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.

But the title of this blog post doesn’t really mean anything. I was listening to iTunes and had it on Random and Octopuses Garden came up on iTunes. For some reason it inspired me to open up MarsEdit and write a click little blurb.

I have been working on converting all of my families home video tapes to a digital format. I must say it has been a rather intensive process. A bit more expensive then I imagined.

The first expense was the Elgato Video Capture device. Scored that for $84 off Amazon with the free 2 day shipping ala Amazon Prime. Another expense was actually getting a VCR. My girlfriends mom had one to lend me. It works pretty well. It has some tracking issues so I ordered another VCR off ebay and now have two VCR’s on my desk.

I remember being a kid and thinking VCR’s could possibly be the coolest thing ever. Now they are just large annoying black boxes on my desk. I picked up the other VCR for $30 from eBay. The lady that was selling lied to me on its condition. But it works as expected.

Also I needed a place to save all of this video as most videos come up after compression to be 2-3GB of data. Then a DVD version ends up being another 4GB or so. Then I make 2 different formats m4v and Divx AVI. Not really sure how my family is taking this. But oh well I am happy to have digital copies of all the tapes. But this all takes up space so I now have 2 1TB Firewire 800 HDD. I have 2.5TB of data hooked up to my laptop for all of these home movies.

Good times. Well I better get back to work. Just thought I would blog some random thoughts.

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.

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.

So I thought I would give a quick update on what is going on around the Tristan circle of life. Last week I ordered a Tivo. This thing has been a pain in the ass. It took a week to get here. But there have been 2 major causes of frustration.

1. The Cable Card Experience.

So in order for the TivoHD to work you need to get a CableCard from the Cable Company. In the Seattle area we have Comcast. Usually for most of my issues I either hop on the Comcast Chat or get on Twitter and send a note to @ComcastCares. So my first try was with the Chat. I got one guy saying that I could just drive to the local Comcast Office and pickup the cable card. Slide it into the Tivo and drive home and call Comcast. Sounds good to me.

Some time passes…..

Tivo is actually coming now so I hop on Comcast Chat again and get a new person they tell me I need to schedule a tech to come out and install the card for a fee of $25. Previous guy told me I could do it myself.

The process of installing a cable card is basically moving one flap down and sliding in a PCMCIA card into the device. Didn’t seem $25 worthy to me. But I do recall charging people at Best Buy $160 for Hard Drive and OS Install.

Now that I had a conflicting argument from two different people. I hopped on twitter and sent a note to @ComcastCares I got the following reply.

So I have two people saying the same thing. So I decide to shoot an e-mail off to Comcast Cares. we_can_help@comcast.com I get a prompt reply from a Detreon Roberts. He says they need to schedule a tech to come out. So I accept that answer for the time being.

So I get home that night and make a phone call to Comcast. I get to speak to an incredibly seductive sounding woman named Jen or Jenn. I didn’t ask for the spelling but I wanted info about my Cable Card. She said that I can just go down to the Comcast Office and pick it up. I tell her about all of my experiences thus far. She says “They don’t know what they are talking about. I setup a CableCard for a guy today took 3 mins over the phone” So I e-mailed Detreon back and he says. “You should really get an installer out” So on Saturday the girlfriend of awesomeness decided to partake on the adventure of the Comcast store and we got the CableCard. Came home and installed it and it took about 3 minutes and we were golden.

So I guess I would like to thank the first Chat Person and Jen from Comcast in Washington for being the most helpful. Everyone else needs to think about what they are doing.

2. Upgrading the Hard Drive in the Tivo.

So this was a fun process that I did when the girlfriend was out tending to her late kitty cat Indy. So I was home alone which was probably a good thing because I was incredibly frustrated by a few sources. So I was cranky and just wasn’t a pleasant person.

So the scenario is that the Tivo HD comes with a 160GB HDD which gives you about 20hrs of HD recording. This was not enough for me so I bought a 1TB external eSATA drive hoping I could just plug it in and be good to go. This was not the case as Tivo doesn’t like this idea so I had to hack the box to get it working. So I take the TIVO apart and pull the hard drive. I come to find out that it would just be easier to install the external drive into the TIVO. So I have to take apart this external drive which I didn’t want to do but kinda have to.

At this point I haven’t even powered up the Tivo. So I take apart the external drive and then go to my Computer. I have this Pentium 4 3.6ghz machine I use to just screw around with when I am not using my Mac’s. Luckily I had this thing around otherwise I would have been screwed. So I open up the computer and need to free 2 SATA ports. Currently I have all 4 being used so I boot up the machine and find the HDD that I am not using and power it back off and unplug the two drives. Come to find out that I had these in a RAID 0 configuration so the computer won’t boot. So decide to say screw it all I can just reinstall Windows 7 Beta and just use one drive and setup the other drives later.

So I had to install Windows 7 again to just do what I needed to do. After that process completes I go download the TIVO hacking software called WinMFS.

I then shutoff the computer hookup the 160GB tivo drive and the 1TB HDD. Boot up the machine and followed the instructions located here.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/

I am always baffled when people ask me questions on how to do things with their computer. Since I can find every answer by googling. See here is how you can do it to.

http://tinyurl.com/d9obnl

So I followed that process and swapped out the 160GB HDD with the 1TB and the unit would power on and then crash. So I said WTF! I spent over an hour reimaging my PC with Windows 7 and the process didn’t work. So I swapped the 160GB drive back in and powered it on. This worked great. So I went through the setup process and then took the whole thing apart again to reimage the 1TB HDD with the above instructions. This process worked but took a great deal longer I was getting a bit more positive messages.

As a note if you are going to use WinMFS with Windows 7. Be sure you click “Run as Administrator” or this whole process will never work. So now with all of that completed I have 141hrs of HD recording and something like 1500 hrs of Standard Def recording.

So I got home at 8pm last Thursday and I didn’t finish with the Tivo Hacking until 1:30am. I was rather cranky by the end of the experience. The girlfriend doesn’t even appreciate the Tivo yet. Hopefully she will and I will get some good appreciatin back.

So that has been my Tivo experience. I must say after all of that work I am now an expert in the process of expanding the storage of the Series 3 Tivo’s.

I am sure there are more important things in the world to focus on. Anyone have any ideas?

Well looks like the fun doesn’t stop around here. I have been getting reports of users getting “500 Internal Server Errors” this seemed to be happening for Firefox, IE, Safari. I did some googling and found out that the error is an issue with the hosting provider I use running out of memory allocated to PHP which is running WordPress. I have made the changes that the other sites have recommended and next time that the services are restarted for this server that should resolve the issue. So hopefully the GoDaddy Support team gets an easy close for the support ticket I opened.

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.

Blogged from an iPhone

I hope all is well with the myspace world.

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

But watched the Departed again. I really love that film. I had to go see it in the theater in the solo fashion. But Nick’s mom was watching it with us. I must say that she doesn’t handle swearing or violence in films that well. I don’t really understand that fact it’s never really been a bother to me. Then we kicked back and watched some Red Dwarf and hung out.

I called Ollie on Friday night and I figured the best way to settle the issue was to be the bigger person and here is the summary of my voicemail. “A lot of bullshit seemed to happen. I don’t see us ever in agreement about this issue. I am going to let the past be the past and be an adult and move forward. Let Bigons be Bigons we have a long history and I hope we both can accept that and move along.” Didn’t get a call back but he went to Jason’s Dinner on Saturday night and all was good again.

But Saturday morning I had to get up and go to the Eye Doctor. I hadn’t been in 3 years and my glasses are in horrible condition. One nose piece is missing. The other doesn’t have the soft padding so it tears up the right side of my nose. They are all bent to hell and don’t fit at all. So I went to the Eye Doctor and my eyes are a little worse. But nothing major but time for new lenses anyways. I picked out a nice pair of the FLEXON frames they are cool as hell you can bend them as you wish and they weigh nothing and I got the scratch coating and the glare coating. Then I had to go back in and the doctor put this yellow goop in my eyes that made me have like lazy eyes. She did some thing looking into them. It would seem that there is something wrong with my right eye that she wasn’t really clear on. She wanted to check it when my glasses arrived to see if it was just some odd thing.

To be honest I have been a little worried about it. Usually I am not one to worry but I have been pondering over the past few days what it would be like not being able to see. But just a thought I had been pondering.

Me and the KGB Mafia Man decided to part ways because of our beliefs. Which I am not really clear on but life takes it’s own paths and might as well enjoy the journey.  Not sure what I am going to do with fromseattlewithlove.com

But Saturday went to get some Pho with Jason and we kinda just putzed around all day. Ran into Hans and Daniel at Chungs and me and Hans talked about Windows Vista and probably made Danile and Jason want to rip their skulls out and beat us to death with them. But that didn’t happen.

I think I have found the phone I am going to be using for the next 2 years. The Motorola Q. Craig has one and they seem interesting. T-Mobile offered me the T-Mobile Dash for $149 instead of $199.

Sunday went and hung out with The Mick and we saw Ghost Rider. That movie was just blah. I really don’t recommend it.  I did find one part slightly amusing Eva Mendes.

She was wearing the same ever so cleavage revealing top in the movie. That that I was complaining it gave the movie some value. But it was always the same top but either a different color or a different jacket over it.  Other then that Nicholas Cage didn’t really make the film for me. I just couldn’t find one great thing to say other then nice cleavage. So I will give this film a rating of 17 out of 348 total possible score.

But anyways it’s Monday I am not really with it yet.  Need to get my brain back into thinking mode. Talk to you soon.

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.

If you can comment on a DreamHost Hosted Blog that was migrated to Dreamhost. Here are the steps to fix it.

1. SSH into your address
2. CD to your Domain Name
3. vi .htaccess
4. Paste In

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [L]

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php

# END WordPress

5. Esc in Vi
6. Type in :wq
7. Test Your Comment System
8. Bask in the Glory that it is working.

So when it comes to RTFM it stands for. Read the Fucking Manual. People seem to think I know everything about computers. IN all reality I do not know all that much. I just take the time to read the manual. You wouldn’t have to bitch so much about how support for Product “A” sucks if you would just read the manual.

I love when a company has a PDF for the manual that I can just load into Preview type what I am looking for and Spotlight and Preview find what I am looking for and I can get back to working along. I don’t mind the call from a friend. How do I get “A” to work? Spoil Me a Bit get me some Spring Rolls from Chungs and I am yours for the help.

But if I get a phone call from a friend with something like “My Work Blocked MySpace how do I get around it I need to do this in a hurry.” with no casual chat or witty banter and I can call you a fool for using MySpace in the first place well then I am not really going to help you with your issue. You are just trying to use me and I will get off the phone with something like “I don’t know anything about computers. Best of luck to you in your issue” But take some time people. Read the manual or I will poke fun at you because you choose the lazy route and called me.

I am not a big fan of asking for help all the time. So I try to exhaust every other resource possible before doing so. That is how I know what I know and do what I do. So pardon me for not having so much sympathy if you choose not to do the same.

Cheers to the week starting over. Love to those who need it. Hugs to the Rest. Lets hope this week passes by with as little stress as possible. If you downloaded Internet Explorer 7 do yourself a favor uninstall it. Get Firefox your life will be a lot easier and you will be much safer online. Or just get a Mac and life will be perfect.

Cheers!

I am interested in hearing what Junniper has to say about the comment speed. So I hope everyone enjoys the update. Also interesting new blog I came across Nobody Asked Me by another Jennifer. She’s an Entourage fan she is cool in my book.

Also Tale of Drinking Part 2 is in the final edit. Passed on to the editing gnome. Send me some love.

206.973.7886 or Contact Page on the Right

The tail of Drinking part 2 hasn’t been finished simply because I have been busy or just way tired. I have a little side note from last friday and making a visit to the bar for Katie’s 21st Birthday. Well all of last weekend is a story to tell. Okay Friday after work and beer friday at work I will write some blogs. I will bring the laptop and do some writing. I need to get back to it.

Looking at the Unix Console over Serial Cable using Hyperterminal and Tera Term Pro and the Piece of Shit Windows Command Prompt has been getting to me. I need my Mac back. I miss my Dock and Aqua and iTunes and Expose. SAVE ME FROM WINDOWS!

The unix isn’t so bad. Somewhat familiar with the terminal =p\

Also looks like we are recording a Podcast this Sunday. Mix Master Tristan will be hosting the TFactor with my excellent Co-Host Lord and Duke of Apache in the land of SQL Mike!

The code in the file required to edit was as follows.

$rewritereplace =
array(
date('Y', $unixtime),
date('m', $unixtime),
date('d', $unixtime),
date('H', $unixtime),
date('i', $unixtime),
date('s', $unixtime),
$post->post_name,
$post->ID,
$category,
$author,
$post->post_name,
);

Which Involved changing the code to this.

$date = explode(" ",date('Y m d H i s', $unixtime));
$rewritereplace =
array(
$date[0],
$date[1],
$date[2],
$date[3],
$date[4],
$date[5],
$post->post_name,
$post->ID,
$category,
$author,
$post->post_name,
);

So hopefully that will resolve any issue with that and get my Google Sitemap up and running. Now back to working on the latest write ups of the meaning of life. Not your life. My Life =p It’s fun to be selfish on your own blog sometimes. If you have a blog that is worthy of a nod let me know.

I found a guide to replace the HDD which appears that Apple doesn’t really want you in the laptop so I have to run out to SEARS and get some TORK screwdrivers. It’s like an octagon screw head. Very Bizarre. I think I am going to go with a larger HDD replace the 80GB with either 100GB or 120GB just to fill my need to save everything.

I was thinking these next few posts are going to be rather geeky normally a topic I try to avoid because most people are “huh” or just nod their head. But it’s my blog so you can go Fuck yourself if it’s not your cup of tea.

I got some Unbuntu CD’s in the mail. 1 Set for PC’s another for 64-Bit PC’s and another for Mac’s. I thought I would use the LIVE CD which is a CD that will load the OS on your computer but not touch the Hard Drive. I figured I could do this perhaps and then mount the HDD and use Linux to transfer the information from the old Hard Drive to a backup Network Share on another machine. So I would be using Linux on my Mac to transfer over the Network to my Windows machine.

I tried the LIVE CD on my Windows Box and it doesn’t mount the Hard Drive when you use the LIVE CD so I have to go digging through my Linux books. Good experience I guess for the RHCE to remember the command to mount the HDD since it is escaping me right now.

I thought I could backup my iPod to the Windows Box but it is formatted for MAC and have not had much luck on Google trying to figure out how to Mount a Mac Formatted iPod as a Removable Disk on Windows.

So now it’s just reading reviews and trying to pickout a HDD since I decided the $450 is not worth the Backup from MacService.com and I could get a larger HDD for $135.

On a Side Note. Darin arrives on Friday and we will be all around WA making the rounds to see people. Also on March 13th My Cell Phone will be dead as we make the transfer from Sprint PCS to T-Mobile with the Number. Currently I have two cell phones right now. Since the largest complaint since I got the 8100 replaced with an 8100 from Insurance is “Dude we can’t hear you!” So I am in my car or in public shouting into my phone “What Time DO YOU WANT TO WORK OUT TONIGHT!” or “IT’S THE 9:30 SHOWING OF 16 BLOCKS!” which I am just getting tired of doing.

Anyways if you would like to show your love for a new HDD for my Laptop I believe there is a Make a Donation Button near the top. Might be nice to get a mixer and some new Mic’s get some good Recordings Going. So until I get my problem resolved Podcasts are on Hold. Which sucks because show #8 with my new Co-Host was supposed to record this week. At least it’s Tax Return Time.

My Uncle sent me a clever little note that I should mention.
“Sorry to hear about your Mac taking a dump. Just thinking though… I always
thought it was a great machine… It was you bashing IBM at the diner table as I
recall… But just incase you don’t get your address book back I thought I would
drop you a line to get mine back. I don’t worry too much about what people think of
me using the big gates god products….. As far as I know… No one has ever accused
me of being smart.

Good luck with the hard drive Tristan. I bet you could fix it if you roll up your
sleeves and jump on in.

Steve”

I have no problem against people that use the Mighty Gates Products. I just ask that they experience all that OS X has to offer before they commit to something they are used to. As they saying goes “Think Different”

I have been going crazy. I updated all my podcasts because of this problem yesterday. Which involved a resubscribe and redownload. It took a great deal of time to download every episode of MacTV for the Video iPod. I lost all the episodes of Rocketboom just not cool. My visit to the apple support forums wasn’t as productive as I had hoped. I keep getting the connection refused error.

It is even refusing my link which tells me something is wrong in iTunes because the feed works just fine in Fireant and at BlogLines. Any way to fix this without having to resubscribe to every single Podcast and redownload them all?