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interesting touches to HCI here the idea that keys should be relative.
relative positioning of virtual keyboard
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Category Archives: Apple
More DIY videos at 5min.com
high quality transparent oled display :)
More DIY videos at 5min.com
Broadband upload slow in just South Africa ?
Broadband upload slow in just South Africa ? more like by design and everywhere
Dont think that this is poor south africa not having fast speeds, In the uk with a person having a 40kbps (40k per second) upload speed in London, which is pretty standard on a good connection, it would take roughly 27 hours to send the same 4gb of data. So as you can see this is not just a South African problem. This is to do with broadband connections being massively assymetric, big fat bandwidth down and very skinny up, which means sending or serving data to others, is very slow in comparison to downloading information, This asymmetry is beneficial for most people who like to download lots of data and for providers in that it means home computers are generally unable to act like servers on the internet, and as such we have to pay for a whole class of services including servers etc. which if we had much faster symmetric SDSL we wouldn’t need too, Im guessing now that download connection have increased to a theoretical 24mbit in some areas, we may seem more services like Bethere beginning to offer better upload speeds for connections. Though even there Be Pro 250k (2.5mbit) per second upload speed package, Couldn’t serve much data to many users before failing to deliver, as 250k per second upload speed is still very little bandwidth from a web serving perspective. Even in the unlikely event of obtaining this optimal upload speed of 250k per second, the best currently offered on any home broadband package, the 4gb file, would still take roughly 4.44 hours to send.
Speech Synthesis amazing Cepstral lawrence voice
Speech synthesis has come on a long way since the days of this device :)
Feedback sent to Cepstral, and their amazing voice lawrence :
How much time and labour does it take to create a new voice roughly ?
What price would you be talking, to generate a voice like Lawrence ?
I think lawrence is very good but still has a little non neutral bias in there, if you ever come to create a truly neutral clear english voice, I’d be interested to try out. Also strange in testing the demo, that millie is capable of pronouncing the word “barn” but lawrence is not.
These pronunciation errata can obviously be corrected through misspelling the word until the speech voice gets it right, I guess a way of leveraging these pronunciation corrections, would be a pronunciation correction interface bring-able up on screen by hotkey, that would in realtime send a pronunciation corrective word translation back to a central database at cepstral to then be shared via update with all users ? such that all share the benefits of community labour towards improving the pronunciation dictionary of the voices.
Great work why do Apple not licence the voices from you ? As the system speech synthesis voices have not reached the phase of being bearable to listen to, in comparison to the Audio version of a book say. And also I dont think speech synthesis technology can ever reach its potential unlees the best quality voices are guarantee-ably usable from with any of the mainstream operating systems. Much like say Helvetica as a font, can be relied upon to be available on almost any computer.
When like photo-real photoshop composites, people cannot tell the difference between a voice artist reading the book in audio form and the speech synthesis voice of that same artist reading it, then I guess speech synthesis will truly have arrived as a medium. this ideal is probably like chasing a rainbow in terms of complexity involved with speech timing patterns but hopefully one day. Good luck with your endeavour’s.
More things not fixed in Snow Leopard 10.6 release, bugs remnant in OSX :
More things not fixed in Snow Leopard 10.6 release, bugs remnant in OSX :
the fact the spotlight has not been majorly sorted out, to me the most important bug fix just reeks of the lack of sanity at apple, where given 6 releases of an operating system the search functionailty has still not reached the heights of mac os 9’s perfection.
beeb snow leopard promotion bullshit
Now the beeb comes out with some practically promotional piece as to how wonderfull snow leopard is and claims its ours the website viewers view on snow leopard, can I leave a comment on the website myself ? NO as per usual the beebs comment feature is disabled, so as not to disturb the clear pool of “your say” material garnered from the chosen few, which magically reflects their wished for version of our feedback, rather than the truly messy version which is the reality.
Final Word on whether Power Macs are overpriced
FINAL WORD ON THIS : POWER MACS DESKTOPS ARE OVERPRICED > COMPARED TO A PC DESKTOP, ive been using apples since the days of the apple II, if i as a user, can build myself a quad core mac with 4gb of memory 500gb hard drive 9800gtx+ and all trimmings working except screen, running mac os x for £470.00 (including £99.00 of that total spent on the operating system). Why should I pay apple £1800.00 for a mac pro with the same or worse spec ? and why can they not make a machine for the same or less than i can ? due to volume discounts etc, you tell me ? now anyone who recently switched from a pc, glad you woke up, and wants to get all partial newborn mac propagandist on me, remember i must have converted over 200 people like you to macdom. they are more expensive and the design isn’t worth the extra money, how often do you put a mac pro on show or look at it for days on end ? macs now are basically now PC’s at heart, it is the operating system thats makes the difference and that costs £99.00.
Zombie Software a forum post about silverfast.
I own a canon 9900f (I also have attatched a Canon MP780 multifunction printer with a built in scanner) running under leopard 10.5.7 I downloaded your demo :
SFen-6.6.1r1b(CanonSDK-SE).mpkg
It installed ok
When I ran Silverfast Launcher, it said “There is no SilverFast Scanner Module installed.” and would not go any further.
I decided then to uninstall it using the included script :
“Uninstall-SilverFast (CanonSDK-SE).sh”
when i clicked on the above uninstall script it then proceeded to open the script up in my text editor ?
overall not impressed, wouldn’t run and wouldn’t un-install.
Questions :
1: what Can I do to get the installer or uninstaller to work.
2: Is there still powerpc code remnant in the latest version of silverfast, that uses rossetta ?
3: Is the silverfast plugin happy working under twain in CS3 or CS4 ?
These demo issues did not instill confidence in me, Continue reading
Gripes from the tech past part 3 Jaguar bugs
Enjoy this Gripes blast from the past lol : Some of these probably remain in 10.5, but I cant be bothered to check anymore, I full well Know apple long ago, stopped listening to users, hence the Bugs that remain unfixed since the initial releases of OS X. The themes are often the same though the years change :)
Written 23 september 2003 ————————————————————>
Thorns left in Jaguar 10.2.6’s foot, will Panther be our £99.00 bug fix
Small Thorn 1:
when a window is reduced in view Continue reading
Gripes of Wrath from the Past lol G3 powerbook blues
Just to illustrate how computers have been in a pain in my arse, since lord knows when (well Apples since Apple II europlus days I guess ;) ), lets illustrate some G3 gripes and Issues I suffered in 2002, which I recently discovered written down on one of my drives, but never published (maybe as a covering note to apple repair) from back in June 2002, now Apple can take the negative publicity issues from this rubbish lol.
My motorola G3 CPU was covertly replaced, because only on the IBM version of the CPU could you actually install Mac os X 10.0 on, something that all lombard machines were supposed to be ready for. They had a swapout program going on in the US, but nothing ever got setup for UK customers with the motorola version of the CPU. Tech support at Apple US is much better than the UK equivalent, the guy at apple US support admitted to me he owned the same powerbook as I did, and had the Motorola CPU in his replaced almost a year before my query, with the correctly functioning IBM one, he informed that my unit had the same problem as his did before the swap, ie Macos X was impossible to install and run stably. EU and UK governments are good at guaranteeing cucumbers to be straight, but laughable when it comes to take tech companies to task through trading standards, its always been a serve yourself mentality in getting some true response from tech giants and their non recalled fuck ups, How many recalls have you heard of in the last 10 years ? truthfully they should have launched double or triple that number of recalls on products, but have managed to avoid it but playing stumb with their own customers about design flaws in models. early ibook users have allot to complain about in this dept, the number of motherboard failures were appalling, also all post on apple sites are heavily groomed to remove non flattering information.
sadly this machine was in use by my uncle until quite recently, but now has replaced it with a cheap crummy Pc laptop, as there was no low priced apple alternative.
WRITTEN 12 JUNE 2002 ABOUT MY APPLE G3 LOMBARD LAPTOP ——————————>
Dear Apple I have tried upgrading this machine with a 256 Mb memory module twice, bought from a mac memory supplier, who I have explicitly told them, what machine i have ie bronze keyboard with usb and scsi no built in firewire, with grackle memory controller. It is endlessly tiresome trying to sort these problems, The first simm recognized as a 128Mb Ram Simm, when it was described as a 256Mb ram simm from the retailer, The second simm came up with this error “The built in memory test has detected a problem please contact a service technician”
So now I have resorted back to my old 128Mb simm in the top slot.
Continue reading
Apple share mount now always calls certinfo.me.com
Why whenever I mount a drive across the network it now communicates with certinfo.me.com Ive no idea ? According to an apple explanation its to do with mobileme, why the mobileme needs to know what drive I’m mounting I have no idea. especially as I only had a bloody trial account for a while, its precisely this kind of invasive cryptic background process bullshit that fucks me off, more and more coders are doing this stuff and they dont bother to inform what they are upto or doing, and presume on your approval without asking. If they were just upfront about what they were doing with a particular background process in plain english, and asked for your approval it would be bearable.
my advice get protected from this endless parade of unauthorised internet communication by purchasing this great peice of software.
Then you will finally get a picture as to how much communicating your computer is doing without asking you.