Recently, being on holiday and all, I had the time to upgrade an old Powerbook G4. One of those 12″ ones, that were basically netbooks before the whole craze started. It was running some old old version on 10.3, which was probably pretty state of the art in those days, and still isn’t that bad. But it’s just plain crazy with no Spotlight and trackpad gestures (partly a hardware thing…). A little bit crazy how much I use some of these features…

But anyway, as it was a PowerPC machine (G4 1GHz – retro times indeed!) the furthest I could upgrade it was Leopard, which was pretty good. And going back to using it temporarily doesn’t seem that bad at all, in fact it’s pretty similar to Snow Leopard (obviously), except a little slower. Not bad for an old Powerbook! I thought it was best to do a massive erase (sadly not a 35 pass erase – however fun it looked) and install of the system, which meant that all the applications went walkies. But one thing that I figured out, that might be of use to some people (and this is actually the crux of this post) is that when installing iLife, I could do it (via Pacifist of course) with a new Intel MacBook Pro DVD. Crazy huh? For all the hype of not having Snow Leopard run on PPC machines, the included versions of iLife on the DVD are Universal Binary. That’s gonna change soon I guess. But anyway, that’s what I found out, and I was pretty happy that it worked. Would have been pretty irritating if it didn’t work as I don’t have a clue where to get a PPC iLife ’09 other than the actual standalone product…

But all is good, and all works well so far. Mission accomplished.

À bientôt

Just adding a quick note as I head down to Cambridge to start Easter term of my first year. So far, it’s been phenomenal, the course, while being quite hard (and the workload just fairly intense at points), is excellent and thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve had the chance (and still have it from what I see) to try all aspects of engineering with all sorts of different practicals and labs and exercises, including some that have been tedious, and others that have been incredibly useful and even then not necessarily directly engineering related. But alas, finally, there are exams coming up. A mere 12 hours so I recall. So fun times ahead! (On a sidenote, it felt like I was about to come to a conclusion in that previous paragraph, but clearly it was going nowhere fast so I just ended it… oh well!)

I got one of those new MacBooks too recently. The top spec 13″ one thru Apple Refurb online. I was so contemplating getting a Pro, but just the general increase in weight and size wasn’t really worth it for me. However that may sound a little hypocritical as I was the one carrying a 20″ iMac back and forth from Cambridge at the end of each term. Hmmm. Anyway, the 13″ ones are cheaper and basically as fast. The only difference being the graphics card and maybe a little processor GHz… and it’s nowhere like the huge difference between the last (plastic) MacBooks and the Pros. At least they pretty much have a graphics card now…

Anyway as I said around this time last year, I intended on pimping/maxing the MacBook out just to make it that little bit faster and more usable (I’m not saying they aren’t in any way!), so I went ahead and got a 500GB hard disk (the 9.5mm 2.5″ form factor ones are clearly in production these days as opposed to last year) and 4GB of RAM. However buying the RAM kinda seemed a little pointless when I received the machine as Apple had made a little mistake and given me 4GB of Hynix RAM with the MacBook instead of the prescribed 2GB. So back to Crucial the extra RAM went, and more money for me (so I shouldn’t complain!). Anyhoo, for an overall cost of about £1000, I managed to get a maxed (sic?) out MacBook. Good times…

I just need to get a nice case now, so my volume of crumpler searches on eBay have risen rather spectacularly. Hopefully I’ll pick up something pretty soon. Oh, and they’re really pretty cheap on there too. Maybe not the skins (I believe the Crumpler name is “The Gimp”) – they’re a little pricier for what they are (or at least what I think they are) and there’s an under-abundance of 13″ ones (15″ owners rejoice however). Though you could read into this in a different way with the whole supply and demand concept such that 15″ computers are clearly not the thing, but then again, who am I to judge. However I will keep you informed. Totally…

Other interesting things that I think that I should mention include:
- I’m currently reading (or was, as the hardback is a little big to move) The Bonfire of the Vanities. Excellent book.
- I’m still fascinated by Cradle To Cradle (McDonough and Braungart). It’s an excellent book (and concept too) – and while a little conceptual and seemingly far out in parts, it should be put in practice and widely understood.
- Though it has been mentioned a little recently in press and relevant magazines, “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air” (MacKay, www.withouthotair.com) still seems like a very interesting book to read (I alas haven’t yet – but I have the pdf of it ready to go). Seems like ages since I first heard about it (from the legend Gabor), but I suppose it is a little Cambridge based…
– New Math is worth checking out. Occupies the same kind of realm as the always fantastic xkcd, but wittier in a different and potentially more accessible way.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now. Enjoy.

Though the title of this post may seem fairly complex and all confusing, I assure you it will not be so. It’s merely a collection of thoughts that I decided not to name ‘More thoughts’ or something along those lines…

As for the logic part, while looking around Waterstones (that would be a bookstore) in Edinburgh early last week, I found a very interesting book among the ‘… for Dummies’ and computing books – ‘The Fundamentals of Logic Design’ by Charles H Roth Jr. When leafing through it then, I realised that though a lot of the information contained in it may be really quite obsolete, and not necessarily relevant in these days of computers and so on, it is very fundamental to the understanding to all of the current technologies. To be honest, ever since reading iWoz (Steve Wozniak’s autobiography) and reading about how he managed to redesign computers with fewer (and a more optimal number of) chips, I’ve wanted to be able to learn how this was done, and essentially work out how to do this myself – as it would undoubtedly lead to better understanding of logic systems (which are just slightly fundamental to lots and lots of things!). Anyhow though, this book didn’t even have a price tag in Waterstones, it was obviously too deserved to have one or maybe it just fell off, but later checking of it on Amazon revealed it to be a University level text costing between £45 and £80 – pretty damn expensive. I also found that there was a newer edition that then the one that I had briefly read. Luckily though (and Amazon marketplace comes to the rescue here) I managed to get it for £5 or so! There was a slight delivery charge on it too, but that really was pale in comparison to the £5.75 had to pay to ship it to me (I only had to pay the Amazon flat charge of £2.19 or something like that). So ultimately though I didn’t get the newest edition (I got the 4th) I got it such a reasonable price that no-one can complain! Haven’t started reading it yet, but I’ll definitely mention something once I have!

The other thing I feel compelled to mention is this glaring error in Leopard:

It should obviously be ‘None of your preferred wireless networks IS available’ but obviously there are still some bugs present in Leopard.

Once upon a time I used to go ecstatically crazy over a Macworld launch and write all sorts of stuff about it and so on and so forth. These days I find it easier just to sit back and look at all of the cool things unfurl.

If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.

Fair enough some of this criticism is probably due, for it has one USB port and no media drive. You can make up your own opinions about what you think of this, personally though, I don’t really mind these things. The one USB port seems limiting in most ways, is it really though? How often do you have more than one peripheral connected (AND IN USE) when you’re out and about. Most likely you’ll have a USB key, a printer, an external mouse, or an iPod connected. These wouldn’t all be at the same time though. You might want to use a USB key and a mouse at the same time, which is understandable given the frustation of most trackpads… (AAAGH eeePC!) As we are told though, the MacBook Air’s trackpad is a) multitouch and b) larger. This should hopefully make it more tempting to stick with the trackpad instead of changing to an external mouse. I say ‘might be’ in this case because to be honest I haven’t a clue what the trackpad is like on these things, but if the iPhone is anything to go by, then I’ll probably be impressed. With printers, enough of them are WiFi enabled, or connected to a WiFi network so that the need for a USB cable with a printer these days (unless it’s some huge image files…) is waning. That said, you would only use a printer to print off a document and then most likely unplug the cable and walk away, so having one usb port would not be too annoying. Same goes for an iPod, you’d only sync it on there (that would take a comparitively small amount of time), the charging could be done at the wall. The only usb object left would be the usb drive, something that might be useful, but not always used. So I come to the conclusion that only one USB port might just be bearable and usable!

The DVD drive (or lack thereof) is a different case altogether… But it does resolve itself in a similar way to the USB issue. Apple probably have thought (and fought) long and hard about this and have come to the conclusion that it is not necessary to have one. That is, assuming you follow their way or living (in reference to digital media that is). As explained in the keynote, there are a few things that you would commonly use CDs and DVDs for. In my case these would be…
-Installing BIG new programs (like Leopard, and someone raised the case of Windows w/ Boot Camp)
-Adding CDs to iTunes (I despise the iTMS in terms of listening to music and the culture surronding it as it kills the album, which is an entity in my opinion)
-Watching DVDs
-Converting DVDs to iPhone format.
If this MacBook is not your primary computer, then there’s no real need to do most of these things on it except the installations. You might want to watch DVDs, but you may have a DVD player and a widescreen TV for that, or there’s the iTunes Movie Store, or even you could convert it to a suitable format before you leave home and stick it on your HD. In any case, you could probably manage without it.

Though the MacBook Air has been receiving lots of criticism about it’s revolutionary new features/things that it doesn’t have, most of them are not particularly well deserved. The obvious drawbacks all have reasons behind them, most of these are pretty legit given a fairly normal scenario. So in essence, I think it’s a great little product, with some excellent engineering behind it all, even if I wouldn’t buy myself one in the near future…

Apropos Engadget’s story on a new iPod dock entitled “Jibe Audio’s Sound Machine iPhone dock — designed by Apple alumni.”

The article states that this company’s new iPod dock is, and I quote,

Designed in part by Robert Brunner who led Apple’s design team from 1989-1996, an era which birthed the Newton and the first Powerbooks.

Whilst this is true (I’m not contesting this fact), I don’t see the need to boast that this is by the same Apple alumni from ’89 to ’96 as this wasn’t particularly the best era of Apple products. Think Performas, think Quadras, think unreliability, think no Steve Jobs and most importantly think different from what Apple is now… Why boast this? Seriously, I wouldn’t buy one of these having known it was from the same design team that let the Performas be produced. What a bummer for that company… Then again, maybe they’re proud of the Performas that they made and after all (according to the article) they did make the first Powerbooks, so they can’t be that bad can they?

Other exciting things that I have found all around include a glaring grammar mistake in Leopard! I mean a huge one! I’m not on my iMac at the moment, so I can’t grab a screenshot right now, but it involves this grammatically incorrect sentence:

‘None of your preferred wireless networks are (sic) available.’

Terrible…

In other news, I have some freakin’ sweet concert tickets for next year already lined up (at some cost). These would include The Mars Volta, Radiohead and Neil Young and Crazy Horse!

Finally I get my computer back from Apple. Much better. So, so, much better! You don’t realise how bad it is to be stuck using Windows all the time at work, and then going home to no beautiful *functioning* iMac. Well now its back. It works this time, but what I actually mean is I haven’t found any more faults yet…

I’m not sure why or how I’m finding it so hard to cope with the general shitness of Windows at the moment. It might be because I actually have to do something with it. I was expected to use Paint to create images for documents… What is that about? I had some completely stupid restrictions on my computer so that I couldn’t install any more software, so nothing even like The GIMP to do work with. Then again for the stuff that I’m doing, the program really needed is OmniGraffle Professional.

The GUI is just terrible. There was no effort, absolutely none, put into the creation of Windows XP. I assume that’s generally accepted by everyone because it should be. They don’t even put in any effort to make the ‘taskbar’ look nice. It has the ability to go to one side or the top of the screen, yet, the rendering of it is awful in that position. The icons aren’t even centered, and the buttons (even the start menu) doesn’t even have rounded let alone finished and joined up edges. Why Redmond why?

Then again I suppose its difficult for people without proper Human User Interface Guidelines and such a thing as Aqua. When you’re copying another operating system, everything just happens to be that little bit behind. Shame really… Linux managed to make it all look pretty polished.

But why bother polishing a system that is flawed from its very beginning? I mean why attempt to make GUI look half respectable when the idea of having a window that fills the whole screen as the basis for the OS is around. Firstly, in Windows, Gates wants you to have two window sizes, full window, and not full window, which is usually just too small a size to be of any use! When you’re in full window mode as one could call it, you can’t have any windows on top, or at the side, or available to pull down or quickly glance at… You just can’t!

It makes it so impractical. Well maybe if you’re writing a report, and you want to be so focused and in a ‘I’m so not going to look at any references’ frame of mind, then just one window is great. The other 99.5% of the time, no. ‘It can’t happen here’ as The Mothers Of Invention might say. The impracticalities of it are outstandingly huge. Yes you might need to try something different to realise what you’re missing. But once you’ve seen the light, no going back! Also have a go at hovering your mouse cursor over a window that can scroll, and try scrolling, it’ll only scroll if its active. What an annoyance!

Another nice impracticality and general annoyance is perhaps when you’re thinking ‘hmm, I’d like to open an image in one folder, and compare it with an image in another folder.’ Let’s also assume in this case, you’re one of those many people who doesn’t possess a decent image organiser/editor (even Picasa anyone?). Well in Windows, provided you’ve got over the full screen window problem, you’ve got no hope! If you’d act as a normal person and double click on the file to open it, you get a nice ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ window popping up with the image in it. By this point you should be thinking two things; wow, it actually works and why call it a fax viewer too? Who ‘views’ faxes on their computer, I thought you read a fax as well (providing it had words on it, but thinking about it, who sent complex images by fax? like no one.), then again that might be me with rational thinking again! You might want to open the next window now, so you can go about the action of comparison between the images. You’d navigate to the other folder, open the file with a (swift) double click and… it would open it in the same ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ that you already had open. Oops! Now you’d just have to go back to the other file and open that again. But most likely it will open it in the same window. How useful. Isn’t it just great how Windows lets you have lots of Windows (or not) of the same application, sorry I mean program, open.

Yes, at the end of the day the solution is inevitably obvious, but who cares. The point of this is to again reiterate how terrible certain things are about a too popular OS.

Leopard would be worth getting, I might have to get it soon! I just love some of those new features!

I will start out by apologizing for my lack of posting things in the last few weeks. I have been conducting a test of the iPhone in the best way possible, that is thru not actually having a computer to use and having to rely solely on the iPhone for internet and the management of various forms of communication that I would regularly do…

My computer or iMac to be more precise is currently being repaired by Apple to sort out this annoying issue with the Cd drive importing things at hideously low and slow sped, and unlike the Apple store, this repair is taking its time… AAGH! Still, it gives me a good chance to a) show off my iPhone to the nice Apple store employees when I’m at the store b) show it off to everyone else at various Apple events that were on, such as the Leopard launch and c) try out my iPhone to its full potential an thus write a kind of review.

First that I should say is that it does exactly what it says on the tin… Everything Apple says about the iPhone, it can do. Plus more. The amount of ‘more’ that you want to add to it completely different for everyone, but its really up to you. In my case I unlocked it for Orange Uk, activated it, installed Installer and now I can use Navizon and message people using MSN or AIM. Pretty cool.

Instead of just treating this as a normal kind of review, I’ll just assume the iPhone is perfect and talk about what’s bad with it (its easier that way!).

-The recessed headphone jack is rather annoying. The Apple headphones/headset that come with the iPhone aren’t that bad though. If it wasn’t for the lack of the noise canceling ability I would happily use then as the button to answer calls and pause music is pretty good, I’m getting used to using the headset, isn’t that sad! I will however probably invest in the Shure headset thingy that enables you to use any headphones with it, and it includes a button and a mic! That might go well with my soon to arrive replacement headphones (3rd pair 4th pair!).

-The lack of anything telling you when you are coming to the end of the 155 character limit in a text message is irritating. Especially when you’ve on pay as you go and are trying to save money!

-When the phone is on silent and you are listening to music via the headset, there is nothing to tell you that a call is being received other than the vibrating thing. This is marginally annoying especially when they could implement a thing to ring in the headphones only!

-The battery is weird. Sometimes it lasts for ages, or at least seems to never go down. Other times its not as good. Its probably related to my Wi-Fi usage but hoo haa, the battery’s better than I expected so its all good. I couldn’t imagine listening to 6 or 7 hours of music on my 4th G iPod and seeing very little hit on te battery meter. Isn’t that cool!

To be continued…

EDIT:

Another annoying thing that I’ve found with my iPhone happens to be that when I have a voicemail message, the red dot will show on the voicemail indicating this, which is all well and dandy, but when I’ve listened to the message it doesn’t want to go away and will sometimes persistently keep bothering me about it! It did eventually go away, but I haven’t a clue why!

Its strange isn’t it? Most of the time when you complain about something in today’s society most people really don’t give a damn, so as a result you really don’t expect to get any results!

Well as I mentioned almost 2 months ago I went to the efforts of getting the logic board replaced on my iMac so that it would actually recognise the 2 512Mb RAM sticks that I put in it… Initially I got it replaced by none other than the brilliant Scotsys (yes I’m being very sarcastic), An Apple Authorised Repair Provider. How they managed that feat is pretty amazing, they really do suck at repairing computers, or maybe they don’t; they probably fix them fine and then kick them about a bit, who knows? Anyway the point is that if you send your computer to them then its gonna get damaged and come back (if it comes back) in a worse state than when you sent it away!

In my case I was having the logic board replaced. This really isn’t that hard a job, I could probably do it if I was allowed to open up my iMac myself. Scotsys DID manage to replace the logic board with a new (working!) one, which was a feat in itself. But they couldn’t just do that, so in addition they left the case open at the top, scratched the screen, broke the iSight camera and seriously impaired the Airport signal. As you could imagine I was rather pissed off! I phoned up Apple, explained my (terrible) situation and was eventually transferred a proper customer services dude, the kind that expected you to be irate, so spoke in a calming voice and told you not to worry. Don’t worry though, he’d happily jerk you around too if you left it too long!

I was told that the only option was to take my iMac back to Scotsys and get it repaired (yeah right) by them… This I did, having it picked up and Couriered there (I’m lazy!). It returned a not-unreasonable week or so later with a new iSight camera cable, the case closed but with a scratch on the screen still and very little Airport reception! Yet again I talked to the calming rep at Apple, who suggested I took it there again, or maybe take it to another repair place even further away, maybe 50 miles or so… Little did he know that Apple had opened up their Glasgow store, so instead of risking it with some other cowboys I thought it best to take it to the genius bar and get it properly looked at and hopefully fixed.

I checked out the Apple Store Buchanan St. website and arranged an appointment at the genius bar. A few days later I appeared at the store (finding that I could have basically turned up at anytime and had it looked at, oh well…) and had my iMac looked at. They ordered a new screen and an Airport antenna without even looking at the unit, which was pretty trustworthy of them! I was told it was going to take around 7-10 days which to be honest when you don’t really have another computer to use is quite a long time!

Fear not though! I had a call merely 2 days later to say that it had been repaired and that it was all good and ready to collect… Another longish trip to Glasgow to get to the store followed. I picked it up, checking that it looked okay and that there actually was NO scratch anymore (luckily it had been repaired!), not taking time to turn it on and find out if it ran/booted up okay. Oops. Maybe I just assumed that Apple Store = good service.

Unfortunately I got it home and booted it up to find a very pleasant whining noise coming from the unit. From the sound I could easily tell that it was some cable or the ESD wrapping stuff that had got in front of the fan at the bottom right and was now brushing against it, making more noise than the fans usual silence. Oh, and I should also mention that the airport was no better and that getting reception in my room still was fairly challenging if at all possible (from THAT computer!).

I took my usual course of action and phoned my now good friend Ibar at Apple. He didn’t seem too impressed with what had happened (at least he acted that way), but he agreed with me that this was not the kind of service that I should be getting, which is very true! He agreed to replace my unit with a new one. Specifically the new model, the 20″ aluminium and glass iMac with the 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, the base model I know, but a fairly good improvement to my current model, you must agree. He said that once I had returned the old unit, he would send a new one out. Well he didn’t actually say this, but that was what happened in the end. He actually said something more along the lines of I’ll send you a new model and I’ll also arrange to get your old one picked up. Mentioning nothing of the timeframe that he had implied/imposed. Anyway, in the end I had to wait a week and a half and have another phonecall before the old unit was collected, which was a bit slow. And then wait another 5 days or so before my new one arrived.

So eventually I did get a new model, but it took a bloody long time! Now I have to contact him about Applecare and transfering my subscribtion to the new computer. Hopefully, yet again, some complaining will get me far!

Points Worth Considering

1. I could have repaired the majority of these problems myself. The initial situation involving the case open, the airport reduced and the iSight not working could have been solved by me. The fact that the case was open at this point enabled me to look inside to see how much of a shoddy job they had done. There is normally black ESD tape/paper around the inside of the unit, just under the white casing to act as a Faraday cage or similar. This was non-chalantly ripped off and just placed back on top. As a result I could see the inside of the iMac and see where a) the airport card antenna was and b) where the iSight cable was not routed properly. In the later scenario where there was the noise coming from the fan, that could have been sorted with much greater ease! It would have just required opening the case and removing the obscruction! At the end of the day though, I’m not actually allowed to open the case and sort out the problems myself. I would have voided the all important warranty by doing that, not a good thing! Also, by repairing the problems myself I wouldnot have shown up Scotsys’s dodgy work, and not get a brand new iMac!

2. I could have complained and got a better iMac. I bought mine back at the start of 2006 for £929, I also bought some more Apple RAM, worth around about £60 at the time (although I tapped a bit of eBay to get it for £18). The new model that I received cost considerably less than this, around about £700 or so. I don’t have the exact figure to hand. But, if I asked for a refund as opposed to a replacement model, then I would have been able to purchase a considerably better model, and even chip in a bit of my own money to afford the 24″ one! That is if they had let me, which I’m not entirely sure they would have. But, then again I think there’s something in the Sale of Goods act that mentions a refund or replacement must be given. Could have been worth a go, but would have taken more time I suspect!

3. I could have kept my old iMac (temporarily at least) so I could have used migration assistant to transfer the old data smoothly. This would enable me to transfer the data more smoothly, have my old (noisy) computer with me for longer, and give them the chance to forget about it and not pick it up. I know someone who has done this and now has 2 iBooks, although one doesn’t really function as a laptop after Scotsys repaired it! In that case I could have sucessfully repaired the unit myself and get another computer out of it. Probably fairly unlikely to happen, but then again always worth a go if it happens again!

EDIT: I think the CD/DVD drive might be broken, importing CDs into iTunes at 5x isn’t normal is it?

As the title might slightly suggest, yesterday was a pretty good day. Firstly there was the opening of the first Apple store in Scotland, in Glasgow on Buchanan Street. I was lucky enough to attend this, and wait in the queue and be one of the first to be in the store, obviously I wasn’t the first as I hadn’t been there since last night… but if that floats your boat! It was a pretty cool store though, they’d completely redone the building on the inside so it looked really immense with the glass stairs, granite tiled floor and open stone work on the walls which looked pretty cool! I grabbed a few pictures which I’ll add at a later date… I got the Apple T-Shirt, the classic one that everyone gets if they’re one of the first to the new store. I missed out on one of these in Shibuya in Tokyo, but at least I got one now… Finally an Apple store has opened, hopefully putting an end to the monopoly in central Scotland that is Scotsys.

The other awesome thing that happened yesterday was the reopening of Fopp. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Fopp had ‘died’. But luckily or should I say unluckily HMV has bought it and reopened some of its stores, so the best way of CD shopping has been revived! It was just great to finally go to a proper CD shop once again. The times without Fopp had made me so annoyed and pissed off when I went into HMV and saw their attempt at good deals – 2 CDs for £10 or Virgin’s deal – 4 CDs for £20, when Fopp managed to sell them for £5 each in an even more pleasant record environment. Unfortunately though, I think some of the prices have risen slightly, especially on the new/chart CDs. Well at least its back…

Now that the exam results have arrived (as of 16th August actually) I found out with great pleasure that I got 4 A’s at A-level (Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry) and will be attending Pembroke College Cambridge from October 2008 to read Engineering. Pretty good chat eh?

Meanwhile I’ll be working for a year at Selex Sensors and Airborne Systems in Edinburgh. Gaining some experience for my engineering degree and making money (hopefully)!

At the moment, I’m in a slight feud with Apple (well actually more like Scotsys!) because I sent my beloved iMac to have its logic board replaced by them, it then returned with the screen scratched, the airport signal greatly weakened, the case still open at the top, no serial number and the iSight not working, not good for an Apple authorised service centre! I have taken photos of the damage (If you’re reading this Scotsys!) and will be sorting it out…