2009 is fading fast, and a whole new year stretches out before us. Before things slip away, I need to take time for my annual jonandnic.com re-cap…
For starters, this has been easily the most normal year of our lives — where by normal, I mean relatively sedate. We haven’t announced plans to move to another country, we haven’t worked 3 jobs between the two of us, and we’ve managed to fight off the yearly itch to find another place to live. We haven’t even made any major purchases this year. 2009 has, for us, been about shedding our youth, and finally embracing adulthood and parenthood.
Not that these things are without adventure or challenge — just that the adventures are of a different variety and the challenges are a little smaller in scale. It turns out that we won’t actually fall over dead if we’re not constantly changing things up — we just have to learn about some different roles, and focus on some different goals.
With that in mind, we set out to do things like improving our home and gardens, finally dealing with my persistent back issues, and sending out some great young people on adventures of their own… not to mention marrying off Nic’s sister and going on our first ever family vacation!
In fact, we were feeling so good about this new normal life of keeping our kids alive and legal, that we hardly noticed when a good old-fashioned adventure snuck up on us out of the blue. Suddenly the life we were much more accustomed to was back with a vengeance — and it came to us, right here in our comfy little home, without us having to go anywhere to find it.
So comfortable were we that we almost turned it down — our own voices from our not-to-distant past, as well as the encouraging voices of family and new friends, made sure we didn’t. Which is good, because we don’t plan to ever!
And with the decision out of the way, I was off for 3 months of travel and trial, while Nicole’s mettle was tested on the home front — not alone, thanks to the afore-mentioned friends and family, but certainly more independant. Proving once again that when God sets a task before us, He sees it through for us.
Of course we continue to see all of these things — both the lessons in stability and those in adventure — as preparation and equipping. In the past year it’s become increasingly obvious that our own plans are meaningless… but as He did for a cop from Canada (and a teacher and a nurse that I know pretty well), we are confident that God is putting together a plan for us greater than we can imagine. As of 2009, we’re done trying to guess what that is, and done trying to put our own plan into place. We’re following God where ever He leads us, and obeying whatever He asks of us — even if we don’t understand it at the time.
Here comes 2010, and we can’t wait to see what He has in store — for us, and for you. A belated Merry Christmas, and an on-time Happy New Year to all of our readers. Thanks for hanging in there with us during a fairly blog-sparse year… hopefully next year will be better!
AppleTV for Mac
This remains the most popular thing I’ve ever posted — despite the fact that its really nothing special. The meat of it is a little start-up script that contains no undiscoverable tricks. I don’t even use it any more!
Nonetheless, it’s in-demand, and I can’t find a hosting method that can keep up. So, here’s my solution:
- The start-up movie is no longer available here — it probably shouldn’t have been posted here to begin with. If you find someone with a Patchsticked AppleTV, it’s trivial to SCP in and grab the start-up movie (discussed here.)
You can also use any other movie you want, which you specify when you edit the script.
- The screen saver never worked right on a normal Mac, but Scott Q has engineered a replacement. His link appears to be down, but get in touch with him and send him your thanks.
- The script itself is still available here.
Copy and Paste the script into the AppleScript editor, updating it to provide the path to where ever you want your start-up video, and save it as a run-only script. Add it as a Login item in your account, and you’re set.
- The background image I made is awful (it was just a screen shot) and I’m sure someone’s made better, but I’ll keep that here if you want it. If you do this right, you should only see the wallpaper for a few seconds anyway, so if you make yourself an all black image, or find a nice Apple logo, you’ll be all set.
And honestly, that’s all that was released. Like I said, nothing magical. My Mac Mini worked fine as a Home Theater PC, but eventually I just went with an actual hacked AppleTV (which smoothly handles anything but MKV) because I wanted my Mac for other things. If you find any other great ideas, feel free to share them here!