Category: Appley

Cold Cats and Hamsters on Wheels…

So as is becoming tradition a new update OS X has come out and I have upgraded at the absolute earliest moment possible. And as is tradition I am having one problem that no one else on the internet seems to be having… My DivX movies have no sound! It’s only in QuickTimeX but it’s still damn annoying. Other then that the hype is true… I got space back on my hard drive (and not just because of how the OS reports the space the install footprint is smaller), things do move faster (not much but enough to be noticeable), and it’s totally worth the $30.

Biggest difference… when I’m running VMware my MAC does not instantly kick into overdrive with the fans.

The gym continues… and I seem to be making incremental progress. Treadmill time at 15 minutes is officially “No Problem” at what for me is almost a full run. That is the biggest difference I have noticed, other little things like increasing weight and reps on machines and free weights so that provides a increased amount of motivation to keep with it. That and I bought a new toy that really makes life nice. I picked up a Moto S9 Stereo Bluetooth headset. Which in combination with the Budda Phone makes for a good combination of running, lifting, and biking. And the S9 works on any phone that has A2DP capabilities so pretty much anything that has any sort media capabilities that has come out in the last two years that isn’t named “iPhone” toss in Pandora and damn this is better then a iPod. Hell it’s better the the mythical iShit!

Pandora however is a whole other ball of wax. It seems that my favorite Pandora station seems to really like David Gilmour which is ok by me since it meets all of my requirements for “good music” but every 5th song is a bit much.

Finally!

So there is finally a App for the Blackberry that I can use to upload photo’s and blog posts to my wordpress type blog instead of relying on the old Blogger blog… SWEET!!!

Of course if I had a iPhone I would have had this functionality a year ago… I guess that’s the price I pay for having a Blackberry on a real network.

So it appears that hell has frozen over in more then one way….

DRM is finally going the way of the Dodo in iTunes.

That’s great!

Wait.. do you have any idea how much music I’ve bought on iTunes over the last 5 years?

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 730 tracks… between albums and singles. So yeah just a bit of music. Now at $.30 a track it works out to right around $223 and change assuming that I have to pay for every track (items bought as albums will be cheaper).

And right now at this very moment I can “upgrade” 440 tracks for $107… So that’s 60% of my music that is DRM’d right there…

I’m torn… on the one side I have a music library that I’m very happy with sound wise when I listen to it on my computer… it’s on my iPod that we start to have problems.

On the other side… I could only sync with my iPod and now I can load some sort of music on my phone so I can use that part of it’s functionality. Not to mention stream it all through my xbox and do a shoutcast server of one sort or another.

On the other hand it’s a chunk of change and lets be honest I probally have other things to spend my money on…

It’s a intersting proposition I’m pretty sure i will unlock some stuff I just don’t know if I will unlock it all.

Much thought this will take…

Turning left, it’s not just for nascar anymore…

So I’m in the final evening of a two week vacation where I have been red necking it up the entire time.  I started with Deer hunting for 10 days in Kingman, came back to Phoenix, and then did 5 days at Phoenix International Raceway to watch cars turn left.

So what is the net result of this vacation?

1. When dad says get the gun don’t stop by the tire to rack up the shell in the rifle.

2. The Blackberry Pearl is a excellent email and text machine, and in a pinch it’s a decent mobile Internet reader (just don’t expect much)

3. I would really like to goto a Sprint Cup Race and have someone other then Jimmie Johnson I don’t know maybe someone like this guy hell even this guy I’m not picky just someone other then Jimmie Johnson.

4. When I spend a hour at Best Buy and a 2 hours at Fry’s Electronics because it’s a Wendsday and just because I can it’s a sign that I may need to unplug.

5.  Additonal sign I may need to unplug… I seriously thought about buying a second wireless router (Draft 802.11N/802.11G/802.11A) just so I could have Wireless A/N in my house for the Laptop and Xbox.

6. Spending the better part of Wednesday night and Thursday morning trying to justify to my self that the second wireless router was a good idea.

Yes folks somethings just don’t change.

And if only that deer had gone left…

So there was a great disturbance in the force today….

I was at work today and suddenly at 15:17 local time I felt a wave of energy ripple through my body, like millions of people all went “WTF?” at the same time.

I came home to find a security update waiting for my Mac… but wait there was documenation on the apple website to boot!

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3216

Unless your a Mac user you have no idea how momentious this is, and if your a Mac hater you can now put documentation for security patches right next to “Right Clicking” in the catagories of things that the Mac used to not do but now does.

Shoes and bad weather….

You know this whole thing about being one of three people who believe in the Cardinals every year is, when they are on a roll people truly think they are on a roll.  And when they flop two things happen;

1. People go “Oh hey there are those lovable losers the Cardinals”!

2. People like me who talk shit about the opponent of the week end up receiving it twice as worse on Monday.

Yes it’s going to be a long Monday and if San Diego loses tomorrow night against the NY Bretts I’m really not going to be happy.  I mean it’s one thing for the Cardinals to be 0-3 to start the season it’s almost unthinkable for the Chargers to be 0-3.  Though after last years rough start they did make it to the AFC championship game where they lost to the Patriots who lost to the Dolphins this week who lost the Cardinals last week… So in some cosmic sense that probably means something but I’ve not had nearly enough beer tonight to even begin thinking about what that might be.

That is a question for minds greater then my own.

Now on to things that I might actually be able to do something about.

Last year I traded in my rather shitty Cisco / Scientific Atlanta 8300 HD Cable box for the sublime bliss that is a TiVo HD.   And through the power of the Internet and upgrades to the operating system the TiVo has been coming out with new features.  The latest of which is the ability to watch youtube videos on my 52 inch HD tv.  You know because youtube videos need to be watched in 52 inches of HD.  Another feature is the hook into the Amazon video no demand service for downloading pay content of TV shows and Movies as well as free Promo content (think pilots and season premieres) right off the top these are two things that I couldn’t do with my former cable box nor could I transfer shows to my desktop computer and then to another device to watch later.

So why am I writing about this? Well the question hit me recently downloading TV shows is pretty common now with iTunes and Amazon video on demand.  Which if I like the show I have no problem paying for a copy that I can keep and watch when I want to how I want to (though we aren’t quite to that point yet we are finally making progress).  Now what we need is a TiVo hook into Hulu.com which has tv shows for free for you to watch on the internet.  And these are shows that are meant to be watched in 52 inches of HD glory.  I will admit there are a couple of shows that I want to check out (Fringe, Doll House, Sanctuary) but I don’t want to record them on my TiVo since I feel that commits me on some level to watching them and I have enough crap being recorded on there and I’m pushing up against the space limits as it is in my TiVo Box.  So I guess my next great hope for TiVo is to figure out a way to get Streaming programs with their associated commercials (like 5 minutes per 43 minutes of program) to stream to my TiVo… I don’t want to buy them but I do want to watch them.

So now to circle this back around… NBC has their web strategy all wrong… at least for as far as I can tell.

First during the Olympics they made you download Microsoft Silverlight to watch the competition online.  Which great and all, but I don’t have that crap loaded on my either my PC or MAC and I just want to watch Michael Phelps and the Redeem Team kick some ass.

Second I was watching tonight’s Sunday Night NFL game between the Packers and Cowboys on TV and decided to check out the webcast of it.  It was alright the raw feeds from the other cameras on the field are a nice touch to bad you have to sit through a commercial to get to it, sit through the commercials during the main game broadcast and if you get to click happy on the extra cameras guess what else you get?  Yep another commercial.  So really my only incentive to watch the webcast is to make sure I see every commercial possible.

Finally, in NBC’s infinite wisdom it has taken product placement to a whole new level and for as far as I can tell the only reason any of this is going on is because NBC has no clue.  Some examples of this are Eureka on Sci-Fi (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of NBC-Universal) whose whole third season is being sponsored by Degree Deodorant (to the point that a “experimental new formula” was a key component in solving the problem of the week in one episode (my two suns).

And then there’s “Knight Rider” I expect a certain amount of cheese, but this is bordering on the absurd.  First there is the obligatory Ford product placement in the new KITT (the Mustang VS the Old Trans AM)… but wait there’s more KITT has a new mode it’s called F-150 mode!  So not only is NBC killing a tv show that I remember fondly as a child, but they are also turning the car into a transformer.  The only way it could have been better is if another one of the new modes was “Expedition Mode with environmentally friendly and carbon neutral diesel hybrid engine” oh wait I may have given away a key plot point to a future episode.

No wonder the writers striked if I had to deal with this crap I would want more money too.

Also you may have noticed that I’ve taken the approach of calling several things out by explicit name this evening… Well this is my attempt at a Google Bomb.  Maybe just maybe if I put enough pop culture geek references then maybe someone other then my 3 loyal readers will read this.  Or NBC-Universal is going to be making a call to their sister company GE Nuclear Weapons and Microwaves and “take care of the trouble maker in Phoenix”

iPod magnetic

How you know you’ve been living in Arizona for to long, 88 Degrees and no breeze is a glorious night to sit on the back porch and blog.

I picked up a new iPod this week and I’ve been in awe of this little device once again. If your a long time reader you know that I spent the better part of 2004 gushing about my at the time state of the art top of the line 15GB 3g iPod. The iPod line has come a long way in that time, I picked up the new one knowing it would be infitenly thinner and have a better screen then either of the last two. What I didn’t count on as triple the battery life for some reason I though the iPod was still stuck in the 15 to 20 hour range not in 30+ territory.

And then there’s the choice of sync it to PC or Mac… and well I chose Mac this time around for no other reason then it seemed right. 6 hours later I read the first reports of iPods with iTunes 8 BSODing windows boxes. Hmmmm I made the right choice, well that and it turns out that firewire is no longer supported as a syncing cable (which dissapoints me just a bit I always have enough firewire ports I never have enough USB ports) Oh well I will survive.

So hows the lazy man playlist maker aka Genius? Take it or leave it on iTunes… I acually like it on the iPod though.

I did a genius list off of Pink Floyd’s “High Hopes” and in no particular order here is a sampling of 5 songs….

Pearl Jam, Given to fly
Radiohead, Lucky
Rage Against the Machine, People of the sun
Smashing Pumpkins, Zero
Led Zepplin, No Quarter

It’s eclectic… I can’t say that would have Rage and that particular Smashing Pumpkins song in a play list based off of a Pink Floyd song but I’m not going to entirely disagree with them either.

So genius is nice for random playlists that you haven’t been listening to for forever and a day. My only gripe is one of my long standing gripes in that there is no easy way to find and fix corrupted files in iTunes that “skip” in my iPod. And when I say skip I mean the song skips to the next song in the list.

Also the FM adapter I picked up either sucks or is broken… more research is requried.

iShit convert no more….

one month and six days into the iPhone 2.0 era I can say that I have finally been able to shake the iShit desire and be happy with my blackberry….

What caused the change of heart? Not much but I’m going to chalk alot of it up to the blackberry being just a all around solid phone and email machine. I’ve had the blackberry for 6 months on verizon and I’ve dropped one call (and that call was in a basement where everyone else got zero bars…) truly this phone is the first one that hasn’t made me want to change phones within my normal 6 to 9 month period.

The fact that it does data just as well as it does voice is at this point just a bonus.

Now granted the iShit does have several things working against it here in Phoenix… first is the network (AT&T) which has less then stellar coverage in the region (for the record the other GSM provider T-Mobile is only moderately better) and Phoenix is a core market for Verzion (stretching back to the days of US West Cellular in the 80’s and early to mid 90’s) I’m hard pressed to go anywhere in Phoenix and not have really good coverage (actually for the record I’m hard pressed to go anywhere in the country and not have good coverage).

So why the decidedly un-iShit friendly pose all of a sudden… reports on the internet and people I know personally who have had really bad experiences with the iShit 2.0. Which is unfortunate because I truly love my Mac Book Pro and will be buying another Mac either as a home server or as a play machine in the next year or so. It’s all really kind of sad for the iShit.

But let’s all remember that that fine folks at Apple started life as a computer company and not as a celluar device company… though imagine if they had gotten in on the cell game back in the late 90’s or early 2000’s… man that would have been sweet.

Oh well.

5 fucking bars….

Little known fact… I’m a cell phone whore…

I upgrade cell phones on the order of every 12 to 18 months. Sometimes way less (6 months for a LG slider several years ago) and very rarely ever more (There was a samsung flip phone that I had for damn near 20 months and I finally just got sick of) So yes I’m a bit of a cell phone whore. I’m almost to 8 months on the current phone (a Silver Blackberry 8130) which works really really really well. The calls are always clear, it’s easy to txt message on, and I always have coverage with my wireless provider (Verizon, it’s the network don’t you know).

2nd little known fact… I’m a Apple whore…

I’m like all things Apple, Steve Jobs could shit diaherra call it the iShit and I would probally still think about buying it. And if it the “iShit” came in colors I would probally buy one, but it would just be the plain brown one because I’m too cool for a colored “iShit”

So as you can imagine I’m in a bit of a quandry since my two whorish tendancies are about about to come together again at a new lower price, bigger capacity, 3G, and a two year contract.

Did I mention I’m no longer under contract to Verizon?

As you can guess it’s been a rough couple of days… Really the only thing keeping me from getting a iPhone is the AT&T network in Phoenix. Which depending on who you talk to is either really good or really shitty.

Other factors?

The cell repeaters at work don’t do AT&T, you know thats kind of important when you spend a portion of your day in a led lined room.

Not 32GB, I will be honest if they come out with a 32GB version I will probally not be able to stop myself… unless it’s $400 in which case I will go buy a new blackberry not under contract and call it good.

I don’t want to be under contract again… yes it’s a little more expensive for the phones. I do like having the option to leave at any time merely because I feel like it.

Everyone at work uses Verizon… this shouldn’t matter but it does I use just as many in calling minutes as I do anytime minutes. If I switched I would have to doubly my minutes at a minimum

And so the iShit whore stays put for the time being and hopes that the black berry touch screen thing turns out to be a good phone and email machine… because lets be honest the only thing I care about it phone call quality and txt messaging.

And with out of the ashes rose a “Pegasus”

So when I got home from hunting I came home to a desktop rig that would not turn on, after 3 hours of dicking with it I still couldn’t get it to post. This is the 5th time this year it’s done something like this to me and 3rd time since August.

So I did what any sane normal person would do, I ordered the parts for a new PC.

So 3 days and a bit of money later I now have a desktop rig and laptop rig that are truly on par with each other in almost all aspects except for one.

After screwing with Vista for 3 days to finally get it where I want it I am no longer of the opinion that those Mac vs PC commercials were were advertisments… THEY WERE WARNINGS!

Vista vs MAC OS X, hands down no contest MAC OS wins and I’m not saying that just because I have special place in my heart for Unix based operating systems either. It truly is the better OS, except for that whole playing games thing… Steve Jobs, hell Fake Steve Jobs even, if your reading this GAMES ARE NOT BAD THEY ARE GOOD!

So yeah I’m on Vista but it is nice to have a desktop rig that can play all of my games again. I guess that is why I bought a MAC so I could do work on it and not be bothered with all of the games.

Two final thoughts…

1. I know a few of you (Clint) are probally kind of curios as to what I got for a rig, The general specs are a…. Intel E6850, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD (main system drive), 8800 GTS 320MB Video Card.

2. I also upgraded from Tiger to Lepoard on the Mac over the weekend… I found the icon for a PC file share server to be how you say… Intersting : )