Greg In The Desert

>

Here’s some video I shot of President Obama’s drive to Rio Rancho High School on Thursday. It was recorded and uploaded in HD to YouTube.

The first part of the video is the drive down Loma Colorado. I couldn’t drive and film at the same time so set the camera on the dashboard. You can see the camera crews and protesters on the left. The New Mexico Independent says there were about 100 protestors.

The second part of the video shows the presidents cadillac one and the following motorcade driving up Northern Blvd. The Lowes parking lot gave a great vantage point. In retrospect I should have walked down and filmed from the corner of Northern Blvd and Loma Colorado.

For some reason strangers always come up and talk to me and a several people asked me why we were all watching. Many were pissed that they couldn’t drive down Northern Blvd.

baltolover272 has posted a video of Presidnet Obama leaving the high school.

KRQE has Obama’s address on YouTube as well.

I’ve found little use for Dashboard. I use the stock and weather widgets and that’s about it. Package Tracker is a extremely handy widget for tracking packages. It works well as a widget since it’s something I simply want to check out once or twice a day. It also supports Growl, so if I’m sitting at my computer I get a instant notification of the status. The interface is well thought out and it’s free, as far as I can tell.

The 4.0 beta is out with a lot of improvements. check it out at Mike Piontek’s website.

This came out of no where. Apple quietly introduced a new mouse today. “Yawn” you say, everyone has a multi-button mouse. Being Apple and all, they have some innovative features.

Innovative Scroll Ball and Button

Perfectly positioned to roll smoothly under just one finger, Mighty Mouse’s Scroll Ball offers full 360-degree scrolling capability — up/down, left/right and diagonally. You can scroll long web pages, pan full-size images, maneuver around large spreadsheets, control a video timeline and more. And you can even click the Scroll Ball to access your favorite Tiger features such as Dashboard, Spotlight or Exposé.

I’m buying one, and I will buy a bluetooth one when it comes out.

Update 08/02/05 07:00PM: The first review that I’ve seen is out. Looks like you can get them right now at the Apple Store. I suck because there is no Apple Store in New Mexico so I have to wait 5 days for shipping. I could have driven the nearest store and picked one up myself quicker than the shipping.

I certainly didn’t see this coming. Konfabulator is the program that Apple copied to give us Dashboard in Mac OS X 10.4.

Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site. In doing this, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information.

I don’t use Dashboard in 10.4 and have completely disabled it. I understand it works fine in 10.4 along with Dashboard, and if your using an older version of OS X you can now download and use it for free.

Update 06/26/05 8:19 AM: check out widgets.yahoo.com.

Rumors have it that MacOS 10.4 “Tiger” will be out on April 1st. To further confirm this you can preorder 10.4 from Amazon for 94.99 with a rebate. 10.4 is Apple’s next generation operating system.

Features:

• Spotlight: find anything, anywhere on your computer in no time flat.
• iChat AV: video-conference with three other people from your Desktop with higher-quality picture.
• Safari RSS: surf, receive RSS news-feeds, personalize content, and view Web pages in one place.
• Dashboard: open and close the Dashboard instantly using a function key to access Widget mini-applications.
• Automator: automate manual, repetitive, and batch tasks with point-and-click simplicity.
• VoiceOver: access the Mac through speech, audible cues, and keyboard navigation for the visually impaired.
• .Mac Sync: keep valuable data on Macs, portable devices, and .Mac accounts up to date using sync
• Enhanced UNIX support: work efficiently using Tigers 64-bit enhancements, new utilities, and an optimized Kernel.
• Xcode 2.0: develop applications more quickly and take advantage of new Apple technologies with Xcode 2.0.

Technologies:

• 64-bit: run a new generation of 64-bit applications that can use 16 exabytes of virtual memory.
• Spotlight technologies: sort, search, and organize by tapping into a search architecture within applications.
• Core image: develop ultrafast, hardware-accelerated and pixel-accurate filters, effects, and transitions.
• H.264/AVC: see how H.264/AVC delivers higher quality video at lower data rates for everything from 3G to HD.

This has been a shameless plug. Thank you for your time.