Sunday, November 18, 2012

Some Random-ish News

I just noticed that Intuit announced their tax program TurboTax will no longer support PowerPC and will now require 10.6.8. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Although I was a bit surprised to see the company VP show up in this MacRumors Forum thread to explain the reasoning. It's just jarring that they're going from supporting every Tiger-capable Mac going back to the '90s to now only Snow Leopard. On the plus side, there's always TurboTax Online, and they also have an iPad app.

In more Linux adventures, I've been troubleshooting a couple of glitches with pulseaudio, which got installed as a dependency to Cairo-dock. Pulseaudio is like a face hugger from the Alien movies. It latches onto your system and it won't let go. Anyway, I fixed some problems and wrote the solutions in the sound section here in case you're interested.

And charging a Kindle on your Linux box is a lot less complicated than other web pages say. Many posts say you need to use the eject command from the command line for it to begin charging, but I found just clicking the eject button in PCManFM works, too (the Kindle mounts in /media/Kindle on Debian Wheezy, FYI). Now I just have to figure out the iPad.

6 comments:

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  2. For those of us who neither plan to relinquish our PPC Macs nor go back to paper returns, take a look at TaxAct (www.taxactonline.com), a web-based alternative for preparing US Federal and State tax returns. Costs aren't bad and my G4 Mac renders the web interface properly across several browsers (Aurora, TenFour, SeaMonkey). Once complete the product can be submitted electronically or on paper (pdf print file).

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  3. Slightly unrelated but do mplayer and gstreamer work in your Debian installation? On my lubuntu install they either play crappily or flat out refuse to play anything. I've tried installing all codecs, purgeing and reinstalling and nothing helps. Ubuntu forums indicate its a known upstream Debian problem. For the moment I can use VLC instead, but its much more resource intensive and the mozilla plugin doesn't play nice with youtube sometimes.

    Completely unrelated but I just tried out the elementary OS luna beta. Boy howdy that is a sliiiiiick user interface, and surprisingly lightweight to boot. If you have PC lying around I strongly rec putting it on a thumb drive and checking it out. Canonical should can Unity and go with this instead.

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    1. There was this bug with gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad:

      https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gst-plugins-bad0.10/+bug/973014

      It broke playback of many .mp4 files and was why Minitube choked on so many videos. The bug also affects Totem and everything else that uses gstreamer, though I don't think mplayer has anything to do with it.

      My version of mplayer works fine, though I compiled it myself to run on a G3. Didn't Zen at PowerPC Liberation mention he was having video problems with Lubuntu's development release and if you wanted good video performance to stick with stable?

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  4. I have to say, I was still pleasantly surprised last year that TurboTax still worked on the G5. I figured it would have been discontinued by then. So I don't bear Intuit any particular ill will, though I'd probably feel different if I were an annual subscriber, and at least I have an Intel mini around that can still run TurboTax until they drop 10.6.8 (or, I might run it in Virtual PC -- haven't decided yet).

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    1. My mom used to run some kind of tax software, can't remember if it was TurboTax, on Soft Windows and then Virtual PC. So I guess it's back to the future.

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