Atomac.net

It’s that time of month again where I feel like posting up yet another boring shot of my desktop. Why do I do this? I guess it’s more for myself really. I like having a back log of things I have done (even if it is just wallpaper changes) over the months regarding my desktop. In Atomac’s pitiful stats it seems to have helped some people find wallpapers they were looking for. So I suppose it is not all in vein.

This month for some reason I felt like a little fangirlism going on. Plus I really like the apple and frog in this wallpaper.

OS: Mac OS X 10.5.1 “Leopard”
Wallpaper: Think Green Space by psychopulse.
Docked Apps: Finder, Dashboard, Apple Mail, Safari, NetNewsWire, Yummy FTP, SubEthaEdit, Adium, ecto, iTunes, iPhoto, VoodooPad

My desktop really doesn’t change much. I keep it pretty zen so I can focus on various tasks when they come up. I admit lately I have been pretty stuck on doing nothing but playing video games. Well, you guys should know the drill right now. Questions, comments, post ‘em.

Or should I say “blog cleaning?” Atomac went under a little maintenance today which included an update to the Mandigo theme and some logo clean up. A few days ago I went ahead and cleaned up some of the unused features I added to the site. One of which would be the various bookmarking icons that would appear at the bottom of each article. If anyone misses these please go ahead and leave a comment. I would be more than happy to bring it back if there was enough demand. Other than that the site should be in completely normal working order.

I am hoping to get back into my blogging groove despite the up coming traveling that is going to be done this month due to the holidays. I think it would be fun to get some new pictures up sometime as well. The snow is already melting here and it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any more for some time. I have my fingers crossed that there will be more soon though.

As usually comments and suggestions regarding the site are very much welcome.

I couldn’t pass this up. Merriam-Webster named “w00t” the word of the year for 2007. I don’t know why that surprises me so much. You would think a word that is in he real dictionary would have made it. Before I go on, here is a run down for those of you that don’t know what “w00t is:

1. w00t (interjection)

expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”

w00t! I won the contest!
Submitted by: Kat from Massachusetts on Nov. 30, 2005 23:18

[From Merriam-Webster Online]

I admit to saying this quite a bit myself. w00t is a very easy word to say and for some reason it just gets the point across so much better than “yay” or “whoohooo” etc. Oh and yes the double zeros “00″ are completely necessary. “woot” just doesn’t look or feel the same to me.

So shout it out and be proud! It has been quite a w00t-tastic year.

Well, it seems more sites are picking this up, but I first saw it yesterday on MacUser. Looks like you can grab yourself a legit free copy of DivX Pro.

So what does this temporarily free Pro version net you? Well, usually the only part that’s free is the software that gives you the ability to play back video; the Pro version, which normally costs $20, lets you actually encode content (even exporting from QuickTime Player or iMovie), and also contains a batch conversion utility. What does DivX get out of it? Well, your email of course, though they say that it will only be used to send you your serial number and other mailings “in regard to your product.”

[From DivX is free for all...for a limited time only]

Though there is a catch. Seems you gotta trade in your email address for this free copy of popular encoding goodness. I for one am more of a Hand Brake user and prefer to encode my videos using XviD. But for those interested go ahead and trade in your email. I do love free software, but I think I am gonna pass on this one.

Those of you that take on this deal, let me know how it goes! DivX does promise your email won’t be used for evil purposes, but then why ask for an email address at all. Tip to the wise, I would use TrashMail for this.

I haven’t been this mad at a gadget we’ve bought in a long time. The weird part is, when we first got it the thing worked pretty well. I suppose I should back up and explain what I am shouting about.

PolyVector and I decided when we first moved to Flagstaff that since we spend so little time on the phone that having a regular land line was just too expensive and not worth it for us. At the time we didn’t feel like having a cell phone so we looked into using Skype as our sole means telephone communication. Well, at first everything seemed to pan out Skype was ok but answer calls was a pain in the ass since we just ran the software application on one of our computers. So in comes the gadget I am now so very pissed off at.

We bought a Netgear SPH200D Dual-mode Cordless Phone with Skype. At first (as you would see from the review) the phone sounded great and worked pretty flawlessly. I must have read dozens of reviews before deciding on purchasing this $200 pile of crap now sitting behind my iMac unplugged and in a heap. Probably close to a month after purchase the phone started having weird issues. It would very frequently be frozen on the “System is starting up” screen. I have read forum posts on the official Netgear site and have tried dozens of things to get the phone in tip-top working order. I do have to give it credit though, when the phone does work, it works quite nicely. Making and answering calls is much easier using a phone than using the Skype software.

But back to my bitching, so after deciding to deal with this mess of the phone appearing to be frozen and resetting the device probably three times a week, I would religiously check the SPH200D support page for firmware updates thinking this would hopefully solve my problems. No updates till this past November were given. And so I am finally excited! I got the new firmware and starting updating the phone thinking I will have my originally working SPH200D. And once the update finished I immediately got the “System is starting up” screen stuck there for probably a few hours before I decided once again to reset the device. I am no n00b when it comes to updating device firmware. I have bricked a few routers and got them back to working order with freshly modified firmware etc. I get a kick out of this kind of stuff and I am pretty good at fixing my mistakes.

So before I continue on with this thing rambling I will just make my final statement about this phone here and now.

The phone worked very nicely for the first month. I genuinely was impressed. But after that it was all down hill. I would say if you are in the market for a VoIP solution and you really want to go the Skype route, stay away from the corded phones from Netgear and Linkysys. They are nothing but problems waiting to happen.

For friends and family, you can still call our regular number I have Skype forwarding calls to the iPhone for now.

Thanks everyone for listening to my rant.

By now, I am sure you all realize how crazy we are about our dogs. So it is about time I posted up at least one cute picture of Prancer in the snow. The beautiful snow has reminded us of Sam lately and we have been remember many wonderful things about him. Prancer decided he wanted to go out front, he sat on top of the couch pillows near the window this morning just being fascinated with the snow. Naturally we opened up the front door and let him have his fill.

Don’t worry, we only let him sit in the snow for about 30 seconds. With his little chickens legs we were afraid he might catch a cold being in the snow for too long.

The snow this morning was beautiful and thick! We are still 5n0w n00b5 (I couldn’t resist the 1337 speak) and so we too sat in front of the window for who knows how long just watching the flakes fall. Simply stunning.

So today we went out and traded in some of our junk games that we haven’t played in who knows how long. I have included a picture to show case the 15 we decided to trade in at the local GameStop instead of sitting here listening them out.

PolyVector already tossed the receipt, but I believe we got something like 45 bucks USD for that pile of crap. And with our new found cash we got Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360. Oh and the really cool part is, since we’re ordering some pizza to scarf before we get down and kill some fellow human beings via Xbox Live, Dominos gave us a nifty 48 Hours free of Xbox Live Gold. Meaning once again I don’t have to purchase an account to help PolyVector whoop ass. Though today’s down side is the snow is melting away. Oh well, I suppose everything can’t go my way.

Today was nice and cozy. We had our first real snow of the season! And I am sure you guessed right on what we did with our time. Yep, played some video games and made some new Miis on our Wii. I snapped a few shots while it was snowing and I thought I would go ahead and post ‘em up.

I made everyone some fresh coffee and we snuggled on the couches with the pups. not a very productive day, but it was nice and relaxing. I am hoping the snow continues through the night and then some. I would love to get better shots this winter season.

I did a little bit of work this morning on Atomac to make it a tad more iPhone friendly. I talked a bit last month about posting from the iPhone and how I got a very nice WordPress plugin to help make the backend accessible. I know we don’t get many (if any) readers who are viewing Atomac on an iPhone, but it does make my life easier accessing the site with a much more compact version greeting me when I am on the road (or out around town). So I went ahead and disabled the WP-Cache plugin for the time being and got the iWPhone plugin all setup up and cozy. The picture to the left is Atomac on the iPhoney application so I could show you guys a nice screenshot of the theme being seen when using an iPhone.

Oh and I finally noticed why some of my images when I post have the damn white background even though they are PNGs. Seems when using the Google Picasa Web Albums Uploader, if you choose not to upload the actual size of the image the alpha channel is not preserved. Oh well. I am much too lazy to care right now. I will make a better effort for future images.

Alright, so we have had our iPhone for quite some time now and Monday was the first time we’ve actually used it as a cell phone. And who was the lucky person who got the first call? Our very special roommate Willow! We were going to go out and have some dinner at our favorite local Mexican restaurant and wanted to make plans to meet up. I gotta say the sound was decent, no cutting out despite the low bars indicating poor reception. The only thing was the case we chose hurt my ear a little. Now this could just have been me and my anxious self pressing the phone to my ear a bit too hard. Nothing that can’t be adjusted. I think this phone was the perfect choice for us. Every time we are out there is always a use for its amazing internet capabilities. It has helped us look up dog product reviews, game reviews, and taking down development ideas when out.