Binary Bonsai

Hey, everybody bitching and whining about your iPhone plans out there in the world (yeah Canadians, I’m looking at you, whiners); I think it’s official now. Denmark has one of the worst iPhone plan in the world (though it looks like Norway beats us).

Not to mention Telia, which doesn’t have the best reputation in the country either…

So, you know, the next time you’re a Canadian whining about Rogers and their iPhone plan, consider that ours is not only more expensive, but worse in every conceivable way. In fact, you can’t get a plan for your iPhone in Canada that’s as bad as the ones we have here in the Northern countries.

Think about that for a moment.

You will be hard pressed to find anyone who has been involved in such a wide swath of the most influential movies out there. Terminator, Aliens, Predator, The Thing, Edward Scissorhands, Jurassic Park, Artificial Intelligence and not to mention a lot of less iconic, but equally impressed films in their own right, like Monster Squad, Leviathan, Constantine and despite the actual movie not being too impressive, no one can deny the absolutely stunning work on the suits for Burton’s Planet of the Apes. Oh, and about a gazillion other films as well.

Stan Winston darn pretty well invented the modern day Hollywood iconography in creature design.

I recommend that you get The Winston Effect, which is a fantastic rare look behind the scenes of these great movies and their creatures; and a look into the mind of the guy behind them.

My young and teenage self live in the shadow of the work this man did, and I salute him.

Currently our household has 3 Macs. A 1.66Ghz Mac Mini (my workstation, called Valkyrie) w. 1GB RAM, a 1GHZ Powerbook w. 512MB RAM (Rikke’s machine, called Freya) and my 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro w. 2GB RAM (Godiva). They’re all running Leopard and share the wifi network (on which there are several other devices, as well as a 1TB network HDD). Connected to the Mac mini is a 250GB disk for photos and music and a 500GB disk for time machine backups.

Here’s the deal; I want to hook the Mac mini up to our 40” Bravia and use it as our media center, running OSXBMC on it as well as whatever other applications it would make sense to run on there. In turn, I would then have my 20” Cinema Display, wireless keyboard and mouse and the external HDD’s sitting without a workstation.

This is where the MBP comes into play, because I then want to use that as my primary machine from now on (where it’s been my secondary up until now). But I’m not sure if I can live with some of the issues that crop up in doing this. So I’m looking for some qualified help here:

• The iTunes Library. This is the biggest issue. I’m approaching a 160GB library, which is currently hosted on an external HDD. My MBP’s disk is a mere 120GB, so there’s an obvious problem here. I play music through our Airports, and if the MBP doesn’t carry the music, I can’t do so unless I’m wired. So I can either keep my music on the external HDD so I only have access to it when I’m ‘wired’. This sucks, because if iTunes discovers that its ‘library disk’ is gone, it resets that location to the MBP itself, and so I have to manually change it back all the time. Or I can prune it down; though I’d rather not to be honest. Or I can keep a sub-set of it on the MBP. Or I can keep it on the Mac mini. If I keep it on the Mac mini, I can’t manage it though, except on the TV or through a VNC connection, and that feels a bit bleh. Man, do I ever wish Apple would allow me to manage shared libraries… Or I can find some other solution that eludes me.
• iPhone. I need to have a loose wire for syncing the iPhone if I’m not wired up to the display. No biggie. But again, the iTunes issue.

• Now You See It, Now You Don’t. I’m afraid of applications leaving their windows on a screen that is no longer there, when I unplug the cinema display. I generally think OS X deals with multi monitors well (opposite Windows, cuz DAMN!), but I’m unsure if this is a problem at all?

And of course, anything else that might be of interest.

Comment are open.

One of the reasons I turned off comments on this site, was because the amount of spam that managed to slip through the cracks continued to rise, despite Akismet doing its very best to stop it. And the reason for this, was that somehow, the spammers have found a way to actually post coherent comments, that make sense in the context of the entry, but which then link back to sites that are obvious spam-sites.

Here are two examples, Adida and Alan.

Both these comments almost fit into the conversation, though Adida’s is somewhat off-topic (though strangely humorous to me, as I’ve seen that particular film quite a few times when I was a kid) and Alan’s being a rehash of sorts of a few of my notes from the entry itself.

The catch of course, is that you only catch the fact that these are spammers if you pay attention to the site they link back to. Because of this, in the last half year or so of 2007, I manually went to all URLs I didn’t know, just to check if they were spammers.

I don’t intend to turn on comments again on a regular basis, but I’ve found a wonderful method of subverting these idiots.

I change the link to point to Unicef.

Because obviously I don’t want any traffic or pageranking to go to spam-sites; but why waste the opportunity to have the spammers work for good?