I’ve always been a fan of RSS readers. Right back when XML was starting out and RSS feeds became the norm on blogs & websites, I would use an RSS reader to aggregate the posts from my favourite sites & blogs. Back then I’d access them for offline viewing on my palm pilot or O2 XDA (well before smart phones we had palm tops such as the XDA and companies like Palm who provided me with the Palm IIIc where huge). The advantage of RSS was the fact that posts could be pulled in from loads of different sources, without the need to go checking each individual site. For people like me, who are obsessed with the latest information, this was a game changer. Also, back then, most RSS feeds consisted off the full text of the article, including pictures, making it easy to aggregate blog posts and news posts for viewing offline. This was the days of extremely limited GPRS access which was extremely slow & costly. So syncing for offline viewing was the norm.
Tag: osx
OS Sierra external speaker pop & hissing/buzzing/humming noise fix
Since upgrading to OS Sierra on my iMac, I had noticed a horrible buzzing noise coming from my external desktop speakers. The pop would occur after a short timeout and seemed to indicate that sierra had put the audio driver to sleep, leaving no output to the external speakers. The initial switching off of the speakers would cause the pop and then the speakers would buzz until a system sound woke up the audio driver & played a sound.
This hissing & buzzing of the external iMac speakers was driving me mad. A few years ago I remember a fix called Antipop which was a small Daemon which would play a system narration consisting of no actual sound, but enough to keep the sound driver from sleeping.
Can’t update Firefox on OSX 10.7 Mountain Lion – Mozilla ends Firefox support
This evening I was greeted with a message from my trusty firefox installation that OSX 10.7 (Mountain Lion) is no longer supported and as such won’t receive any future updates. This contradicts the message over on the Firefox support site which states that support will continue to August 2016. I, like many people still run an old iMac. This machine is fast (faster than my brother in laws brand new iMac running OSX El Capitan) in real life even though the hardware is in no way a match.
I’ve tried all new versions of OSX on this machine and the last fast version to work is OSX Mountain Lion. I cannot replace a machine due to bloaty software and I in particular hate it when an OS gets bloaty. OS’s should be light & fast and allow each user to customise the system with software based on their needs. I don’t like all the new & faddy features to be baked into the OS. It’s harder to tweak and generally performs badly.
WWDC2015 – Thoughts on WWDC, IOS 9, Watch OS and OSX El Capitan
Like all tech folk I ate dinner early yesterday & sat down to watch the live stream of the WWDC 2015. This is a big day in the tech calendar & we often learn of new & exciting things coming out of the super secret Apple engineering labs. It wasn’t quite as good as 2013 when I was in San Francisco for the WWDC but I can’t complain.
The three big announcements this year where iOS 9, OSX El Capitan and Watch OS – With a little extra bit at the end for Apple Music & Beats 1 radio. All exciting things & a lot to get your head around.
Call of duty MW3 on iMac – apple osx lion boot camp
I’ve been having issues with my Xbox overheating. It’s due an upgrade but I’m saving hard for a new car so I’m not spending any money. Since I don’t have any windows machines anymore I decided to setup a boot camp partition and install windows 7 to play modern warfare 3.
My iMac is a mid 2009 model iMac with the 2.93ghz core 2 duo processor, 4GB of ram and a nvidia GT120 dedicated graphics card. I thought this would be plenty to run Mw3 in low graphics settings, but I was so surprised to see it run at high graphic details with 2x anti aliasing enabled and sustain a minimum of 30fps on really detailed open maps. When in buildings where less scenery is visible its possible to hit 60 or 70fps. Bearing in mind this is with everything set to high so the graphics look great, and 30fps is perfectly playable & fast. If you want an even faster gaming experience you can reduce the graphics quality. This is also running at the iMacs native resolution of 1920×1200 resolution.