Here’s the latest in Microsoft’s poor attempt at whining about how uncool the products that run their bloated attempt at an operating system are, but you should buy them because they’re cheap. If they’ve been offered $1700 for a Laptop which they’re going to get back free, why don’t they use all of it and get something which will last them the length of her course, and further? Also Microsoft, why do you show a 13″ MacBook and then show the price of a 15.4″ MacBook Pro? Misleading, or what.
In other news, one of Apple’s new adverts manages to rip apart Microsoft’s whole “personal” feel to their adverts in one sentence, 4 words. Right at the end. Back to the drawing board?
Coldplay announced a week or so ago that they’d be bringing out a new Live Album and giving it out for free, and now they have! I’m hearing that people outside the UK might not be able to grab it, but grab me on Twitter or whatever and I can probably sort something out for you…
I came into the situation yesterday of having to unarchive a pretty huge split file which was spread over two DVDs. I was out running a Games Night at my University and therefore away from my home PC and external hard drives, and with this year’s work drawing to near-completion, I didn’t have enough space to copy both files onto my hard drive and then extract it. (While I try and keep 30gb of space free normally, my Final Major Project takes up a lot more space than my usual workload!)
It was archived in a .rar format, meaning that I typically use Stuffit Expander to extract it out. There are other apps to do this, but I’ve always found Stuffit to be just fine for this sole function- .zips are handled by Apple’s built in Archive Utility as it’s just simple and quick. Extracting it out took quite some time for the first disk, meaning that I just went and played Mario Kart while it did so.
Coming back, it required the second disk, and unfortunately came up with a message similar to the one above when I tried to eject the first. Stuffit wasn’t quite smart enough to handle it on a separate process, and I didn’t feel like fumbling around for a paper clip to jab into my Disk drive wherever the force-eject button is. You can force eject it by restarting your machine and holding down the mouse button when you do so, but as I was half-way through extracting this wasn’t really feasible. From doing a bit of Googling on the subject, there are a lot of people with the same problem, without any answered method. Unfortunately it seems that the only way of doing it is via an app called Toast Titanium.
While you used to be able to get a trial version of this app, it appears that Roxio are being an arse about their new version. It seems to be the accepted norm that you are able to get a trial version of an App and then activate it later. Bit of a shame really, as it’s a sure-fire way of getting a Disk drive to eject. In the bottom-right hand corner of the main window, is an Eject button which seems to override anything that another Application is doing and force it to eject the disk. If you can find an older trial version online then go for it- it’s a pretty much sure-fire way of getting the disk out. As a result, the disk ejected, I put in the second disk which then mounted quite happily, and I carried on. Hooray. I think the problem comes down to that an application like Stuffit needs to run the unarchiving as a different process to it’s main GUI, which should then keep this from happening. Who knows, eh.
Nb. If you know of any other (free) app which does the same thing, then let me know. I’ve gone through a number of free alternatives like Burn, as well as free trials of my other favourite burning app Disco, but nothing else so-far has worked.
Roadrunner Records, the label behind Dream Theater seems to be teasing me. A new video has been released for “A Rite of Passage”, one of their new tracks from their upcoming album Black Clouds & Silver Linings, of which a few of the tracks have also been leaked. I’m mashing my head in as I wait for the CD to be released and sent out to me, as I’m resisting listening to the tracks that have been leaked out. The video will likely do my head in as well as it won’t be the full version of the song (as confirmed by one of the comments.) The cut down version of Constant Motion had a few solos cut which although didn’t wreck the song, are very obvious to the fanbase who have heard the track on the CD. It’s understandable as to get it onto music tv channels, but I’m going to have to wait until the full version to check it out.
For the time being, feel free to check out the video above, as well as the Constant Motion video linked below the jump.
“Nooooo!” I hear a large portion of the web tech community saying. But thankfully, CBC’s Search Engine has been picked up by rival broadcaster TVOntario and will continue on as normal, except hosted and broadcast from a different place on the interwebs. In an announcement on the podcast itself, the host Jesse Brown stated that due to recession cutbacks, CBC wasn’t able to continue on with show, along with a number of others on the same network. He seemed to be leaving with good spirits, and with the TVO staff loving the show, it only took a day and a half for the deal to go through.
I’m very happy to be hearing this, around this time last year the podcast was in trouble as well when CBC cut back and Jesse was left to host and run the show by himself instead of with a team. It came out of that better than ever, and I think it’ll do great on another broadcaster. Sadly it will be on less frequently than before, but I can only imagine that the extra time in-between episodes = more awesomeness.
