An encounter with Mr. (or Ms.) Hawk

Just as we reached the top of the hill where Stanford’s Big Dish radio telescope is located on our Saturday 6-mile jog, spouse Linda yelled. I, with my head down and puffing up the steep (for me) trail, had missed this very pretty brown-and-white hawk perched on a signpost immediately opposite the Dish.
Mr./Ms. Hawk didn’t […]

Standards drive a personal technology upgrade

Lately, spouse has needed to record some interviews. At the recommendation of one of Linda’s colleagues, I wound up setting her up on our Mac with Audacity, the open source audio digitizer/recorder for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Linda was collaborating with colleagues on other platforms, and it was nice to have source files […]

The world’s most secret blog?

Our Mac OS X 10.4 Server, which has been turned off for a couple of months, has just been booted. Not sure exactly what, if anything we’ll be doing with this machine, but we’re going to give it another hard look.
Earlier we had thought our inexpensive half-terabyte array and some lightweight software and a couple […]

Los Lobos

Long day, now sitting in front of a Mac listenig to Los Lobos’ latest, The Town and The City, downloaded from iTunes. of course. This band does not disappoint. Moi, I love Chuco’s Cumbia and The Road to Gila Bend, but every cut has its charm…

The LAN overhaul begins

With the Mini finally upgraded, we can get down to the fun part, architecting the new LAN. First stop will be to learn a bit more about DNS behavior, and then doing the back-of-envelope diagrams that serve as a starting point. The half-terabyte array, an SMB share, is proving to be problematic on our Mac […]

Enemy of the state

We bought a movie from iTunes last night, just to see what the experience was like. The movie starts as soon as the first bits are down, but it stalled frequently as playback overtook download. We watched an hour of Enemy of the State, quite the topical flick given the current US government’s […]

The Mini, finally sees all 2 GB of its new RAM

It was a struggle, and the Mini almost didn’t make it through the process, but the Intel Mini now sees al 2 GB of its new Techworks RAM from Other World Computing. The problem may not have been bad RAM: the problem may well have been a very small metal tab on the retaining clip […]

A quiet evening with the new iTunes 7

Saturday has been busy: we finally have found some time not booked for other activities. We set the spouse up so she could record interviews from the phone to the Mac (with a couple panic ‘help desk’ calls along the way), did the shopping (including presents for an upcoming baby shower), bought a new […]

The half-terabyte array, re-thought

With 5 months under our belt using the half-terabyte array, we are re-thinking completing the project by adding 2 more 250 GB NAS drives. These SMB shares (aka CIFS as the Mac prefers to ID them) have a way of dropping off the network. Often, they can’t be remounted without restarting them (this takes me […]

Stanford sunrise

Even after 17 years of jogging the same circuit, there are still surprises. As I made my way past the corral by Stanford’s Red Barn this morning, I noticed for the first time that Hoover Tower was visible from this spot - silhouetted here against the morning sky. Linda was surprised that she had never […]

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