MSi Wind/Advent 4211 Hackintosh

There’s a bit of a craze going on taking £280 Advent 4211 subnotebooks from PCWorld and hacking them to run Mac OS X 10.5. You have to open them up to swap out the WiFi card, and there are sound issues, and the screen is still small, and and and… Advice thread here.

Very tempting. I was playing with an early EeePC the other day and found the keyboard basically unworkable; the 4211/Wind looks like it’s much better in that department, though the battery life isn’t great.

I’d be entirely happy with a Linux subnotebook, but for two things: iPhoto and iMovie. Kvatch.

Dinner

Lovely dinner last night with Rosie and George, the schedule for their new flat (woohoo!), their wonderfully expressive greyhound Neela, and exactly 391 pictures of Ecuadorian monkeys.

They’ve been in the rainforest for the last two months.

Not with the dog. The dog was being pampered with fresh linen sheets and fluffy towels in a dog hotel somewhere (that’s what they’re like, right?). And they didn’t take the pictures to show the monkeys in the monkey sanctuary, that would be pointless. The pictures came out of the…

Oh, look, they’ve been caring for monkeys. In the jungle. For a while.

I… may be a little confused.

Perhaps it was the 391 pictures.

Apple software survey on Final Cut Pro

I just completed an online survey about my use of Final Cut Studio, for Apple software research. It doesn’t appear to be under any sort of NDA, so I guess I can pass on what I found interesting:

Most of the questions were routine profiling stuff – trying to get a picture of the range of uses to which I put the products. Describing myself as dissatisfied with Soundtrack Pro and Qmaster led to additional questions asking me why, that sort of thing.

But a whole batch of questions were about review processes, and how I seek feedback and signoff from my clients. Do I send them DVDs, put Flash video on a webserver, or send them tape? Do I get feedback via email, phone call, or annotations on the web video?

Oh, please please tell me that Final Cut Studio 3 – presumably coming next year, and a significant rewrite to Cocoa/64bit if it’s going to be Snow Leopard-native – will include some sort of work-in-progress review module. That could rock.

At the moment I’m cobbling together simple websites with Flash movies for my clients to view. It works, but I’d love:

  • That process to be automated from within Final Cut.
  • My clients to be able to scribble annotations directly on the video
  • To be able to load those annotations into Final Cut as timeline markers.

That would be sublime.

Given an either/or choice between this and Soundtrack Pro actually, you know, working, I’d plump for the latter without hesitation. But would it be wrong of me to ask for ‘both’?

Deceit

“I remembered to put sugar in it this time,” said my mum, as she handed a steaming mug of tea to Flossie.

Wait – yesterday Flossie drank a mug of tea with neither sugar nor complaint?

“Yes. I often drink tea without sugar, if I haven’t any to hand.” She confessed this in a remarkably matter-of-fact tone, considering my ensuing horror.

Every relationship is based on trust, on certainty, on specific immutables. In our case: how we, respectively, take our tea. And now I discover that Flossie has been lying to me all along.

About tea.

If she’s deceived me about – of all things – tea, how can I ever trust her again? How can I be sure that she likes fish, as she claims?

And if tea and fish are in doubt… well, frankly, what’s left?

I’m sorry, HOW much?

My chum Ben points me to this wonderful court report from the Guardian about a bogus heiress who claimed to have two million tonnes of gold stashed in caves, which she claimed was worth $300×1041.

The key line, as Ben notes, is:

“Financial consultant Richard Bedard, who had handed her £127,000 to pay for “legal things”, insisted he still believed in her.”

This is key not because:

“He claimed a CIA agent had assured him the money really existed.”

No. That’s just gullible. We could all fall for that.

It’s key because he apparently believes she has $4.6×1033 per person on the planet.

‘Financial consultant.’

Dear heavens.

Mathematica for iPhone

Every now and then, I like to start a rumour that’s entirely fabricated, in the hopes that it will turn out to be legitimate after all. Thus:

I hear on the grapevine that Wolfram are looking at building out an iPhone version of Mathematica. The idea of something the size of a pocket calculator being able to do hard-core algebra is exciting enough, but there’s a kick in the tail here – apparently, the front-end on the iPhone can be made to talk to a back-end running on a Mac Pro or indeed any Mathematica grid. Wooohaa!

One significant problem is that the App Store isn’t currently configured for products costing in excess of £2,000.

Kite photography at the BIG Event

I ended up doing a whole bunch of sessions at the BIG Event last week, but undoubtedly the most fun was a bunch of us pratting around with a range of demos outdoors. My bit, with Elin, involved dangling my mobile phone off a kite in a valiant attempt to take a group photo. We failed, but somehow that ends up being less important than the attempt.

Here’s the rig and first attempt, from the ground:

And the result of that:

Feet

So here’s the second attempt, in which we were shooting video:

Anyone still interested can see our very first kite video attempt, shot last year, on SciCast: here.