Monday, December 31, 2007

Podcasts And The Sansa e260

Back to the Sansa. I have discovered an awesome piece of software for Podcasts. It's called myPodder at Podcastready The Best thing about it is you can download the all in one version and it will work in Linux, Windows and Mac. But here is the best part.... It installs to the device itself and can be used on virtually any computer because the software is launched from the player not the computer. For a geek like me this is very handy folks.

The View From the Pimple

Sled Rides At The Pimple

Derek Dave and myself took a little trip to the Pimple a local launch site. It was my second chance to try my new Sup' Air Altix harness and man is it sweet. This was my first attempt at the Pimple and all went well. I did some brief terrain flying getting within a few meters of the big trees growing on the slope. Short but fun . This picture is pre-flight of my brother readying for launch

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Doing Mac leopard OS

Well As you may have read in earlier post I bought a Mac Mini. After trying it for a few days I went online a bought 2 gigs of fast ram and tore the little box part and installed it. Because of it's small form factor it uses laptop ram. After watching a Youtube video it looked doable. All went well and It was running great under Tiger. But My wife and I decided to spend our anniversary upgrading to Leopard. Well things did not go well. I watched my wife do an upgrade instead of a clean install and all went well. My turn did not. I always do clean installs in windows and Linux but based on Jackie's experience I gave it a whirl. My first attempt ended in a stalled install. Second attempt worked but after a few hours I discovered that my machine was locking up if left for awhile and it was shutting my Time Machine back up drive down in the process. Nothing would wake it. Nothing except a reboot. Then it would not reboot or allow a re-install. I took several hours reading Google searches to find a way to reset it. Then a clean install and still problems. I was getting a little short thinking Tiger was the way to go. But While I was at work my wife did a clean install with nothing plugged into it. That worked. It has still crashed a couple of times and some times it will not wake from sleep. Tiger was rock stable. Leopard has a way to go. While I am not impressed with Vista I have to say Leopard has not been a great experience either. Time will tell if either of these OS's can match their predecessors in terms of stability.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Man I Love Linux

This post is coming to you from a Linux Desktop. Linux Mint 4.0 to be exact. I have been very impressed with the rapid pace of development of Open Source Linux desktops. In the last two years I have seen a step by step refinement of the Linux desktop. I have tried too many too mention. The Distros that have stuck around are Mint, Ubuntu, PClinuxOS, Dream Linux. I also use Puppy Linux to refurbish older hardware we sell at our thrift store. Puppy consistently makes old Pentium II's viable work stations for basic computing. Anyway back to my rave. I bought a little Sansa e260 for under a $100 to replace a Creative ZenV Plus that died. I was disappointed by the lack of Podcast support in Windows. So out of curiosity I booted into Mint Linux and fired up Amarok. It saw my player right away and I was able to load songs and setup automated podcast downloads. If it was not for my need to run Photoshop natively I would ditch Windows altogether. But for now I dual boot. I also use Mac and recently tried to do an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard more on that later......

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Ever Wonder Who Dave Is?


Well this is Dave!
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Looking Back


Dave took this while Paragliding in November. These are views of Kamloops that very few ever see.
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The Launch

It's been a while but here is a picture of Dave doing his thing at the Little Dome launch
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