Earlier this week Apple released OS X 10.4.7 upgrade which unfortunately broke Transparent Dock’s ability to make changes to the Dock. I’ve just come across ClearDock from Unsanity which isn’t just as functional as Transparent Dock, but it does allow you to change the Dock background and border to either transparent of defined colors. Having worked with a transparent dock for so long now I found having the old background and border back to be really ugly. Thank you ClearDock.
Technorati Tags: ClearDock, OSX, Transparent Dock
I’m not great at keeping up with the offers on MacZot, but today’s was being talked about all over the net and I made sure to grab a copy for myself.
MacZot is offering iClip v3 for free today. This is ahead of the Universal Binary release of v4. I’ve been aware of iClip, but haven’t looked at it much in the past. It’s a very helpful multi-clipboard tool which hovers nicely on your desktop. As I’ve been pulling this new blog together I had been copy and pasting code changes into TextWrangler so I could flip back quickly if required. Now with iClip it’s all stored in multiple ‘bins’ which which I can easily push content to and from. The interface for the upcoming iClip v4 looks beautiful, but I’ll hold off treating myself to a copy until I upgrade to an MBP later in the year.
Technorati Tags: MacZot, OSX, iClip
Yesterday I was really excited to see a posting on TUAW referencing an unstable release for Skype for Mac with video making it’s way around the net. The unofficial release is legit as a Skype developer, confirming the release, has asked that people not use it as it will destroy some data on your Mac. It wasn’t a formal beta or RC from Skype.
The lack of good Mac to PC video conferencing tools has been a niggle for me as long as I’ve owned a Mac (~2.5yrs). Living in the US with our family back in Ireland we like to video conference, especially to let the grandparents see their grandson. To date we’ve been using a mixture of Yahoo Webcam and Skype 1.4. iChat to AIM didn’t work due to a firewall issue on the other side, though iChat to iChat video is just superb. Of recent we’ve been using SightSpeed which is working flawlessly except that I don’t know anyone else using it. With Skype for Mac with video only a few months away I’m psyched, or should that be skyped 
Technorati Tags: Sightspeed, Skype
Yesterday iEmulator announced the release of v1.7.9 as a universal binary. My first thought was how does this run on an Intel Mac if it’s Universal? But since I don’t have one I’ll have to try it out on my iMac G4.
Incidentally, I used the iEmulator press release as my first digg on Digg.com. I’m no longer a Digg virgin. As a side note, Digg 3.0 is growing on me by the day with their new topics and sub-topics. My submission was even dugg by 5 other people within 24hrs. I feel a little special somehow…
Anyway. iEmulator is based on the open source Q emulator which is a coca port of QEMU CPU emulator. I decided to download Q instead of paying iEmulator $24 for their version (it comes with DOS, email support and few other things).
21 hours later I have managed to install Windows XP on my G4. Q installed in, oh.. less than 3 minutes. 5 minutes more to figure out how to create a Guest PC and install Windows (boot from the CD, Scott! duh!) and the rest was just waiting. My wife grew increasingly concerned about the heat emanating from the Mac. It’s special to her.
Needless to say Windows XP ran like a dog, more like a dead dog. If you’re going to try it on a G4, don’t even bother. I’m sure a G5 would be somewhat usable, but I doubt it would be worth the effort either.
I’m holding out of a MacBook Pro (Parallels!), but waiting for revision 2 and the Merom (Core 2 Duo) chips which I hope will solve some of the skin melting heat problems!
Technorati Tags: Digg, iEmulator, QEMU
This is the new scottmyles.com blog. I’ve had a blog on my site for about 8 years now, and I don’t even think 8 years ago it was called a blog - I was editing the index.html manually back then. Over the past few years I’d stopped blogging on this site and setup a family blog at ScoJo for my wife (Jo-Ann) and I to write about our experiences since moving from Ireland to the US.
Anyway, I wanted to start blogging about non-family interests and so have setup this new blog. Hopefully I’ll get better at writing interesting things!
