Would You Work on This Guy's iBook ?

Thinking different
The Consumerist has reported that Apple techs have refused to work on computers that have been exposed to excessive cigarette smoke. They claim it is a bio-hazard. It might be gross & the goop might actually damage the computer, but I doubt it is a bio-hazard. When I was a lad & started fooling around in radio at WYSO, WUSO & Bruce's Jolly Roger, I was instructed not to smoke around the electronics. At Jolly Roger it was more an issue that Bruce's parents would have killed us for smoking in his bedroom. Anyway, growing up in a house full of chain smokers I saw the yellowy brown residue everywhere, most notably on windows.
So, if you spend a lot of time tokin' up and zoning out on your iTunes Visualizer, I guess you can expect your Apple warranty to be voided. The kids at the genius bar putting on haz-mat suits might be worth it, tho.

Use your own handwriting as a font with the YourFont online font creation tool.
The online service is OS agnostic and generates a TrueType font usable on Lin, Mac & Win.
You can use your font like any other TrueType font

And, of course, stunning video effects !

To send your documents out to friends and foes, use a word processor like Writer in OpenOffice and simply export your document with the font embedded using the Export to PDF function.
The process is pretty simple. You download a template from Yourfont, print it, enter your characters, scan it and upload it to YourFont. It processes the images to a font nd you download & install. Processing took about 2 minutes.
Placement of the letter in the template is important. As you can see, I did a horrible job. Anything in the boxes of the template is going to become part of the font, tho so you can't draw rules on the paper. I would sugget editing your scan in an image editing tool like GIMP and making sure everything is placed right using guides. This is especially important if you are trying to create a script font.
I would suggest using a hard paper or even plastic to print your template on and using a felt tip pen so you get a good smooth line. You also might want to practice some of those weird characters you don't use every day, like §s and æs and ¤s.
A whole alphabet is not neccesary, You can just make decorative capitals or scrolly embellishments.
What's really cool about this is that you don't really have to use the regular alphabet. You can make your own alchemical font or hieroglyphics or veve library. Or you can just buy professional versions at Deniart.
I imagine you could even use high contrast images of the fam.

MasOSaiX
MacOSaiX 2.1 has been released. It is a free Mac application for creating "mosaic" images.
This is me in 315 porno images.

Pretty simple to use. It takes A LOT of images to finish a mosaic. 50 pictures left me with a bunch of empty gaps. You can save as png with transparency for the gaps, tho, and create more weird effects in editing appliations like GIMP.
You can use a Google image search if you don't have any images floating around on your hard drive. But if you don't have any images to use, you're just plain weird.
You could do some pretty obnoxious shit with this if it did video.
the app takes it's time but it's kinda fun to watch. ok, I am easily amused. It's fun to watch once, maybe.
MacOSaiX and GIMP are both freely distributed. While MacOSaiX is a Mac OSX app, GIMP runs on multiple platforms.

OpenOffice 3 Native on Mac OS X
OpenOffice.org has been released to run natively on Mac OS X Intel computers with the release of version 3. There is also a PPC version but it seems kind of unofficial. Previous versions of OpenOffice required Mac users to use X11 and it was slowernHell. NeoOffice worked natively just fine, tho. A quick and dirty startup test had OpenOffice 3 running a tad quicker than NeoOffice 2.2.3 on an old 450 G4 x2/1G RAM.
OpenOfffice is an office suite like Micro$oft Office with a word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation application. It opens and saves most of the MS file formats and has PDF and Flash export built in. It is freely available for Linux, Mac, Solaris and Windows.

You can download the Intel and PPC versionshere

Cool things you can do with a Mac Mini.

Read the article here.

Installing Windows Vista Business SP1 on a MacBook Pro
First dilemma - how the hell do you open the Windows Vista box ?
It looks like a book and has a curved front along the left side of the box. But it doesn't open along the left side.
After breaking the box into pieces & still not being able to access the disk, I look online for Windows support and find out the box opens along the Z axis from down on the lower right.
This is going to go well.
I begin to partition my HD with Boot Camp Assistant. A few minutes into this and the computer crashes. oboy.
Fortunately, the partial partitioning somehow ate up a bunch of diskspace that I do not know how to clear, but now I do not have enough room to install Vista or do much else on the Mac side, either, for that matter. So it's time to wipe & reinstall Mac & lose my purloined Acrobat & InDesign.
No rest for the wicked.....
Re-installed Mac
Ran updates
Everything looks ok
Start up Bootcamp, partition works ok - start Windows installation.....
yeesh
This thing starts and stops so many times I don't know what the hell is going on.
Looked like everything was done, so I inserted the Mac installer disk to load Apple specific drivers & tried to run the installer but I kept getting a message saying I could not install because I had a "pending restart".
Sorta weird as I never saw a dialogue box saying I needed to restart and that I could do it now or later. So I restarted, and then I was able to install the drivers & Bootcamp control panel. It is just like the typical Mac startup disk control panel for anybody who remembers or still boots into OS9.
So, 4.5 hrs after I started I was booting back & forth between OSs.
Now I just have to install plug ins, applications on the Mac side, set up email and Airport....
ugh
Do that tomorrow.