Just moved the contents of my life, in crate form, to my girlfriend’s place. Despite all the bad press, the natural choice for a ‘cheap’ move was U-Haul. I used Private Mini Storage of Sawdust Road Spring Texas, and we reserved a large truck a few days in advance, picking up on Saturday at 11am.

We arrived about 10:30am and went through some basic paperwork. My quote was $39.95 + $14 insurance + $50 mileage estimate coming out to about $120. This really is quite a lot cheaper than hiring movers, especially when moving lots and lots of small boxes which are easy but time consuming to load.

The Tiptons were couteous and business-like, and Randy pulled a 24′ gas truck round the front for me. I guess they are used to people renting trucks, so there wasn’t too much mollycoddling. The truck was a gas-powered 24′ with AC and automatic. It had 194,000 miles on it and started up fine. As usual with any big, fairly well-used piece of equipment, there were a variety of hisses clunks and squeaks, shakes, lurches etc. But, the truck had a good vibe going, being extremely clean, and having all gauges working. I asked, and the truck was a ‘one-way’ truck, from Arizona. Apparently these trucks are the best maintained ones, having to do long hauls across the country.

I put 20 gallons of gas in it, since it only had about 1/8th of a tank according to the gauge, and the drive down to my apartment went fine, with 45 and beltway 8 passing beneath the big wheels at about 55-65 mph. I kept a good eye on the gauges and the truck never lost charge, or got hot, though the gas sloshing around in the 40 gallon tank (my guess) sure made the gauge go up and down.

Once down at my apartment, I loaded the entire floor of the 24′ truck with boxes and plastic crates. Some of it was stacked up, but there was enough space to have most of it one layer. At least nothing was going to be falling around.

The drive back up to Spring was pretty uneventful, until the ramp onto 45, when two guys in a truck got somewhat of a scare when the wheel came off (!!!) their truck. The people in an Explorer on the 45 feeder were pretty lucky not to get killed, as I watched the wheel from the other truck just miss them.

Made it back and unloaded, then returned the truck on Sunday morning about 10:30am. Final mileage was 80 miles, so the bill was just over $150 bucks (+fuel), so I was pretty happy. Overall, if you’re happy driving a big truck, that doesn’t go very fast, or at least aren’t scared, then go for it. It took about 6 hours to do the whole move, so I saved probably a couple hundred bucks on movers. Recommended.

That was some busy weekend. Spent a bunch of time on Saturday and Sunday packing boxes in my apartment. Actually, this time, I’m using sterilite tubs from Target, which are a lot nicer (and more expensive) than cardboard boxes. It’s pretty nice to be able to see what you have in a tub though.

The picture above was cropped out of a digicam original taken in crappy lighting and enhanced using Graphic Converter. It’s definitely feeling like every time I do something with this mac, I find some more cool software. GraphicConverter is like a Mac version of PaintShopPro. It supports lots of file formats and has a pretty comprehensive toolbox, and list of effects.

Fox are showing some NASCAR. It looks kick-ass in high def. The screen cap shows that it really does test a G4 pretty much to the limit. It’ll stutter and suck down lots of battery, but it’s fine at Normal performance settings.

Wow! I just hooked up my Elgato EyeTV 500 to my Powerbook G4 and was watching HD TV in about 10 minutes. This is quite an advance on the near hundred hours it took to get a Linux 2.6.11 kernel custom built and compiled so I could run MythTV with a PCHD-TV card.

Really, like 10 minutes.

I opened the box and pulled out the 8 x 5 x 2 silver box with the HD decoder in it. Pushed the software CD into the slot on the right of the PowerBook and dragged the app and docs to my Applications folder.

The amplified Terk HD antenna ($40 from Radio Shack) screws into the back of the Elgato box and a firewire cable connects between the box and the mac. This cable also powers the box, so if you are running on battery, expect it to drain a bit faster.

Displaying HD also takes a lot of power, so expect your fan to be running and your G4 to get a bit hotter than normal. Incidentally, the picture looks great, with so far no glitches. Recommended. Mine was about $240 refurb, directly from Elgato.

There’s a great piece of software called TiddlyWiki. It builds an entire (tiddly) wiki into an HTML file. You can save a new file to disc, then open it and start adding posts. The posts get indexed and linked, just like a real wiki, but everything lives in one file.

The overall effect is like the old outlining software that used to exist before it was embraced and extended by Word.

Click here to play with and download a copy.

I already ordered a black 20 Gig iPod. Having TV shows to watch on the go will be fabulous, especially spending time hanging round airports and the like that I do these days.

Here’s a pic of the quality (on a G4 PowerBook) of watch Night Stalker. For a relatively crappy resolution of 480 x 320, the picture is great. Bit of pixelation, but it’ll look great on an iPod. It’s fine for watching at double size.

Isn’t that awesome.

It’s a funny night. Apparently Coronation Street (Corrie) goes down ok in Canada. I know this cos’ I’m sitting in Detroit watching CBC and there’s an hour of Corrie on’t telly. I’ve been in the US that long, that I’d forgotten this entertainment existed. Ooh, that Martin’s on, and his daughter’s pregnant. Oooh, maybe dreadful Deirdre’ll be on.

The following video came off of slashie dot. Bear with it …

Funny video

Warning, it does contain some bad language.

I bought an Apple iSight camera for my Mac Powerbook G4 this morning. I’ve wanted a web cam for a while, and finally, discovering all the cool video software on my mac pushed me over the edge.

Unpacking

As usual with Apple gear, the packaging of the iSight is superb. The plastic wrap comes off and the content box slides out of the outer cover. The main box then folds into two, with ‘Enjoy’ and ‘Designed by Apple in California’ the first things you read.

Inside the box, the iSight itself, a carrying tube and various holders and other gubbins await.

Plugging In

The iSight clips to its firewire connection, which is in turn clipped by a cool looking but slightly precarious clip to the top of the powerbook screen. After a slight pause, the iChat setup runs. I cancelled this the first time and went straight for Quartz Composer.

The video quality is damn good for webcam type hardware. 640×480 at 30 frame per second doesn’t sound that great, but the image quality is clean and smooth. I was very impressed. I’ll post some more images later.

Quartz Composer is a live video patch panel that makes it really easy to patch live video, images, clips, RSS, text through visual effects onto the screen. See the picture of me on a cube. ;-)

Isn’t that teh cool !?!?!?!?!