Category: Technology

Got my Quad!

And I’m insanely delirious with joy

I’ve done the photos for a what-is-in-the-box kind of thing, but honestly it wasn’t too many frills. The CPU, keyboard, mighty mouse and a power cable, USB extension cable and a DVI->VGA adaptor.

Some initial thoughts:
This thing is heavy. It seems heavier than my dual-G5 at work, but I could be wrong. I never had to lift that out of its box.
It is sweetly quiet, it isn’t silent, but I don’t think I’ll need a box around it if I want to record in the same room.
I haven’t had a chance to install any software that will really put it through its paces performance-wise, but it is definitely speedy
I don’t get all the complaints about the mighty mouse, seems totally cool to me. May not even replace it with a trackball (my preferred interface device).

So far the best part was how insanely easy upgrading it was. I got my mac with 512 MB of RAM and the lowest size disk. Then while I waited and waited for my Quad to finally arrive, I got another 4 GB of RAM from Crucial and a 300 MB hard drive and they sat waiting for their host to appear. After booting the mac the first time to enter in my data and make sure it works, I installed all the system updates and then shut down. I skimmed the upgrade instructions in the manual and then bam! installed the extra ram and the hard drive in a couple of minutes. This is by far the easiest upgrades I’ve ever done on a system (although installing RAM into an SGI Indy was really easy), there is a ton of room in the case to work with and the system they have for mounting the hard-drives is dead simple and so insanely cool after having sliced my hand open trying to screw in a hard drive into a PC chassis.

Now, for the rest of the weekend, my goal is to get all my software loaded and really put this thing through its paces. Also, I’ve got to move stuff from my powerbook onto my quad. Looking to the future, I’m wondering about a new or additional video card. I’m wondering if there was something in between the default card which I got and the $1600 dollar card that was the other option. Also, I’m wondering if there are any other cool PCI Express cards to look out for…

I’ll post more when I’ve spent a bit more time, and I’ll post pics when I move my iPhoto library over.

iTunes 6

a humble review

I’ve been a happy iTunes user for years now. When iTunes 4.9 came out, I ditched iPodderX because even though iTunes wasn’t as powerful, it was nicely integrated. Then iTunes 5 came out with the Nano and it looked ugly and didn’t have anything of interest to me, plus there were lots of reports of bugs. So I decided to wait. Now iTunes 6 is out and I decided that the folders were worth upgrading for. And they are, mostly.

I don’t know why they decided to make their interface uglier, but they did. They didn’t make it less (or more) useful, they just made it less pleasant and I’m not sure why.

The folders for your playlists are nice, but it would be nicer if you could drag multiple playlists at once into them. It took forever to organize my playlists dragging them one at a time into folders.

The video tab is ok. I like it better than having my video in the middle of my music collection (oh wait, it still is).

I actually like having my podcasts in my iTunes library, that is the way we did it in the old days kids and it let us do nice organization of them and actually have them play after one another instead of jumping back to the main menu. With the podcasts in the main library though you really want some of the iPodderX features like playlist generation for podcasts and being able to override the genres on download.

So, am I happy that I switched to iTunes 6, not especially. Maybe eventually. If you’re on iTunes 4.9 and you don’t plan on buying video soon, I’d wait.

Apple’s big announcement

some observations…

I’m surprised that they aren’t selling the remote and Front Row software as part of iLife. The eMac has disappeared. The iMac is really being pushed at the high school/college/graduated-but-living-in-a-studio-apartment set. I was surprised that they didn’t add a TV-in to the iMac as well. I think some of the fake video iPod designs are more interesting than the actual one. Steve shouldn’t have made a big deal about the video in the iPod because he is right that not many people will be using it. The cool thing about the new iPod to me is that it is thinner and that the battery lasts longer. I don’t really need that 2.5″ video viewing experience and if I wanted it, I would use my PSP for that since it has a wide screen. Also, if this is the year of HD for Apple, why is the new iPod still firmly stuck in the 4:3 world? Selling videos and TV shows in iTunes, great, long overdue. $1.99 is a great price for a TV show, but videos shouldn’t be any more expensive than songs. Also, it sucks because a lot of record companies used to post their videos on their websites so that you could download them for free. Guess that is over. Soon we will be able to rip our DVDs to big disks just like we do for our CDs (I know a lot of people are already, but for me either the compression or the disk space needs to improve enough that you still get decent quality when you project it).

I think that the biggest disappointment for me was that there were no new Powerbooks or Powermacs introduced. I (and many people I know) are waiting for the last rev of the G4/G5 high-end machines to buy before the MacTel switch. I know that Apple’s inventory is getting low… C’mon Steve, help us out over here!

what the hell happened to Orkut?

It has become the best Portuguese language social networking service on the internet.

As someone who used to work on virtual worlds software, I’ve followed the internet communities sites with some interest. It has been interesting to see each new one emerge become the leader and then recede as another site takes it place. There was friendster then orkut now myspace. I just visited orkut again for the first time in many months to see many of the communities abandoned, without a post in the last 6 or 8 months. The only recent posts seem to be in Portuguese. Even in the Seattle group, there are events for Sao Paulo listed! The Brazilians have overrun every forum and group and claimed it as their own. I wonder if Google is planning to do anything about it, because otherwise, it is certain that Orkut will continue to decline until it isn’t worth the support costs.

Old School DVD burning

Nothing like burning bad after bad disc when the discs are pricey

Switching to burning DVD+R DLs for backup has brought me back to the old days when CD-Rs cost $8 and it could take a couple duds to get a good one.

I’ve been using the Lacie Dual Layer DVD burner with Toast 6 Titanium OS X 10.3.9 and Memorex DVD+R DL discs and an external firewire drive. I had pretty good success at first, but now I’ve just burned 4 duds in a row (two getting errors during writing the lead-out and two hanging the writing right in the middle).

It is amazing how cavalier I’d gotten about burning DVDs, having a 99% success rate had just become the usual. Compound this with the fact that DVD-Rs are now down to under a dollar each in bulk while Dual Layer discs are still up around $4 each.

I’m not sure if this is a firewire issue, a media issue or a software issue. Just like the good ol’ days.

Tivo saves television

My second technological revelation today

For one reason or another I’ve avoided getting a DVR. First it was the expense, and then it was the hassle of stringing the phone cord across my den. Then there was the politics of the Tivo company adding new advertisements while you were skipping over the others or supporting the broadcast flag or not developing the Tivo desktop for mac… I decided to go with an alternative. I was going to build a media PC around a Mac Mini, but that was an expensive proposition. Don’t even talk to me about Microsoft’s Media PCs.

Finally, I just broke down and bought the Tivo and now it is all much clearer. The beauty of Tivo isn’t time shifting or skipping over adds. The beauty of Tivo is that I no longer watch crappy TV anymore. I no longer flip around looking for something decent to watch when I am in the mood to watch TV. The side-effect of this is that I’m actually watching less TV, I think. When I’ve watched everything saved up on the Tivo, I’m not really willing to waste time looking for something else to watch. I’d rather just pop in a movie or read a book or something. This is the benefit I never understood or heard expressed this way…