Posts Tagged ‘iBook’

I think this is the first time I’ve actually typed an entry from the comfort of my bed; I’m not doing so because it’s late (although it is), but because it’s bloody freezing here. The builders arrived here on Monday to begin some rather major work on the place, and as a result there’s currently no heating or hot water. There’s no kitchen either, and what’s left of the bathroom is lying in a skip. But most importantly, I still have broadband!

It’s actually quite cosy - one of my cats likes to sleep on my bed, which is as good as having a hot water bottle, even if she invariably somehow manages to take up most of the room, leaving me to fit in around her. Oh dear, I’m suddenly reminded of the TV commercial that’s on at the moment in which a woman says (using what must be some terribly filthy euphamism), “I can’t get up without my furry alarm clock”; perhaps I just can’t go to bed without my furry hot water bottle. Besides the cat, the iBook on my lap generates a reasonable amount of heat too (I know, we’re not meant to, but having watched An Inconvenient Truth a few days ago, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever want kids anyway).

By the way, today marks the the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantánamo Bay. There are still 385 prisoners there (including ten British residents), not to mention the other 13,600 ghost prisoners being held/tortured in secret US detention centres around the world. As Clive Stafford Smith says, today represents the anniversary of too many shameful acts..

I managed to get away from London last weekend to do a bit of long-overdue catching up with friends. I took my iBook with me so I could get a couple of hours work done on the train, in between enjoying the complimentary drinks and muffins in first class (not because I’m too stuck up to travel with the riff-raff in standard class, but because this country’s stupid transport policies mean that it’s cheaper to buy two first class singles than a standard class return).

Unfortunately, within a couple of hours of arriving, my friend Chris managed to spill a very large glass of wine over my iBook as we browsed the web. It got well and truly drenched and immediately cut out. Chris quickly turned it upside down and I whipped the battery out, and we then dried off as best we could before leaving it to one side. Chris was pretty mortified, but with a few glasses of wine in me I had to laugh.

The next day I popped in to a shop and had a play with the latest Apple laptops, and started to think that perhaps it wasn’t such a disaster after all… claim on my insurance and get my 18 month old iBook replaced with a new Core 2 Duo MacBook. Sweet.

After three days drying out time I decided to try turning the iBook on, still convinced that all that wine would have shorted out the logic board and turned it into an attractive paperweight. Much to my amazement it booted up with the familiar Apple bong, and I was able to log in as usual. Screen, sound and hard drive all fine. By now I was looking forward to getting a new MacBook, so I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not (I decided I was happy, as a new MacBook would mean shelling out on a larger Crumpler bag too). Quite how the iBook survived I don’t know, but it’s definitely earned the tag “Old Faithful”.

If only the same could be said about the Antec PSU in my Windows box. When I got back to London I fired up the PC and within seconds the PSU died. I was not a happy bunny, especially as this is the second Antec PSU I’ve had to replace within the last year. Although it’s still under warranty I decided to buy a different one rather than wait for Antec’s painfully slow RMA process.

My shiny new 600w PSU arrived yesterday and what did I discover? Not only did the Antec PSU die, but it seems to have fried my rather expensive motherboard in the process too (and I had to try every component in Rob’s PC to be sure). So now I’m waiting for a new motherboard to delivered.

The moral of this story? Don’t buy Antec PSUs. In fact, don’t buy/build a PC, just get a Mac. And be careful with your wine.

Sorry I’ve not posted anything for a while, but we’ve got a ton of work on at the moment, and any free time has been consumed by some rather heroic piss-ups. To make matters worse, the hard drive in my main box went into death throws the other night, and I’ve been busy making sure my iBook’s up-to-date. Not the major crisis it could have been, as I had time to back everything up between BSODs. Plus I was planning to build myself a new windows box in the next couple of weeks anyway.

On a related note, I was speaking to a friend today who’s managed to get a hacked copy of OS X Tiger running on a bog-standard PC (albeit with an IDE rather than SATA drive). Not sure if it really heralds the arrival of cheap hardware running a really good OS, but it’s certainly an interesting experiment. I’ll post the link to it once I manage to get GPG set up on my Mac to decrypt his original email.

Update 18th August: Still not got GPG set up, but see comments for the Tiger on a PC link.

Well I’ve finally taken the plunge and updated my iBook to run Tiger. Don’t want to tempt fate, but it seems to have gone smoothly. It’s definitely more memory-hungry than Panther, but does feel slightly faster overall. Spotlight’s a welcome addition, although I think it needs a little more work. I feel fairly ambivalent about Dashboard—not sure how much I’ll really use it once the novelty wears off (the Magic 8 Ball widget has proved quite useful: Shall I do any work today? “Definitely not”. OK then!). Early days yet though…

The good news: Apple a giving out free batteries to some iBook and PowerBook owners. The bad news: it’s because the old ones might catch fire.

Models affected are 12″ iBook G4 and 12″ & 15″ PowerBook G4s sold between October ‘04 and May ‘05. More details on identifying the dodgy batteries from Apple. Thankfully mine’s OK.

This is my idea of relaxed blogging — sitting in the garden on a Sunday afternoon, cool drink in hand, watching the cats chasing flies (OK, I could do without the flies, but they keep Patty and Selma amused — see exhibit A and B below).

The one down-side of the iBook’s white finish is that it does tend to reflect a lot of glare back onto the screen. However, I’ve discovered that with some careful positioning, it is just about possible to work whilst sat in the sun. Of course ideally there would be some contraption to enable me to use the laptop from the comfort of the hammock — the iHomer perhaps?

None of that swanky wi-fi technology for me though — I’ve got a ten metre cat5 cable running out of the window.

Speaking of wi-fi, does anyone know of any pubs or bars with wireless internet access in East Dulwich? My cat5 cable isn’t quite long enough to reach the EDT or Blue Mountain Cafe. This is kind of an up-and-coming area, full of middle-class thirty-somethings, so surely there would be enough demand. It would be so handy for those informal business meetings and geeky piss-ups.

With all the work we’ve got on at the moment, I’ve not really had the time to post lately. Of course my new iBook’s consumed quite a bit of my free time as well: learning how best to do things in OS X, getting the necessary applications set up how I like them, and generally being all “Ooh, shiny new toy!” about it.

My new cats have been keeping me pretty busy too; if I’m not playing with them, feeding them or changing their litter trays, then I’m trying to stop them causing havoc around the place. For instance, this morning I caught one of them trying to climb inside the combi boiler – I managed to grab her just as her backside was disappearing through a previosly undiscovered small hole in the top of the boiler.

Incidentally, althhough I keep referring to them as “the cats”, their names are actually Sugar (black and white, complete cuddle cat) and Spice (all black, fluffy bundle of energy). Not really my sort of names, but that’s what they were called when I got them, and I thought I’d stick with those as it’s what’s down on their Blunkett-esque ID chips (I’d probably have gone for Patty and Selma, or maybe Sherri and Terri). Anyway, it’s meant to be bad luck to rename a ship, so perhaps the same applies to cats too….

A couple of people have suggested I post photos of the cats, but to my mind that’s just a little too sad. I mean, really I’d have to go the whole hog and put together a garish page dedicated to them on Geocities, with perhaps a mawkish poem about how great cats are, along with 30 animated gifs of cartoon kittens chasing balls of string.

As for work, I’d love to whinge about some of it, but I my thin veneer of professionalism prevents me from doing so. That said, the last couple of weeks have been a bit more interesting as I’ve been doing some work in Flash for the first time in ages. My Flash skills are somewhat rusty, not having used it since version 5, so it’s taken me a while to get up to speed with the changes in MX 2004. Thankfully the Actionscript is all fairly object oriented nowadays, which makes life a lot easier.

I’ve got mixed feelings about Flash after a fortnight of using it; on the one hand it’s got some really useful, powerful features, but on the other hand it makes other fundamental tasks difficult or impossible. For example, one’s made to jump through hoops in order to query MySQL – presumably Macromedia are trying to push their commercial remoting products.

I also find it surprising that there’s no way to generate an image using Actionscript. For the project I’m working on it would be great if users could design something using the .swf, and then export the frame to their browser as a .png file. But sadly there doesn’t seem to be any way to do this. Perhaps I need to invest in Director… Pah!

I’m also having to resist the urge to use Garage Band to create a soundtrack for the Flash file. Surely my freeform jazz odyssey could only enhance the user experience?

After touring the Far East and western Europe for an aeon, my 12″ iBook finally arrived this morning (possibly some sort of telepathy on Apple’s part, as I was going to cancel the order if it hadn’t turned up by Monday). Anyway, I’ll save my grumbles about Apple’s poor choice of shipping companies and crap order tracking system for another day. My iBook is here, and I love it.

I’ve also got a McBain’s Baby bag to put it in, and the extra RAM and a two-button mouse are on order, as is another network cable (the only spare one I had was 30 metres long, which does seem a little silly with the iBook sat about 50cm away from my router).

Apart from a few bits of software, the only thing I really need now is a new chair. I’m currently sat on an old folding wooden chair, as one of my new cats has decided that my office chair is the most comfortable place to relax… I’m such a soft touch. Still, can’t really blame Apple for that.

I finally made it up to the Apple store on Regent Street on Saturday, dragging a few friends in tow. Unfortunately I hadn’t considered the mass of students and backpackers using the shop as a free internet cafe, and consequently couldn’t get anywhere near the iBooks. After spending a while trying (and failing) to justify the £2099 price tag of the 30″ Apple Cinema Display to myself, we ended up retiring to a nearby bar for wine and chips.

A wonderfully out-of-it evening ensued, starting off by watching the brilliant Elf, before spending hours listening to FSOL’s Lifeforms and Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden (enough said?). By the early hours of Sunday morning we were ready for Napoleon Dynamite, (which I’d not seen before, and turned out to be so wrong, and so, so funny) and genépi. The night culminated with us compelled to eat chicken soup at 5.30am after watching the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld.

Also worthy of a mention is the lovely Sunday lunch Simon and I had at Le Chardon in East Dulwich the following day. The tuna steak is highly recommended.

Anyhow, I eventually managed to get my hands on a 12″ iBook this afternoon after Rob and I had had our usual post-meeting fry up in Soho. And I have to say I was impressed - it was nice and solid, and had no trouble handling the things I asked it to do in Photoshop. The keyboard and display didn’t feel too cramped, which was my main concern, so I think I’ll definitely get one very soon - with the larger hard drive and some extra RAM from Crucial. We also had a play with the Mac Mini, which really is a nice bit of kit, even if, as I discovered inadvertently, the power lead does come out quite easily.

So with my mind made up, I’m now wondering about a bag or case for my forthcoming 12″ iBook. I’m rather taken with Crumpler’s range - their bags look suitably cool, don’t shout “Mug me!”, and more importantly they’ve got funny names: Mac Bain (my favourite), The 12″ Gimp, Very Busy Man and Cheesey Disco. Crumpler’s site is a particularly mad Flash experience too. Any iBook bag/case feedback welcomed though.

As a result of my iDilemma, I’ve been scouring the web for good comparisons of the various Mac and PC options, and found these articles over at Anandtech very helpful in convincing me to go with a Mac: A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User’s Perspective and A Month with a Mac - Part II: The Mobile Experience. Struck me as a pretty balanced look at the pros and cons, with quite a favourable conclusion. However, this thread on a Mac forum about iBook build quality does concern me rather. Time for me to do some heavy duty opening and closing at the Apple store I think.

I’m thinking about getting a new Mac, and I also need a laptop. The obvious answer would be to get an Apple laptop I suppose, but I’m distinctly underwhelmed by their offerings.

The iBook is over-priced and under-specced: the cheapest model is 700 notes and comes with a 12″ screen and a 30 gig hard drive. The most expensive is a grand and comes with a 14″ screen and a 60 gig drive. All the iBooks run at a resolution of 1024×768, and come with an inadequate 256 megs of RAM and a 32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9200. I could probably get a similarly specified ‘PC’ laptop for about half that, so no thanks.

The PowerBook range is lovely, but still over-priced compared to almost every other make of laptop out there. Although great for carrying around, the 12″ screens would be a little too pokey for me, so I’d have to go for the cheapest 15″ in the range, at £1400 by the time the RAM’s upgraded from 256MB. Think I’ll pass on that too.

What I’m seriously considering is buying a cheapish Windows laptop and one of the dinky Mac minis (if I can sort out a reasonably priced KVM solution); that way I get two computers for less than the price of one top-end iBook.

I dunno, it’s so complicated trying to be part of the iProduct generation!