Yo Michael Bay, I’m a let you finish your action scene in Transformers 2, and it was real good and what not, but THIS is the best action scene of all time! OF ALL TIME!
Challenger To Michael Bay
February 6th, 2010iPad, The iPod XL
January 28th, 2010So I was wrong.
I guess I was hoping to be surprised, for something a bit more. But it turns out to be just the BFG version of the iPod Touch. Is Apple doing a Nintendo now?
Apple iPad; WiFi top, WiFi + 3G bottom (from Apple’s gallery)
Unnaturally Large Requires Unnatural Physics Calculations
January 26th, 2010Are those breasts or jelly? Even silicone doesn’t behave like that. Beware of highly amplified boob-physics that will jiggle them individually to the slightest movement. Video may be NSFW.
Yeah, once you watched it, you can’t unwatch it.
Are there actual living human beings that pay good money to buy these games? Then again, if the sales aren’t good for the first game, there wouldn’t be enough funds to create this one. Yes, this is actually a sequel.
Question Of The Day: Are You A Robot?
January 25th, 2010
To find out if you are a robot, you must truthfully answer these questions three:
That Apple Tablet Thing
January 21st, 2010
Not my invite.
All over the interwebz, the major blogs are showing off their respective invites to the next Apple event. I have always said that Apple’s marketing is good, and I think the cryptic message really tugs the heart-strings of the Apple faithful. Seems like it’s giving a huge hint that Apple has something new to dish out, not a rehash, not a refresh, not an upgrade, but a totally new product. Version numero uno. Of course, all rumours point to some sort of tablet device. Here’s what I hope the fabled tablet to be.
Wifey’s New Machine: Dell Vostro v13
January 16th, 2010Wifey wanted a machine of her own to fulfill her computing needs. Her work notebook is a hulking 14.1″ Acer machine, which is really too heavy for her to carry to-and-from the office everyday. I suggested she get something a little smaller, without sacrificing screen real-estate and with a proper keyboard, as she wants to do her work on it too besides just web-surfing. So I guess netbooks are out.
I did a little research and it wasn’t long before I came across the Dell Vostro v13. A 13″ light ultraportable with a thin profile meant for office use. One look and I told myself, this would really make a nice notebook for her.
Image from CNET’s gallery
Impossible Really IS Nothing
January 12th, 2010At least for him.
There is really no such thing as too many talents.
My Skinny On E-Book Readers
January 11th, 2010
Image taken from some site found using Google Images.
There have a multitude of e-book readers, or e-readers, in the market today. Most notably is, of course, the Kindle by Amazon.com, probably because it came from one of the enormous-est online retailers. Besides this, there are other e-readers as well, both niche and open, like Foxit’s, Sony’s and the Nook from Barnes & Noble. Currently, all of this employ the same technology for displaying text: e-ink. Only available in black-and-white, e-ink is useful for this purpose for two reasons: supposedly readable in all lighting conditions and its extremely low power requirements, only requiring power to change. Thus, among gadgets with which we are used to having battery life in terms of hours, e-readers stand out by having battery life in terms of days. e-ink technology is also sufficient as reading text does not require any sort of animation, except when “turning the page” of the e-book.
I’m quite the gadget nerd. So why is it not appealing to me?
Before I was e-crazy, and long before I even have some sort of income to supplement my gadget lust, I was a bookworm. And in some ways, I still am. I grew up on Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Franklin Dixon, Archie comics, and, if you remember, The Bookworm Gang. I lapped up stories on the Famous Five, the Hardy Boys, the Wishing Chair and the Faraway Tree. My family wasn’t well off enough to buy all the books that I crave, except for a subsidised subscription to the Bookworm Gang, so the library card became my salvation. I have lots of cherishes glimpses of the library from my memories. Even now, going to the library is also fun, albeit for different reasons. I also love frequenting second-hand bookstores or used book sales, to grab old Archie comics or other books on the cheap. They may be torn and dog-eared, but somehow it adds a bit of character to it, like it has gone on some fantastical journey before reaching my hands. Poor aesthetics can never take away the joy of turning the page to devour its content.
Seeing, holding, turning the paper of an actual book. Smelling it. These are the properties that can never be digitized (unless maybe if this happens). Sure, not everyone indulges in books this way. Some prefer to just consume the content; how it is consumed is entirely irrelevant. I went to a book store with a friend once, and on impulse, I purchased Wolverine: Weapon X. He actually chided me, asking why I would spend over $30 buying a comic. If I wanted, he has a lot of comics on his harddrive that he could have passed on to me. But the feel of holding an A4-sized hardcover is totally different from the digital format.
However, I do recognise that some books would be more useful as e-books. Textbooks, for example, would benefit as one would be able to annotate and take notes on the e-textbook. These notes can then be indexed and searched. They can also be uploaded and shared over a network. One can organize these notes into whatever format is desired, for easy reference and collaboration, probably sync’ed using Evernote or even Microsoft OneNote. Textbooks are also typically heavy to carry around. I know. My university textbooks never leave my hostel room. In digital format, physical limitations is completely irrelevant, replaced by storage limitations instead. But since flash memory is super-cheap now, if an e-reader can accept additional storage devices, or have loads of storage built-in, this would again be a moot point. E-readers are definitely useful in that regard.
DRM is another fiasco one will have to contend with. After Amazon demonstrated its ability to Force Wipe one’s purchased e-books, my waning lust for an e-reader dimmed even more. What if a representative from Borders breaks into your house to take away that copy you’ve bought? I’ve already tolerated buying digitally-distributed games on proprietary platforms. I don’t want a book to go the same way. I don’t want a Steam-like error message, stating “servers are too busy, please read the book later”. I still haven’t found an easier method to purchase DRM-free music, relying on a friend in the US to email me Apple gift certs so I can purchase them from iTunes. It took a long time for music to go DRM-free. How long will it be for e-books? Will it ever?
For now, I am unconvinced of the merits of an e-book reader. All the models look unimpressive to me. With rumours of an impending tablet-like device, could Apple sway me? Hmm…
The Journey From Windows To OSX
December 31st, 2009It’s not as perilous as it sounds. There’s just some things that one needs to get used to. What I like is that while some Linux distros tries to emulate how Windows works, so that it makes it easier for potential Windows users to switch, OSX tells you to screw what you know, and do things this particular way instead. Foe example, the buttons to minimize and close a window is located on left instead of the right.
Since Apple controls both hardware and software, OSX feels much more integrated with the hardware. This also makes the OS much more stable, but I generally don’t think that OS stability is no longer an issue in this day and age. Those who argue that Windows is not stable at all should go back to Win9x days. Now, if Windows screw up, it’s most likely a hardware issue. It’s a by-product of trying to support the gazillions of possible hardware combinations available today. However, OSX will always be inherently more stable than Windows, simply because it is usually only installable on Apple-certified hardware, and also because of its Unix backend.
Performance on Snow Leopard is generally fine and becomes much more snappy after the RAM upgrade. Multitasking is not a problem, and is in fact much more pleasurable due to the gestures on the trackpad. For normal coding, office work, using iTunes and browsing the web, my MacBook is more than capable, though I did experience my first spinning wheel of death in Firefox once. However, this is easily rectified by “Force Quitting” the application.
I was quite surprised about applications installation in OSX. Having been subdued into thinking that simply copying an application over and expect it to work is heresy, I believed that only the magic touch of an installer is the one true way of making applications work. Even when I used Ubuntu, one needs to be familiar with Synaptics or Aptitude to download and “install” applications. In OSX however, installation is a dirty word. One does not need to perform any voodoo in order for applications to work. Applications come packaged in .app files and one can simply run it. And that’s it! There’s no “installation” or “registry”. Theoretically, a .app file can be run anywhere in the system, as long as you have permission to do so. However, there is a special folder in the dock called “Applications” which is linked to a physical location on the hard drive (/Applications) where you can simply copy all your apps into it. If you frequently use a particular app, just drag it onto the dock and a shortcut will immediately be made. Nifty!
The Dock is a very useful application launcher, which Windows 7 tried hard to emulate. You can launch apps in it (DUH!), set which app to run at login, is customizable, and is also where currently running apps are shown. A little “light” is shown at the bottom of app when it is run, regardless of whether an app is docked.
Enough about installation and launching apps. First time OSX users need to also know how the OS handles quitting an application. One must know that clicking on the red X on the window pane of an app does not quit the application, but merely closes an instance of it. The benefit to this is that the enxt time you launch the app, it will be much faster, since it is already in memory. The obvious disadvantage is that if you don’t have enough RAM, your machine memory may get overused and performance will take a huge hit if hard drive swapping comes into the picture. To properly quit an application, one can manually go to the “File” menu and choose quit, or by pressing Cmd-Q on the keyboard. Again, this takes some time getting used to as well.
Another major change is that in OSX, there is no such thing as “maximizing” a window. The “+” button switches between “user state” and “standard state” of a window, and an app developer usually sets “standard state” as stretching the window to fill the screen. This is of course subject to preference, as there are advantages and disadvantages to this.. Personally, I prefer a maximize button anyway. With OSX’s improved usability using the multi-touch trackpad, switching windows is just a swipe away. If one is working with big 1920×1200 monitors, one can really appreciate the Aero Snap feature in Windows 7, where dragging a window to the sides automatically maximizes to half the desktop, and you can just pull the window off where it will snap back to its original size. For OSX, you may have to pay US$7 for that.
Another thing I appreciate in OSX is how well the sleep works. Just to have a taste, I can start up a virtual machine in Parallels, and while the VM is running, close the lid to put my MacBook to sleep. When I open it, everything will be magically restored, including the VM state. A friend reported that he was playing Civ 4 when it went to sleep/hibernate as the battery was depleting. When he plugged it in and resumed, Civ 4 was at the exact state when OSX went to sleep mode. Now, that’s freaking impressive. I think this represents the height of what can be achieved when the OS is tightly coupled with the hardware. Fast boot up, fast shutdown, and amazing sleep capabilities. I will never shutdown this baby ever again.
This is just the impression I got of OSX after playing with a couple of weeks. OSX is as polished as any unix-based OS can be. I’m impressed with how user-friendly this OS is, and if it wasn’t for the folder nomenclature, you will be hard pressed to see its unix roots. OSX is a joy to use for both play and work. But then again, so is Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04.
MacBook Impressions
December 28th, 2009I have owned the MacBook for approximately 2 weeks now. It may not be perfect but it does come pretty close.
The MacBook looks very slender, yet feels strong to the touch. Apple listed it as being 2.13kg, but it feels much lighter than that. My old 2.4kg Dell Inspiron feels much heavier by comparison. There’s a lot of curves, which gives it a nice contour to look at. At one glance, you can tell that the build quality of the machine is about as good as the Thinkpads, or maybe even better. This is one of the two notebooks that I have encountered where lifting the screen does not require you to hold down the base. (The other is a Dell Latitude D630 if you’re curious.) The hinge does not feel too sticky nor too loose, but care must be taken not to exert too much force of course, since hinges are mechanical and prone to wear-and-tear.
The use of magnets on a computer may be an anathema to some, but it really does its job well. Instead of mechanical clutches, the screen is kept in place when it’s closed by a magnet, strong enough to hold it in place but weak enough that it is easy to open and shut the lid. The other part is the patented MagSafe power connector. I am absolutely in love with this. The power cord is held in place to the MacBook using a magnet. This achieves two things: it is very simple to mount it (just hold it near and it will latch), and if someone were to trip on it, the cord comes off safely without causing the notebook to experience death (or near-death) by falling off the table. One thing I did by accident was to affix the cord backwards. And it started charging! Of course, by doing so, you block a whole range of ports, unless you’re willing to bend the wire at an extreme angle that would lessen the lifespan quickly.
Since I just mentioned it, all the available ports are on the left (with respect to you). There’s the power port, an ethernet port, a mini-displayport out, 2 USB ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack an oval-ish hole that I have yet to figure out what it’s for. Ventilation maybe? This plethora of ports is quite dissapointing. Only 2 USB ports? A mouse and an external HDD and there’s no spare. And shipping a laptop with a niche display out port without the necessary adapters to convert to VGA, DVI or HDMI is an act only Apple can get away with. So I would recommend getting a powered USB hub and 3rd-party display adapters if you want to output to a monitor, which is totally an unnecessary expenditure. The right is the slot loading disc drive, which I discovered requires you to push the disc all the way in. I was a bit hesitant at first and expected the drive to detect it when the disc is at most halfway in. I don’t want to push it all the way in and damage the receiver mechanism.
Chiclet keyboards are always a pleasure to type on. The MacBook’s has a nice clicky feel to it and is fully featured, minus the numpad. However, while typing, I sometimes feel as though the sharp edge of the notebook is digging into my wrists. Good thing it’s not that sharp though. I could die by blood loss just by typing this post alone! The only major difference between Mac keyboards and other PC keyboards is the use of Command, Alt and Control. Another major difference is that in order to use the function keys, F1, F2, etc, one needs to hold the fn key on the keyboard. Else, the keys are for media, adjusting volume and brightness, etc. Somehow I feel that this makes more sense. I don’t really use function keys that often, and on a laptop, I usually turn the volume up and down, and adjust brightness settings a lot, because of the change in natural lighting since you go places with the laptop. I also use iTunes a lot on OSX, so the play/pause, back and next keys get hammered as well. All these differences take some time to get used to of course, and once you do, you’ll appreciate the changes for the function keys a lot.
But of course, the piece of hardware I’m most pleased with it the oversized multi-touch trackpad. I’m a huge advocate of a mouse, since most trackpads suck ass big time. I didn’t believe it when a friend touted the virtues of the trackpad. How can one NOT use a mouse? It’s much more accurate and precise! However, Apple solves this by making the trackpad extremely huge, so you wouldn’t require too many swipes of your finger to reach your intended target. A huge trackpad also means that it can accomodate all 4 fingers on it. (I’m a huge fat guy, so if my 4 fingers can fit, so can yours!) With multi-touch, this means that there are supports for 2, 3 or 4 finger gestures. I was a bit disappointed to find that 3-finger clicking is not official. I am too used to the middle click to open links in new tabs or close tabs in firefox. Luckily, this is easily solved as there are many applications that extend the the gestures of the trackpad. If you just want middle click, the aptly named Middle Click app will suffice. No, I will not Cmd-click. Why use two hands when you can use one, since this seems to be the underlying philosophy behind this awesome trackpad.
Apple reported that the battery life on a full charge can supposedly last for 7 hours, a fact that is confirmed by Anandtech. I have not really tried to last that long without charging, but it does give me peace of mind to take the power cord off and just run on battery power. One catch is that it is not user-replaceable though and requires you to send it back to Apple to be replaced for them to perform some voodoo.
I am also impressed by the Nvidia 9400m integrated graphics solution. I can run WoW perfectly in 1280×800 resolution at medium settings. All my other games, mostly indie, aren’t too bling-bling. I have yet to install games on my Windows partition in the MacBook, though I suspect it won’t suck as bad as Intel’s integrated graphic solutions.
The use of the rubberized base is another huge disappointment. The whole base is a giant rubber plate which means (1) it picks up the slightest hint of gunk easily, and (2) you can’t clean it off. After just two weeks of use, there are well-developed black marks at the four corners where the MacBook makes contact with whatever it’s placed on. I have resorted to placing it on my cloth mousepad on my desk, like that will do much good.
Since I got this MacBook from a promotion, I just got the base configuration. So I spent an additional $270 to upgrade the ram, from 2GB to 4GB, and the hard drive, from 250GB to 500GB. The ram upgrade is very worthwhile in my opinion as there is a noticeable boost in its operations.
Being my first Mac, I am deeply impressed with the hardware. Having owned/used the Dell Inspiron 640m, Dell Mini 9, Dell Latitude D630 (OMG! So many Dells!) and the Lenovo T400, and a whole host of various notebooks of friends and family, the MacBook has impressed me with its attention to the little-est detail that other manufacturers usually take for granted that its users will forgive them for not improving them. However, it’s yet to be the ultimate consumer portable computer, since issues like the rubber base and available ports is not as good as others. Despite its flaws, it’s becoming my main machine now for surfing, coding and a bit of light gaming. OSX is another impressive OS, which I’ll probably chronicle soon, if my in-built laziness hasn’t been activated.
