Tag: Apple

Catch Up

Been pretty busy so not had much posting time, so without further ado…some stuff.

  • PS3 update. Firstly the reviews of the update have garnered some great reviews. Upscaled DVD’s look great, noticeably better than the 360. I guess most surprising for me is that they looked better/on a par with the Denon I have. Looks like I can eBay another piece of kit. Of course me writing eBay really means it will retire to the ‘gadget graveyard’ – the attic. I have an embarrassing amount of old gadgets and tech that I won’t part with or can’t be bothered selling on eBay and dealing with Nigerians (sorry all legit Nigerians), kids wrecking bids and fraud. 720p playback of Blu-Ray is also welcomed. Network playback of media…nice try but not quite there yet. Nero and Media Player 10 work well on Windows for sharing media. For the Mac, options are a little more limited. TwonkyMedia Beta 4.4 and EyeConnect are the best bet’s for the moment. Hopefully a version of Connect360 will support the PS3 (news that Connect360 tries to talk to the PS3). Joystiq have a list of 20 clients that may work. Final option is to use a NAS device that supports DLNA. Unfortunately my current NAS doesn’t. Synology forums admin have said they have purchased a PS3 to look at connectivity – supporting DLNA would have been my preferred option although it’s probably easier for me to rely on a Connect360 derivative.
  • Since switching to Mac I’ve only used Windows to update my remote and a couple of other small’ish tasks. However the last 3-4 weeks have seen me use Windows every day for a couple of hours and during that time Parallels has been a life saver. Rock solid and to be honest, you are hard pushed to notice your running a virtual OS. The coherence feature alone is worth the money. The good news is version 3 has been announced with increased USB support, 3D graphics support (pretty vague but a good list of Windows games) and future Vista Aero support. Sounding good and like a good little fanboy I’ve already paid for the upgrade.
  • Halo 3. It’s soooo much fun. It’s a shame it will finish this Sunday but I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of weeks. Robert – hope to see you before Sunday!
  • Forza out this week. Has had great reviews, the user screenshots from USA & Japanese gamers have looked awesome and a received a 9 in Edge this month. Roll on this weekend.
  • I’m starting to become a GTD geek. Been using iGTD for a few weeks, Omnifocus is picking up some good early press and the process has really help me keep on top of tasks recently. If you’ve got a lot on (even a little but some of it’s long term) or need something to help manage those inspiration moments that need noted down somewhere then give GTD a try.
  • WWDC next week which means a lot of Mac rumours. New laptops and iMacs could make my hardware feel out of date which is always the problem with Macs. However, the hardware has been good since I switched, the software excellent and I have absolutely no regrets. Should have done it years ago. Tips for next week – new Leopard features (I still think there will be some virtualisation/boot camp news) and new Macbook pro’s. One more thing – new iPhone features?
  • I think I’ve finally settled on a work/laptop bag. I’ve always admired Tom Bihn bags and I think the soon to be released Zephyr will fit my needs. Why does it take 30 mins to choose a laptop and 6 months to find a bag?
  • Try and catch the Jobs/Gates interview from last weeks D|All Things Digital. Gates comes across really well and it was nice to see the respect they both had for each other. Video’s here and now on iTunes.

Mmm – that went on a bit.

Style

Bit of a lazy weekend has been had although there’s a few things worth noting. Firstly, Casino Royale on Blu-Ray looks fantastic. If you’ve got a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player (all 10 of you in the UK) then this is a must own title. I’m enjoying the PS3 for movie playback so I’ll be picking up the remote which will get a lor more use than the 360 equivalent. Only annoyance is the remote is Bluetooth rather than Infra-red so I can’t program it into the Pronto.

The new Bond has moved to the Bourne style of movies and low and behold if there isn’t a Bourne Ultimatum trailer available. Really looking forward to this and hope it meets the same high standard of the last two.

More style can be found in the new trailer for Forza 2 (cheers Graham). Around one month to go for this must have 360 title that can’t fail to be good – can it? There hasn’t been a decent racing game on the 360 since PGR3 (Test Drive unlimited is a sims game rather than proper racing – harsh but true) so i can’t wait!

I also decided that I would start hand crafting my own site style a good while ago but that stalled after a couple of days so I finally got round to putting some time into it this weekend. A new app from Panic may help (Coda) but it isn’t even revealed until tomorrow so that will have to wait. I’m finding it all a bit frustrating at the moment but I’m getting there…slowly. I’m guessing at my pace it will be a few weeks before I have something to show for my efforts. At the moment I’m aiming for white, minimal and little or no graphics or ajax. It’s time to get simple.

Trialling .Mac at the moment and it’s great for keeping the two Macs and their apps in sync (calendars, address book, iGTD, Transmit and Yojimbo). The trial lasts for another couple of months before I have to hand over any cash but it’s likely thats another £70 to the Apple temple which is a tad annoying as .Mac doesn’t offer much disk space – this is an area Apple could address for not much money. It would be great if the £70 bought 40Gb of disk space to back up to and share.

Back to the grind

Well after a great week off it’s back to work tomorrow. Got lot’s of outdoor work done this week which was good. The weather has been great for April – yet more freaky weather! Also got chance to enjoy the PS3 a bit more, catch up on some movies and also some TV. Sky+ is great but I can never keep up with all that I record. That meant I had over 3 weeks of some series to watch but then I can at least skip the adverts.

Also starting to get my act together with the two Macs and also thinking about off-site backup (paranoia is rife at the moment). I hadn’t really got the laptop and desktop working well together yet. The NAS drive I’ve got is good but gets noisy, so much so that I’ll be picking up an alternative or at least busting it open and replacing the fan with a larger, slower, quieter one. I’ve got the mail sorted by switching to IMAP so that all my e-mail (dating back to 98) is available on the server so from either Mac or on the web I can see it all. Next is the sharing of data between calendars, address books and a few applications I use. I’ve got a couple of options. Sign up to .Mac which is £70 a year for syncing and access to a 1 Gig iDisk. There’s other benefits but none that I would use. Alternatively I could sign up to something like Dreamhost and use it for the sole purpose of remote backup and synchronisation, making use of Transmit to keep folders in sync. Dreamhost would give me 160Gig with Webdav support for £60 a year. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, back to watching Lost. The last three episodes have been great!

EMI and Apple…sitting in a tree

So, the big announcement today wasn’t Beatles on iTunes but something far bigger. Firstly all EMI music singles will be available DRM free for £0.99. Not only that it will be encoded at a higher bit rate of 256kbps. All EMI albums will be available DRM free and at the higher bit rate. £0.79 EMI singles at 128kbps will still be available too along with the DRM that is currently employed. You can upgrade any EMI DRM’d music that you’ve previously purchased on iTunes to the new format for £0.20. All this will be available in May.

About time!

I hate buying music from iTunes and not having it available on the 360 or other devices. The jump in quality is also a nice bonus. Well done to EMI for stepping forward and finally providing DRM free music. I don’t believe that 90% of consumers really said they wanted DRM free music at a better quality and higher price but it suits me. Hopefully some of the other music labels will follow in the coming year(s). So how many people thought it was all marketing when Jobs released his open letter regarding DRM in Feb this year? Ho ho.

Spanning Sync

The Spanning Sync public beta is now available again after the servers took a pasting midweek. First impressions are mixed. First sync took a few minutes but sync’s after that seem to be quite fast. However it seems to be one way at the moment. Syncs from iCal to Google are working but not from Google to iCal. Still, early days and teething troubles are expected.

I should probably have mentioned that this applies to Mac iCal users only and is an app for syncing Google to iCal calendars.

Macworld Thoughts

Despite all the rumours that an iPhone would be launched, despite knowing how good Apple industrial design is, despite loving how all my Apple products work…the iPhone launch tonight still surprised me. I expected a good looking device but not that good. I expected a small device but not that small. I didn’t expect so much in such a small device either.

Key factors are the screen resolution, the multi-touch interface, it runs OS X and it’s sync features. The rest (iPod, camera etc) are all just nice extra’s for me. I’m also pleased it won’t be here until the end of the year. Gives me time to save and also get my current mobile contract out the way. Should also get some firmware updates out of the way by the time I buy. Only snag – it will be covered in fingerprints within 5 minutes!

The other big announcement was Apple TV. Specs were as expected and included a 40 Gig hard disk. However it looks no more than an iTunes sharing device and I wanted a bit more. Also there are no video cables included and while an HDMI cable is only £17 it’s another little extra. I’ll be reserving judgement until it’s on the market and the first reviews come through. I’m really interested in how extendible, if at all, the Apple TV is.

Not announced at the keynote but of most immediate interest is the new Airport Extreme. Now supporting draft N standard it should give faster speeds over a wider range. It also allows a USB printer to be shared wirelessly or a USB drive to be plugged in and shared on your network. The site also states you can plug in a USB hub and share multiple drives or printers. Sounds a good buy for £119.

No leopard, no release dates, nothing else really but looking at the iPhone you be hard pushed to see a more exciting gadget from CES this year – it even made the top three stories on BBC news. Amazing.

Macworld Predictions

The first Macworld where I’m actually a Mac owner takes place on Tuesday. So like other geeks here are my predictions for the two hour keynote.

  • iPhone – maybe. But is it a phone with iPod type functionality or is the emphasis on the iPod which has additional phone capabilities.
  • iTV. With flash disk, support of external drives via USB2, HD playback, HD downloading from iTunes, playback of media from home pc’s Macs and NAS devices, a mini OSX – the community at large could then add so much functionality over time – some of the dashboard widgets would look great on the big screen, controlled from bluetooth keyboard or Macbook/Macbook pro. We’ll also get the proper name which if it has to include ‘Mac’ will make it the MacMedia or something corny like that.
  • Updated Airport to take advantage of the pre N hardware in Macbooks. Macbook Pro’s and iMacs. Maybe driver support won’t be available until leopard though.
  • Leopard – a new look. Maybe the reason why the Apple logo was black- a new dark look to Mac OSX? Will also get release date and some previews of new’ish functionality. Built in virtualisation or is Parallels to good to compete with?
  • iLife – updates but I don’t think there will be that much of a change
  • .Mac – never thought this was much value with so much web competition doing it better and for free. Maybe this is where some Google integration will come in.

A couple of days from now we’ll know how close the list is. if I was to pick one thing off the list it’s iTV – I really want something new that works with all my media to replace XBMC which is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Ruby Monday

The inner geek has been satisfied today. Since getting the Mac I’ve had an urge to do a bit of programming. Nothing fancy but I really wanted to play around with Ruby on Rails to see just ow easy it was to get a nice web app up and running. The only problem was getting a development environment. My web host offers Ruby skeleton and I couldn’t get command line access. No worries – install it all on the Mac. Todo that meant installing MySQL also. Firstly I followed the excellent post on Hivelogic, Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. This takes you through everything you need to get Ruby up and running. This was also my first proper use of Mac terminal. I loved the following warning…

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Anyway, the install went well and I’m now at the point of starting to dabble but that will have to wait until later in the week. One final tip – there’s an excellent set of MySQL GUI tools available from the MySQL developers. Handy if your not familiar with command line MySQL.