I’ve been using this table with a program called Pixelmator as it’s an alternative to photoshop for performing some touchup work. Lately I have been into creating black and white photos and then painting in  only part of the color. I have an app do to this on my iPhone called Colorsplash. But using Pixelmator with the tablet is a bit more fun.

Since it is essentially a digital piece of paper I thought it would be cool to create a digital signature that I could put into an e-mail so my name actually looks like it was written by a real person. But I have really crappy handwriting. I am not really sure I should be doing something like that.

Here are 3 drafts I created on my tablet.

My handwriting looks like chicken scratch. But it could be the fact that I am still getting used to the tablet. I think this will requite a bit more trial and error. But so far I am loving this tablet.

Life has been treating me pretty well the past few months. I haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog. I did update the wordpress blogging software. Added a plugin that will grab all of my tweets and post them on the site.

But I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend. Would anyone want to read a review on the iPhone 4 or any other piece of technology that I own.

This prompted me to write up a long detailed e-mail on good backup tips and some free tools and general good advice about saving data. I didn’t get a thank you. I didn’t get one response.

E-Mail is my thing. I love e-mail I find it 100x easier to solve problems with an e-mail then a phone call. I am always on e-mail. You send me an e-mail it gets forwarded to my Mobile Me account which instantly puts it on my iPhone and boom I know you sent something and i will get back to you ASAP. To make things easier for my family I setup a Google Group so that you can just send an e-mail to 1 address and everyone gets it. But people seem afraid to use it.

Here are the current stats on the group.

185 Tristan
118 Mom
49 Aunt
31 Grandpa
31 Uncle
27 Cousin
20 Family Friend
20 Alex
15 Family Friend Old Account
14 Grandma

This has been up for over 2 years and doesn’t seem like it’s getting that much use. Getting people involved in the discussion on things like planning birthday’s is near impossible. My girlfriend her family seems to have e-mail and planning family events in the digital realm down. I don’t get why it’s so hard to reply to an e-mail or click a link and fill out a form.

I finally got my grandma hooked up with a Jitterbug cell phone. That is the oddest phone I have ever seen. Only cell phone I had ever used that has a dialtone when you flip it open. And that everything on the phone is either “Yes” or “No” Do you want to call Tristan?

My family has a ton of videotape so I got the means necessary to work on converting them to the digital format.  My desk is kinda loaded at the moment. Two Apple laptops got some VCR’s going here and just piles of technology at the beck and call to get all this done. Here is an picture of my desk at the moment.

Sent out an e-mail for that no response not a person in the world seems to care. I tested out the technology with my High School Senior Slideshow. I wasn’t in it but it was the only video tape I had around the house.

You can view that at the following link North Kitsap High School Graduating Class of 2001 But I would be careful. It’s 46 minutes of a slideshow of people you probably have no clue about. It was really just a visual test to see how well it worked. I also changed the audio to be a bit better quality.

But I hope to get on this project there are tons of funny. (Well I would find funny) videos that we recorded over our childhood years. That I would like to convert to a digital format. I don’t think I would want to convert them to DVD. Since would be easier to grab a video file and make a DVD if you so choose.

But anyways I guess I just wanted to rant that my family doesn’t use technology in a way that seems to be the most productive. Or seem to care about any of the efforts that I put forth into helping them. But what do I know. It’s late I am going to bed thanks for reading.

Some Tech Specs : We captured this on December 14th 2009 at various locations around my hometown of Kitsap County, WA. I used a Flip Ultra HD camera for all of the video and we went to various locations and I would capture my sister dancing from 15-30 seconds depending on the location. The video was inspired by the “Where the Hell is Matt” video which you can see here.

The music is Praan and you can grab it off iTunes at the following location : http://bit.ly/91XPu4

I edited the movie on my MacBook Pro using iMovie 2009. Which made it incredibly easy to do. I captured about 58 minutes of video in various locations and had to cut it down to 4 minutes and 29 seconds to match the other video. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them leave them in a comment below. I am not sure if we will do this again next year but who knows what the future holds.

Later went to the Apple Store and played with one and just couldn’t justify the switch to AT&T at the time and the $499 & $599 price tag. When the iPhone 3G came out just over a year later I had to have it. Then a year later the iPhone 3GS came out. Getting video and a compass didn’t seem worth the upgrade to me at the time.

So iPhone released OS 3.0 and now 3.1. Tomorrow we get MMS which I have had on my phone for a while now but the copy and paste has been awesome. Especially when adding all of my shipments to my Delivery App. I highly recommend Delivery Status Touch. But I do have some complaints about the iPhone.

If I get a text message my phone alerts me and shows the name and says “Text Message” seems like it gets angry sometimes and I never get the text message but that doesn’t really concern me. What I don’t like is how I get notice that I get a new e-mail but I don’t get any notice on the lock screen when I get an e-mail. I need to unlock my phone. Tap the mail app and then I get to see who sent the mail. I would rather have a notification like the SMS alert for e-mail as well. I understand not everyone would want this so it would nice if you could shut that off as well. It would also be cool if I could have an updated weather forecast on the locked home screen.

Other then that the iPhone has been evolving rather nicely and I have been pretty happy with all the updates. Picture messaging comes out tomorrow. I have had it on my iPhone for 10 days or so now. I have enjoyed it so far. I have tried every hack on my iPhone.  I have Jailbroken, Unlocked, MMS, Tethering if there has been a guide for it I have done it.  Jailbreaking is cool and all but it doesn’t seemed like I have ever gained much from doing it. Other then changing the theme on my iPhone and a few funny apps. I keep thinking I should jailbreak 3.1 to try out the Google Voice App.  Speaking of Google Voice. I am loving that service. I like it better then Grandcentral when they were the dudes in charge. Mainly due to the new interface.

But that is all not much going on really. Weekend is almost here.

I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD.  You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.

http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087

But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.

But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.

Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.

I must say Arrested Development was introduced to me by my girlfriend when she got the DVD’s from the library. I got to watch 4 episodes or so before it ended up having to go back. I wanted to see more so I could have waited for her to get the DVD’s again but I didn’t have time for rational solutions. So I did some research and found that I could get each season for $20. I didn’t like this idea it just wasn’t geeky enough. So I found that you could hack an AppleTV with Boxee and watch Arrested Development via Hulu. I had been wanting an AppleTV for a while now so I decided to go that route since it was geeky and seemed cooler at the time.

Instead of spending $60 and getting DVD’s and being happy I decided to spend $300 on an AppleTV. Got a USB thumbdrive I had around the apartment and loaded the AppleTV Patchstick on there and installed Boxee and I could have Hulu on my TV. It has been shown that the AppleTV has been a great investment since it plays all my media now. I used to have this task delegated to the Playstation 3. But it wouldn’t play my DRM stuff from iTunes now the AppleTV does it all and I am happy. Plus the HD rentals on AppleTV make it worth my while.

But the moral of the story was I got to watch Arrested Development and every other TV show or internet video I wanted on the magic AppleTV box.

Which inspired my ringtone.

Here!

Link is in iPhone format so you will need iTunes to play it.

To win the contest you must visit the link below and complete the following.

http://www.papertoilet.com

All you need to do is get to the end of the roll and if it says you are winner it will give you a promo code. Leave a comment with the promo code and if you are a winner it will say you are a winner. If not well better luck next time.

Good Luck to you all!

So we are running v2.2.1 at the moment if you come across any issues. Especially Internet Explorer 6 or 7 let me know. I spend more time fixing those problems then anything else. Usually it goes like this.

I use some newer or different tag that does the same thing. Internet Explorer doesn’t like it and messes up the entire page and then I need to go figure out how I can use a workaround to get that issue solved and make sure it works with everything else. You pick your battles I trying to go with Firefox but I forget the rest of the world isn’t so enlightened.

They did release a Beta of Safari on Windows. Which is nice for testing stuff while I am at work. If you want to try a different browsing experience.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Friday I went to go see Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard.  This movie lived up to all the Die Hard fame. One thing that was a bit of a bummer since they had the PG-13 rating you couldn’t really get in a Yipee Ky Yay Mother Fucker. With get Yippe Ky Yay Mother *Gunshot*. So the premise of the movie is hackers take out the world by crippling transportation. Then taking out money and so forth. So it was Die Hard in every aspect of Die Hard. I give the movie a very positive rating with a few dings for no “Welcome to the Party Pal!” But if you go your entire life only see Die Hard 1 and Die Hard 4. 2 and 3 are not really worth your time.

Saturday!

So I went to the Seattle International Beerfest at Seattle Center. I made a few drunk dials. So this place is pretty sweet for $20 you get a 5oz Beer Glass and 10 beer tickets and you have music and all kinds of beer to try. I tried so many kinds of beer I can’t even recall. Some were amazing others not so much. After my first 10 beer tickets ran out I was rather golly and sloshly. The guest list was Jered, Nick, Justin, Greg and the reason you are reading this to begin with. The place was packed and it was a rather nice day. I was shocked there were a great deal of females at this  thing. Most girls you talk about beer and they hit you back with Coors Light or Bud Light. But when I saw a girl drink a 20% ABV Stout I was like there is a girl who has it together. They had $3 pints as well. While waiting in line for the pints I met this guy named Steve and I was rather drunk and friendly and he busted out the iPhone.

The Apple Geek in me was like holy shit. Steve being a cool dude lets me play with the thing. I want one of these things rather badly. $600 seems totally worth it.

So we hit Beerfest around 2pm and we left around 6pm after I was rather drunk and we then went to Red Mill Burger.  I am sorry to say you can’t get a better burger in Seattle then Red Mill. Then we went to the ferry and passed out. Got home and then went out for the night. I was feeling rather tired and Sunday was going to be a big day so I retired the evening early.

Sunday!!!

Sunday the Girlfriend came over.  This was also the day that Me, Nick and Justin have Brunch. So she came over and we hung out for a bit chatted. Then I said we must get going so we hit up the grocery store since I was told to pickup some fruit and juice. I get stuck carrying the heavy things. So cliche but I enjoyed having a purpose.

When you are taking your girlfriend to meet your friends there are one of three outcomes. Meh, Eh or Sweet or translated Ok, Bad , Good. (Speaking of translations. The new saying that evolved from Beerfest is Delta!  Such forms would be “Because I’m so Delta! or Say what! You better recognize the Delta! or That translation from Meh to Ok was Delta! Dude I know)

So I figured well I like to be prepared in such situations so I gave her the names and a slight background of everyone she would be meeting. Her and Audrey seemed to hit it off amazingly. Audrey told me I needed to bring her back.  So I think that would classify everything as “Sweet” or “Schweet” the one thing I forgot to mention about this bunch is they take forever to get anything to go anywhere. We arrived around 12:30 to go play MiniGolf but all things said after Brunch and so forth we didn’t leave until 3:45 or so.

But we had a fun day hanging out and I feel like I have met a real keeper. Junniper seems to approve of her just by knowing her name. =)

The parents found out about the girlfriend they want to meet her. They invited me out to have a BBQ at my mom’s work want me to bring her along down at the 3rd of July Fireworks. I am still on the fence about that one. Parents are a totally different realm. They say I should be a bit more concerned about the stories my sister could tell. I was thinking going up on the grassy hill and just having a picnic. Who knows at this point.

Tonight is Guys Night. I have a day to make a decision. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.

So I searched Google and Forums and nobody was really offering any feedback that was anything that I hadn’t already tried. So last night I thought I would power through this problem because I had some free time and there were some e-mails with youtube video links. For a temporary fix I was taking the youtube links and pasting them into vixy.net and creating a quicktime file to download. Which was rather time consuming but hey sometimes you just need a laugh.

So I wanted to see where the plugins were installed on the Mac. So I found out they had a filename that went like this.

<name>.plugin

So I used spotlight to run a search for that plugin file name and found they were located under the following directory tree

/Library/Internet Plug-Ins

And I found a few flash player files so I deleted those. Since it is in a rather scary directory I had to type in the admin password for the device. That is one thing I love about Mac’s it won’t let you fuck it up unless you are really trying to on purpose.

So I deleted those and then tried to install flash player again. It was throwing me an error that I don’t have enough permission to do so. So I tried to run the installer from the command line using sudo which wasn’t really getting me anywhere.

So I figured that I needed some more permission so I loaded up Quicksilver and used it to launch NetInfo Utility. Went looking for users and found my username. I was assigned a UID and GID (User and Group ID) of 501. So I changed it with this utility to 0 which is the root user UID.

Doing a little research I found out a simple command in terminal could have fixed my issue for changing UID as well

sudo niutil -createprop . /users/userName uid XXX

This does create one issue with changing file owners but I didn’t think about that at the time. So after the change was made I logged out and then logged back in. Installed flash. Launching the NetInfo Utility and changed my UID and GID to 501 again and then logged out and back in again.

After I log back in I find that all of my desktop settings have changed so that took a little brain time to figure out how to change how everything was displayed but that was quickly resolved and youtube is working again. Which prompted a twitter update.

I know this is rather technical and most people will just blow this off but I thought I would share my experience in case a future google search user runs into the same problem I had where flash player just stops working.

So nice being able to see that Kitty Kat Finally Dance

http://maczot.com/discuss/?p=411 

“It’s like a mac podcasters wet dream.”
(http://www.tristanpipo.com)

My contribution to the history of the internet.  It’s cool to be featured on such things. =)

Dear Tristan,

A few months ago, you downloaded the single “You Know My Name” by Chris Cornell. Unfortunately, you were charged $1.49 rather than $0.99 for the song.

Please accept my sincere apologies for this mistake. You are a valued customer and I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused you.

As a gesture of apology, I have issued three free song credits to your account. The next time you buy individual songs, your song credits will be used as payment until they all have been used.

To see the credits, refresh your account information by signing out and back in to the iTunes Store. The sign in/sign out features are located under the Store menu of the iTunes application.

Your song credits should appear next to your account name. If you have any further questions or require additional assistance, please contact our customer service team by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Fretheim
Customer Experience Analyst

I hadn’t noticed this charge that was higher on my account so I went and searched through my iTunes Recipts and saw that it was an issue. So my props to Apple and iTunes for actually I have never heard of iTunes giving you a refund on anything. Just thought I would share that iTunes yet again proves they are awesome.

For some unknown reason to me the Internet Explorer users of the world have been sending me a great deal of e-mail about this. I never use Internet Explorer since you can no longer get it for Mac since Microsoft admitted defeat in that realm with Firefox, Safari, Camino and Opera being the key players on the Mac. But if you desire here is the link. My Dream Woman – Mac in the meantime I suggest you uninstall IE and grab Firefox.

Has a 12” Powerbook and falls in Love with a Mac Pro. Makes my 15” 1.5ghz G4 feel sad as well. But I keep holding off until Leopard comes out to buy a new Mac Book Pro.

I was in love for about 2:45 seconds there. Back to Reality.

http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/02/ms_macbu_birthd.html

I got a Thanks Tristan!

Some reason that made my day. Ahh the simple life of a Mac Geek.

So I will be sitting here exploring the work related issues and then I will hear some noise coming from behind me. I charge my phone and iPod while I am sitting at work just so I have the juice to keep musically and phone satisfied. I gotta have my music and all that fun stuff. I did get a new ringtone for my phone that I hijacked from Gizmodo the ringtone for the new iPhone.

http://www.tristanpipo.com/file/iPhone%20Ringtone.mp3

So anyways I look over and see that my iPod decided to play Weird Al – White and Nerdy from his Straight out of Lynnwood which is a town here in WA state. I haven’t really researched into why he named the album that. But not much of a town Lynnwood I have never heard anyone say.

Dude: “Tristan, Dude, Yo, Sup Man. We gotta go to lynnwood to find some chicks.”
Tristan: “Chicks, Interesting. I would like to find some. But lynnwood?”
D: “Yeah, Dude, Yo. That is where all the hottie mchotties hang out man. You gotta pimp out that shit”
T: “Hmmm Pimping eh? I got my purple hat right here. Let’s roll out”
D: “Word Up.”
T: “Man that is a tight ass awesome cool shit of neat awesome nice”

Well maybe that did happen. (No it really didn’t happen. If you think it did. Well I don’t normally talk like a Yo-Sup Dude Talk)

So anyways. My iPod just started playing Weird Al. So I look over hit pause and then go back to the menu on the iPod. Silence for another 45 mins or so and then the master of tunes Mr. Frank Sinatra starts playing behind me with “I’ve got the World on a String”. Now odd that my iPod would choose to play those two songs. Very different. One is a parody of a Rap song that I am not famaliar with. The other is by one of my favorites Mr. Frank Sinatra.

I do ponder that I am White and Nerdy but do I have the world on a string? Is it sitting on a Rainbow?

So after that I paused it again and sent a few IM’s to people to see what they thought. But as with most IM conversations about technology when I ask a question they are short lived and people just humor me till I shutup about anything tech. Most are like “I thought you were the tech guy” I had this issue happen with my old 4th Generation 20GB Black and White iPod. It would randomly start to play Green Day – I fought the Law which resulted in it having 418 plays and most other songs having 15-20 plays on my top 25. I solved that by doing a factory restore. It takes a long ass time to load 26GB of Music over USB to an iPod. But anyways my iPod is being haunted or it’s a software bug. I tend to think it’s the latter but interesting to ponder why those two songs.

Hmmm Monday… Weekend just happened. Should I talk about the weekend. What happened so interesting over the weekend. I did have a few things. But we shall save that for another time.

I must finish this blog because the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail said he would bite my legs off if I didn’t wrap this up soon. Cheers Everyone! Digging the feedback.

P.S. Here is an image I found amusing.

Edit: Well doing some research on Weird Al he was born in Lynnwood, CA not Washington. Anyways no edits were made to the post. Just this added line. =)

Now I love this phone. I love how it works and how Mac like it is. But the prices are $499 and $599 for the 4GB and 8GB in respect. Also the fact that it is on cingular is also a bother. Because looking at the plans for the basic plan with 900 mins it appears to be $60 and $40 for unlimited data. So to get basic use out of the phone is $100 a month plus tax and all that jazz.

Now if this device was coming out on Sprint I would consider the $499 and be happy with the plans that they offer. I look at that phone and think that it’s sexy as hell. It’s thinner then my 30GB Video iPod and has every feature I could want.  Well it doesn’t have games but eh. I have my Nintendo DS Lite with me on the go and I do have Tetris on my T-Mobile phone but I play the DS Lite more then Tetris on the phone.

So right now this device seems like an overpriced luxury. It was $299 I would snatch it up in a heart beat. But the $100 a month is crazy. I pay approx half that currently for mobile phone access. Cingular needs to seriously rethink their data rate structure. If I have a device like this I would use way more then the 10MB connection that I get for the $$$ on unlimited sprint for the same cost.

Maybe I should take Jon out for a steak dinner see if he can get me the hookup on the iPhone come June or at least the plan.

Well I have had this album on preorder for a while now. The new Tenacious D. The Pick of Destiny. I must say it’s a rather catchy tune. I just want to go around screaming “It’s a Pick of Destiny” I should record myself saying that. You get the CD Covers and a video with the whole deal the Time Fixers. Yes I make some cash if you click on it. More if you download a few songs.

And always if you need to catch up on Heroes you can grab the episodes for $1.99 a pop. Tonights episode was awesome. I always await Monday at 9pm. It’s good to finally have something that isn’t shit on TV.

Just trying to pay some bills. Pimp some stuff I like. =) Also if you haven’t picked up the king of all media players. The iPod I also got the hook up for you on that.

Alright I am done paying the bills. I make 5% of your purchases if you click the link and go buy something in iTunes. The hardware has a variable pay scale. So anyways enjoy. Happy clicking. Thanks for reading.