jessedyck.com

My poor old iBook never had the capability to do the two finger scrolling that all the kids are up to these days. We’d be sitting in a coffee shop together, glaring down all those MacBooks and MBPs when they’d rock the two finger goodness, while in the back of our minds we thought “we’ve been together a lot longer then you lot, you switchers”. Well, that as mostly just us being bitter. After a while, we found iScroll2, a great little free app that adds this functionality to these old dogs. Who’s to say they can’t learn new tricks!

Well, the Leopard release day came and went, and we were quick to jump on that upgrade, not thinking twice about what we might lose. Sure enough, pop open Firefox and start reading the latest Daring Fireball updates… wait, no scrolling, NO!!!

Fear not, for iScroll2 has since been updated with complete Leopard support! It’s really a great thing to have two finger scrolling back in Leopard on these older machines, you really don’t realize how much you rely on something till you lose it completely. I even thought it may be time for a new laptop! Ok ok, I know I need a new one anyways, but shhh don’t tell her!!!

Grab iScroll2 from sourceforge here!

Something that my family has always done with their cars is keeping a record of the fuel used and KM put on the car every time it gets filled. When I bought my Golf 2 years ago, I wasn’t too worried about it and just let it slide. Since gas prices hiked up quite a bit over the summer, I decided to start keeping my own gas and maintenance log so that I could keep an eye on how my driving habits would hurt the bank. The question then arose, what method do I use to record this data?

The most common method is by keeping a log book in the car and just writing in all in by hand. The only problem with that method is that it is very low-tech. Me being a geek, I want something much cooler then that. The next obvious solution (in my mind) would be by PDA, but unfortunately I have yet to replace my Zire 71 that I sold for iPod money, so that it out of the question at the moment. While I was trying to decide this, Google up and released Google Spreadsheets. What a better way to test out this new Google service then storing my cars gas and maintenance records! So that I did. One night I spent some time formatting a spreadsheet and making some pretty awesome formulas to calculate my MPG and L/100KMs stats. After a few months of using it not only am I happy with the ease of use that comes with all things Google, but I am quite satisfied with the performance of both Google Spreadsheets (being entirely web-based) and my little 2.slow VW Golf.

I’ve got the spreadsheet set up so that each fill up all I do is punch in a few numbers and Google’s massive server farm does the number crunching for me, spitting out the recent fuel consumption numbers on my car. For your pleasure (and thanks to Google for integrating the feature) you can see exactly what I am talking about by viewing my published spreadsheet!

01 Golf Fuel Consumption

So there you have it, she is still right around the area that fueleconomy.gov says she should be, and that makes me happy.

Apple just released iTunes 7.0.1 today. I read through a bit of the forum thread on macrumors.com, thankfully a lot of people were reporting that this update fixes their problems. I’m happy to say that my audio is back to normal after installing this update. I even changed my quicktime settings back to normal and still, perfect audio. Now I guess only time will tell if it will continue to eat up 200MBs of RAM.

On another note, why does everyone hate the new Blue icon? A lot of people on macrumors.com hate it for (seemingly) no reason. I think it accents the new interface well, seeing as iTunes 7 is practically the biggest interface change iTunes has had to date. I welcome the new icon (and the new update).

So, Steve did his thing today and released a bunch of fancy new products. Like usual, I followed as much of the presentation live on macrumors.com as I was awake for, eagerly awaiting a new wide screen iPod for me to waste my savings on. While that never came, we did get a bunch of cool new items. A new iPod there is, but my favourite item was iTunes 7, primarily the new iPod integration and album art. As soon as the presentation (note I’m not saying keynote…) was over I quickly jetted over to iTunes.com to download and install it… This is the tale of my journey…

(more…)

So, for no reason at all the other night I was wanting to create an M3U playlist of certain audio files. Now, iTunes did not seem to want to do it, also I did not want these files in my iTunes music library. So there I was, all alone, in a dark room in front of my computer, so I decided to hunt Google for a good playlist creator. I found one that did little more then put the file names into a text file, a few others that were completely bloated and barely worked right, and then I found exactly what I was looking for. Playlist Creator 3 (very original name too)! Great interface, could use a few small improvements, like the ability to drop and drag with the order of the songs, but all in all it did exactly what I needed! And it even creates .pl files, as well as the .m3u that I was looking for. I decided because it’s such a great little program that I would post it, maybe help get the word out about it. So here’s the links!

http://www.oddgravity.de/ (you will need to change from the default German language)

Oh, and since I am also a Mac user, I found it relevant to post that this is a Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP app, though next year (2006) it will no longer be available to those poor win98 (hopefully ME as well) users anymore. Since my file server is a winbox, I have no need right now for a OS X app like this.

!–jdyck–!