(begrudgingly) resolved

I took care of the freezing fullscreen issue by downgrading to Flash Player 9, which was a considerable bother to find online. I played some of Hulu's HD content, and it was gorgeous and not choppy. That's the first time I've rendered HD content – quite a relief that it works.

I don't know the difference between Flash Player 9 and 10. The HD content plays fine, so I don't think I have a reason to care. (It still bothers me on principle!)

I also took care of the fact that my computer goes to sleep when watching videos.

#!/bin/sh
trap 'pmset force -c sleep 90' 1 2 3 14 15
pmset force -c sleep 0
sleep 7200
pmset force -c sleep 90

I put a link to this file on my desktop. I just need to double-click it (thanks to its .command suffix) to disable the inactivity-based-sleep functionality for 2 hours. Break it down:

1. The trap means that if the script gets prematurely interrupted, it re-enables the sleeping.
2. The pmset bits disable and re-enable the sleeping behavior.
3. It re-enables automatic-sleepage (... eww) after a 7200s=2h delay via sleep.
   

wierd and unwelcome

This Adobe bug is quite annoying. Does anyone else have this happen? If I use fullscreen mode on Flash player (YouTube or Hulu, e.g.) then the video freezes while everything else (like audio) continues. There's lots of forum posts out there where people discuss this, but the only fix is to disable hardware acceleration. That's a no-go for my meager Mini.

I use OS X's Screen Sharing to control the Mini from my laptop. When the video locks up, I can either connect via Screen Sharing or disconnect in order to fix it. This is a weird band-aid, but Screen Sharing is obviously related to video. It's annoying to do it every 5 minutes or so and to keep my laptop in my lap to watch video.

Some page I saw said it only happens when watching 480p content. And, for me, it only started happening when I started using 1080i. It didn't happen when I was using 720p.

This alternative suggestion did not work for me, which was sad. Took a while though, so my hopes got lifted and then squashed.

weird but welcome

So my $450 craigslist Mac Mini was choppy when it was feeding 1080i video (such as 30 Rock on Hulu) to my $150 craigslist HDTV. I wasn't happy.

But, today, it worked.^† Other than this Mac OS X update, I don't think anything else changed.

Yay? Yay...? Yay.

† I tried it again when playing around to try to figure out why the screen bounces when I set the mini to output 720p. Still don't know what's going on with that one.

scientists are hot

Exercise is Goooood

Tyler and I have created the habit of taking Jupiter and Honey to the Haskell Indian Nations University nature preserve in the mornings on a "double dog walk." We let them both off lead. Jupiter gets worn out sprinting about and chasing the other dogs we meet and then becomes a couch potato for the rest of the day. Honey actually plays (just a bit) with Jupiter. It truly warmed my heart the first time I saw it – she's dog-aggressive and has never played with a dog before. It was awesome.

I just took Jupiter to puppy class for the first time since we started doing this daily (past week or so). He was his normal overly-excitable self at first, but about half way through he got really attentive and obedient. We actually got to show off a bit with some happenstance long distance obedience – there was literally oooing and ahhing. He's quite obedient at home without major distractions (we practice nothing's-for-free for feeding twice a day) and that finally came through at class tonight. It was awesome.

Defying Gravity

Keith and Tyler and I just watched the last episode of Defying Gravity. I can't believe this show is canceled. That is uncool.

Well I was completely anti-social today

http://nicolas.is-a-geek.org/chat.html

You have to tell your friend via some other means what room you're in, once you start one.

I've used it a bit in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. And on my phone – which is just plain weird.

In case you're wondering, it uses Apache 2.2 running on Leopard, with a multi-threaded Haskell program running server-side in FastCGI mode – and of course, the infamous XMLHttpRequest.

Call me a minimalist and then re-design the interface for me.