Well its almost a happy new year as today is the last day of 2006, but it really isn’t 2007 yet because well its not the 1st of Jan!

Christmas and the general new year period happens to be a really good time of the year for good films on tv. I’ve recently warched some really funny programs and films on the old tellybox.

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2006 was on at least a few times, but is incredibly funny, especially with David Walliams, Russel Brand, Jonathan Ross and Rob Brydon. Worth a watch as its on again

As usual, Never Mind The Buzzcocks Christmas special was on, which hilariously as usual was very entertaining viewing, just like the regular series. You may even be able to find it on the old net somewhere…

Another few films that I have recently seen which have been exceptionally well made include:-

The Pianist, a Roman Polanski film about a Polish pianist surviving through the Holocaust in Warsaw despite his Jewish background and Nazi occupation of the country. Very moving but brilliantly made… You can currently pick it up for around £3 at HMV.

City Of God, a Brazilian film about the hoods and gangs in Rio. Absolutely fascinating and very well worth seeing… It was on TV recently, but can be bought at various places for arounf £5.

Man, I love cheap DVDs and CDs!

Merry Christmas to all!

And to all a goodnight…

AppleInsider | Apple Retail plans second Scotland location for 2007

I just read this article on AppleInsider and was amazed to find out that finally Apple was finally going to build or create a retail store in Edinburgh.

Originally, a couple months ago when I found out that they were going to move to Glasgow I was so gutted as anything that appears in Glasgow first rarely moves to Edinburgh unless it is very successful. Knowing that the Apple store would be fairly successful I would have expected it to finally move to Edinburgh, but not in the near future at all! Now though, the fact that Apple has scoped out a place on Princes Street in Edinburgh, the main street, there will be no more relying on Scotsys, the fairly useless Apple authorised reseller in Scotland, which could be described in a word as awful!

Now I really can’t wait at all! Just need to find out where it will be…

Edit 7/1/07: A Scottish paper had a story about the Edinburgh Apple Store.

Well as I may have mentioned in earlier posts I did change the front page or the entry page, to my site. I’m using the nice same Java-script colour changing or rotating code as before except I’ve slowed it down… to make it slightly less headache inducing :-). Otherwise the only difference is that there is a recent posts section which you may even be reading from now! This concept had been planned for a while now, its just that now has been the only time where I have been bothered to integrate it into the site, it took a fair amount you know!

Anyway, I should be back soon with a new addition to the Browser Wars article.

Just noticed that while editing my site a bit, the new Photoshop Icon could quite easily be the symbol for an element in the periodic table. I know it isn’t, but there is Pt which is platinum and Pb which is lead. So why not Ps?

By changing my site I meant altering the style sheet slightly so it didn’t look so awful in single post view and making the header rotate between various images, mainly art from Radiohead or Stanley Donwood.

Well seeing as the Photoshop CS3 beta is upon us, I thought that I should try it out as I’m a happy Intel Mac user who has been slightly without Photoshop (or a fast Photoshop at least for ages). After downloading it and doing the various registration steps, I started it up. First things first, damn its fast. It loads in basically no time at all. It has barely any dialog boxes saying loading or please wait and it has a very nice new simple icon. Tbh, I quite like the new icon, so I’m not going to complain at all. At least it means that there is a new version to mess around with at speed and have fun over the holidays, which have just commenced!

On an other note, there is a very groovy video comparing Vista to Mac OS X on the NYT site which points out once and for all that that are 100% completely different OSes.

Enjoy!

Well I really shold be continuing a trend I started a week and 3 days ago by continuing the “Browser Wars” articles about which browser is better, but I found something even better!

www.potionfactory.com

This is an independant Mac developer team of two switchers that makes really really nice perfectionist apps like Tangerine, a bpm/tempo analyser for iTunes that makes tempos based on the beat and intensity of the song. Although this idea has been used before, I’ve never seen it displayed in such a great way, the attention to detail with the album covers different lengths to represent the song lengths which pop up when you roll your mouse over them are intricate to say the least. Their site is equally great, so I highly recommend you check them out. They really should be nominated for an Apple Design Award!

Technorati Profile

This is only here because for some reason I just realised that my Technorati.com link to the blog wasn’t working since I’ve changed it to /index.php instead of just www.mohoyt.com.

But now, I’ve finally put it in its own subfolder and the new address is www.mohoyt.com/blog

Enjoy

Well, here is a delicate topic… Web browser of choice.

Personally, I use the internet a lot. Apparently its quite popular at the moment, but I don’t have to tell you that!

What is a big dilemma for some people is their choice of web browser. On a Mac, there is a fair choice, and some are far better than others, but in the end its a personal choice… The best few I will outline for the next few posts! Starting with Safari…

Safari is the default Mac internet browser. Honestly though, its really really good! It may not load some pages, it may screw up the rendering of other pages, and may be slow at times but it is a very useful and versatile browser. Compare it to the default offerings given with other OSes, Windows you get IE which is dire and full of holes waiting to be exploited or patched and it is fairly dated! With Linux distributions you generally get Firefox which is a very good browser (mentioned later).

The best thing about Safari is its expandibility, for me, it basically does everything. Using plugins I can get it to a stage where other browsers just dream of! For example, in Safari I have a plugin called Saft which has such great features as resuming the page that you were looking at when you quit and having Crash Protection which restores all of you tabs and Shortcuts which makes configurable searches available through the address bar. I also use Inquisitor, which although is in beta at the moment, is too amazing as it gives you a Spotlight interface to Google (or other sites) searches with the search bar. There is even an online version to this at www.inquisitorx.com/beta/ which I recommend you check out! I also use SafariStand which isn’t quite as useful, but it has a nice searchable history feature and a viusal tabs bar, similar to some other browsers…
But overall, I think Safari is very expandable, especially seeing as there is a plugin/customization site dedicated to it, pimpmysafari.com. Other great things about Safari that I really miss with other browsers is the built in RSS reader that displays all of the news feeds on a searchable page that can be sorted various ways etc, this coupled with the no. of new items in a feed appearing in the bookmarks bar, even when the feeds are in a folder is just an ingenious idea and is very helpful, especially when you have many feeds of different categories. And then there are the tabs, which work really well, but tabs are becoming such a popular thing now-a-days that they really aren’t too special! Even simple things like having the backspace/delete button for going back is great, seeing as it doesn’t seem to exist in Firefox, as is the Private browsing feature, which prevents malicious sites from dumping cookies on you. And on top of all this you have the Debug menu which produces many colourful tools for developers and has the options to render a page as if you were Firefox or IE and if that doesn’t work, there’s a menu item that says “Open current page with…” which gives a list of your other browsers. It’s also based on Apple’s own webkit, which may be buggy in some respects, but it certainly isn’t Microsoft so you won’t have to rely on any other slow company to release update for it…
The main downsides with Safari are that although it doesn’t work with every single page perfectly, it will work with 97% of them. It is also pretty slow to load when you have lots of plugins, but I think the compromise is worth it. I’ve heard people complaining that there is no cookie management support, but I’m fairly sure that there is a plugin for that. And there is no way to configure proxies within the program itself (like in Firefox) so it may be less useful in restricted situations.