by Brandon Yap
Who’d ever thought you could make authentic espresso (with crema!) out in the middle of nowhere.
The HandPresso Wild is a hand-held, portable espresso maker. It makes real espresso using 16 bar of pressure to force hot water through the ground coffee in about 30 seconds. This is no gimmick, but a viable device for making espresso almost anywhere.
Wow. Check out the video on the HandPresso page.
by Brandon Yap
So you’ve used something like TechTools’s Surface Scan only to discover you have bad blocks on your Mac hard drive. Now what? Bad blocks are supposed to be automatically marked as bad by the drive controller and remapped from the drive’s factory pre-assigned reallocation pool, but sometimes this doesn’t work so you end up with bits on the drive which can’t be read from and written to properly. TechTools will not map out bad blocks for you, so what will? The answer is surprisingly obvious. Because bad blocks are reallocated on writes only, erasing the disk in Disk Utility using the Zero Out Data security option will write across every block on the disk, marking the bad blocks as it goes along so they won’t be used again.
Yesterday I decided to apply the 10.5.2 update via Software Update. It downloaded and installed just fine, then proceeded to reboot my machine so I walked away to do something else. When I came back about about 10 minutes later, I was greeted by a blue screen with a black cursor. So I thought i’d wait some more. 30 minutes later and still nothing more than the same blue screen. Ok no problem, this happened to me on the Tiger to Leopard upgrade I thought, i’ll just reboot and be on my merry way. It worked for the upgrade, surely it would work now. So I reboot. Apple logo, grey screen, spinning circle. It kept doing that. Something’s wrong. Ok i’ll boot into Safe mode. Same thing. Upon booting into Verbose mode, there was some error about mDNSresponder which kept looping and looping.
Crap!
I knew my data was probably intact, but something had messed up the boot process during the upgrade.
It took the Leopard DVD and an Archive and Install to recover the system, but it recovered well with no loss of data and all my user information and applications intact.
So while the upgrade didn’t go smoothly, I got there in the end. If this happens to you, it’s not the end of the world. Just reinstall.
It’s about time Apple got going on this one. Americans have for a number of years enjoyed easy ordering of photo books from within iPhoto. Just today I received a mail from Apple stating that iPhoto books are now available in Australia! *chrorus sings* *light shines down from the heavens*
Now you can finally send Aunt Flo (who doesn’t know the difference between a radio and a computer) all those pictures you’ve been meaning to for the past year in a nicely bound and glossy book.
TinyMCE is a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control released as Open Source under LGPL by Moxiecode Systems AB. It has the ability to convert HTML TEXTAREA fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is very easy to integrate into other Content Management Systems.
Version 3.0 has finally been released bringing with it full support for Safari 3! Woohoo!
Start your developer engines. It’s time to upgrade your webapps!
Often i’ve wondered if there was a better way to keep track of serial numbers for the software i’ve purchased. This usually involves keeping a text file up to date with your serials, but an upcoming trend is for software vendors to distribute license files which makes the traditional method of tracking licenses difficult.
LicenseKeeper is set to change all that by becoming the central repository of all the licenses you own.
