Windmills of My Mind

urrr where the hell is that minimal green template I was using? ...first my CSS broke now can't find a good template

Wow what will they come up with next?… & I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. For the source article you can read it here. But basically it says the billboards can detect if you’re a male or female & convey the appropriate Ad. Guys may see an AXE commercial for example & girls, some brand of nail polish.
Even before I read the comment on the article in my mind is said, “lawsuit” I mean... They are bound to get the gender wrong sometime… and what of those with both genders? Technology like this while helpful to businesses is bound to cause embarrassment to untold millions. That won’t stop businesses though if the majority of times they get it right & rake in more profits due to such targeted placement.
Here is another thing though; are Ads targeted to women totally useless to the male gender? Of course not! There may be a perfume Ad playing that is obviously targeted to women but one seeing that may opt to get that particular brand for their wife or girlfriend. It actually helps to see Ads aimed at the opposite sex because it rounds out your knowledge. You will be better able to gauge what is hot or not should you ever have to buy items for your loved ones.
In the end I think it may cause more harm than good. I believe the Technology itself is great! just the application of it needs to be tailored towards something with less social side effects.
The ability to gesture at the billboard thereby choosing which gender you want Ads displayed for may be a solution. The billboard itself should play Ads a random by default, ….well what do you guys think?

Oh how I pride myself on being able to tell if a movie is a 1 to 4 star just by a preview trailer ….and boy did I prophesy this time. Some people try to fool you with lots of action sequences but that’s not enough. Without a general idea of how the plot may go you can bet the movie will suck. Rarely do advertisers just show the ‘action’ alone in a preview when they have more substance to give us.

Now lets put this latest installment of Star Trek into perspective. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was good (for the non-comic book reader) & still the New Star Trek made X Men look like Mariah Carey’s Glitter. It was that cool & I don’t care what other reviews say but I’ll give it 4 stars (& yes… I mark a really hard scale)

Now I’m certainly no Trekkie, after all I can’t even remember the plots of the previous Star Trek movies however I’ve watch many of the TV episodes from the times of J. T. Kirk to Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Two things you realize after watching Star Trek episodes or movies. It can be really cool & it can be really corny at the same time. For example, taking a ship to warp drive will always be cool also the acting done by William Shatner & Patrick Stewart was always spot-on. You really believed they were Captains of Star Ships. However love on the Enterprise was always a disaster, it just didn’t feel right in my book. Not to mention when certain ethical issues come up they must deal with it in the end of an episode & the dialogue there can sometimes be ‘cheesy’ to say the least.



The latest Star Trek did not suffer from those ‘cheesy’ lines like some others did. The cast all acted like people in their roles should …and a delicate balance of action, humor and romance ensued. While there was enough action to make you spill your popcorn they didn’t rely on those sequences to ‘make’ the show. The plot was deep enough to be satisfying without going into overly detailed & complex explanations. The hard thing about doing a movie with such a long history is that you HAVE to appeal to the long time fans or else! but when you can do that AND draw in newbies then you’re in business & that’s exactly what this movie does. You will love “Scotty”, Spock, Sulu & Kirk even if you have no idea of what they are supposed to be like from previous series. Provided you do know something you will be impressed with the faithfulness of the movie to past character personalities.

There is no down time or lull in this movie… just warp drive. From the first minute, I turned to my friend & said “it’s all ready better than Wolverine” & she agreed with eyes wide open.

I asked one of my friends if they were interested in seeing this but they said it was not their kind of movie. I personally think they would have loved it though. So in closing I have to recommend this to everyone. Even if Sci-Fi is not your thing or if you have pre-conceived ideas about it based on its history… I assure you, you will not be disappointed.

So here I was on my Mac with a 7GB .dmg file (Disc Image) that I wanted to transfer to an External hard drive for safe keeping. Easy as copy & paste right? (more like ‘yeah right’)
Most Hard Drives (like my external HD) are FAT32 formatted. Standard for PCs etc. HDs in FAT32 can be recognized on the Mac as well so it’s a good thing to have this format if you have to swap files between these 2 Computer types.
But here is the thing… a FAT32 formatted drive cannot copy or have pasted to it a file that is larger than 4GB. Therefore I cannot get the downloaded file off my computer to external media for safekeeping.

Now Macs HDs are formatted in HFS which can copy files over 4GB! So why not reformat my external HD to HFS you say? Because HFS formatted drives will not be recognized by a PC so I’d only be able to move data between Macs. Initially I thought not even burning to a DVD would work as a DVD can only hold 4.7GB & my file is 7GB. Thankfully I found some solutions:

I could upload my file to an online storage site, then download to any computer with an Internet connection. There are many free services like this, but they usually set limits on how large one file can be & your file can be deleted if you are not using their service regularly. To over come this you would have to have a paid subscription that is usually around 4 - 6USD a month. The best service thus far is SugarSync. (Which does much more than just store stuff)

Toast it! Being on a Mac I’d use toast to burn data files, little did I know that as of version 7 you can split files over several DVDs if it’s too big to fit on 1. Windows users would have similar applications.

But the best solution was actually splitting the file myself using a dull knife…. just kidding… using a Terminal command. A simple spotlight search will help you find the Terminal. Basically it’s equivalent to the RUN feature you find on Windows. Here is what you type in to split your .dmg (Disc Image):

hdiutil segment -o mydvd -segmentSize 100M /Users/[your Mac username]/Desktop/dvdimage.dmg

The “mydvd” will specify what you want your files to be named, so change it to whatever is relevant to you.

The “-segmentSize 100M” specifies the size you want each part to be split into, just change the megabyte number to what ever you like. However I chose to replace that line with “-segmentCount 3” meaning I want the file to be segmented into 3 parts.

The last part of the code is “/Users/[your Mac username]/Desktop/dvdimage.dmg” & this is where the file you want to split actually resides on your computer. In the example it shows the file is on the Desktop & it’s name is “dvdimage.dmg”. After replacing those fields to suit you just type (or better yet paste) it into the terminal window & hit Return. The larger the file the longer the process will take. My 7GB file took about 10mins.

When its finished you will automatically see your newly created files in your Home Folder.
The first file will be (the name you specified in your code).dmg
The second will end in .002dmgpart
The third, .003dmgpart etc.

Only then it was possible to transfer my smaller files over to the external hard drive as they were all under the 4GB limit.

To use / mount my Disc Image again I just have to double click the first part of the segmented file & OS X will do the rest. …there! Easy as Pie! well.... maybe Pi.

(some credit goes to flash tekkie)