The Videos section of my site has recieved a complete overhall. After much deliberation I decided that it was too much work to keep the videos hosted on my own server and decided to use the excellent video hosting service Vimeo. What I love most about Vimeo is the ability to upload 720p videos to their servers, and SD vides uploaded to Vimeo look great as well and 100% better than YouTube. My videos page is now a blog page that I will embed my videos from Vimeo into. You can subscribe to the Videos rss feed to stay up to date with my latest videos.

Cheers!

- Justin

The rss feeds for Justin Allard dot com are now being syndicated through FeedBurner. The original rss feed will not be up for more than a week, so please subscribe to the FeedBurner feed to keep getting updates. Thank you.

I have been hard at work (well, it wasn't really that hard) creating Marathon packs for Windows and OS X and I am happy to report that I have gotten both Marathon and Marathon Infinity finished and uploaded for both OS X and Windows. All of the packs include the HiRes Texture packs, AlephOne, and their associated data files. So have at it! Go grab yourself a copy of Marathon.

On Saturday, I was out at the fairgrounds with my friend Bryan watching my brother play in the XPSL paintball tournament. When I pulled into the parking lot earlier that morning, I thought to myself, that it would be an awesome place to spin some doughnuts, and I was right. So, here's Bryan and myself in my s10 spinning some doughnuts.

I was bored and decied to make a wallpaper. Three different versions to be precise:

The first version has Justin Allard dot com with a deep internal shadow and quotes around my quote.

The second has a light interal shadow on Justin Allard dot com and quotes around my quote.

The third, which is my favorite, has a light interla shadow on Justin Allard dot com and no quotes around my quote.

I'm pretty sure nobody will use these, but hey, I just thought I'd share them with the world.

My clear marker lights came in for my truck today, so I installed them. It was really easy, just two torx screws and the lens slides out and the bulb twists out. I had to get some amber bulbs since it is illegal to have clear bulbs and clear lenses. So after I picked up some amber bulbs from an auto parts store I installed the new lenses. I think they look a lot nicer and cleaner than the amber lenses. I've got some new pictures up of them in my truck gallery.

I've finally gotten around to taking some pictures of my truck and putting the up on the net. Go check them out in the Images section.

netPong is an awesome little Pong app. But you are probably thinking, "why is 'net' in the name?" Well, with netPong you can automatically link up with a friend on your local network or play alone. However, the coolest feature is how you control your paddle. netPong uses the built in Sudden Motion Sensor in your MacBook or MacBook Pro. Simply tilt your MacBook (Pro) left or right to move the paddle. It takes a little getting used to, but once you get it down, it's awesome. As always, you can always find netPong on the Games page in Macish.

Senuti and VLC are both two great apps and both do totally different things. That's why I've added them to the media section of the Mac Apps. Senuti is a great little app for pulling music off of your iPod (or a friends;) and putting it on your Mac. VLC is one of the best media players available for any platform whether that be OS X, Linux, or even Windows.

I'm also trying out a new little Featured Links section in the sidebar of the blog. Basically it'll have have links to stuff on the site that has been recently updated or links to other sites that I think are pretty cool. Most of the links will stay up for about a week. It's just not going to work out the way I hoped.

I've added a new section in Mac Apps called Deep Tweaking. The apps in the Deep Tweaking section offer extended personalization that would normally not be possible without feeling comfortable in Terminal. These apps can dramatically simplify tasks that would otherwise take some time to do.

I recently changed the folder structure of my site. Because of this, some of your bookmarks may have been broken. These changes also broke my rss widget, so I updated it to find the new feed location. You can download 1.3 from the Downloads page.

I'm moving stuff around in the Macish section. I've now made two separate categories for Mac Apps and Tips and Tricks. Mac Apps will have all the Mac apps that were in the Macish section. Tips and Tricks will eventually contain tips and tricks for Leopard and Tiger, and maybe even Windows.

I apologize for broken bookmarks to all of my Mac apps pages.

The Milky theme is back. I didn't like the other theme as much as Milky, and I figured out how to make the title smaller, so now it's back.

Earlier this week I got maybe 5 Kernel Panics in one day. I thought is was due to me running a Leopard dev build, so I re-installed Tiger (whose GUI and Dock I much prefer over Leopard's) hoping to solve my problems. But it did not. When I was updating from 10.4.6 to 10.4.10 I got another Kernel Panic. Needless to say, that KP hosed my install of Tiger. That last KP got me thinking that my RAM may be bad, so I put in the two stock 256mb sticks and re-installed Tiger using the Upgrade command. (I should say that right now I am very thankful for back ups). Unfortunately that Upgrade didn't work out and resulted in a Kernel Panic at boot up. That really got me angry. I again re-installed Tiger this time zeroing out the hard disk and doing a clean install. After Tiger installed I copied back all of my data over night.

The next morning I had to put one 1GB stick of RAM in so I could install Photoshop for my photography class, so I put in the one stick that I was pretty sure was not bad. Later that night I put in the other 1GB stick of RAM that I thought might be bad. So far I have yet to have another Kernel Panic with my 2GBs of RAM, so now I am thinking that they may have just needed to be re-seated.

I now have a new theme on my site that I like, and I hope you guys do too.

As you can guess by the title of this post, a web based CMS (Content Management System) had little success for me.

I first tried Movable Type, but it failed to install correctly for me twice. After that I moved on to try out Drupal. It installed great, but I couldn't get it to do what I wanted very easily. If I do go web based, Drupal will probably be my first choice though. Wordpress came after Drupal. It installed very quickly, but I'm just not to fond of it, as far a the ease of customizing themes.

Now, I am back with my favorite CMS, which isn't web based and is Mac only, RapidWeaver. It really is an awesome program and well worth the $50 Realmac Software charges for it. It's ease of use is incredible, and it's flexibility is amazing. Anywhere you can put text, you can drop in html or any web code and RapidWeaver will do what it needs to do and display or hide that code correctly. It's a very nice app. The only big downside for me is that it's not web based and Mac only.

If I ever get away from the Mac OS I will move my site to Drupal.

I am going to try moving my site and blog to the Moveable Type platform. It should be better for me because I will be able to post and edit the site anywhere I am from the web and I won't have to use proprietary software (although it is very nice software that I have come to love) that only runs on OS X to update my site and blog.

That being said, wish me luck. My site will probably be down for much of the day, so don't panic.

I just made a few minor site changes. All of my image galleries on my site are now consolidated into one section called "Images". I also moved the location of the image galleries from the root directory to /images, so some of your bookmarks may be broken. I apologize for that inconvenience, and I try my best not to move stuff around very often, if at all.

Those are the changes, I hope the end up making this a better site.

I've added a whole new section to Macish for system monitoring apps, and in that section I have added iStat Menus.

Also, in the Miscellaneous Apps I've added the famous system-wide notification app Growl.

I have finally gotten around to adding a Games section to the Macish. Some of the games in there so far are Quinn, X-Moto, and Solitaire XL. When I discover some new games worth mentioning I'll throw them up on the games page. So, go check out the developing Games page and have some fun.

There are some new applications up in my Macish section.

Taco HTML Edit is a new addition to the Web Apps. Taco HTML Edit is a full on HTML and PHP editor for OS X. Taco HTML Edit has many features including a built in spell checker, live previewing, and syntax checking. It's light-wieght and best of all, it's free! I've used Taco HTML Edit a lot, that's even what I created my email signature in. It's a great little HTML editor.

New to the Miscellaneous Apps is AppTrap. AppTrap is the feature that Apple forgot. It is a simple PrefPane that detects whenever you put an application in the trash. When you do put an app in the trash AppTrap offers to delete associated system files that would normally get left behind if you just put the app in the trash. AppTrap is a quick, easy, and streamlined way to delete all of the files associated with an application.

To go along with the old theme of the site. I changed the GUI of the rss widget back to the old GUI. You can get the widget on the widgets page.

The old theme is back by popular demand. I like it better too.

To go along with the new site theme I revised my rss widget's theme. It is available for download on this page.

The site is all back up. Everything should be working fine. If you experience any problems shoot me an email, or leave a comment. Hope you like the new theme.

Justin Allard dot com is temporarily down for maintenance. Although you may be able to see the home page, some other pages may not be working properly while the site is uploading.

I took the site down at 5:00 pm -8 UCT.

It should be up by 9:00 pm -8 UCT.

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.

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.

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.

Soon, I will be moving my blog abRANDOM to this page.