The Day After X-Mas
I’ve been productive today on what seems like a small scale, but it’s huge for me.
The office is the same room that the X-mas tree is in and thus it was destroyed yesterday. It still has presents in it and the floor is a mess with little pieces of packing peanuts and wrapping paper. But, I’m about to fix that and I know it.
First though I had to run to Staples and get a new video card and sound card for the computer. Forward planning and all that. *grin* They are both installed and I’m feeling much better. Now I have a second monitor output AND a DVI port! Yes, there is a new monitor in my future. I also fired up Second Life and nearly died at how faster and smoother it is. Curious if the sound card will help with my streaming issues. That WAS the plan but haven’t tested it yet.
Also, two new books came for the holidays in the mail. Both of which I’m flipping through and reading and digging for totally different reasons. I highly suggest both of them:
- Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day
by Gina Trapani
- Prank the Monkey:The ZUG Book of Pranks
by Sir John Hargrave
Yes, you can see that my mind is in a couple of different places based on my reading. But, I use to work with John and when he mentioned sending over an advance copy to check out how could I say no? If you haven’t been by Zug.com today you should. It’s a lot of fun. The Lifehacker book and LifeHacker.com has already changed some things on my computer and in the quest to be more productive it is certainly going to play a role in my life for 2007.
X-Mas was good. Lots of smiles. TONS of Wii playing and the kids were psyched when I charged up and loaded their iPod Shuffles for them. I’m psyched that they have a configuration setting to limit the maximum volume. That is HUGE for a parent like me so I’m digging that. I don’t seem to have the setting on my iPod Video. I wonder why. Doesn’t seem to make sense.
Mixture of work, catch up, forward planning and other things this week. Nothing major planned.\
Update: Spoke WAY to soon on everything being ok with the new equipment. Seems the new sound card would rather not work with CastBlaster. Grrr…. Kind of a bad thing for someone hoping to record say a podcast today?
December 26th, 2006 at 3:10 pm |
It’s sort of strange that you don’t have the possibility to set up the maximum volume on your iPod video. I have one, too. It’s the newest one (30 GB). And there is actually a possibility to determine the Volume Limit.
You can find it in Settings - Volume Limit.
I wonder, if this is being integrated in European iPods only? There are some laws here in Europe prohibiting too high volume levels in devices like the iPod. Because of that the European firmware is different from the US version: apart from the settings I mentioned above, there is a volume limit in the firmware that cannot be activated or changed - of course, there are hacks available in the internet to deactivate this firmware thing, but I am glad that the firmware is the way it is - so why change it?
December 27th, 2006 at 9:52 pm |
Most of the new iPod features are avail via a firmware update. You can update the firmware right from within iTunes now (update iTunes to latest, then update firmware)
You should have brightness setting, volume control maximum, search, etc. To add the search screen, add it to the main screen in the settings menu.
I have the new 30 GB too and I have the volume feature
Frank