May 23, 2004

Evil Webcam Shocker

So I was trying to figure out why iChat doesn't recognize the Logitech USB webcam I brought back from the States. After poking around for about an hour, I saw that iChat only works with FireWire webcams. Great, thanks a lot guys. What a kick in the stones. It's not like I can pop back to the shop in New York were I got the cam and trade it in for another. Why Apple would only support FireWire, when almost all of the cams I've seen use USB (except for the iSight of course) is beyond me.

I just downloaded AIM and will try to get that to work with the cam. But I think I gotta pick this battle up again tomorrow if I can get home before 9 pm. I'm still wiped out from yesterday's bachelor party for my friend Anton. It turned into a looong night.

I'm still working on getting the pics from the last US trip up. I've had zero personal time since I got back, and it's killing me. I got a book on Zen meditation from this awesome bookstore Hannah took me to in Chicago. I guess it was more of a gesture of intent than anything else, because I'll be unlikely to have the time to read it, much less practice the techniques it teaches. Yeah yeah, complain complain...

Must sleep.

Posted by case at May 23, 2004 11:21 PM
Comments

Silver tower, dual 1.25 , 512K of RAM, and no superdrive (there was a budget limitation). What's funny about it is that even had I had an unlimited budget, I might not have gotten more connections (I can still add them if I win the lottery I guess LOL) being as at the time I bought it I didn't have a single thing to plug into the firewire anyways.

What am I saying?! of course I would have gotten the most tweaked geeky loaded machine possible! It would have been my $8K e-mail appliance! Actually strike that, I would have gotten a big-ass display, too and it would have cost me more than that. Oh the Canadian dollar. :)

Posted by: Deborah at May 26, 2004 06:52 AM

Yeah, I hate it when companies reduce the capabilities of the hardware for the sake of market strategy rather than technological reasons. There's no reason iChat wouldn't be able to support USB if they wanted it too. That doesn't burn me up as much as the bastards that decided to put region-limiters on DVDs though, but I guess that's another story.

So you've got the smurf tower or the silver one? That only has one FireWire port? That's a drag. I've got two on the 2nd gen iMac I've got, which is nice because I can have the iPod and a cam plugged in at the same time. I did run out of USB ports a long time ago though, and bought a hub. It's cool looking at least- it has all these green telltale lights that look cool when the room is dark. (Yes I'm a geek)

Posted by: case at May 24, 2004 04:11 PM

Man, you know what else sucks about that? I just got OSX 10.3 ($200 CAD), and I was kinda thinking about getting a cam at some point. But if I plug a cam into my firewire, I will have to be switching all the time for the damn Pod connection. And that entails hauling out the tower and bla bla bla. I'm already in the spot of having to switch my printer for my mic if I want to do audio chat (some of these things have to be physically connected, rather than through my monitor's USB connections for example. Doesn't make sense to me, but there it is). I wonder if a hub would work; and I wonder what happened to Apple's uber-ease and compatibility?

(Sorry, rant ends!)

Hi, Peter! :)

Posted by: Deborah at May 24, 2004 06:38 AM