eject cd in mac book pro

today I insert a DVD into my macbook pro but no response… it really make scare.

OK.. no panic.. googling and here is the answer (extracted from macrumors.com – http://guides.macrumors.com/Force_Eject_a_Stuck_CD_or_DVD )

# Open Disk Utility and choose the disc you wish to eject in the left-hand pane, then click on the Eject button.
# Some Macintoshes have a paperclip hole that you can insert a straightened paperclip into, manually triggering the eject mechanism.
# Open Terminal and type “drutil tray eject” to eject the disc/tray, and “drutil tray close” to close the tray.

Amazing – stop motion animation

In dig into youtube, my attention  focused  on the stop motion animation/file.

The idea is simple, you take a 1000 pictures on an objection and and glue them together and play in ~24 frame per second. Everyone can do it using your webcam (of course it takes long time). But you just cannot image how hobbyist can take it into this extreme.

super awesome..

Text to Speech Site

I’m not native english speaker, it is a bit difficult to speak word correctly.

And I find this Text to speech site is rather useful.

It is AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech Demo Site.

Just types in your word, it returns wav and say in beautiful voice.  It has more than ten voice for you and my favorite is Cystal (ths first one).

Gundam 1/1 scale – dream comes true

really amazing working… 1:1 scale gundam in standing position.

G10 – update / comments

after using Canon G10 for few months, it is really great camera.

Pro:

• Lot of settings, fun to play with
• Really Great LCD display (best I ever see in Consumer DC)
• Support Great RAW Format
• Support Manually Focus

Cons:

• Picture is not that good if display in Large Screen or in actually picture (especially when compare with my old IXUS 700)
• AutoFocus is not accurate in indoor or not enough light source, here I find MF is the solution (even it is not that trivial to use)
• Noise is still high in High ISO
• the eye viewer is not correct => almost useless ( I am rather disappointed with it)

Canon G10

Just purchased Canon G10. It is nice (but not little) DC.

It is bigger and heavier than normal DC, but with more switches, you can change options without go via the menu.

And the picture quality is quite good, especially the warm nature color in compare with other companies.

But the downside is (same as other small DC), the noise level is higher when using high-iso.

Sample photos

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Ubuntu 8.10 – Create USB Startup Disk

Ubuntu 8.10 – has a feature call “Create USB Startup Disk”. It creates bootable USB drive for install.

But the best part of it is, it has an addition feature named “reserved extra space”. It allows user to save set file, document, perference or even application, just like you’re working on normal harddisk.

It is amazing, for example, I can install application (let say the gnome-do) on the desktop computer. Plug the USB drive into my notebook and write blog about it.

Of course, it has a downside, since it consider you’re running as livecd. It takes rather long time to startup. In my notebook, it take ~3-4 mins.

From ubuntu forum, someone mentioned that he tried to do the full installation on a USB drive and it only take ~30 secs to startup. I will give it a try if I can find an extra USB drive.

Great Papervision 2 tutorial

Papervision 2 is the best tutorial site on papervision 3d.

http://papervision2.com/tutorial-list/

Tutorial is straight forward and easy to follow.  Especially it helps you to setup development environment using open-source ide flashdevelop, which is a great tool if you don’t want to pay any money to adobe.

Free Icons site

Find some interesting free, looking good.
http://fasticon.com/freeware/