stripethree

It’s happened before, I write something nice about new Apple products only to have ones I own fail in response. It’s nearly happening again, not two weeks after discussing Apple’s new laptops. Both my iPod Mini and my G4 Cube are one the way out, fading fast. Both have had a touch time of late as the iPod’s battery had long since seen it’s better days, with the player only working when it’s plugged into a power source. This isn’t all that bad, since I mostly use it in my car, where it’s powered. Lately, however, syncing the iPod has been a challenge. The iPod seems to struggle with communicating with my laptop often necessitating a dance of unplugging, replugging, shutting down iTunes, starting iTunes to get the iPod to sync properly. I could replace the battery and go ahead and replace the hard drive, as that might be why it’s sluggish to respond to syncing, but that cost will be me more than half way to a new iPod that will basically be better in everyway.

This past weekend while trying to load up some stuff on the Cube for a BBQ, it took a dive, a belly flop to be exact. It no longer recognizes the new or old hard drive throwing input/output errors and refusing to start in anything other than single user mode. A new battery, which supposedly is a known point of failure, didn’t help anything. I found an old CD that came with the Cube that provided a hardware diagnosis, but it came back with everything looking rosy. I know better. I’m not sure what is wrong, and I’m really not that interested in finding out because it will probably be more money than it’s worth. A decent motherboard upgrade, if that is what is failing, will be a few hundred dollars along with a few hundred more to get the RAM to support it. If it’s cabling or something else internal it will likely be expensive and a pain in the ass to fix.

So what now? Really, I can survive without both items, but do I want to? The iPod still works just fine when plugged in so as long as I don’t mind listening to the same music on it, all’s well (for now, that is). I would probably go for a Nano if it came down to a new iPod because I still want something compact. The coolness factor of the Touch is certainly high, but that’s not enough to justify spending twice as much money. Sixteen gigs of space is plenty for my uses and I’m not interested in using a lot of the video functionality since no iPod offers the battery life necessary to get me through the flights I most commonly take. I’d have to play around with the Touch to see how well the WiFi works and if I’d be interested in making use of the other available applications.

I will miss the functionality the Cube has provided and unlike the iPod, there’s no functionality in the meantime. It’s a paperweight as I write this. The external hard drive I have hanging off my Airport Extreme can support some of that functionality but the temptation to pick up a Mac Mini has never been stronger. However entry point for that solution is $600. The refurbished and used markets aren’t going to be a lot of help as even the Power PC Minis are fetching good coin. It also doesn’t help that rumors keep recurring that the Mini is nearing it’s EOL (End of Life, as in discontinued, gone, kaput). I hope that is not the case.

My plan for now is to wait. First to decide how much I want to spend and on what and second, to see what new things may surface at MacWorld in January.

Today seemed like just another Tuesday. Until you remember that every now and then on the occasional Tuesday, Apple decides to hold a special event and unveil the next revision of whichever product line the spotlight shine upon. On this particular Tuesday, laptops were the objects of attention, as Apple announced significant changes to the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines along with minor updates to the MacBook Air. Now, I have had my trusty PowerBook G4 since the holiday season of 2003 and have watched as the PowerBook turned into the MacBook Pro, then was revised, and revised again (and probably again, I haven’t counted), then emerged the MacBook Air, and now, the newest MacBook Pros. Each time I ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ over the new features, and this time is no different. The nerd in me even appreciates the in depth presentation about the new manufacturing process, as a single brick of aluminum is turned into the majority of the laptops frame and structure. Today, as with every revision I’ve watched via streaming web video after the fact, I came across the same set of thoughts. Is it time to replace my PowerBook? Has it run it’s course? Can I resist the temptation of delicious new product?

The answer’s are still, for now, No, no, and yes. This laptop, the one I am typing this blog entry on now, is over four and a half years old. That is ancient, by computer standards, and ironically, I have an even older Mac (remember the Cube?) sitting mere feet from me, also still in service. My PowerBook’s life has not always been smooth sailing as it bears the scars of being dropped, scratched, dented, and spilled on. It survived the tail end of my undergraduate experience, the entirety of my graduate experience, and the first four years of my professional experience. I’ve replaced some wear items along the way – the hard drive, battery, and keyboard – but not enough that would justify the cost of a new laptop. It certainly didn’t hurt that I was ready and willing to take the thing apart and replace components on my own. My point is, the thing still works, and I really don’t do the kinds of things with it that would merit needing a much faster processor or other upgrades beyond what this computer can deal with. One of the real reasons that I have been able to resist the temptation is that this is the last laptop Apple offered in such a small form factor. Granted the new MacBook weighs the same 4.5lbs as my machine and it’s footprint is not that much larger, but I am certainly not the only one waiting for Apple to re-enter the so called, sub-notebook market. The MacBook Air comes close and really, was the biggest temptation, because it is all I would need or want in a laptop. I rarely use the optical drive, I rarely ever use wired Ethernet, and even those uses are ‘rarely’ and not ‘never’, it would probably never be the only machine at my disposal so I would have no reservations with a laptop lacking some of the more common hardware. It would be perfect and I would have one already, if it were just a size smaller. I’ve seen it in person and the form factor is great, but everytime I come back to my little marvel the larger 13.3 inch laptops just don’t seem as comfortable. I’m probably crazy for implying that a 3.0lb, stick figure thin laptop as powerful as the Air is over-sized and ‘uncomfortable’, but Apple, that’s your own fault for making this laptop so damn good.

I have to say, however, that I do see the writing on the wall, for both machines. The Cube has a lower ceiling for upgrades and the expense of a newer processor and more RAM will rival that of a more capable Mac Mini, especially as the market for used or refurbished units expands. I for one, believe the end of life rumors for the Mini are just that, rumors, so the second hand market should age like wine. The Cube cannot run Leopard without one of those expensive motherboard upgrades and as more years pass and more revisions of OS X come along, it’s only going to get further and further behind. Sooner or later it will be time to put it to pasture, but it can always look forward to a second life as a fish tank. As for the PowerBook, well, it’s future might be a little more secure. It will honestly depend on how hard and fast Apple closes the door on the G4 processor and if you haven’t noticed, Apple has already put a few nails in that coffin. I was disappointed when I found out that my trusty G4 didn’t have the power for the new iMovie, how much longer before it isn’t good enough for OS X as a whole? Will Snow Leopard mark the death bell for the Power PC processors? We will see. If OS 10.6 goes Intel only or even G5 and up, and someone at Apple convinces the bean counters that the market for MacBook Mini is alive and well, then there really won’t be much of a decision for me to make.

Until then, however, onward march my pair of G4s.

A disappointing first try at iTunes movie stores rentals.

First, navigating the store to figure out what movies could be rented was a pain. Apparently there are a lot of movies that can be bought but not rented. I don’t get it and I didn’t bother to look up why. Trying to watch previews was hopeless, they would load and play audio, but the video would hang, which would turn out to be a taste of things to come. It also took 5 tries to get the download to actually work, and hopefully that didn’t result in five charges to my credit card. I will have to check tomorrow. The iTunes store kept resetting the connection and I had to start all over. It is worth noting that this was being done on a computer with wired connection and I’m pretty sure whatever the issue was, it wasn’t on my end. So we finally get the thing downloaded and settle down to watch it. More disappointment. The video frame rate is horrendous with the movie skipping badly, I’m guessing we were getting 1-2 frames per second, if that. The audio could keep up, but not the video. I thought, well, maybe the Cube (450Mhz PPC, 768Mb RAM) can’t handle this so I tried to play it on the Powerbook. Same problem. Then I thought, wait, the Cube plays other movies all the time even ones of similar size, without a problem. Sure enough, I brought up some video of similar size and quality to the movie I just downloaded and it played perfectly. From a networked drive at that.

I started to hit Google about this issue and found that it is a known issue with no real fix or even response from Apple. Not good. So there goes the $4 and 3 or so hours of my time trying this out. I won’t be back anytime soon unless I hear of massive improvements. I was hoping this would turn out well, instead, it seems I will resign to subscribing to NetFlix.

Now that the MacWorld 2008 keynote, and all the rumor and hype that preceded it has come and gone, I would like to take a look at what was announced and offer pure opinions on each new item. Note that I, like most of the rest of the free world, have no yet land eyes or hands on most of these things since they are not going to available for the next two weeks.

First we have Time Capsule, which is basically an 802.11n Airport Extreme base station with a built in 500GB ($299) or 1TB ($499) drive. It also has hooks to allow Leopard users to backup to a Time Capsule using Time Machine wirelessly and automatically. Pretty slick that Apple is bringing simple backup to the everyday user, good considering it’s something everyone should do, but usually don’t until we’ve already had a catastrophic loss of data. Personally, I don’t have Leopard, and don’t plan on updating anytime soon since both of my Macs are, well, old. I would still love to have one of these, seeing as how only a few months ago I replaced a deceased Airport Express with a new Airport Extreme and I am in the market for an additional external hard drive. The price is more than you would pay for non-Apple wireless router and a comparable external hard drive, but I suppose Apple justifies the premium in the ‘all in one’ functionality and the ease of use factor. Plus, when do Apple products not cost a premium? Is it worth it? I think so. In my experience Apple’s Airport products have been very easy to use, rivaled in that respect only by Linksys, which you could argue wrote the book on easy to configure routers for the average joe. Sure, I can plug an external hard drive into my existing Airport Extreme (or many other routers out there), but that’s another device taking up valuable surge protector space, another USB or Firewire cable, and another ‘box’ on a shelf somewhere. There’s something to be said about the elegance of a smart solution such as this, especially when you already have plenty of cables running amok in your office or under your entertainment center.

Apple also released some software updates to the iPhone ad iPod touch (of which I have neither) including an updated (new to the iPod Touch) Maps application which now allows you to triangulate your current position, provided you have a cellular or wireless internet signal. I like this idea, it’s one thing I do not have on my Sony W810i with Google Maps and I would love to have it. There are many times it would have been very useful. The new software for the iPod Touch will set you back $20 if you already have the hardware, and I’m not sure why Apple is charging for this, since this stuff is already on the iPhone and the iPhone software update is free. Who knows. I’d probably pay the $20 to get the Maps, Mail, Notes, and Weather (Stocks? Meh) on an iPod Touch, if I had one. Nice to know they’ll be there if I get one.

Next was a dual announcement of sorts, AppeTV ‘Take 2’ and iTunes movie rentals. It is not clear if the hardware of the AppeTV has been updated, but the software certainly has, and it breaks free of some of the limiting factors of the first iteration. It is now a stand alone set top box, no longer requiring a computer. Brilliant. Buy and download directly from the iTunes store without having to have a Mac or any computer for that matter. HD content is now supported and the price also dropped, now $329 for the 160GB model. The 40GB model is still around at $229, but really, 40GB? I have more music than that, much less TV shows and movies. Movie rentals have arrived also, with every major studio on board, including limited amounts of their libraries in HD.It’s $2.99 for a library title, $3.99 for a new release, and $1 more for HD content. I don’t rent movies much anymore basically because I think Netflix is too expensive and going to the video store is a pain, but maybe this is the ticket. Once you pay for a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it and 24 hours from when you start watching it to finish it. Follow me? You can view it on your Mac, AppeTV, iPod, or iPhone. I like this, a lot, and it’s going to make it all too easy to rent movies. My only two questions are, why no subscription based service and why only 24 hours to view the movie? Most video places let you have at least 48 on new releases, if not more. I wonder how long that 24 hour limit will last, we’ll see. I am anxious to try this out because I am a little nervous about how fast the movies will download and how the quality of the non-HD movies will translate on my TV. This pair of announcements were probably the most significant, simply because it shows that Apple really wants to go after the digital media market, despite some of the recent setbacks on the music side of the iTunes music store. The first revision of the AppeTV was lacking, and Apple knew it, Steve Jobs even directly said so in the keynote, and now I think they’ve taken a huge step in the right direction.

Lastly was the long rumored, long drooled over ‘super portable ultra light sub compact’ whatever you want to call it notebook, the MacBook Air. I understand what and why this product is what it is but have mixed views. This is certainly not a replacement for anything in the current MacBook line, and for the price point (starting at $1799) it can be easily pointed out that you can have a well (perhaps better, depending on your needs) configured MacBook. The Air does not have a built in optical drive, a built in ethernet card, firewire ports, and only has one USB port. It it built to be wireless, almost completely wireless, to the point that I bet if Apple’s engineers could have figured out how to solar power that sucker through the lovely lightweight aluminum skin or the heat generated by the Core Duo processors, they’d be throwing their MagSafe power adapters at the fridge to see if they’d stick. It’s got an 802.11n Airport card of course, the latest and greater Bluetooth (2.1), 2GB of memory standard, a 13.3” LED backlit display, a light sensitive backlit full size keyboard, and built in iSight. Apple even will let you get a 64GB solid state (flash) drive in this little sucker, for about a grand more that the base price. I like it, and it would be very useful to me since I rarely have my laptop plugged into wired ethernet, I rarely use the optical drive, and really, I rarely use many of the other ports. I think it would fit my needs nicely if I were in the market for a new laptop, but I’m not since my Powerbook keeps on chugging. Even with the trick software that lets an Air borrow another computer’s optical drive wirelessly and the other cool things Apple has to promote the wireless lifestyle (Time Capsule anyone?) I still don’t think this is going to appeal to a whole lot of people, but I could be wrong. I love my 12” Powerbook and I, personally, would have much rather seen a MacBook ‘Mini’ to complete the line, something with a 11.1-12.2” screen with some of the same de-contenting done to the Air at a lesser price. It seems small, but the 12” is so comfortable that even when I go into the Apple store and fiddle with the 13” MacBooks they seem cumbersome. Granted, the Air only weighs 3 lbs, which is 2/3 of what my Powerbook weighs, so maybe I will think differently when I have a chance to see and hold it in person.

Overall, the announcements did not seem to generate that frenzy that the last major announcement, the iPhone did, but that’s a lot of expectation to live up to. Also, the fact that everything announced had been rumored for weeks, even months, and in some cases, leaked at the 11th hour, probably left some people waiting for a surprise ‘one more thing’ on top of all the goodness that Apple delivered. They have simply set the bar for these types of things so very high and people seem more relieved than anything else that the things they were hoping would see the light of day, were revealed. Other than iTunes rentals, I probably won’t buy anything that was announced yesterday simply because I’m not in the market. However if I hit the Apple store in a few weeks and fall all over a MacBook Air, don’t be alarmed if I ‘accidentally’ throw/drop/kick/drop-kick-throw my Powerbook into a wall or something (oops!), but only after a thorough backup!

After all those (mostly) nice things I said about the new products, an old one takes a dump. I woke up to a completely dead Airport Express this morning. No idea why; it’s three years old and had probably been bounced and beaten thoroughly, I’ve seen the cats trying to smack it around a few times so maybe it had just had enough.

So now the question I have until 10:00 when the Apple store here opens is, another Airport Express or an Airport Extreme?

So I finally got a chance to fiddle around with an iPhone and by most points, I was impressed. In about 20 minutes of trying everything I could think of, multitouch worked wonderfully. The screen is impressive especially when viewing the web and using Google maps. I do have one very, very big complaint. The keyboard. I found it painful to use. One handed, two handed, either way it just didn’t work for me. I can type faster on my W810i, which does not have a full keyboard, and with less mistakes. To their credit, the feature that guesses what word you are trying to type when you make a mistake is pretty damn accurate. Now, granted, I’ve heard over and over again that you have to get used to the keyboard and blah blah it’ll adapt, and I hope this is true. I’m not spending $500 to find out though. I found it easy to get over the lack of tactile feedback for knowing when I’d hit a key, I apparently just didn’t have the knack to hit the right key. The idea of the virtual keyboard though is brilliant, and it really shines when it isn’t there. Wait, that makes no sense. Of course it does, because that real estate is taken up instead by a large Google Map, a longer list of contacts, etc., etc. The keyboard in landscape mode, for me, was damn near unusable. Maybe my typing is just that bad (talked to me on AIM lately?) or maybe it’s because at this point I think I can code in Java or PHP faster than I can type plain old English. The transition from portrait to landscape and back seemed painfully slow on this particular phone, but I can’t help but wonder if the sensor was thrown off by the rather hefty security lock that was attached to the back of the phone.

The device itself seemed solid. There’s no way to know what kind of abuse this in store model had seen, but it was in excellent shape. A few dings on the bottom, no doubt from being dropped on the counter, but the screen was flawless and the software never seemed to hesitate other than the aforementioned screen orientation issue. I wonder about the Edge speed though, I thought it was a bit sluggish and I tried a couple experiments. I loaded a handful of pages on the iPhone at the same time as I loaded them on my W810i using Opera Mini. Every time, my phone was faster (and yes, I’m a Cingular/AT&T customer). Granted, my phone doesn’t have a 3.5″ screen and the pages didn’t look as good once loaded, but I found this a bit odd from a performance aspect. I didn’t get a chance to listen to any audio on it, but video playback was smooth and crisp. I could already see myself having this thing propped on the stationary bike watching Entourage or Burn Notice while at the gym.

Overall, I was impressed, but not surprised that there were some shortcomings. Multitouch would be fantastic on an iPod, and I really think it’s just a matter of time before that happens. However, I also know that Apple never seems to rest, and Steve never seems to be satisfied, so I imagine version 2 will be even better. We’ll see; it could be great, but I still can’t see paying $500 for one.

I also downloaded the 30 day trial of iWork ‘08 following the Apple event last week. With the enhancements to Pages and the addition of Numbers, my hopes were high that I could purge Microsoft Office from my non-work related machines (I don’t use Keynote much, but it’s a nice added bonus). So far, I’m again impressed. Pages is not a leaps and bounds improvement from the previous version, but it is more mature, more polished, and so much more straight forward to use than Word. It doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, and it is certainly targeted at ‘Joe user’, who just wants to get stuff done quickly and easily, but still wants that ability to make something look like it took hours and hour to create. I’ve liked Pages since the first version came out, and now, it’s just that much better.

Numbers blows my mind. I’m by no means an Excel expert, but I have to deal with it at work sometimes, and I have monthly budget and car maintenance/parts spreadsheets that I use frequently at home. The spreadsheets I see at work make my head hurt and I have no idea how someone keeps their sanity while updating and maintaining these spreadsheets. I am thankful it is not my job, and that at home, I have the choice to use something else. Excel will no longer be handling the stuff I do at home. What I found the be impressive: even though Numbers breaks from what users are used to with Excel and other programs, I found that it was almost too easy to learn. Faced with something I’d done ten thousand times in Excel but never in Numbers, I kept thinking, now, what’s the logical way that this should be done? More often than not, it was exactly how I thought it would be instead of wading through menus, submenus, and dialog boxes just to get something simple.

Hopefully it’s not just the ‘newness’ of the software that has me singing it’s praises, and I will definitely find out. I plan to use every ounce of that free 30 day trial before I make the decision to buy the new iWork. At $79, it’s going to be hard to not buy it. I can see my cursor dragging Office to the trash bin already…

Lastly, there’s iLife ‘08, which I have not yet tried, but at which I am a little bittersweet over. Upon watching the keynote that introduced the new iLife suite, I was excited at the overhaul to iMovie. I watched that portion of the keynote multiple times and was ready to drop $79 on the new version. Then I saw it.

iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster).

Damn. Thwarted. I was thinking about this, and originally thought, well, it’s got to be a processor speed thing. At least, I hope so. The awful thought that this was the beginning of the end of support for the G4 processor dawned on me and I hoped that it isn’t the case. I don’t remember what the speed ratings of the last G4s were, but they can’t be that far off. Then again, the G5 was a whole other beast and benchmarks have shown that the new Intel processors out run those, so… I don’t know. I’ve got no reason, yet, to ditch my G4 Powerbook, and iMovie alone isn’t going to sway me. Barring something unforeseen (yeah, now I’m jinxing myself), it’ll be a while before I buy another computer, so I guess I’ll have to make do with iMovie 6. The chances I will get the new iLife remain slim; any iTunes updates are free, the iPhoto updates are cool, but not ‘must haves’ to me, there were only a few changes to iDVD, and I don’t use Garageband or iWeb. So basically, $79 for ‘events’ and other stuff in iPhoto, and I don’t have or want a .Mac account so I won’t be taking advantage of the new .Mac web gallery, as tempting as it is. If I could have the new iMovie and be publishing photos and movies to a .Mac account, that’d be ~$200 Apple would be kindly and happily taking from me. Alas, it’s not to be for now and I’ll be sticking to my home grown PHP gallery software and figuring something out for video.

T’was a busy weekend and was happy with things I got done in many aspects.

Started off Friday with some much needed painting on the side mirror caps. After the journey across country these were looking pretty rough.

Got them back on the car so as not to rock the Terminator 2 side mirror look and headed off to Tucson for a gathering of Volkswagens. Yes, I drove an hour to go to a VW gathering and no, there isn’t much going on in Sierra Vista. I definitely noticed that driving on AZ90 and I10 at night is a bit eerie as there is nothing lighting the road other than the cars driving on it, which were few and far between. There were many times where beyond the span of my cars exterior lights, nothing but blackness. Got to Tucson and hung around for a while with some of the local folks chatting about cars and such. Went to Applebees and grabbed a drink and some food and hung out for a while. Good peoples. By the time I got home, that was basically it for the evening. I wish that gathering were closer, because over 100 miles roundtrip isn’t going to happen on but a few Fridays.

Saturday I got off my rear end and finally installed a pair of parts on the car that I’ve had for over a year.

This was quote the undertaking since door panels had to come off, interior panels had to come off, wire had to be threaded above the glove box but below the air bag, etc. This was all motiviated by the desire to replace the speaker cover on the passenger side which someone cracked when loading my car to move. Whoops. At least it’s a cheap part. Anyway, by the time I got to the passenger side stuff and saw how the speaker cover is held in and that it would have needed to be drilled out, I decided I’d deal with the crack for now. VW uses T20s everywhere, why couldn’t they have here, why’d they have to make things difficult? The door lock slides went in and in addition to looking sharp with the brushed aluminum and the blue LEDs and such and such, they don’t rattle!. They fit much better than the OEM parts and I only managed to break two of those silly one time use door clips.

Next up was some computer nerd action. The thought process is that I should work on starting a web business, because seeing kids five years my junior rake in cash for stuff I know I have the skills to learn and do sure starts a motivational fire under me. So, I decided it was time to learn something new (on top of the Enterprise Java class I’m already taking no less). I poked around, and since I’ve been doing all sorts of fun database application stuff of late, stumbled upon demos and setup for Ruby on Rails. Now, I’ve heard of RoR before, but never really had reason to look into it. Once I did, I was happily off in nerd heaven, rubbing my hands together with a sinister grin thinking off all the fun database applications I could write. You can laugh, it is kind of funny. I went and set it all up on the Cube so I can have some fun and learn some cool stuff.

So hopefully I can keep the motivation high and something fun and interesting can come of this little endeavor.

For the evening’s activities, we went down to Bisbee, which is a small town on top of the border, about a half hour away. We went for a chocolate tasting, a charity event taking place at the library in downtown (I use the term loosely) Bisbee. Once we found the place, paid our way in, and got our tickets we were off to spend said tickets on chocolate treats of all varieties.

Everything was quite delicious, even more so since we skipped dinner to attend. We then walked around town for a few and noticed that although it seemed straight out of 1975, the town was a bit livelier than Sierra Vista. We met up with some folks and found a local bar. A few beers, some pool, and some intensely competitive shuffleboard action and we decided to see what else the town had to offer. We found another bar, much more populated and with the added bonus of live music. Drinks, more pool, and we were just about the last to leave for the night.

Sunday was a lazier day and all we really did was go out to dinner after I watched Maryland topple Duke. All I will say about that is #1: Yay; #2 why can’t they play like that every game?

Thanks to EBay however, I did recieve a nice new keyboard for my laptop to replace the aging, worn out unit that was already down a key and prime to loose some more.

Using the new one made it apparent just how beaten down the old one was, and I have a real ‘K’ key again! I guess after over three years of daily use and abuse, the refresher was necessary. I also have a new battery on the way so I can hopefully end the days of being tethered to a power cable. EBay is fantastic, I’d put off both replacing these parts because they cost over $200 from Apple and many parts resellers online. I scoured EBay for some reliable sources and found both things, in their original packaging, for under $100 total. Score.

For dinner, we went to a small, local, Italian place that prides themselves on their pizza. It was good, very good, I just had to remove some of the excessive amount of cheese from it. They deliver too, thus I am now faced with finding excuses as to why I didn’t make lunch, and instead ordered in from Delios. Yum.

That’s all for now, time to go wrestle with WebLogic a few minutes more in an attempt to get something accomplished on this class assignment before Heroes starts.