My dad had recently gotten a bunch of firecrackers for the Fourth of July, so I, my friend Bryan, and my brother, decided that we should blow up something. We settled on blowing up a potato. Go watch the video.

I got a new cable modem today. For the past few months my internet has been very slow. We finally called in to tech support to find out what the problem was. Tech support diagnosed that the cable modem was hurting our speed. I was only getting half a mbps down when I should be getting about 7mbps down. Today I went and exchanged our old cable modem for a new one, and viola! Fast internet!

Also, last Friday night I ordered some Spy KGB sunglasses. They were on sale for $30, a price that is hard to beat considering that they regularly cost $140. They arrived this afternoon.

I enjoyed reading the text feeds and watching the stream of WWDC 2007. It was nice to see some more features of Leopard like then new Finder, Quicklook, and the new Desktop. But, to me WWDC 2007 was more like WWDC 2006 version 2.

Quicklook, in my opinion, is pretty cool and I will definitely be using it in Leopard. The fact that it can play videos in full screen leads me to believe that Apple may be getting rid of Quicktime Pro. I think it is stupid that you have to pay $30 for full screen video playback; although, a working serial for QT Pro isn't too hard to find.

I am liking the new sidebar in the new Finder. It is now more than just a place to store folders or apps that you want to drag and drop to. The thumbnail preview of files in Finder are really cool, and I suspect that they will come in handy when you need to quickly find a PDF or Keynote presentation, but with Pages or Word documents the thumbnail previews might not be so helpful.

The semi-transparent Menu Bar on the new Desktop is a nice welcome. It would be nice if Apple allowed you to adjust the transparency of it. However, I am not digging the new Dock. I think is is very ugly, yet somewhat beautiful at the same time. I would really love to have the option to revert the Dock to a Tiger style dock. Stacks are going to be very cool and very handy. When I saw the stack with the large grid I thought, "Wow, that is just like Overflow!"

The rest of the keynote was pretty much like having to review for finals. It was pretty much everything that Steve has gone over at last year's WWDC.

Some of the features that were covered in last year's WWDC that I am looking forward to are Spaces, iChat Theater, Web Clips, and the new Mail.app.

Currently for virtual desktops I am having to use Virtue Desktops which is fine, but it takes about 6 clicks to put an app on a different desktop. Spaces solves that problem and that is the biggest reason, next to the 'exposéing' of the Spaces, I'm looking forward to that app.

iChat Theater should be pretty cool, but I believe that it will only work with someone else with iChat, which can be unfortunate.

Web Clips should be cool as well. I have a few sites in mind that I would make some Web Clips of.

All in all, I am looking forward to Leopard in October and I can't wait to find out what those other 290 secret features are.

I was trying to find the sum of the widths of both of my monitors so I coulc make a canvas that width in Photoshop.

I first used OS X's calculator, and to my surprise and anger, the canvas was much to large for both of the screen shots of my monitors. I was like, "What the heck? Why is the canvas so big?!"

I decided to add the widths myself and got 2960 instead of the 3000 that OS X's calculator was giving me. I double checked my answer remembering that Google had a calculator and it too told me the sum was 2960.

I made a new canvas with a width of 2960 in Photoshop and it was the perfect size. I'm just amazed that OS X's calculator won't do this simple math.

Try it out if you have a Mac and email me if you had the same thing happen in OS X's calculator as I did, or if it is adding correctly.

Watch the video of this strange event.

I have updated the rss widget for my blog here. I changed the title, fixed the feed, and changed the icon. So, go ahead and download the new widget

The site is back up, and should be functioning perfectly.

Also, I added an app to the Macish section of Misc. The app is the Hex Color Picker. In short, the Hex Color Picker lets you view and edit the hexadecimal HTML color codes in the Mac OS X color panel. This can become very handy if you are a web developer or programer in need of a color hex code. The Hex Color picker can recognize short hand and HTML/CSS color keywords, and it has a live preview of the color as you enter the hex code.

Justin Allard dot com will be down starting at 6 pm -8 UTC this evening. I am doing some cleaning up on the server. Hopefully we will be back up by 7 pm -8 UTC. Sorry if this will cause you any inconvenience.

VMware Fusion Beta 4 has been released. In it includes the new feature Unity, which I blogged about yesterday evening. It also has better Boot Camp support and improved performance, and some UI tweaks. Currently, I am downloading it. I can't wait to try out the new Unity feature. I plan to give a little review of it after I have played around with it for a while

Also Boot Camp 1.3 has been released today, as well as Parallels Desktop 3. It sure does seem to be the day for Windows virtualization software to be released, granted that Boot Camp doesn't virtualize Windows, jus the BIOS.

VMware Fusion is a free beta, so don't hesitate to download it and try it out on your Intel Mac.

This is Unity demonstrated in VMware's Fusion. It is very similar to Parallels' Coherence view. What I applaud most about Unity is that when you exposé the windows in OS X, the windows in Windows do the same as well. Parallels does not do that; instead, when you exposé it treats the Windows OS as it's own window and not individual windows as their own. Unity also ads some nice drop shadows to Windows windows.

I can't wait until I can use this for myself.

This is a new widget that I made that pulls the rss feed from my blog on this web site. It is based off of my abRANDOMrss widget. All I've really done is change where it pulls the rss feed, and the UI.

The eyeOS is a web based operating system (OS). It is a really cool concept, being able to access your OS from any computer with a web browser and an internet connection.

The OS has a few built in applications. Under the first Office tab at the top is a small word processor (pictured above), a file manager, a calendar, and a contact manager. Under the Network tab, there is an rss reader, and a web browser! Under the Accessories tab there is a calculator, and a note pad. Under the Games tab there is chess. Under the System tab there is a simple process viewer. And finally, under the Places tab there are links to the Home folder, Desktop, Public folder, and Groups.

There is the date and time in the bottom right, and in the bottom left is what would be called a taskbar.

The green button in the bottom center lets you log out, launch an app, see your applications in a folder (similar to OS X), and open the system preferences where you can change your password and set a custom wallpaper.

I really think this is a cool concept and has some great potential, especially for a student that is computer hopping between public libraries, school, and the dorm/home. I would really like to see some more applications, like a simple photo editor, and a wider variety of games.

I've decided to just leave abRANDOM where it is, and use this blog for all of my future posts. I will continue to upload the podcast to Gcast, and I will upload an enhanced AAC version here for download that will feature pictures of whatever Bryan and I are talking about at the given time. So, for now on, I will be making all future posts here, but I will maintain the old podcast feed.