Aspell Fox does not work

I am currently using FireFox 1.5.0.1, and found that the spellchecker Aspell Fox does not work. What a blow that is since I was long for a spell checking in a web browser so that I won't make stupid spelling mistake when filling up a web form. Let me know if you found some working spellchecker plugin for FireFox, as I haven't seen one yet.

Blog about Celebrity gossip

I stumbled across this celebrity gossip site called Faded Youth : Celebrity Terrorist which flooded with US Entertainment gossip news. I am not a big fan of that sort of material, but found that site pretty well designed.

3D Rendering of Gorillaz at Grammy

Those who watched the opening performance of Gorillaz and Madonna for 48th annual Grammy Awards should find the "live" performance of mixing 3D animation and live person interesting. The Wikipedia mentioned slighly how the technology is being done. However, the technology was actually first being used at Europe MTV music award 2005. The one at grammy is sort of an advanced version. Nevertheless, it's still fun to see technology continuously mix with art, creating something never seen before. BTW, there's gonna be a phone game featuring Gorillaz, which I personally don't find it amusing at all :-I .

How to give Ubuntu write access to the local FAT32 drives

I have Ubuntu installed, and was basically enjoying it. Honestly, as long as I can access Internet, I don't have way too much complain on an OS. But one thing was irritating: I had problem opening some multimedia files on the local harddisk partition. I went to the Ubuntu forum and found someone mentioning the problem. Eventually it pointed me to page about how to config Samba. Hopefully it can resolve my problem once and for all.

Installed UBuntu 3.10 on my desktop machine

Yeah, I just love installing OS :-D .

I am installing UBuntu 3.10 on my home machine because I always want to someday leave Windows OS. The more I saw Windows Vista the more I think moving to the Macintosh OSX is the solution. Windows is just getting to become an ultra clumsy environment. Plus, the web makes living with mutiple OS a non-issue.

I am still installing, got some problem on the LiteON CD-ROm recognizing the UBuntu installtion disk. Using Pioneer had no problem at all. Funny how the LiteON has no problem with the LIveCD version of Ubuntu though.

Found a reason why my home desktop PC freezed during startup

I was puzzled in the last 2 weeks about why my machine started to freeze at the BIOS boot up screen at the line "checking NVRAM". Simply by Googling the web I found the solution in a web site:

Turns out it was caused by some USB problems. Simply by removing my USB removable harddisk resolved the problem.

Some Mac software worth trying

10 Semi-Obscure Mac Programs You Shouldn't Be Without

Tried. 10.4.5 Intel update on the patched 10.4.4 OS. Not working.

I tried installing the 10.4.5 Intel update from Apple site on the 10.4.4 installation I have at home. No luck. Guess I need to wait for the hacker patch.

Mac OSX 10.4.4 Successfuly in my home PC but ....

Last night I successfully installed Mac OSX 10.4.4 (Prepatched), and had the following founding along the way:

- PS/2 keyboard was not working at first. And even more fustrating was that the USB keyboard was NOT working neither. After being fustrated for a while, I found the solution at this page. But then, the challenge became how I could type without a keyboard. Luckily the USB mouse was still working, so I followed the instruction of this page to bring up the on-screen keyboard. Next I need to find an editor that allows me to change file in the protected area, so I donwloaded TextWangler and then follow the following instruction:

Adding these two lines at the end of the file "/etc/rc", just before "exit 0"
kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePS2Keyboard.kext
kextload /System/Library/Extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePS2Keyboard.kext

The file was shown as in /private/etc/rc but that's alright.
The tricky is to use the damn on-screen keyboard to type the whole thing and make sure the captical letters were entered correctly.

Eventually I made it and have the PS2 keyboard working now.


- Build in Network and network card not working. This is the most fustrating part, and I am looking forward to work on it.

- My ASUS (Nvidia) GeForce FX 5200 does not support QE + CI (lame VESA 3.0 driver), so machine doesn't support those fancy Screen Saver Flurry effect. It also stays in 1024 x 768. I heard that the higher resolution will work if I modify the "com.apple.boot.plist", but I still need to figure out what the heck it is.

- Audio is working for AC97 internal sound card but only on the Lineout, and that means I have to find another speaker to plug to the line out port since I already have my speaker connected to the headphone out of my PC. The Firewire M-Audio Solo was recognized but does not work, but then it won't cause the AC97 to stop working. So I'll just leave it there.


For more detail about all these hardware compatibility, go to OSX86 site.

Resize Macintosh partition for free

Here's the link about how to resize Macintosh partition for free.

Using Macintosh in a Windows world, 2006 real life edition

It's a funny feeling to use a Macintosh (MacOSX 10.4.3 for Intel) on a Windows network environment, but that's what I am doing now. This is my second day of using this Mac on PC (DELL Optiplex GX280), here's my founding:

- There IS a way to use remote desktop to connect to another Windows machine! This is a big plus to me since I need to support Windows web servers. You can download the tool for free at this site. However, this version seems to be age old and as usaully Microsoft has negative incentive to update this (shit!). The following are some downsides:
* Only support 16 colors!
* Can only connect to server machines like Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. Yes, I know that the readme file says that I CAN connect to Windows XP, but I was not able to make it work so far.
* Only 640 x 480 resolution.

I have to say that it's better than none, though.


- Sharing Files is also ultra easy. Just go to System Preference, open the Sharing applet, and select Windows Sharing. You need to turn on the Windows Sharing, and assign an account. I was surprise that the user name can have space between it. Pretty awesome.

- Setting Network Printer
This is also ultra easy. Go to "Print & Fax" System Perferences, click "+" button. In my case, mine is a IP Printer, so I choose the IP Printer button, select "Line Printer Daemon - LPD" as the protocol, enter the IP address in the "Address" item. And that's it. Oh, remember to set the default page size to "A4".

Installed Microsoft Windows Vista Beta, hated it, and uninstalled it.

I had Windows Vista installed on my machine DELL Optiplex GX280. I tried it which worked semi-OK, but then there's so many glitches here and there and so irritated that I eventaully uninstalled it. Besides, I installed the Server version, and it was not as fancy as the client version. Bottomline: I may not even use the Vista when it released. Microsoft has some serious problem with this Vista thing.

Continue using my crappy 20Gb harddisk

My 20Gb portable harddisk was serving me few quite some time ever since I yanked it out from my Compaq Presario 1720 US harddisk. Probably because of being used a portable harddisk with a lot of connect-discounnect-and-connec-again, the harddisk gain some bad sector. In order to regain as much usable space from the harddisk as possible, I have to create partitions that skipped over the bad sector part. Since I have no simply way to know where the bad sector is (notice that I said easy way, which rules out those crazy sophsticate harddisk tools like SpanRite 6 or such), I use the Disk Management feature of Windows XP (under Computer Management console) to create partition. If the tool got stuck during the formatting partition, I simple stop the formating and create a partition that avoids the problem part. I continue doing that until I have a partition that formats at normal speed and complete within reasonable amount of time (say 10 minutes). Now I have 5.8 Gb, and then 2.44G of dead zone, and then 6.06Gb, and then 1.5Gb of deadzone, and finally 2.77Gb. Let me see how longer I can continue using this harddisk.

Finally found a great DVD -> PPC solution

Finally I found a great solution for me to convert DVD video files into something I can play on Pocket PC. It's called Apollo DVD to iPod. And it even support "Green version" (no installation).

My only complain is that the volumne of the generated audio seems to be a tag overblown. I need to find some way to resolve this....

DVD -> PPC : Still haven't found what I am looking for ...

I was kept trying to find a simple DVD to Divx (or MPEG4, whatever that plays on Pocket PC) solution and so far I haven't found one. The road is much bumpier than what I expected.

I tried the following software:
- Apollo PSP Video Converter
- WinAVI MP4 Converter - Works with RM file
- Clone DVD Mobile

They all work reasonabily fine, support zero installation, and some even support converting RealVideo file. But none of them does BATCH conversion from DVD files to Divx. I have quite some music video DVDs that I want to convert, and I cannot find one that converse DVD AND support BATCH conversion. Sigh.... Search continue ...

DVD Recorder: found a disc that works ...

Several days ago I found out that my Pioneer A10 DVD Recorder had problem reading the disc it wrote. Today I tested the recorder using a barrel of Sky 4X DVD-R Disc that I brought today, and burned it with 2x speed. The recording was suggest and the A10 drive has no problem reading the disc. So for reliability and time saving (so that I don't have to waste too much time on testing what I burned), I'll stick with 4x disc with 2x speed for a while.

Still found mixing and matching DVD Recorder and DVD disc a headache ....

DVD Recorder nightmare again

I smelled something was not right last week when I tried to use the Pioneer A10 drive to bootup the MacOSX 10.4.3 boot disc. And then the last 48 hours, I tried burned multiple DVD+R disc (Sky 8x brand, burned at 4x speed), and they all had the following situations:

- The disc itself was burned successfully and could be read on both my LiteON DVD Drive and my Office DVD Drive.
- Nero reported verification error at the end of the burning.
- The Pioneer A10 had problem reading the disk.

For this moment I sort of concluded that the read feature of the DVD Recorder was broken, while the recording feature seems to be working fine.

Somehow I keep of having DVDR Recorders that has this sort of problem. Usually the problem is not that the DVD Recorder failed to operate entirely, but instead fail to function occationally. That makes it very difficult for me to send the DVDR Recorder back to the manufacturer for repairing.

Guess I will have more development on this issue in the future.