Geek Swagger.
Archive for January, 2008
MacHeist?
Jan 31st
Alright in the past couple weeks I've heard about MacHeist a lot. If you don't know what it is, it's basically a package of Mac applications for roughly the price of what one of the applications would cost. It's a heist because you're getting it so cheap it's like stealing it! Excellent. Anyways, I don't really mess with my Mac at all with programs I pay for, I just don't use it enough to warrant that plus you can find freeware to do almost anything you need, but I'm thinking about trying out MacHeist.
There have been two versions of MacHeist, each with varying different applications, but both could be acquired for a mere $49. Some have argued that this is bad for the developers because they're making so little from the deal, but you can also say the brand awareness gained is worth it. I think it's perfect for a user like me that isn't really tied to any of these highly-proclaimed apps because I haven't been using my Mac long enough nor do I rely on it as much as most serious Mac users have. Hopefully if I do try out MacHeist (it would have to be MacHeist III, since the second MacHeist offer just ended) it will get me more interested in using the Mac.
The one application that interested me the most was Cha-Cing, an OSX money manager that is quoted as being "fun to use!" I need a program like this, and if I could give myself a genuine reason to boot into OS X a little more frequently then all the better. There are some other applications that are interesting like Snapz Pro which lets you do screencasts, but how often do I need to do an OS X screencast? I can't remember ever needing to do that, and even if I did there has to be a freeware application out there that does the same thing.
Now that I'm typing this I have to ask the question, why not just buy Cha-Ching, and leave it there? The hope is that one or more of the other applications would do something so great that I'd be driven to use it. Really, I'm just looking for a great reason to invest in some of the hard-working Mac developer's products in order to keep myself tied to OS X. I've searched sites like Digg for apps that every OS X user must have, but for the most part they're applications whose functionality can already be obtained as easily on a different platform or they're little throw-away programs like alarm clocks and so on. Yes, the alarm clock is slightly prettier than the free one I already have and never find a reason to use. Amazing.
Pretty depressing post, eh? OS X is great! Go give it a shot! Speaking of operating systems though, in the process of writing this post I burned an image of gOS to a disc so I'm going to go ahead and try that out. Expect a post about it sometime next week. I don't have much of a use for gOS but it looks pretty sweet. We shall see.
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Turnaround
Jan 29th
At the beginning of January it finally happened - my Xbox 360 decided it was time to . It was a launch 360, I got it in December after preordering it in August (the 360 in November '05) and despite all of the buzz about the problems everyone else was having with their 360's getting the red ring of death, I started to think mine was immune. Then, after placing my 360 side-by-side with my Playstation 3, within a week the 360's graphics processor . I first noticed problems playing Call of Duty 4 with immense amounts of artifacts on the screen, and then the next day I saw the red ring and the 360 threw up a nice little critical hardware failure message.
I'm assuming that the restricted heat flow caused by the 360 being side-by-side with the PS3 plus the heat that the PS3 put off (despite me never running them both at the same time) caused the failure. If that's the true cause or not it's hard to tell, but the point is I soon found myself on the phone with 1-800-4MYXBOX, and they quickly directed me to so I could file my request for repair digitally. I went ahead and did so and they sent me a box. I got the box about a week and a half later, sent in my 360, and just got it back on Monday (1/28). It took them roughly a month to send me a box, fix my 360, and send it back to me. Pretty rough considering that when my Macbook had to be repaired I had it back within a week, including box shipping times. I understand that Microsoft is swamped with these repairs, but still that's a pretty long turnaround time.
Anyways, I'm happy to have it back. I fired it up and tried out the demo for . Pretty good game, I think I'll have to pick it up. I've since separated my consoles, leaving the PS3 on a separate stand near the entertainment center, so hopefully I won't have to worry about repairs anymore. I tell you what though, between December's Xbox Live difficulties and now this repair situation I've become a little frustrated at Microsoft. The best part about the whole deal is that Microsoft offered up a as compensation for the Xbox Live downtime last month, but the offer ended on Sunday. The day before I got my 360 back. Despite the game in question (Undertow) not exactly garnering critical acclaim, I still would have liked to play it. So it goes. Now I get a chance to invest some more time into Assassin's Creed, plus give Mass Effect a shot. I'm pumped for CoD4's multiplayer too. =)
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SeeqPod
Jan 24th
I wasn't really sure what to call this post so I just called it what made sense. There's a somewhat new site, mostly just new to me, that I've been using a lot lately. It's called . If you haven't heard about SeeqPod it's basically a music search engine with one bonus - you can listen to what you search for. The SeeqPod engine crawls the web to find hosted music (.mp3, .mov, .wav, basically any audio file you can think of) and then lets you add it to a playlist for playback right inside your browser. It's really great for that one-off song that you don't really like enough to (because we all BUY our music, right?) but you want to give a quick listen.
Just a while ago I had the pleasure of getting a new machine up and running, and because I obviously didn't have any music on the box while I was setting it up I used SeeqPod almost exclusively. I typed in a band I wanted to listen to, chose "add all" beside the list of songs the SeeqPod found, and I instantly had a playlist of songs streaming to my machine. Not bad. Also another nice thing (depending on how you look at it) is that because SeeqPod only crawls the internet and thus relies solely on what people have hosted, chances are you won't fine the entire catalog from an artist. The nice thing about that is that you'll probably get most of the popular songs from an artist across their entire discography. So for example, if I type in "" I get a list of Porcupine Tree's classic songs across all of their albums ( and just to name a few) so I have a neat little playlist right off the bat. Doing the same thing in my music collection means scanning through every single album's folder, finding the songs I really like, then adding them to a playlist for whatever player I'm using. Needless to say it can take a while. "But what about playlists?!" you say, "at least when I put together a playlist on my computer I can save it and reuse it later!" I agree, and that's a nice feature.
Savable playlists is such a nice feature that SeeqPod has them. Once you've put together a playlist you can save it for reuse later, share it with friends, or even embed it on your site like so:
It's a pretty nice site but I almost wish it was kept "underground." I'm concerned that as SeeqPod gets more attention they might have some legal problems on their hands, but until then give it a shot and remember to use it only for music you already own (*wink* *wink*). Seriously though, I think it's important that artists get paid for what they give us so I'm not a huge supporter of music piracy. If you find a new artist through SeeqPod do the right thing and buy their album to ensure they're able to make more music down the road. 
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Gaming rigs
Jan 22nd
It's getting to be about that time in my current desktop computer's lifecycle where I can start to tell that I need to upgrade. I've had the machine for 2 years, I built it back then and so far it's been a pretty well-behaved box. No real problems besides one dead stick of RAM, which compared to problems I've had in the past is quite manageable. Still, newer games are becoming more sluggish and there are some that I don't dare to run at all (, ) so I find my browser wandering towards and more frequently, building the machine in my head as I go. The only problem is that it's kind of difficult to tell how much power I need without going overkill and spending 3 or 4 thousand dollars.
Now I love building computers more than your average Joe, of that there can be no doubt, but still I sort of dread the process. You spend all this money and then the process of making it all work is dropped in your lap. You hope there's no problems, and generally there are none, but it's the prospect of something going wrong and the hassle involved with troubleshooting, returning incompatible hardware, ordering new hardware and so on that kind of wears on my mind. Up until recently my argument was "Well I can spend a bunch of time and money building a new gaming PC or I can just get a PS3 with no worries involved." Now that I have the PS3 there'll be no more of that!
Because I wasn't too interested in messing around with building it myself I started pricing retail gaming machines - particularly HP's and rigs. After configuring a model comparable to what I would be happy with it's hard to imagine getting away with a new rig for less than $3,000. Still, there's the added bonus of just getting the new machine and being done with it...no hassle involved. I was set on purchasing one of these boxes (leaning more towards the Blackbird) but then I heard about .
In it, the developers of Crysis () show that it's 100% possible to build a machine that will run Crysis, the most demanding game out right now, on high settings for only $900. I'm sure they posted this to show that it was in fact possible to play Crysis without spending thousands of thousands of dollars, and it sort of convinced me. Although building a machine can sometimes be a hassle, I'd rather put $900 into one and deal with building it myself then spend over $3,000 just for convenience. So that's the plan. I'm glad to see that Crytek had the guts to stand up and show everyone that you CAN play their product without taking out a loan. Hit the video to catch an example.
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The aftermath
Jan 18th
Tuesday was the Macworld keynote (which I previously posted about) so I figured I'd do a real quick rundown of the new things that were announced. First off in order to support Leopard's Time Machine feature he announced the Time Capsule. If you don't know what Time Machine is, it's basically a backup program that comes with OS X Leopard that writes files to an external drive. What if you're using a laptop though? Kind of a hassle to constantly be hooking up your laptop to the external drive. Basically what the Time Capsule is, is a 500GB or 1TB external drive that uses AirPort Extreme to backup with Time Machine wirelessly. It works with multiple Macs too, so you could backup your Macbook, iMac, etc. all to one device. The 500 gigabyte model will cost $299 and the 1TB $499...prices that are pretty steep just so you can properly use a feature that was so highly regarded in the first place. How many people are going to want to drop $500 on a hard drive just so they can use a backup program with a little less hassle?
Next up comes the iPhone. I was hoping for a couple of things for the iPhone...first off I was hoping to see an upgrade. The iPhone is still only available in 4 and 8 gigabyte models which is fairly anemic. Secondly I was hoping that Apple would finally cave and announce that the dev kit for the iPhone would be available. Neither of these things happened. First Jobs let us know that the dev kit will be out in February, so all of the people who are jailbreaking their iPhones to get third party apps running only have another month to do the same thing without the risk of bricking the phone. He also announced some new applications for the iPhone that would be available as an update starting today. First of all the maps application has been revamped allowing for you to find yourself relative to certain locations. This is a feature people have wanted for a while since the iPhone doesn't include GPS. Next up are weblclips which allow you to make mini-applications sometimes referred to as widgets to display on the iPhone's home screen. For instance, say there's a certain area on a website that you're always looking at. For example if you're on CNN.com just for the part of the webpage that shows headlines. You can now make an application that monitors that particular area of the page so you can view it without having to load the whole website. Think of webclips like bookmarks or favorites in your web browser except for a specific part of the website. This has been implemented in OS X for a while but the jump to a mobile platform is logical. Finally there's the ability to SMS with multiple people...because I'm not an iPhone owner I'm not sure if this a big deal but it might be. Overall the webclips is cool and the maps is useful but I felt underwhelmed by the iPhone's update. The new applications mentioned above plus a price drop or hardware revision would have been is sort of what I expected. Like I said though I'm not an iPhone user so I'm not exactly crushed either way.
The iPod Touch received a similar update, 5 new applications, but it costs $20. The $20 price is kind of lame, it's such a small price and you'd think they would just give it away free. Still, if you buy a new iPod Touch you get it free. The included apps are Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes, and Weather. Basically a bunch of applications that are included in the iPhone already and have now been adapted for the iPhone. Not exactly breakthrough stuff here though it's a nice addition - at least Apple is recognizing that the iPod Touch is predominately a wireless device akin to a PDA, not just a media player. Next up on the list is iTunes, after all what's an iPod without iTunes? Apple is pushing their movie distribution model by starting up a rental service through iTunes. The rentals will be $2.99 for backed titles and $3.99 for new releases. You'll be able to get them 30 days after the DVD releases, and the playback starts automatically when the download starts. Also, as with other digital movie distribution services, you have a set time limit to watch a movie once you've downloaded it. If you don't start a movie's playback 30 days after you originally downloaded it you'll lose it. Also once you DO start watching the movie you have to finish watching it 24 hours later otherwise you'll lose the movie. Along with this a new revised Apple TV has been announced that does not require a computer hookup. This is proof that Apple is still trying to make the push into the living room despite concerns that the Apple TV might be killed off after a mediocre performance. The Apple TV upgrade was probably the surprise of the show for me, I really expected them to kill off the Apple TV especially if they introduced a new laptop to their product line. Remember Jobs generally likes to only have a small amount of products that all fit particular needs. That's where the Macbook Air comes in.
Alright so you should have heard about the Macbook Air by now...basically it's a Macbook but tiny. Really tiny. Thin enough to fit inside an envelope but with a 13.3" widescreen (same size as the Macbook product line). The Macbook Air weighs only 3 pounds and comes with a limited feature set (1 USB port, no disc drive, 64 gigabyte solid-state hard drive or 80 gigabyte hard disk drive) but it's one sleek machine. It runs Leopard and can fit basically anywhere. The only caveat really is the cost - $1799. That's $500 more than my Macbook was when I bought it a year ago for a machine that isn't nearly as powerful. I understand that the added portability is a great benefit to some people, but the Macbook is already smaller than most laptops out there. I'm just not sure if having this uber thin machine is really an added benefit aside from the wow factor. There's also some touch controls on the trackpad, gestures like pinch to manipulate windows or pictures and swipe to navigate through pages. The gestures seem a little tacked on though, and the animations shown when using them (for example when increasing an image's size with the pinch gesture) sort of ratchets up between levels of size instead of flowing seamlessly like it does on the iPhone. It's a nice touch but again I don't know how much use it'll get on a laptop. It's necessary on the iPhone but maybe not so much for a machine with a mouse pointer. I could be wrong though.
So there you have it, four massive paragraphs for four new "ho-hum" announcements from Apple. I don't know if I'm just getting over the hype that surrounds these events or what but I wasn't really impressed this time around. Yes, we got the ultra-thin laptop but it's not a tablet. I can't think of a use for it personally, because it's not powerful for anything very useful (to me, anyways) and it's so expensive that I'd rather buy a development machine or build a new PC. The iTunes movie rentals might be great for someone who already invested $200 into an Apple TV but that's not me. The iPod/iPhone updates were nominal to non-owners and didn't really make me feel like I was missing out by not owning one. So that's that, see you at WWDC.
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Yeah, about that…
Jan 16th
I just wanted to make a quick update to say that tomorrow's post will probably be late if it's posted at all. I'm having internet issues but it's all written up, it's just on my home machine where the internet is messed up. I'm considering bringing it to campus tomorrow on a thumbdrive so I can upload it, we'll see. In case you were wondering the post was going to be my wrap up of Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld on Tuesday. If you're really desperate you can catch the coverage sans my commentary.
And I just got back to the schedule too! 
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Canibus - Spartibus
CES ’08 – Excitement Ensues
Jan 15th
Alrighty so yet again it's January of the new year and what does that mean? It's time for the of course! CES has been around for a long time and in case you don't know what it is, it's basically a trade show for all things electronic. In recent years it has begun to revolve around display technology, and the like, and although you get to see a lot of new tech it's sort of irrelevant because most of what is shown is a long way off. It's assumed that what is shown will be available by the end of the year but that's almost never the case. So, sure you can see cool things but in most cases you won't actually get a chance to put your hands on any of it for a year at the very least.
Still, there are a couple of notable things about this year's CES. First off, it was last time doing the because he'll soon be stepping down as CEO of Microsoft. This is truly the end of an era. As a result of that they'd obviously want to make a massive announcement, right? Really wow the media and go out with a bang? Well...not quite. There was a lot of speculation heading into CES particularly from the gaming community. A rumor was leaked that a new skew of the Xbox 360, tentatively called the at the time, was going to be announced at CES. This new version of the 360 bundle would include an HD-DVD drive, have a 320GB hard drive, and finally work as an player. Microsoft had been talking the Xbox 360 up as a great IPTV box (it was mentioned at last year's CES for example) so most of this made sense - but it never came. It was reasoned that this was the year and that the recent might have been a result of Microsoft working on integrating IPTV, but that turned out to be wishful thinking.
There was however a with a bunch of celebrities in it parodying Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft. The video was funny and some people even went out on a limb by saying it made Bill but overall the presentation was lacking any excitement. Thank you, Bill. It's been fun. As Ballmer said - we'll see you at the board meeting tomorrow. As far as more significant news goes there was one very important announcement from the Blu-Ray camp. Five days before CES began Warner Bros. came out and announced that they would be in the ongoing HD format wars. A lot of people are saying this is the death knell for HD-DVD as Blu-Ray's list of titles now contains 75% of the best-selling DVDs out there. It seems that the format war might finally be coming to a close. As I , I'm feeling a lot better that I have that (read: ) sitting in my entertainment center. =)
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Gear up for Macworld
Jan 10th
Alright so is just around the corner already and there's been as to what will be announced. Last year we got the first preview of the iPhone, will there be anything big like that this year? It's difficult to say. Most enthusiasts are sure that a new will be debuted - something smaller than the Macbooks running a and no optical disc drive in order to save space. It seems that Apple would offer an external drive to remedy this problem. Whether it' will be touch enabled (perhaps the Mac Touch?) or will have a keyboard is hard to say. I'm personally interested in a nice tablet sized machine a little smaller than the current Macbook's screen with no keyboard that is completely touch controlled. At the same time it seems like Apple has done a lot with their touch technology lately and I'm not sure if they'd want to expand the line so quickly. Obviously releasing something like this would eventually cut into sales of the and the , not to mention move focus away from their best selling laptop so far in the .
Other users assume that we'll finally see an upgrade to the iPhone with and (hopefully) larger storage sizes. The same goes for the iPod Touch (minus the 3G). Software updates are probably negligible... and have both been updated recently so I wouldn't expect anything new there. The bulk of the focus is around this new ultra-portable that is supposed to be announced. For a long time Apple (read Steve Jobs) has been against tablet PC's but maybe with the touch screen interface it might just happen. I don't know how interested in it I would be because it is assumed that the main pull for a device like that would be that it could easily interface with other Apple products (iPods, Macs, and so on) and if I bought one it would be to replace or supplement the Macbook that I currently own. It's basically just a wait and see game. I would love for Apple to enhance the iPod Touch with a larger capacity though and maybe see some products get price drops but other than that I'm not sure about the event. It's hard to top last year's iPhone announcement (which was arguably the tech story of the year, completely eclipsing CES at the time).
As far as concrete predictions I'd say to expect a new small laptop. Not necessarily an ultra-portable addition, but at least an update to the look and feel of the Macbook. I only say that because it makes sense - the Macbook is one of the longest running products Apple has left unchanged so it's due for an upgrade. Whether the Macbook becomes the ultra-portable everyone is buzzing about is another thing completely. I don't think Apple would want to add an additional laptop product to their line (Steve Jobs likes to have only 1 or 2 products to serve every need instead of having 15 different skews of laptops and so on). For that reason I think it will either be one or the other - either the current Macbook will become the ultra-portable and that will represent the small scale of their product line or the Macbook will just be made a bit smaller and given a new look and that will be Apple's new laptop product. Other than that there will be the usual price drops and product feature enhancements that most Apple events see. Capacities will increase, batteries will last longer, and prices will drop. Beyond that who knows.
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Back at it
Jan 8th
Well it's been a long awesome Winter break and unfortunately I neglected the blog for a couple weeks so it's time to start back up. Hope everyone had a great holiday, I certainly did. I got to spend a lot of time with friends and family and basically, just relax. Over the break my gaming repertoire was increased and now my Xbox 360 is sitting next to a . I've been wanting a PS3 for a while so to finally have one is pretty sweet. Because I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about my gaming habits I figured I'd blog a bit about my experiences setting up and using the PS3. I've read and seen a lot about the process and a lot of the time it seems that people thought it was difficult. I disagree. There are some problems but overall getting the PS3 up and running was smooth sailing.
There is, of course, the usual stuff - power connector, ethernet adapter, video hookups. In this case there is a bit of a problem. For some reason (despite including a player and also being advertised as an HD games and media machine) the PS3 only comes with . The 360 at least comes with which, looking back on it, is pretty nice. One thing the PS3 does have that the 360 premium bundle didn't at the time I bought one is an HDMI port. So the day after Christmas I picked up an HDMI cable and now my PS3 is running in true HD. It looks great. If for this reason alone, that is to say if the PS3 wasn't a Blu-Ray player, it would be my default machine for watching movies and the like. I can tell even on normal DVDs that the quality is much improved. The Blu-Ray player is nice, I only have one movie (Spiderman 3 - it came with the PS3) so I can't really give my full opinion yet. It's definitely better looking than your standard DVD but it's not an unbelievable boost in quality from what I can tell so far. I only watched about 15 minutes of Spiderman though so I could be wrong. I need to sit down and watch the whole thing sometime. I also signed up for Blu-Ray's deal they're offering with the purchase of a new Blu-Ray player. All you have to do is clip the UPC barcode off of your player's box, select the 5 movies you want from the ones they offer, and mail the form with receipt and UPC into them. I'm sure the turnaround for the free discs is slow but hey, you can't argue with free.
As part of the intial setup for the PS3 you're asked to setup an initial user for the PS3 itself (much like setting up a user in your computer's operating system when you first install it) plus it checks to see if you have an internet connection and, if so, lets you sign up for Sony's . PSN is their online offering that's similar to the Xbox 360's . You can play online, download games and movies, and manage a friends list. Oh by the way, it's also free. I went ahead and signed up for it right away and again, the process was smooth. When signing up you're basically accessing a web page from the PS3 so it's identical to filling out a form online. You can connect a keyboard and mouse to the PS3's USB ports and fill it out or just use the controller. The PS3 uses a nice auto-complete feature for which guesses what you're trying to type. So, for instance, if I enter "Pla" there's a list to the right of the on-screen keyboard with suggestions of which word I'm actually trying to enter. One of them might be "Playstation," so I go click on that and it's entered for me. This system is faster than the 360's data entry so I was pretty pleased. Next you charge up the controller with the (again this trumps the 360's controller which takes batteries, or is charged automatically with a separate $20 charging cable.
On to the games. I only have one so far but it's pretty great. is probably the platformer of the year for good reason. The other games in the Ratchet series have always been good so the fact that Tools of Destruction delivers is no surprise. I've also tried some demos for other games (, , ) and I think Uncharted: Drake's Fortune will be my next purchase. It's a really great game that hasn't been getting much hype. I also need to pick up an online game, probably (which comes with a headset for online play). So those are probably my next purchase. Overall the experience has been nice, and it almost reminds me of an Apple product in ways that things sort of just work. When I first booted my PS3 it had already detected my network media share so I was able to listen to tunes while I was getting everything going. That plus it's a beast of a machine with a large capacity default hard drive and very few of these proprietary costs like you get with the 360. Especially considering that for about a week and a half around Christmas for some unexplained reason, the service (and the console, practically) was unusable for this amount of time because a service that - all of that made the PS3 look like a good addition to my rig.
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