normal post, which means, this will be the first, and last time, I use this feature. Let’s hope, of course, that I’m pleasantly surprised, and I don’t have to worry about OneNote generated stuff clashing with my own style sheets on my blog.

On the upside… you might like this tool because it took all of 15 seconds to set up w/ WordPress, and it also grabbed my whole category list, so it’s easy to tag posts with. Methinks, editing and then copy and pasting from word as text will work well enough for me in the future. I guess I should bold and test other formatting stuff too.

Edit: Holy crap. It’s sane XML. It works. I just edited this post in the same document… and republished. Maaagical.

Edit 2: Background and highlighting test, which I’ll probably never ever
ever
use anyways.

Edit 3: I broke it by messing overlapping background colors and highlighting. Made it throw in an extra line break.

I haven’t heard of this bug in Firefox before, but it sure is interesting. This comment was found in the source of the podcast feed for David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done”

This is 512 bytes of nonsense, since the Firefox 2 developers, in one of the strangest decisions ever, decided they would obsolete XML styles by overriding them without permission. Furthermore, the developers appear to be disinterested in fixing this. Therefore, we use the unofficial workaround, which includes filling up the first 512 bytes of a document so that the sniffer doesn’t encounter the RSS tag. I really enjoy using Firefox, but this particular behavior really annoys me! Anyway, since I’m almost at 512 characters, I’m going to ramble on for another minute in this comment, and then, without further ado, present you with a valid XML feed.

Also, Hi. It’s been a long time. Things have been good here.

Scoble said Russel’s thinking of switching back. I just finished switching last night.

You see, I love OS X, and I think it’s a better operating system than Windows XP. It has a better permissions model, way cleaner UI (mostly), better looks, and better UNIX interop. But… I switched away from Apple, back to Windows. Why? The short answer is I outgrew how Apple allowed me to use their product.

The Long Answer (and contributing minor reasons in no particular order)

1. I need ink. I can’t take the kinds of notes I do from my scanned textbooks and classes without my tablet. I’m not going to carry two laptops, a bunch of books, or notebooks. My faster and prettier Powerbook can’t compete with this kind of functionality.
2. Picasa, video games, poker software, ad infinitum runs on Windows. OS X is too narrow of a platform for developers to try and target, and consequently too frustratingly small of a sandbox to work in. It’s a sad but true reality.
3. My personal backup setup is on a Windows machine. Why? It’s easy as hell to setup, and I have no idea how to automate backup easily on OS X.
4. I want to own my media again. Xbox 360 integration, Yahoo Music Unlimited!, Windows Media Connect, Orb, my Windows Mobile phone all give me way more options to listen to my music away from home. What do I have from Apple? My iPod and the draconian iTunes. I can use that on Windows if I really want it.
5. It’s cheaper to run Windows. Yahoo Music Unlimited! kills iTunes Music Store in the value department. Also, the sum cost of OS X releases is waaaay more than the comparitive Windows costs. I’ll pay few hundred bucks and be just fine for five years, thank you.

Your mileage may vary, but for this here guy, it’s no contest.

Update: Magnus Nystedt and a commentor made some good observations on my previous post. First off, these are my opinions, I guess I didn’t state that clearly. Anyone looking for a “superior” platform will find themselves frustrated as these platforms are simply tools. Other OS’s are great at respective things, but they aren’t things I value and that’s why I switched. Use the right tool for you.

Magnus didn’t really like that I thought OS X is too narrow a platform. What I meant to say is… OS X is too narrow of a platform for a majority of developers to target. In many cases, the cost of development or cost of porting for OS X isn’t worth it because of the relatively small userbase when compared to Windows. That is a sad reality. I was in no way saying that OS X has an inferior platform for devs, just that the possible rewards for much software is less in the Apple world.

Lastly, yes, with Yahoo Music Unlimited! I only rent the music for a while, and don’t “own” it. It’s the first service to actually deliver as the “celestial jukebox”. I have more options than I do with the iTunes Music Store music, and that’s well worth the montly fee. The end result is that I consume a metric crapload of more music per month per dollar from Yahoo than I ever did from iTunes.

Heard of 43things? It’s pretty damn cool. Heard of 43people.com? Nobody’s supposed to know what it is yet. But I figured it out.

Here’s proof.

I wonder if they’ll leave the link up…

Today is a better day than most to be Tor. Today’s Slashdot article about Tor, an onion anonymizing Internet protocol, made me giggle. The headline reads, “Tor - The Yin or the Yang?”

“Although Tor claims to improve safety and security, the article goes into detail on how Tor can be used as a anonymous attack platform.”

It’s all true, every last word.

Well, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that iTunes now supports multimedia annotation and playback of audio files. On one hand, it’s great to see excellent support for this kind of feature in a prime-time application. On the other hand they’ve gone and implemented something which is pretty much in the same space as the w3 spec, SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). Why re-invent the wheel? Initial signs point to market protection of iTunes, AAC, iPods, and Garageband software. While this new format isn’t proprietary, it seems like big companies like Apple or MS are supporting alternative niche “open” formats, to create market protection. Sure it’s open, but did they really need to make another competing format? In this case, Apple just gave the middle finger to all current SMIL supporting media players.

If it weren’t bad enough that they created a competing format, they only allow the spec to work with their proprietary format, AAC. The Voxmedia Wiki, the most comprehensive source for how to implement AAC multimedia markup, states that Garageband/Podcast Chapter Tool is only compatible with AAC files. Apple’s decision to only support this markup in their player for AAC files fucking sucks. I’m really, really mad about this. I see no reason why the annotations can’t be applied to other file formats, as it should be the player’s job to associate the timestamp in the XML file with the position of audio playback.

Maybe I don’t get this. I hope I don’t, and if I don’t, someone please set me straight. But from where I’m sitting, this new development is a mixed blessing. It’s too bad that the functionality that podcasters have been desiring is caught up in this GarageBand/iTunes/AAC quasi-open format bullshit.

Found by way of Scoble.
Update: It looks like Simon is a bit miffed too.

This is probably the best application of Google Maps I’ve seen yet. Easily find and plot routes, complete with distances. Found by way of LifeHacker.

For example, this was my old running route.

To open a browser from the command line in OS X run the following command. If you want to open to a specific URL, add a space and then the URL.

#opens system default browser
/usr/bin/open

#opens system default browser to brainscat.com
/usr/bin/open http://brainscat.com

Go get your fix.