Greg In The Desert

• Police: Argument over better father ends in shooting – A man shot his former lover's new boyfriend in the leg early Saturday morning after the two men argued about who was a better father to the first man's son, police said.
• Home invasion suspects tied to border group – KVOA News 4, Tucson, Arizona - – The trio are alleged to have dressed as law enforcement officers and forced their way into a home about 10 miles north of the Mexican border in rural Arivaca on May 30, wounding a woman and fatally shooting her husband and their 9-year-old daughter.

  Their motive was financial, Dupnik said.

  "The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs," Dupnik said.

  Forde is the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a small border watch group, and Bush goes by the nickname "Gunny" and is its operations director, according to the group's Web site.

• News : Intel fined for hazardous waste – The New Mexico Environment Department fined Intel for violating the state’s hazardous waste management regulations in March.

  On March 25, NMED conducted a hazardous waste compliance evaluation inspection at Intel Corporation. Inspectors discovered that Intel failed to close several containers of universal waste lamps. Universal waste lamps are bulbs used for standard office lighting and can contain levels of mercury and lead that make them hazardous waste when disposed.

• Growing the Poison Pepper – Boing Boing – I ordered naga jolokia pepper seeds from the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University. The naga jolokia, sometimes called the bhut jolokia, the ghost pepper, or the poison pepper, is the world's hottest chile pepper. My brother, the expert gardener, is growing them right now. These are pretty difficult to grow in Minnesota; they take forever to germinate and the drop flowers at the slightest provocation.
• Bare-bones warning to Boulder cyclists – The Denver Post – Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner warned Thursday that police will ticket bike riders if they expose their genitals during the World Naked Bike Ride, which is planned for Saturday as a protest against oil dependency.
• Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down – The Denver Post – The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming—the very problem wind power seeks to address.
  The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.
• Four Reasons Why iPhone Owners Hate AT&T – With the iPhone 3G S news now in the wild, the discussion digressed from the announcement of the 3G S itself to AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier in the U.S. (at the moment). Without a doubt, this relationship is where Apple's weaknesses lie.
• Three Things the Palm Pre Does Better Than the iPhone 3GS | Popular Science – Arguably the Pre’s biggest draw is its super-elegant multitasking schema—apps fill up “cards” as they’re launched, which you can quickly scroll through horizontally by pressing the main button, which zooms out into a “card”view. Closing apps is done by flicking it off the top of the screen, which feels great. Aside from the five icons in a quick-launch bar and those within the three drawers of the app launcher, there is no icons-on-a-desktop conceit.
• Al Jazeera English – Europe – WHO declares H1N1 pandemic – The World Health Organisation has declared a H1N1 pandemic, the first such annoucement in more than 40 years, as infections continue to rise around the planet.
• Atomic Warfare – Intel last week bought for $884 million Wind River Systems, a venerable embedded operating system company — yet another of the chip giant’s recent forays into software. The reason for this purchase is both simple and grand — to help Intel vertically integrate and to further its Linux ambitions. Intel’s ultimate target with this purchase is Microsoft. It’s all about kicking Redmond out of the netbook business.

My 6+ year old PowerBook G4 Ti 1Ghz is having occasional video problems. This old computer is happily being used by a student, except for this very annoying video glitch which can be seen in a picture I posted to flickr.

Here are some of the things I can note about video issues:

• I can take a screen capture of the image.
• The image appears through screen sharing apps (VNC)
• Comes and goes without warning.
• Sometimes it will appear on start up when the Apple logo appears.
• New windows from an app will not have the effect, but the background will will still have the effect.
• You can “erase” it by moving windows around.
• The cursor/pointer will appear over the top of the glitch and not be affected by it.

Some of these symptoms makes me think it’s a software issue rather than a hardware issue, however the problem has occurred in Tiger an Leopard and through multiple re-installs of the operating system.

I have searched the Apple message boards but I didn’t turn this up. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything posted, just means I may not have used the correct search terms.

Lifehacker compares Vista’s BitLocker vs. FileVault. They like BitLocker better.

OS Encryption Showdown: Vista’s BitLocker vs. Mac’s FileVault – Lifehacker

FileVault encrypts the users’s home directory and all the files in it. As you read and write files to your home directory, in the background, FileVault encrypts and decrypts those files on the fly. Only the user’s login password can decrypt and mount this drive image, so at login the home directory becomes available as usual – its icon, however, looks like a lock. To other users on the same Mac, however, all files in the user’s home directory cannot be accessed.

BitLocker doesn’t just encrypt the user’s files, it encryptes the entire operating system partition, including Windows files, all your software applications as well as all the users’ data stored on the drive. You create a USB key with the password on it and plug it into your PC in order to start it (like a key for your car.) BitLocker uses a small boot partition to check for the right password, and only boots up if it’s present. If not, the hard drive is completely inaccessible.

From MacRumors, Kevin Rose says the Apple iPhone will be out in January.

• Going to be coming out in January
• All phone providers
• “It’s small as sh*t”
• Don’t know anything about the Operating System
• The OS is supposed to be “cool”
• Doing some unique things
• Two batteries, one charger. One for MP3 portion and one for Phone.
• 4GB ($249) and 8GB ($449)
• Flash memory, Slide out keyboard
• Maybe touch screen?

I think it will be called the iPod Phone (like iPod Nano, etc) and I will buy one.

I never thought in a million years that this would happen. Intel based Macs will be out next year. I’m sitting here besides my self…

Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

WWDC 2005, SAN FRANCISCO—June 6, 2005—At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple® announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel® microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007. Apple previewed a version of its critically acclaimed operating system, Mac OS® X Tiger, running on an Intel-based Mac® to the over 3,800 developers attending CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote address. Apple also announced the availability of a Developer Transition Kit, consisting of an Intel-based Mac development system along with preview versions of Apple’s software, which will allow developers to prepare versions of their applications which will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs.

This Mac mini review, I can’t figure out if it’s a serious review or a joke.

…its sleek look comes at the expense of the parallel port, serial ports, the PS/2 ports and the drive bays… did I forget to mention that the Mini has no PCI slots either? And no floppy disk drive? Well, no wonder they got the unit to be so small… or I could grab an equally stylish, full-featured eMachine at the gas station with a bag of chips for less than half the Mini’s price, with the added benefit of being able to run Windows XP. Decisions, decisions… The Mini boots up into a stripped-down operating system which Apple calls OS X, similar to the stripped-down WindowsCE OS found on many handhelds

I admit to being an Apple Fan Boy, so my opinion might be a little biased. But it’s so close to completely missing the point, it must be a joke.