worked on a number of projects this past week...finally finished two amps that i had started a couple years ago but just needed some loose ends tidied up.  the millet hybrid amps are pretty easy to build, relatively inexpensive, and sound terrific.  i had to get holes drilled for the case in the maxed version (the silver one above), which my friends ryan and trent helped with...a few mods here and there and i finally completed it...the minimax (black case) had some fit issues with the wiring and re-soldering kinda sucks.  but, it works, sounds great, and i'm happy with it. 

i also built a mini-mini cable using some neutrik connectors and canare star quad cable, which i have a bunch of...it's pretty.

my imac's camera hadn't been working for over a year since i last got it serviced...last time i installed a new hard drive in it i saw that some wires had detached from the camera's circuit board.  so i decided to try and fix it...and it works!  the wires are tiny and it was hard to not create bridges between the solder connections, but i guess i did a good job b/c the camera now works.  video ichat/facetime anyone?

projects also include some cooking ones...decided to make some cinnamon rolls, which turned out okay.  but i have a better sense of what to do next time.  i baked it a bit too long for one thing.  but i also need to let it rise a little longer so the dough gets more airy and chewy.  good experience...not hard at all...though it takes time b/c of all the waiting.

up ahead: re-tiling part of the shower in the master bath...installing the fireplace mantle i built...and we'll see how adventurous i am.

i sold my nikon d70, lenses, bags, etc. and picked up the panasonic gf1 micro 4/3 camera.  it comes with the uber-cool 20mm f/1.7  lens and i got a good deal on the 14-140mm f/4.0-5.8 zoom.  i took it around woods hole today to test it...it's weird having an interchangeable lens camera without a viewfinder.  there's an electronic viewfinder available, but it's expensive and the resolution isn't that great.  i'll wait for the 2.0 rev.  the 14-140 lens is heavy and it's a bit difficult to hold the camera steady with the big lens on.  but i guess that's the tradeoff for having a much smaller camera.

the lcd screen is very bright and crisp...coming from the 1.8" screen on the d70, it's a revelation.  the screen on our fuji f31fd is pretty nice, but not nearly as nice as this.  it's double the resolution of the ep1/2, though only half the resolution of some of the top dSLRs.

i haven't yet looked at all the photos on my computer...maybe this weekend.  for now, i'm loving the size, screen, and newness of it...it will keep my attention once i start loving the images.

when i do a new install of my mac operating system or get a new machine, here are the apps that i MUST install in order for me to use my mac properly:

1. quicksilver, the best app launcher and so much more
2. dropbox, the best online storage to back up, share, and sync files. awesome.
3. xmarks, syncs bookmarks between all your browsers and across machines. backup for your bookmarks, basically.
4. 1Password, a single repository to keep all your passwords. 1password, along with dropbox makes it easy to have strong passwords to all your favorite websites, but only have to remember one password to access it. using dropbox, you can have the same 1password settings across different machines. also a cool iphone version.
5. evernote, a do-it-all "scrapbook" for you to store almost any kind of file. throw important website, documents, images, pdfs, etc. on your evernote account, and you can access it anywhere. they have this cool text image search function that finds texts WITHIN images. good iphone app, too.
6. textmate, a really good text editor. text edit that comes with the mac is good, but textmate takes it to another level. i do a lot of text editing of xml, html, etc. documents, and textmate is awesome.
7. vlc, a video player for the mac (and windows/linux) that plays almost any kind of file. quicktime on the mac is pretty lame when it comes to playing different file types. vlc is the solution.
8. mouse locator, for today's larger screens, it's easy to lose the mouse cursor. mouse locator puts a colored ring around the pointer for a few seconds to help locate it...sounds silly, but very very useful.
9. perian, which provides quicktime with more functionalities to play different media types. still doesn't play as many filetypes as vlc, but a must-install for any mac.
10. super duper, to clone your hard drive to an external drive. you need to back up your hard drive, and more than just back up certain files, why not clone the entire drive so that you can have a bootable backup drive in case you need to boot from it.

the great thing about almost all the apps above is that they are free. the only ones that cost money are 1Password and textmate. the free alternative to textmate is textwrangler from the guys who make the excellent BBedit. a lot of mac developers use BBedit as well...between textmate and BBedit, i bet that accounts for 90% of the mac developer community.

a couple of good apps to use for you video people are handbrake and transmission. both are free. handbrake allows you to rip DVDs so that you can save them and watch them on your computer or ipod/iphone. it also converts .avi and .divx (and other formats) into quicktime-compatible formats so that you can watch on your mac/ipod/iphone. very powerful and very useful. transmission is a bittorrent client that was developed by the same guy who wrote handbrake. it's now an open-source project, but it's very good.

that's about it. install the above apps and your mac is powered up and ready to go!

yes, it can't do this and doesn't have that. no video camera. no multitasking. no flash. and yet, when you read the experiences from someone who actually played with it yesterday, you get a totally different story. it's different than anything you've ever used. it's fast. it works exactly the way you think it should based on experiences with the iphone/ipod touch. it's intuitive.

i remember when the first ipod nano came out. it wasn't the aluminum ones they have now, but rather had that polycarbonate front, kinda like the older imacs had. i went to the apple store just to look at it...and after seeing it and holding it in my hand, i ended up buying one. it was that beautiful and that amazing. i couldn't have understood that based on any keynote, any picture, or anyone's word. i had to see it for myself.

that's what's going to happen with this iPad. people are going to question it, diss it, etc. but they'll play with it and hold it in their hands...and i'm guessing more than a few will end up buying it when they had no intention of doing so at the start. i imagine juri and i will get one...we travel enough that it's something we would make good use of...but who am i kidding - we'd find a reason to buy one anyway.