Google Maps and the land of Oz

It seems that Google Maps has been updated with some relatively recent, high-res imagery for Melbourne.

Since it's release, the entire south-eastern region of Melbourne has had very low-res images, and there has been no map information.

Now both of these are fixed...

We have maps of Melbourne as well as high-res imagery of the eastern suburbs that seems to be relatively recent (as in the past six months or less)

Good onya, Google!

Print Gocco

I've had my eye on the Print Gocco kits for a while now as an easy introduction to screen printing, only they're rather expensive, and are no longer in production. They are available on eBay for over $100, however what should I see out on the street on Hard Rubbish Day but a brand-new Print Gocco set!

I saw the box, thinking that someone had tossed out a used kit, or filled the box with rubbish, but when I opened it up, it was a brand-new, unused kit - lights, screens, inks - the whole lot...

What a score!

The aptly-named Thumper

No, really. Thumper. AKA the Sun Fire X4500.

It's a 4RU, 4-way x64 server from Sun with no less than FOURTY-EIGHT disks in it. Rather than the traditional RAID systems, where the disks all slot in the front and there's a whole heap of wasted space at the back, this beast (and I'm not using that term lightly) opens up, like a drawer, and you slot four dozen disks in vertically (taking getting perpendicular to a whole new level!). Weighing in at over 75 kilos, this isn't a light unit and it can provide up to 24TB in just 4 RU of vertical space. Able to deliver around 1 gigabit per second from disks to the network, this would be an ideal server for large amounts of high-definition video or other tasks that require an aggressive storage arrangement.

Mac OS X 10.5 - AKA Leopard

Well, the release of Mac OS X 10.5 is imminent, and we're hearing very little about what's happening with this next version of the OS.

This could mean one of two things:

One: Tt's an evolutionary upgrade, not a revolutionary one, and Apple aren't going to hype it. (ha!)

Two: It's a huge upgrade, with plenty of amazing new features, and Apple know that the best way to get a LOT of talk about it is to not release any details before the event and then suddenly drop it all on us, all at once.

Now, if we look back to the release of 10.4 Tiger, at this stage of the game, there were plenty of features announced, and one the Apple Developer Connection, there were beta builds in the downloads area, and all was good. Features were being hyped, people were running betas, and reporting on them, and there was lots of buzz going around.

So, what could Apple have up their sleeves for this release?

How about a little bit of vino for the masses. Maybe we won't need Parallels or CrossOver Mac to work some Windows magic on OS X.

Now, think about it. Apple are now famous for taking Open Source projects and using the best bits for their own purposes. There may be some issues with the LGPL License that Wine uses, which is very different in it's ramifications to the BSD License that they got a whole heap of OS X under, but I'm sure Apple's legal team can sort that out. How good would it be to have Windows running like Classic did on the PPC based Macs. Have Windows windows side-by-side with OS X windows.

Does anyone else know of any other great conspiracies out there that I should be including in this writeup? =)

Run Classic apps on an Intel Mac

There is some software, the strangely named SheepShaver, that allows you to run classic apps on an Intel Mac.

Check out the write up over at The Apple Blog.

It's kind-of like Virtual PC, but the other way around, you run it on an Intel Mac, and it creates a window in which Classic can boot up. You don't get the seamless behaviour of Classic windows sitting side-by-side with OS X windows, all Classic windows run in the SheepShaver window.

Have a look at this Screenshot for an example.

Performance isn't outstanding, as it has to emulate a G4 processor, and isn't as advanced as Rosetta in doing this, however it is pretty stable, so may be worth investigating if you have that one essential Classic app that you still need to run on an Intel Mac.