I’ve recently ordered a new computer and like with all things when they are new you gotta check them out for faults. Screens are always a worry, so with this in mind I’ve knocked together a little tool that simply allows you to check the display for various little things.

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.

I have written about Streamripper before (removed the older post as is was out of date), it’s an interesting little application that I use now and then. I originally wrote about compiling it back on OS 10.5 Leopard, at that time the current version was a bit busted but in the end I got it to work and posted the details here. Times have changed and software changes so I thought I would update the world on my use of Streamripper. After all the messing about I had with the 1.62.x range of Streamripper I had settled on using 1.61.27 with security patches. I used this for quite a while, last year I thought I would checkout the newer versions of Streamripper and found that they had taken the great little tool and added a whole bunch of stuff that had a dependency on the glib2 library, which is massive when you just want a single little tool. I suppose it’s ok if you are running on a Linux box where you have glib2 installed as it gets used by lots of applications, but on other platforms it’s just overkill and I can’t be bothered with it.

With this I mind I got the source code for the last of the standalone versions 1.62.3, it does everything, and doesn’t have a massive dependency problem like the recent versions. I made a small change to the source, compiled it and life is good again, much easier than compiling for 10.5 and all that bag of hurt of the older versions :)

The reason I have suddenly posted this is I have just re-compiled Streamripper for Snow Leopard using the new Clang and LLVM-GCC compilers. As all of Snow Leopards utils are in x86-64 I did Streamripper as x86-64, a few years back I never thought I’d be compiling Streamripper as 64-Bit just seems overkill, but why not :)

I won’t bother with all the building stuff like my last post on the subject as it’s not that hard really.

Enjoy!

Well it’s only taken me a few years to get to version 1.0. I started my Phasecam widget back before Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came out, around January 2005 from what I remember. Last year around Christmas I released a brand new rebuilt version which I did using the beta version of Dashcode. Well this year as a small Christmas present for my fellow Mac OS X users here is 1.0.

Whats New:

• Completely new Javascript.
• Links checked and fixed, some removed and new ones added.
• More Update options.
• Updated looks and Phasenoise logos.
• Smaller Download

Merry Christmas!

I got fed up with the standard Mac OS X removable media icon on my USB stick so I have made a nice SanDisk Cruzer icon.

All the files are in there for both Mac and Windows. If there is some problem the png’s of the different sizes (16×16 to 512×512) are also in there. For Mac users it’s best to just copy the icon and paste it on the USB stick in the “Get Info” window. Sorry Windows users your on your own. For more info on the Cruzer see USB Flash Drive – Removing U3