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The upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5.5 went fine. Downloading and installing 340Mb update was a breeze and a matter of 20 minutes, but then. Immediately after the restart neither the keyboard nor the touch pad worked. Putting into sleep (it was late night and I postponed the investigation until morning) and getting back to normal unfreezed the keyboard and mouse pointer, but the touch pad button still didn’t work.

Another reboot helped and now everything is working. One thing I noticed though, it was accessing the hard drive a LOT more during the startup. Maybe it was just installing / indexing changed parts, who knows… we’ll see.

Remember

• If you see oddities right after upgrading, don’t panic. The reboot may help.
• If your mouse isn’t working,use the power button (hardware) to call the reboot / sleep / shutdown dialog and the “space” key to select the Reboot option.
• If your keyboard isn’t working, try closing your laptop to sleep.

Two weeks ago my dad has finished another project for me — Monome clone. I wanted it to be different from what’s offered by the respected authors in some ways, and it is obviously cheaper to build it than purchasing the read-made piece from them (of course if you have all necessary tools to carve nice rubber buttons, case, face plates etc).

For those who don’t know, Monome is a USB device with 64, 128, 256 etc number of buttons with LEDs inside each. Buttons can be lid and key events (presses and releases) are sent over the USB to a computer program that does something useful. Classical applications are:

• Controlling a MIDI device (synthesizer, sequencer, sampler etc)
• Visualizing data with LEDs

Here’s what we’ve got as the result:

Features:

• Red wood polished case
• Plastic buttons of increased size (to match the size and spacing of faders on my mixer)
• Soft rubber pads under the buttons for pleasant touch
• Ultra-bright blue LEDs
• Modified firmware to support hardware blinking

And here’s the device in action:

Additionally, I wrote a simple but nice Ableton Live driver to talk to the device, and now enjoying the creative potential of this little thing fully. Currently working on my live set.

THE OFFER

And now something really exciting. It’s probable that we will be building this on demand. Currently there are plans for 64 and 128 button models. We found that the same components are cheaper here and every part of the body is produced in-house making the overall cost visibly lower.

If you have interest in ordering one, leave a comment with a note. Currently we need about 10 orders of the type to launch the production cycle. If there is necessary demand, I will put together a page with the counter and some other helpful info to keep all interested parties informed.

There’s something you should see, or better yet, experience. This morning I came across a fascinating photography project The Light And Land by Bruce Percy that touched me, and touched me deeply.

My first acquaitance with his creative work was on the pages of his podcast which is essentially a smooth slideshow accompanied and narrated by Bruce himself. It was something that I haven’t seen for ages - thoughtful, well-planned, incredibly simple and up to the chase at the same time, that comes to you as a breeze, entertains and makes you tear off your daily routine. It makes you put your life into a different dimension and re-examinate the surrounding carefully, on your own pace.

For impatient, I’m giving the direct podcast link, but still… make sure to check the portfolio section. It’s whole new world that grabs your attention entirely. You will never see it with the same eyes again.

Promise.

I never told you guys, but my sweetheart has finally opened her first very own web-store - Caterok Bags. She is into practical and durable bags design and production, and now everyone can see and purchase them on the Net.

Here’s the front page:

Here’s the product page:

New items are added all the time. Kate spends days behind the drawing board designing simple, yet sparky things. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. If you feel that someone else can be interested, just let them know. Who knows, it could be right what they are looking for. Several times when people were looking for presents, they were excited to discover these cool looking pieces.

If nothing else, enjoy browsing through the collection!

The subject says it all. It’s fine to buy domains from them, but if you want to host your site or app, don’t do it. Everything that is more complex than a “Hello, world!” plain text page will be a trouble sooner or later. Even simple Wordpress with custom permalinks is almost impossible to configure. And if you are lucky, they will Upgrade your account to break it.

To make it worse, the moment it happens, you won’t be able to fix it because a simple change to disable their ugly File Not Found page is reported to take from 30 minutes to 24 hours, but really takes more than 3 days (it is still in progress, so I can’t give you the correct time). Maybe it’s because they are using Microsoft IIS? Probably.

Now check this cute “Page Not Found” message. What a style, don’t you find?

To reiterate, DON’T DO IT. Save your time and nerve cells.

Let me ask, are you scared or excited about the first successful test runs of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland? Do you even know about the project? Because if you don’t, it’s about the time to learn the details and make up your mind.

There are two large camps of scientists out there. Both agree that LHC is the end of the world as we knew it, but each groups sees it from two radically different perspectives. First, believe that we are on the verge of a tremendous breakthrough and vigilantly developing the exploration plans for dark matter, mass and gravity. Others are concerned and scared to death by the idea of inducing a black hole that will grow rapidly to consume the planet and finish our existence.

I’m a practical person and my firm believe is that it’s our chance to make a huge step towards the exploration of the universe, building incredible devices and evolving in millions of other ways. On the other hand, the perspective of Big Bada-Bum isn’t that pleasant. On top of that, it’s a morality question - are these scientists in power to decide for the rest of us whether to ruin Earth or not. Many of us still have unfinished business here.

Opinions?

Automatic plug-in updates are cool, but only when they work. I made attempts to understand what’s wrong with the “update automatically” feature several times, and always hit the same message after entering my FTP details: “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory”.

As a computer geek, I know why it needs FTP, but it wasn’t really clear what exactly it was looking for in the root of the FTP directory and why it didn’t find it. I figured that my server setup is a bit different from what they expected, and scanned the sources for clues.

Apparently, they are looking for the wp-settings.php file which is sitting in the root of the WP installation. So when they find the file, they know where to start looking for plug-ins folder. In my case, it was light years away from the FTP root, so here’s what I did:

• Created an FTP user specifically for the blog
• Made the root folder of the blog be the home directory of this user
• Fed the user name and the password to WP when it asked for the FTP again

All went very nicely and hassle-free. Now you know what to do when you see “Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory” when attempting to update your plug-ins automatically.

Sometimes you rediscover little features that make your life whole lot easier. Today when reviewing the code of my co-worker I stumbled upon the use of the “fetch” on the Hash object. Check it:

One other related technique is:

Armed and ready!

P.S. Thanks for a great tip, Craig!