What's it all about, Alfie?

Found out today that iTerm 0.9.6.20090209 has been released with a few bug fixes on the rendering of bold text and a permissions issue. Nothing major, and while it's nice with it's ability to add the window border on the bottom (or not) and the ability to remove the scroll bar, I'm thinking it's still not ready to replace Terminal.app because of the window sessions.

Still... maybe it's something to suggest to the developers? Might be worth a try.

While it's not a major update, there are a lot of bugs in the version I was running, and so Daniel J. released an updated version of MarsEdit that addresses the biggest offending bugs he's come across in the past few months.

I think I'm going to like a few of these features on the preview pane, but I'll certainly be looking forward to the next big release with lots of cool, new features.

This morning I read that Audio Hijack Pro 2.9.1 is out with a significant advancement in the Instant Hijack capabilities for 64-bit processes, among other things. I'm sure this has something to do with all the new code that's coming out from developers. With Snow Leopard it'll be even more.

Well... nice to see the improvements.

Well, I'm not shocked, but I am slightly disappointed in the leaked views of the new Kindle. It's nice and thin, and with an aluminum back, it'll be rigid which is nice. But there's a lot of 'border' around the screen, and that really increases the size of the unit.

Also missing is any visible sign of the switches for the 3G modem. Maybe it's in software now, which would be nice, but they may also have made it "always on" - we'll have to wait and see.

For now, this is interesting, and supposedly shipping at the end of this month. We'll see what the details are later today and if they can actually make enough of these to satisfy demand.

I was reading the feeds this morning and came across this wonderful little hint about removing the older version of the Flash plug-in for Safari. I had mistakenly thought that when Flash installed itself, it removed older versions of same, but I was clearly wrong.

The old version was in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ and was a file called flashplayer.xpt. I removed the file and restarted Safari and we'll see if I see faster Flash load times. Even if I don't, it's nice to clean out the old dead weight every now and then.

Turns out, there was a slight problem with the "Learn to Play" feature of GarageBand '09 - and so today Apple released an update to GarageBand on Software Update. I haven't used GarageBand, but it's possible I might. The kids are getting a few new instruments and it might be interesting to be able to show them how to get some background music for their tunes.

Gotta love that Software Update...

OK, the technician just left, and I have to say that he was a very nice guy about the installation. He was not used to all Macs (save one linux box), but we got it installed and working in no time at all.

Now I'm running at 50Mbps down, 10Mbps up. Very nice. Sure, it's just the "next level", but it's something that I've wanted to have for a long time. No longer is the speed of my connection the limiting factor - it's going to be the hardware on the ends that decides. And, with my new laptop, that's not going to be a real problem.

Love the speed. Highly recommended.

UPDATE: OK, from work the speed into the house is fantastic! I can't believe it. It's as if I'm sitting there. True, a lot of it may be because the line here is not very loaded - and I'll have to check later in the day, but it's a wonderful sign so far. Wow... this is what I've wanted for a long time. I'm really glad I got it.

My family doesn't watch a lot of TV together, but every time we have an episode of House, M.D. on the DVR to watch, it's time to get everyone together and sit and watch carefully. Everyone tries to pick up the clues, tries to match the BINGO card of House-imsm like "Plasmaferesis" and "it's Lupis", or "get a CAT scan"... it's literally fun for my entire family. And I love every minute of it.

However, last night wasn't the typical House joy-joy as it caused a little problem for the kids. First, we have been having 'issues' with the Comcast DVR box - the fast forwarding would jump minutes and not seconds, just to the end of the recording or to the beginning - seemingly randomly. So Liza called Comcast yesterday and they said that they'd have a technician come out and bring a new DVR box (dual HD tuner). Problem is that all the shows are physically on the DVR, so new box means no shows. This means that the House, M.D. that was taping at 7:00 pm last night on FOX would be gone today when the DVR switch-a-roo happened. No good.

So we decided to watch the episode last night. Yeah... not the first thing you'd see in "Parenting 101"... but these are desperate times, and require desperate measures.

Problem was that after the show at 8:00 pm, two of the kids had homework left to do that they "neglected" to tell us about when they got home and before dinner. So they were planning on sneaking it in after dinner, but then House was far more interesting, and so they put it off.

Procrastination is a type of behavior which is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite procrastination as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.

Thanks Wikipedia... I could have put the pictures of my kids and Liza up there and be just as good. They all get it from her, and she knows it. But, she also got on them for it, and forced them to get their work done quickly so that they still had a reasonable bed time.

So we have to be more careful about replacing DVRs on Tuesday. Prior planning - that's what it's all about.

I was looking at trying to clean up a few digital recordings I'd made back on my old NeXTSTEP turbo Color Slab, which is now gone to the great computer room in the sky, as there was a lot of noise in the samples and it seemed like a simple thing to do - filter it, baby. High-pass filter to be more precise. So I started looking around to see what I had to work with.

Unfortunately, when I sent an email to the Fission creators, it was clear that Fission was going to be a time-slice editing tool - lossless editing in their marketing terms, and I can certainly respect that. It's far more likely in this day and age to have access to a good digital master than the crummy digital master I have now. But be that as it may, it was clear after emailing them that I wasn't going to be able to use Fission for this - I had to look elsewhere.

The next thing I saw was Audacity 1.3.7, a free audio editor. It looked like it had decent capabilities, including a lot of plugins that got installed into the system at /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/ so that they might be used by many different audio editing applications. While I liked the capabilities of Audacity, it just wasn't getting done what I needed. However, it did point out to me that these plugins might be useful by other apps, and that was very helpful.

The next thing I found was something I'd hit on before - Wave Editor 1.4.4. This was a very nicely done audio editor, and while it was $79, I'm not against paying for a good tool when I see it. What I was able to see when I started playing with it, in depth, was that it had the tools to filter out the noise pretty effectively. I was still a little concerned that it suppressed the volume as much as it did when I applied the HPF, but that's probably something I can deal with in the app as well.

It had the nice tools like a spectrum analyzer and lots of ways of looking at the data - very much as I might have written it - from a math and engineering standpoint. Pretty nice. I also like that they have a complete support system built right into the app so I can ask a question if I get stuck on something. Pretty nice for a tool like this that there's a steep learning curve on.

So I'm going to see if I can't fix up these old files and clean out the noise. Sure do hope so.

Today I got a tweet that Twitterrific 3.2 for the Mac is finally out. They have been working on the iPhone version for quite some time now, and the desktop (Mac) version had been sitting a little idle (but usable) while they did the iPhone development.

The release from beta is not a major thing, but I'm sure they fixed a few things. I've been using the beta for 3.2 for quite some time and not run into a single problem. I've seen many other Twitter clients, but this is by far the best for me - small, lightweight, clean and it works. Can't ask for more than that.