G5's Leaking Coolant!

I knew I was right on the money to avoid the liquid cooled 2.7 Ghz G5's

Symptoms are wide-ranged but will include fans spinning wildly, machines shutting down when they heat up, greenish liquid leaking from the case, and if you are able to look, crystalized liquid forming where the CPU meets the heatsink as well as corrosion of all the metal surrounding the CPU module.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who has done ANY kind of work on a car knows full well that cooling/heating systems will leak. For an internal combustion engine that comes with the territory but a computer, for which I may have my entire business running on...a completely avoidable situation. Never should have been produced.

NeoOffice 2.2.1 Out

I just downloaded NeoOffice 2.2.1 and lo and behold I can save as MS Word 2007 (docx) and MS Excel 2007 (xlsx) format. I haven't checked the ability to open docx files but If it does, then unless I get MS Office for cheap, I'll not be doing the Office 2008 update.

[Update]

Holy battery draining cpu cycles! Trying to open an Excel sheet spawns an ODF converter that maxes out the processor with a crawling "waiting for external application" so called "progress bar". Ummmmm. Kill now.

[Update 2]
Finally let an excel document open within NeoOffice. It took nearly 15 minutes with the processor maxed. That's on a G4. I'm not sure what that would be like on a G5 or Intel chip though. Three sheets in the document with graphs. Seems kinda long though.

Technorati Tags: Neo Office

Wake Up Call on Pollutions

For people who pooh pooh environmentalists, I suggest a reading of the recent article on China's pollution problem.

Expanding car ownership, heavy traffic and low-grade gasoline have made autos the leading source of air pollution in major Chinese cities. Only 1 percent of China’s urban population of 560 million now breathes air considered safe by the European Union, according to a World Bank study of Chinese pollution published this year. One major pollutant contributing to China’s bad air is particulate matter, which includes concentrations of fine dust, soot and aerosol particles less than 10 microns in diameter (known as PM 10).

The level of such particulates is measured in micrograms per cubic meter of air. The European Union stipulates that any reading above 40 micrograms is unsafe. The United States allows 50. In 2006, Beijing’s average PM 10 level was 141, according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. Only Cairo, among world capitals, had worse air quality as measured by particulates, according to the World Bank.

Oh and this is a place where pollution regularly blocks the sun.

industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.

Windows Geniune Advantage Outage

Let me, as a MacOS X user, take the time out to:

a) laugh
b) laugh some more
c) shake my head in disbelief

because apparently, even if you've paid for your copy of Windows, and it's all legit, one connection to MS's WGA server will render your Windows install "not genuine."

Now how is that for "secure computing".

NIkon's D3

Nikon has just released the D3

Mr. Lee said that professionals’ camera choices influence consumer tastes. Price is less of a concern for pros, making these cameras more profitable. The Nikon D3 will sell for $5,000, and the Canon Mark III will cost $8,000; both cameras ship in November. <b>Neither camera comes with a lens.</b>

$8,000?

Looks like me and my Kodak Easyshare Z740 will be bosom buddies for a while longer.

E30's Rock

For those not in the know, the 1980's version of the BMW 3 series are referred to as E30's. I have one and recently a "nice young lady" suggested it was "not worth it" to invest in re-upholstering it (it really needs it). Some people are just stuck on "new". Anyway for your perusal is a bomb E30 from NJ.

This is what you drive when you don't want to see yourself coming and going.
See more at the E30 Tuning Site

Maturing iPhone

A nice article at iPhone Atlas on adding custom apps to the iPhone. This is a very good development and makes me consider an iPhone as my next purchase. The stuff I'm seeing here seems like the iPhone will eventually surpass the N800 in practical use for me, with the notable exception of MaemoMapper. I'm already a Cingular customer (Not happy that they are now ATT as I dropped ATT for certain ethical reasons) so that issue doesn't bother me, but as I've been griping about my N800, it can't make calls when I want to make calls and I'm not sanguine about paying yet another party for the ability to make phone calls. With the iPhone now available as a refurb product through the Apple online store for $100 off. It is now a better deal (closer to my investment in the N800) so when the N800 reaches it's anniversary I'll see where the iPhone stands and I may make the switch.