Universal Rule

Visiting Lapland, listening to Lauri Tähkä

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:14:53 GMT

I was doing a bit of cross-country skiing (and a lot of work) in Lapland for two days. During the first day, the skiing was bad (temperature about 4-6 degrees above zero, thus making the skis not slide well), but on the second day the weather was excellent. I managed to ski about 30 kilometres, the first time on skis this winter. The first day, it took three hours to ski 18 kilometres. On the second, one hour for 12 kilometers.

I attended also a rock concert by Lauri Tähkä & Elonkerjuu. I had no previous knowledge of this Finnish band, but got a big positive suprise: good (Finnish) lyrics, nice set of songs with enough variations, a good show, and a nice group of musicians who knew their instruments. Perhaps not my all-time favourite type of music, but good nevertheless. I'm currently listening to Lauri Tähkä, perhaps I'll become a fan.

Listening to SXSW 2008 Showcasing Artists music

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:04:34 GMT

I have been listening to the SXSW 2008 Showcasing Artists collection, 764 tracks of it. There are a lot of interesting new musicians in the collection I had never heard of. I suggest downloading the SXSW 2008 torrent if you are interested in music which is a bit different than the mainstream.

Update: my Last.fm profile shows what I have been recently listening. The total number of tracks played is 65,530 - but I think that quite a lot are missing. And because all members of the family have been playing music, there are all kinds of styles included in the statistics.

Becoming a science fiction author

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:49:45 GMT

The local library was selling old magazines cheaply, and I picked up five issues of Portti, which is a Finnish science fiction magazine (and I guess a bit of a fanzine as well). I haven't had time to read Portti for several years, but now (during the so-called skiing holiday here in Finland) I managed to do a bit of reading. It was a surprise to find my short story in the issue 4/2006. (Story title "Kala jolla oli polkupyörä", Fish with a bicycle.) I took part in the Portti short story writing competition in 2006, but never realized that they would print my piece. (I got a honorary mention.) Well, there it was. Perhaps I can now state that I'm a science fiction author (with one published short story). But this may well be the last one as well - I don't have currently any craving to write fiction. Too much writing nonfiction at work I guess.

Leopard - 10 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:30:33 GMT

Leopard has been running for well over 10 days on my iMac, since the first boot after installing 10.5.2 upgrade. (I switched from Tiger at the same time.) There have been minor nuisances, and some stupid things I did myself. For example, I shut down the external Time Machine backup disk without unmounting it first. Fortunately no data seems to have been lost or corrupted. Two days ago I started doing Time Machine backups of my iBook over the wireless connection to the same external disk on the iMac. The first backup (over 35 GB of data) took about 10 hours, the next one less than one hour. A bit too long for my liking. One reason may be the slow wlan connection on the iBook, the 802.11g-version instead of the newer 802.11n. But there may be also some software bottlenecks involved. In any case, doing the backups is quite simple, even if it takes a long time. I have the firewall enabled, and just a few allowed software packages, which should limit the risks of over the network backups. I have to once again say that Leopard is one smooth beast. Running simultaneously a lot of programs on many different accounts on the iMac has hardly ever slowed it down. Perhaps once or twice there have been slight pauses in watching EyeTV, when I have been recording programs, doing Time Machine backups (both from iMac and iBook), and downloading software and music from the net (SXSW 2008 Showcasing Artist torrent, for example). It now seems that 10.5.2 is one of the most stable Mac OS X releases ever. At least I hope so. One of the great new things of Leopard is the ability to make Dashboard widgets from web pages with Safari. I have made a couple of good ones, of weather services for example. The Leopard Dashboard seems to be a valueable tool, compared to Tiger where it was more like a toy.

Leopard - 6 days, 5 hours, 27 minutes

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:06:45 GMT

I have now been using Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.2) for over six days on my iMac. There have been no problems, and I have even remembered to switch on the external disk for Time Machine backups every once in a while. I was anticipating some problems, but it seems that there are few if any. In fact this may be the smoothest Mac OS X upgrade ever, and I have been using all versions since 10.0. Most 10.X version changes have caused some problems, but this didn't, at least so far. Impressive. On the other hand, I usually jumped in quite early, sometimes even with 10.X.0 version, or 10.X.1 version, so perhaps waiting a bit explains the good feeling.

Leopard works well on iBook G4 and aluminium iMac

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:59:34 GMT

I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard a few days ago, and there have been suprisingly few problems. (Almost none in fact.) The biggest surprise was that the parental restrictions defined in Tiger were immeadetely functional in Leopard without any tweaking. Thus, the children are allowed to use certain software, and only those. Also, I was afraid that certain older games would not work in Leopard, but all seem to work so far. I had two games which didn't fit into parental restrictions under Tiger. For some reason you had to use a normal account for them. I haven't yet checked whether Leopard is better in this regard.

Upgraded my iBook G4 to Leopard

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:19:09 GMT

After a few days worth of positive experiences of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.2) on my iMac, I upgraded my iBook to Leopard as well. I have the last version of iBook G4 --- a 12 inch model at 1.33 GHz. There is 80 GB of disk, and I recently upgraded the memory to 1.5 GB.

I made an "Archive and install" type upgrade, which went flawlessly, although it took quite a while. At the same time I took the opportunity to remove some old software and documents from the iBook. There was even some Mac OS 9 software still there. After the cleanup I have 22 GB of free disk space instead of 12 GB.

I tested screen sharing between the iBook and iMac, and it worked suprisingly well. Browsing iTunes music and iPhoto pictures on the iMac works also nicely from the iBook.

So far I haven't really run into any inconveniences with Leopard. Sometimes Stacks behave a bit suprisingly, but that may be just a question of newness. I'm quite happy with the speed both on the iBook and especially in the iMac. For some reason Leopard seems snappier even on the iBook, which is unexpected.

The only incompatibility so far is Cisco VPN on the iBook. It starts up properly, and tries to connect, but doesn't manage to do it, and never reports an errror. On the iMac I haven't had any difficulties in using Cisco VPN.

Good Leopard - or bad?

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:43:54 GMT

I have been corresponding with SSP on Leopard user experiences. He has had negative experiences with EyeTV and iTunes: "multitasking in X.5 is rotten and things skip a lot". However, for me things are different.

EyeTV seems to work in Leopard even smoother than in Tiger. For example when pausing a recording and then continuing, there is no that small "hiccup" in the beginning of playback as there was with 10.4.11. And this is while multitasking - usually I have 4-5 users logged in to the iMac, and some of these accounts are doing things in background, such as reading dvds or cds or downloading things (such as software updates) from the net. Usually I have 5-10 different programs running on these accounts (no need to shut them down, is there?).

But I do have the new iMac (2.4 GHz, 4 GB of memory, 750 GB disk), which is a quite nice machine in terms of performance.

Yesterday I watched a recorded movie with EyeTV (version 3), while simulaneously recording two programs (I have the Diversity model). And at the background I was ripping a dvd with Handbrake using all available cpu capacity. In addition, on different accounts I had an e-mail program, Last.fm etc. software running. Everything was as smooth as can be.

Today I switched on Time Machine, and the first backup is currently in progress. So far I haven't had any trouble (listening to iTunes, watching tv, listening to Last.fm).

Perhaps I'm just fortunate? I do hope this feeling of satisfaction with Leopard continues.

Now I'm learning to use Spaces. Several years ago (in 2001 perhaps) or so I was using a similar system in Gnome and KDE (running under Mac os X), but those virtual desktops were worse implemented. And Quick Look is definetely helpful in checking what a file contains.

Made finally the leap from Tiger to Leopard

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:25:08 GMT

The second update to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.2) was released yesterday. I today upgraded my iMac from Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). I bought a copy of Leopard last year, but postponed the upgrade due to worries about incompatibility.

I made a default upgrade, and there were no problems although the iMac had lots of additional software installed (including system utilities etc.). Everything is running as smoothly as can be wished.

I read a lot of complaints about the details of Leopard from the net discussions. A bunch of nitpicking ninnies! Although Leopard is markedly different, I think the new features (transparent dock and stacks) are real improvements, not just eye candy.

I haven't yet tested Time Machine, but will do this in a few days. I'm currently doing the backups with Carbon Copy Cloner, this is sufficient for now.

The value of the new features remains to be seen. Quick Look, Spaces etc. seem reasonable improvements, although not revolutionary. I already got used to Quick Look, and probably will miss it on those Macs running Tiger. Also, some of the current software requires Leopard to work properly, for example EyeTV and Cover Sutra. Thus it was time to make the leap to Leopard.