Jon Simpson’s Weblog

My personal space for ideas & information.

Archive for the 'PowerBook' Category


mplayer, fontconfig and freetype on OS X

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

Since mplayer got decent support for SSA/ASS subtitles, complete with embedded fonts I’d been meaning to check the feature out. Recent subversion builds of mplayer had required an upgrade to freetype 2.2.1 from whatever ancient version Apple ship with OS X 10.4, and after enabling passing ‘-ass -embeddedfonts’ to the media file, I was slightly [...]

Replacement PowerBook

Wednesday, March 16th, 2005

Ok, so the replacement for my previously damaged PowerBook arrived today. It’s as expected, and at this point I think I’m going to wait a few days before making any sweeping statements about its functional state.
Again, it seemed just as I had got used to the iBook, the PowerBook came along and impressed me with [...]

Comparisons: iBook vs PowerBook

Thursday, March 3rd, 2005

As I was in the process of moving all of my e-mail, documents and other trivial pieces of data back to the iBook pending the PowerBook’s departure, the large difference between the two hit me. Having gone from the iBook to the PowerBook, I had obviously noticed the improvements that the new system had brought, [...]

Misfortune strikes.

Monday, February 28th, 2005

I’ll use a timeline to indicate events:
Timeline -20 days: Order PowerBook.
Day 1: Get new PowerBook
Day 2-3: Enjoy excellent new laptop & get all my docs/settings transferred.
Day 4: Find ethernet port not accepting any cables. Contact Applecare to arrange replacement.
Isn’t life great? I waited almost 3 weeks for this one to ship. I wonder how long [...]

PowerBook Updates

Monday, February 7th, 2005

So the much rumoured PowerBook updates emerged at lunchtime on Monday of last week (01/02/05), and underwhelmed the Mac masses anxiously awaiting the Powerbook G5 (any Tuesday now, right?). Not content with bringing you this ‘news’ a week late, I’ll continue with random information about how the update affected the PowerBook range, and why [...]