blackrimglasses.com

If Eli ends up doing this when he’s older I will be the happiest dad alive

[From

Robots Are Taking Over the World (but ukeleles will save us). - Boing Boing

]

if this works with OSX with more than two fingers this is EXACTLY what I want to replace my mouse.

[From Multi-Touch Supporting Bamboo Tablet Joining Wacom Family Based on Blurry Pic - Wacom bamboo tablet - Gizmodo]

“Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online,”

I thought Adobe customers were looking for stable, streamlined, fast and current software that didn’t crash our machines?

[From Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion | Beyond Binary - CNET News]

Between this and EventBox I feel like I just got a new Mac. Brilliant app. Might replace Evernote for some stuff. Certainly stickies.

[From Notational Velocity]

In the last post, I talked about the network infrastructure which powers my digital life. The gist of it is that I need to have persistent, always-on connectivity from all locations to all systems which encompass my world. To do so, my office, home and our data center are linked up with high speed connections and within the same class-B subnets.

Now, the computing devices which make up the usage of this network infrastructure is the subject of this post.

Inventory

The following is an inventory of the machines that I own and run.

Whew. That is a lot of machines.

Now the fun part, going through the machines one by one.

First though, you might wonder why it is I have so many computers, and if I actually use them. The answer to the first part is: because I can. The answer to the second: yes. I use computers to fill functional gaps, meaning where I see a need to apply a machine (and its constituent parts, ie OS, browser, etc) to a problem, I do. Machine’s are cheaper than time.

Mac Pro (8 Core)

This is my main work machine, which I estimate I use 8 to 10 hours per day, five days a week. The machine is a 2009 Mac Pro, with eight cores running at 3.0ghz. I have 16 gigabytes of RAM in the machine, and two Nividia 8600GT video cards. These cards drive four Samsung 2343BWX displays.

I love these displays for a few reasons. First off, they have the typical Samsung display, which is to say crisp, bright, high contrast and even gamma. And secondly, they are one of the only high density LCD’s on the market, running at 2048×1152 resolution. Four monitors might seem to be over-kill, but I use them fully. The left most monitor I used to have monitoring screens on, but this started driving me crazy. I now reserve it for “long running” programs such as Spotify, iTunes and some home made monitoring dashboard type components that are written in Flex.

The left screen is used for “information” streams, including Twitter, Yammer, NetNewsWire and other info sources. The middle screen is for “focus” and contains web browsers, programming, etc. And finally the right most screen is for “communication” and features e-mail (Apple Mail and Entourage), iChat and Skype.

The machine has four terabytes of hard drives (four 1TB drives). One drive is for “boot” and the other three are in a RAID configuration for storage of the Users folder from OSX and movies, music and other high bandwidth type files.

To this machine is attached a 2TB Lacie drive that I use for Time Machine, and only Time Machine.

The optical out of this machine is connected to an Onkyo receiver and from there to a pair of JBL studio monitors that are on my desk.

Mac Pro (4 Core)

This used to be my main machine, but is now sitting on a stand up desk on the other side of my office. It has two Acer 24″ monitors as displays and during the day primarily displays what we call the War Games Console. The WGC is a VNC connection to our management server which has a careful grid of top, iftop, mytop and ApacheTop on it from all our web-heads and database servers. I also have Cacti and a special Flex dashboard we made on there. I use this to monitor the health of our infrastructure.

The other use of this machine is to show people our systems when I have visitors. I do this instead of having people gather around my desk as used to occur.

I also use this machine with a SATA dock to test out OSX and other OS betas.

Mac Minis

I have a total of three Mac Mini’s that I use regularly. Two of them are applied as Home Theater PC’s, one at the office and one at home. On them I run a variety of software, mostly for testing out the concept of HTPC, as I have yet to see software which fulfills the promise of the 10 foot view of computing.

The software I am testing includes Hulu desktop, Boxee, Plex and Front Row. None of them are perfect, so I often resort to Finder and Quicktime.

The Mac Mini in the office is most often used for meetings and presentations. The home and work Mac Mini’s are hooked to a Samsung 55″ LCD television. The one at home is a slightly newer model.

The lone Core Solo Mac Mini I picked up at fire sale for about $300.00. It resides inside the main wall in our living room. hooked to a 15″ touch screen monitor. On this I have running Indigo from Perceptive Automation as well as some assorted other daemons. I have a custom Fluid full screen browser running a dashboard for our house which shows time, Flickr photos, lighting controls, weather and the security cameras.

iMac

Not much to say other than it’s a white iMac that my wife uses.

Mac Book Pro’s

My main remote machine is a unibody Mac Book Pro. Because of the brilliance of DropBox, my Mac Book Pro seamlessly transitions to my remote machine after working all day in my office, provided that I shut programs down on each machine between switching.

At the house we also have two Mac Book Pro’s from the two prior generations. These are used by my wife around the house, and by visitors.

Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh

The Dell Mini 9 is a “throw in the back of the car” computer, or a “I’m going to Starbucks” computer. It’s not very fast, the keyboard sucks and its prone to crashiness, but in a pinch it works to read e-mail, RSS and it too has DropBox sync, so it can pull in my work documents. I would love to get a new hackintosh (Dell Mini 10V), but will wait to see what Apple will be doing in this space.

iPod Touch

The iPod touch is used as a remote control for various systems in our house, including the Sonos, Indigo (the lighting system), the cameras (one for the front door, one for the baby) and the receiver. It is a first gen iPod Touch, with no need for us to upgrade.

iPhone 3GS

The iPhone 3GS, as I blogged, functions like a NetBook for me. I use it for work e-mail, calendars and addresses, as well as a phone, but it also functions as a remote blogging machine, news reader, remote control for the house, VNC, SSH, etc. I can do everything I can do from my house on this machine, and it fits in my pocket.

Also know how you know Apple’s working on a general purpose device? I use Kindle.app on my iPhone more than I use the Kindle now.

[From What Steve Jobs Actually Said About eBooks ]

Jobs scoffs at the idea of a dedicated ebook device (a la Kindle), not the idea of ebooks in general. If Apple has shown anything, it scoffs at what it knows it can do better.

[From Is this Apple's e-book trojan horse? - Big Tech - Fortune Brainstorm Tech ]