• Pownce Community Wiki / API Documentation
  Documentation for Pownce’s new public API
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As you’ve probably heard, Leopard’s Time Machine won’t work with a disk connected to an Airport Extreme base station. However, there’s a very simple work around.

Connect the drive directly to your Mac and tell Time Machine to use that drive. Disconnect the drive and connect it to your Airport Extreme Base Station. Connect to the base station and mount the drive. Time Machine will now recognize the drive and start backing up to it.

However, I find that AirDisk in general is very flaky. Even in normal use, I find that it often drops the connection at random times.

Via Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:

Well, duh! I’m not voting for that very reason and I know a lot of other people who usually vote but aren’t this time. I’m not voting for any Democrat after the way the party screwed Florida, and there’s no way in hell I’d vote for a Republican.

The only major problem I had with Leopard is that it won’t see my Brother HL-1440 laser printer, which is connected to my Linux box and shared via CUPS (which I had reported as a bug).

It turns out that Leopard only uses Bonjour to discover shared printers by default. However, CUPS browsing can be easily enabled.

Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and look for the following lines:

# Show shared printers on the local network.
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow all

Add the following line after it:

BrowseProtocols all

To activate the change, restart cupsd (sudo killall -HUP cupsd). You should now see any shared CUPS printers and be able to add them.

I’m now running the final version of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. I had been running various developer builds on my iMac since WWDC, but I never installed it on my MacBook Pro since this is my main personal and work system.

After doing a full backup to an external drive and verifying that I could boot from it, I did an upgrade install rather than archive or clean install. It took about an hour, although at one point it said the install would take 5 hours. The upgrade went smoothly and everything worked without any problems.

Although MacFixit tries to frighten people about OS upgrades, and in particular using anything other than archive or clean installs, in most cases it’s perfectly safe.

Leopard feels a bit faster than Tiger on my MacBook Pro and almost all of my applications work with no problems. However I really miss SAFT’s safari enhancements and Chax’s iChat enhancements, since neither of them work in Leopard. Input Managers (including SIMBL and most Safari enhancers) are no longer supported in Leopard.

The dock appearance in Leopard never bothered me, even though I put my dock on the right side of the screen. The new plain dock does look nicer, though. I never did like the translucent menu bar, but it doesn’t look bad at all if the top part of the desktop picture is a solid color. I use Hamad Darwish’s Vista Wallpapers, which work nicely with the translucent menu bar.

I rarely bother with Text To Speech, but the new high quality voice Alex sounds a lot better than any computer voice I’ve ever heard.

The picture screen saver has a great new mosaic style. It assembles a mosaic of each selected picture from your iPhoto library.

Uploaded with Skitch!

A lot happened today. The floors are finished, all of the cabinets are mounted, most of the appliances are in, and the ceiling light is up. The guys had someone come over and measure for the granite or quartz countertops. The kitchen is now mostly usable (except for the lack of a sink). Besides the sink & countertops, they still have to put in lights under the cabinets.

The guys are going away until the middle of next week. I’ll have granite & quartz samples tomorrow so I can pick out the countertop. Not much will happen until the countertop is ready.

• Apple – Education – Bel Aire Elementary School
  For Ailing Student iChat Means ‘iCan’
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• MacJournals News : The despicable MacFixIt
  The more afraid MacFixIt makes you of installing new software, the more often you’ll check the site—and either view the ads or upgrade to a paid subscription—to see if it’s “safe” to install yet. If you actually learn how things work and make your own
  (tags: Apple Leopard Mac osx)

They finished putting in the cabinets and put down the tile. The floor & walls are uneven, so they spent several hours just getting everything level.

Two years ago today we got hit by Hurricane Wilma. Although Hurricane Katrina got more press, Wilma was the bigger disaster for south Florida. I lost power early in the morning and was without power for 10 days. Almost the entire county lost power when many power lines and substations were damaged.

We had a cookout by the pool every night, since that was the only way we could cook. Someone set up a generator, so we spent the nights hanging around the pool & clubhouse instead of in our dark apartments. We were still without power on Halloween, so we had a party for the kids in the clubhouse instead of letting them go trick-or-treating in the dark.

We learned from it and prepared for future storms. The condo association bought a generator and a large freezer for the clubhouse. One of the reasons I bought my Prius was because of the long gas lines we had when most gas stations were without electricity to pump gas.

We just finished having the last roofs replaced – almost half of the 34 buildings needed a new roof. Other than that we were pretty lucky. We didn’t have any damage other than the roofs and some flooding. A lot of people lost their homes and some of them still don’t have their roof fixed.

The guys made a lot of progress today. The microwave oven and most of the cabinets are in. The stove is in place but not connected, along with the bottom cabinets on that side. The wall is uneven, so they need to fix it before they install those cabinets.

Via nancies.org: Weeks of rumors broke into the press today with the New York Times reporting that Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” will be distributed by ATO Records. The band made waves recently by selling the release online on a name-your-price basis, rather than surrendering ownership or distribution to a label. Dave Matthews and Coran Capshaw’s ATO Records — an imprint of RCA/BMG — has earned a reputation as a label that’s willing to let artists do their own thing, which is presumably what attracted Radiohead to them.

The guys finished painting, picked up the kitchen cabinets, and started installing them. One of them fixed my doorbell, which hasn’t worked since I’ve lived here. A piece was stuck and it took less than a minute to fix.

I’ve avoided writing about politics because I’m just too angry & bitter. I don’t share the euphoria about a predicted Democratic win. Nothing is assured until the election is over, and even if the Democrats win, nothing will change.

Much as I dislike the Bush administration and how they raped this country, the Democrats are no better. I’m still angry about them abandoning Florida because of the early primary date (which was set by our Republican governor & legislature). I’m not going to bother voting if my vote won’t count. Beyond that, they refuse to oppose any of Bush’s more outrageous actions. They just roll over and play dead on issues such as domestic wiretaps for fear of being labeled “soft on terrorism”.

I’d like to see Obama get elected, but I see very little chance of it happening when everyone is practically anointing Hillary Clinton as the next president.

Interestingly, some of Hillary’s biggest supporters are Republicans, including Drudge. Despite speaking out against her publicly, they secretly want her to win because they know she won’t change anything. She supports the war and has remained silent on Bush’s abuse of power. She’ll continue to go along with their policies if she’s elected.

Although there are a lot of things I dislike about Ron Paul, he’s probably the one who can bring back respect for the constitution and end the war. No Democrat will touch the Patriot Act or do anything about wiretapping & other abuses because they’re so afraid of being labeled “soft on terrorism”.

I’m afraid it makes no difference who gets elected (unless by some miracle Ron Paul does), since they’ll all leave Bush’s policies untouched. Our country has already been damaged beyond repair.

All of the mess, noise, and confusion is taking its toll on the cats, especially Midnight. Cody spends most of the day outside, so it doesn’t bother him as much.

Midnight hides most of the day and occasionally shows his face when he wants to eat or use the litterbox. Somehow he managed to get out today, most likely while the door was open when they delivered the stove. I didn’t notice he was gone until about 7; I figured he was just hiding under the bed like he usually does. I looked for about 90 minutes with a few of my neighbors helping. Finally my friend heard a little cry by the side of my building. It took a few minutes to finally coax him out so I could carry him home.

The guys did more electrical work, closed up the walls where they could, applied textured surfacing to the walls & ceiling, and picked up the stove. They’re making lots of progress – if everything goes according to schedule, the cabinets & floor should be in by the end of the week and the washing machine & drier should be hooked up.

All of this mess is starting to take its toll, however. The cats are freaking out and I almost lost Midnight (more about that in another post), and the paint smell & dust is getting to me. I’ve been sneezing continuously all day.

• Nintendo Software Development Support Group Home Page
  Apply to become a Wii developer here, and get developer info & support.
  (tags: game development wii)

• Download fonts | dafont.com
  A great collection of free & shareware fonts.
  (tags: design free fonts typography)

The guys took out the old tile today, sprayed the ceiling, closed up the walls (except for places they still needed to access pipes), and prepared the supports for the cabinets. They’re taking tomorrow off and will finish the plumbing work Monday & get ready to put in the cabinets.

• Mac OS X: Prepare Your Mac for Leopard
  Tips for cleaning up your Mac before you install Leopard
  (tags: macosx Leopard tips)

I hadn’t heard Arcade Fire until I saw this item at MetaFilter. I always like big eclectic bands featuring an accordion & violin, so of course I fell for them right away. I bought Funeral & Neon Bible from eMusic and I’ve been listening them for the last few days.