stripethree

It’s been a while since I’ve had a good new, or in this case new to me, tech toy to play with. I have been casually browsing and pondering some sort of computer purchase since my situation was gradually moving towards ‘dire’. The Cube is, and has been, dead. I tried a bunch of things to fix it and have resigned to the fact that it’s not coming back. I was given a friend’s 14″ iBook that died so I could pull the hard drive for her to get her data back and I haven’t been able to fix it yet. Everything about the problem says logic board, but I haven’t had any success with it yet.

Then my Powerbook starting acting up with symptoms of a bad reed switch or inverter cable. It will not sleep or wake properly sometimes, and more telling, it will randomly go dark regardless of power source, charge level, etc. It’s fixable, but, well, I’m not positive that’s the only problem and I wasn’t too keen on taking about my only working computer for a recon mission.

I found out Anand was selling his laptops to get a 13″ MacBook Pro, one of which was a Dell Vostro A90 with some nice extras. It was not much of decision since the price was right and I knew I could trust the condition it was in. This is the same friend I had Summer get her iBook from and it’s been running flawlessly. The Vostro arrived yesterday and it’s pretty kickass. It has two solid state drives, an 8GB running Mac OS 10.5.6 and a 16GB running Windows (you have to physically swap them but it takes all of 3 minutes), 2GB of RAM, 802.11g, Bluetooth, build in video camera, etc. etc.

While it does not have a lot of drive space, for what I plan to use this for it won’t need it. I’m going to take a whirl at fixing the Powerbook and hopefully that will work fine. I’m still looking for a second hand Mac Mini for a set top box, but people trying to sell them on Craigslist are asking out of this world prices. This machine will be great for travel – I plan on taking it with me week after next – and will also be great for some car related things (c’mon, you knew there had to be a car tie in somewhere). With the Windows drive, it will be perfect as a VAG-COM machine to scan and clear codes and, with the same cable, I can download a free program from GIAC and change engine maps with a few clicks. I see the addition of a 100 octane tune in the near future.

The biggest challenge will be adjusting to the keyboard. It’s about 90% of the size as a traditional laptop keyboard, has a few auxiliary keys shuffled around, and has different tactile feedback that what I’ve been using. I don’t see it as being that big a deal once I get used to it.

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.

…and don’t feel like updating or redoing the theme I previously built, I’ve moved to an off the shelf WordPress theme called ‘Journalist’ with lots of of so fun widgets on the sidebar. I have also managed to hopefully fix the Cube, which will re-assume it’s position as a fun/development box. It is hooked up to my Samsung LCD TV as a monitor and my receiver/DVD player/surround sound for watching videos or downloaded movies but it also has a fresh update of mySQL, PHP, and Ruby on Rails so I can get back to being more geeky on my free time. Now that I will not be commuting three hours everyday I want to get back into keeping up with what’s new and shiny.