G5 = Gotdamn!

Wow, so Apple came out with a bevy of announcements today. I won't repeat what's already been covered on /., but hell yeah baby. Go Apple! Please put my dual-1.42GHz G4 to shame! I'm going to look forward to upgrading to your 3GHz G5s as soon as they're available in 12 months!!! Hell yeah!

Other people's pictures are fun...

First, get depressed by looking at Mashuga's photos...

Then, cheer yourself up with Natalie's.

Certainly one of the most interesting sites I've seen in a long time.

If only I'd known....

Link to image

Specs for the new PowerMacs, from Apple. Get 'em while they're hot. They aren't going to be up for long. Looks like somebody goofed.

In case anybody wonders, here are the specs:

- 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors
- Up to 1GHz processor bus
- Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM
- Fast Serial ATA hard drives
- AGP 8X Pro graphics options from NVIDIA or ATI
- Three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
- Three USB 2.0 ports
- One FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports
- Bluetooth & AirPort Extreme ready
- Optical and analog audio in and out

I bet it'll be slower than a IIcx.

(I say this only to make myself better about recently buying a dual 1.42GHz PowerMac G4).

Cry.

Update (21:31 PDT): Apple's fixed the graphic. Here's a cached copy courtesy of the Gods at MacRumors.

Update (6/20 4:31 PDT): The cached copy on MacRumors is gone thanks to Apple's legal department. In any case, I believe those specs to be real. Apple legal doesn't usually ask for stuff to be removed if it's fake.

iDVD, for why do you not use my chapters!?

Video editing on my new PowerMac is very nice. Compared to my old 800MHz iMac, this new dual-1.42GHz PowerMac is a speed demon. Lately, I've been grabbing some shows off the TiVo and archiving them. The convoluted conversion process I have to follow goes something like this:

1. Download show off of the TiVo using MFSStream
2. Convert .ty source file with TyConvert X.
3. Demux resulting MPEG-2 file with bbDEMUX
4. Encode resulting .m2v file into format of my choice (DV for iDVD projects, in particular) with DiVA
5. Convert .m1a audio to AIFF using madplaywrap and MAD.
6. Normalize resulting audio file with Sound Studio
7. (optional) Compress AIFF file into MPEG-4 AAC or something smaller (if I'm not outputting to DVD).
8. Use sync-hole to combine and sync audio/video tracks between the DV file (or whatever output compressed format I chose) and the audio track.
9. Use Quicktime Pro to edit out commercials
10. (optional) Save as a self-contained movie

If I'm going to DVD, I end up with a large DV file that I bring into iDVD. The iDVD product page says that iDVD will read chapter tracks within a Quicktime file and then use them within a project. Does this work? Yes, for iMovie, no for the chapter tracks I've been added to my movies. Once I create the chapter track and add it to my DV file, Quicktime works fine with it. But, bringing the file into iDVD does nothing. iDVD doesn't even recognize that there's a chapter track there.

And, I can't take my huge DV file and import it into iMovie because iMovie has a limit to the size of clips you can import. Argh!

I wonder what I'm doing wrong here. Am I asking too much of iDVD, or is there a bug that prevents it from reading chapter tracks from files created with Quicktime Pro?

The Matrix Revieweded.

From the review of the Matrix Reloaded:

Even if you disagree with everything bad I've said about this movie, there's one point I think everyone can agree on: Keanu Reeves' ass does not need to be seen, ever.

Funny stuff.

Yes, AAA does rule.

This is what Nicole and I did this afternoon.

Fun.

15 items. Do you get it? Do you?!?!

Fucking A.

I went to see X2 this afternoon. It was great. Afterwards, I needed to do some grocery shopping for Nicole. I go to the local Fred Meyer to do all of my shopping, and I like to use the U-Scan after I'm done gathering my loot.

There's a big sign above each unit, which I'm sure nobody reads, that says 15 item limit. And, these units require a little bit of manual dexterity, as you have to scan the barcodes, and then place them into a bag (gasp!). There was this 20-something blonde having difficulty with the machine.... okay, no biggie, happens all the time. The problem however was that she had at least 20 items to scan, perhaps more, and she'd already scanned at least 10. I'm number three in line waiting for people to finish up, and she's holding everybody up because she's got so much to scan, and because she can't follow simple fucking instructions on the machine. Argh!

The U-Scan is a wonderous device, if you know what you're doing. It's quick, efficient, and you can get in and out of the store quicker than having to go through a normal checkout line. But that efficiency has rules. To all the illiterate idiots out there - read the fucking signs! The U-Scan has a limit of 15 items. The express checkout line has a limit of 10.

Seriously.