e v i l _ b l e n d e r

I wouldn't often refer to myself as a true geek. I tend to think of myself more as a geek-in-training, or a fellow with geek inclinations. That aside, every now and then I find a fun toy that I know my brothers/sisters, possibly co-workers won't think is that cool at all. I've got to tell someone about it though!
Check out GeekTool!
It is a control panel for Mac OSX (I guess it's a "preference pane" but I'll never get used to calling it that!) that lets you show various information directly on your desktop. No window necessary. It can show images from the web, as well as output from your terminal.
What good is that? Well, right now, I've got my current IP address displayed right on the top left of my desktop, and with a little more terminal fiddling, I'm hoping to soon have a list of the 5 applications using the most CPU at any given moment.
(It's SOMETHING like 'top -o cpu -l 6 -n 5 -R -s 5' - I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to take the bottom 5 lines from this output yet... I tried using '>tail -n5' at the end, but that didn't quite work like I thought it would.)

Perhaps I _am_ a geek.

I just think that the terminal is just about the best part of the Mac's OS. Guess I'm just letting my DOS roots show. Except that I can actually DO STUFF with the terminal. I couldn't do much with DOS other than changing directories and copying files!

Posted by vashremix at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple's Garage Band application is a pretty nifty thing. I read a post over at Stevef's about it, but now I've installed it and tried it out myself.
I like that it's very MIDI based. I managed to quickly put together a pretty reasonable sounding guitar and drum loop on my own. I do have one minor quibble with it though... I don't recall anyone saying that it would only work in 44k instead of 48k!
Why does that matter?
I've got the fantastically simple to use iMic that I use to hook my mac up to speakers for all my applications.
NO OTHER PROGRAM on my mac has ever complained that the iMic was working at 48k and _it_ could only work at 44k.

I suppose that's what you get for a very cheap (money-wise I mean!) program that's geared towards folk not using anything other than their computer's built in hardware... but... come on. It can't be _that_ hard, can it?

Posted by vashremix at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)