Mac +/- for Macs & Mac users, plus or minus, more or less.

So now I'm in Orlando Airport, which for all the pretty furnishings and pleasant design, also lacks free wifi. They have some pitiful "Pay Email" stations I'll get a quick pic of, and some unhelpfully numerically labled WEP password protected networks. If you're going to have to pay, it should at least be WPA encrypted!

I'm sitting in the Norfolk airport at the moment, beginning a trip to Florida for family reasons.

Through previous experience I'm resigned to not having any wireless access here, because some dumb pay-for-service company runs the wireless here. (As a result, I try to never fly out of Norfolk.) The vendor, whoever they are, runs something called "flynorfolk"--at least that's how it appears on my Airport menu. I can select it and connect to the flynorfolk network.

Trouble is, when I launch my browser, I just get the blank "Not connected to the internet" message. Clearly, there's supposed to be some sort of paid authentication happening, but I don't get any such thing.

So, since I'm a tech head, I pull up the network pref pane to see what the network looks like. Nothing. Maybe they'll get a little message when I change my DHCP ID to "Paid Wireless Sucks."

So, for a little fun, as I write this, I'm creating an ad-hoc wireless network with the ID "George Allen is a Racist Jerk."

Not that hard to amuse me when I'm this groggy. It's 7:07 am, and I've been up for 2 hours.

When the airport recording comes on to "advise" us about the current TSA Threat Advisory Status, does anyone else experience a moment where they feel like they're in a distopian science fiction movie?

I'll bet you never read the "terms and service" agreements that almost everyone forces on you before you use their product.

If you're considering using the Amazon Unbox movie service, be glad that the folks at Boing Boing have taken the trouble to read and analyze it for you:

Boing Boing: Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die

For example, here's his analysis of their "privacy" terms:

Amazon says it respects your privacy, but this clause tells the real story. Click "I agree" and you've just signed away permission for Amazon to wiretap all of your viewing habits, and to search your entire hard drive continuously and report back on all the software you've installed. The entertainment industry can produce a blacklist of legal software that it just doesn't care for -- say, software that lets you take screenshots, or screen-movies -- and refuse to allow your movies to run if you've installed it. In other words, this clause lets Hollywood specify how you must configure your PC.

Like Cory Doctorow, I'll never ever buy one of Unbox's movies. At least not while these terms are in place. You shouldn't either.

Technorati Tags: Tech

Today I used the lovely Disk Inventory X to find excess large files on my Mac. As expected, most of the fat files were various video projects...But what's this? In logs?

A three gigabyte log file?! That's gigantic! Log files are just text, and text doesn't take up much space. So that must be a lot of text.

So I tried to find out what made the log so big. To say the least, I was unsurprised when Console locked up trying to open a 3 gigabyte log file. Thank goodness for the command line. A bit of more action in the right directory and some paging through what started out as a normal log file got me to

[567] file:///Library/Widgets/Weather.wdgt/Weather.html:Error - Out of memory 2006-08-11 21:57:09.838 DashboardClient[567] (com.apple.widget.weather) undefined: Error - Out of memory (line: 0)
[567] file:///Library/Widgets/Weather.wdgt/Weather.html:Error - Out of memory 2006-08-11 21:57:09.898 DashboardClient[567] (com.apple.widget.weather) undefined: Error - Out of memory (line: 0)

Thank goodness that console needed to record this error every half a second for days. Of course, the end of this file wrote out while I was on vacation. Which begs the question--why was the Weather Widget even doing anything while my screen saver was on?

Technorati Tags: Macintosh, Tech

Preppy undergrad to his female friend: "I don't know how to explain it, but I'm like exploring things and shit."

Technorati Tags: funny, UVa

These are some of my very favorite links, found through years of refined web browsing.

Mac Stuff

• MacNN
• VersionTracker X
• dealmac
• MacSurfer
• The Cult of Mac Blog
• MacFixIt

Tech Coolness

• hack a day
• Instructables: step-by-step collaboration
• Gizmodo
• CommonBits multimedia
• popurls.com | popular urls to the latest web buzz
• The Best Media in Life is Free

General Coolness

Children of Men actually gave me chills to watch. And since it is being released in the middle of the holiday movie season, the studio must have confidence in it.

I don't usually post political stuff here, but I think it is extraordinarily important to get rid of George Allen, who was the worst governor of Virginia I ever worked under. Read this.



Also, he voted against Net Neutrality and then weasel-lied about it on his taxpayer supported web site.

Walking past an open dorm room, a female First Year asks her mother(?) "Can you teach me how to wash this?"

After 3 attempts to enter her SSN on the certificate page "But I do know it! I just don't know it!"