It’s pretty simple, listen to the album you want to buy, click BUY, select your format (MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC etc…) enter you Paypal details and boom your downloading your stuff. No signing up, no messing about.

It was easy, simple, and overall a good way to buy music. I still prefer CD’s but as they offer ALAC and FLAC it’s fine and reduces wear on my CD drive.

Bought an album and an EP for £8, all FLAC so I can convert to any format I want, just good stuff.

The tool is set out in two phases, the first phase consists of the tones white, black, light gray, gray, and dark gray. These will let you spot the easy pixels, gray is nice as you’ll be able to see if the panel is evenly lit. The second phase is just an RGB test, cycles red, green, blue, yellow and magenta. This will show any pixels that are stuck in those main colours.

It’s pretty simple and a tiny download written in Java so you’ll need Java installed. Mac OS X users have the Java system by default, Windows users will need it, thats if you don’t have it already, most people do. There is a Read Me included in the download with full instructions.

Any problems / help, or if you have something to say let me know.

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Default font: Menlo 11

After all these years I thought it’s time for a rewrite, I’ve learnt a lot more since then and seeing as it was originally an exercise to learn some basic php I thought why not have another crack at it now. I rewrote it last week and it was looking much better, today I thought why stop there so I have got rid of the old single image and replaced it with 7 new ones taken fresh today. All images are items from my Christmas tree :) Now you will get a Christmas image at random, and for good measure I’ve also thrown in a few more festive messages for certain days :)

Some of the images may clash with the text colour so I’ll keeping an eye on that and I’ll fixit if it’s really a problem.

Enjoy!

I stumbled across some other forums which mentioned the use of peanut butter, most people were ignoring it and I can see why smearing a food stuff on a car sounds like a bad idea. Personally I don’t have problem with it, peanut butter is pretty natural, I eat it, where as other people seem happy to apply some form of chemical solvent, now that sounds crazy.

A quick note, I bought a pack of cheapo toothbrushes which I also use to clean my alloys with, I just used another one of those to get any tiny bits of peanut butter to went in to tiny seams out once it had dried. If you find this helpful then please leave me a comment. Oh and by the way as the disclaimer on my about page basically says you do all of this at your own risk :)

One extra note, for small little line like on grills and other tiny bits of rubber trim a normal pencil rubber with some water works great.

This is pretty nasty noise, it’s booked in to see the Puma man next week so I’m hoping that it doesn’t cause any damage in the long run.

If you have any ideas about the noise let me know!

Update

All repaired, I took a trip up to PumaBuild yesterday and in the end the nasty noise turned out to be the water pump.

In the diagram above the top image shows the standard way to wire a balanced cable. This is Pin 2 Hot, Pin 3 Cold, and Pin 1 to Ground (GND). This works great for the standard digital applications and also for microphones where a hum and noise could be introduced in to the cable.

The wiring of audiophile cables is slightly different, traditionally you would leave the Ground (GND) connected only at the source end of the cable. This method provided the same screening as the standard method but reduces the chances of creating ground loops as the ground is disconnected. This probably doesn’t work too well for microphones where long lengths are used and there is a pretty good chance of noise being introduced.

My problem came when you have dual shields in a cable. Do you connect it the standard way and ignore a shield? Do you wire both shields together and follow the standard connect it at both ends? Or you could do the third option which is what I did, connect in the standard way but leave the outer second shield disconnected at the receiving end (Second Diagram).

If I were wiring for analog use then I would follow the audiophile method and leave the ground disconnected at one end, For all other uses including microphones, digital interconnects the method pictured above should be great!

Just a quick recap:

The main tools are located in /usr/bin. In this folder you will find both gcc 4.0 and 4.2 along with g++ 4.0 and 4.2. The commands gcc, g++, cc, and gcov are all symbolic links to the default 4.0 versions. To make 4.2 the default we just need to modify the symbolic links.

To do this we need to go in to the Terminal and issue the following commands:

Now you should have a complete working gcc 4.2.1 tool chain. If there is a problem you can verify the symbolic links are pointing at the correct targets by typing ls -l Hope this helps someone else.

Anyway this afternoon I noticed that Safari kept using 100% CPU and becoming un responsive. I kept force quitting it but the problem kept coming back after about 10 mins. I tried the usual repair permissions, delete preferences and caches etc to no avail. I then thought I would try the Safari 4 Developer Preview, I downloaded it and installed it. It was perfectly stable and very fast, can’t wait for the finial release of that badboy! At this point I was still stumped as to why 3.2.1 was holding the CPU hostage but Safari 4 was fine. I uninstalled Safari 4 and reinstalled 3.2.1.. On restarting everything seemed fine but yet again it took all the CPU, back where I started. Just launching Safari and then closing the window and waiting would cause the CPU to be held hostage again.

I ran a filesystem trace to see what files Safari was touching, I basically sat and waited until the high CPU condition happened then took a look to see what files were accessed. After an hour of watching and timing the problem it seemed that Safari was continuously reading from the filesystem which is what was causing the massive CPU load. It was triggered by an unusual cache file hit, I did a check to see what network connections were established and saw some odd looking google server addresses, it then dawned on me that Safari 3.2 features anti-phishing protection that uses a blacklist provided by google.

This also explained why the the Safari 4 Developer Preview worked correctly as it doesn’t yet have the anti-phishing stuff. I turned off the anti-phishing stuff in Safari 3.2.1 and sure enough everything went back to normal. Me being me I was still bothered because why would it suddenly cause problems, it’s been working fine until today. I went back and took a look at the cache files it was using for the blacklists, I thought that corruption of some kind was most likely so I deleted them. I then re-enabled the anti-phishing mode in Safari 3.2.1, now been three hours and all is well again.

Relaunch Safari and all should be well. I couldn’t find any references to this problem online so I though I would post something.