Category: Apple

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Bright & Shiny

I did something that I probably shouldn’t have done.

Macbook air january 15 2008 1799

I just got a brand new MacBook Air.

I was a bad boy and spent money that I shouldn’t have. However I have a plan… it’s probably not a good plan but it’s a plan nonetheless.

At least I didn’t go for the new MacBook Pro retina display… Drool, Drool

So this little puppy is fast I optioned it up to the max, i7 processor, 512GB solid state drive, 8GB of RAM.  Slick! and quiet unless i’ve got it doing something really intense. Then the fans kick in and it’s surprisingly noisy.

I have to hand it to Apple. Their migration assistant works like a champ. It took a while but this machine grabbed everything off my MacBook Pro (2008) version and got me a working machine with almost zero effort.

I am always impressed when software works as described without a hiccup.

My plan is to upgrade the drive in my MacBook Pro and squeeze some more life out of it. Meanwhile I’ll be  using the Air as my main machine for a while. Obviously, the machine will also be with me pretty much 24/7.

I’m pretty impressed with the speed that I’m seeing on applications opening. I’m also getting used to OSX Lion, soon to be OSX Mountain Lion. I’m thinking that I like Lion… I really wasn’t sure that I would and was wondering how I was going to downgrade it to Snow Leopard functionality, but I think there will be no need.

This little puppy is backing up to the NAS as I write this… It’s claiming 8 hours to completion I’m hoping that the backup will be done sooner than that.

I’m impressed by a number of things about this machine. First is, as I mentioned the speed. The other thing that’s interesting is the display. It’s easy for me to forget that the display is only 13″ The clarity is so nice that I’m having no problems working with it. While this is not a retina display, I think that it’s an improvement over the display technology used in my older MacBook Pro. The overall weight of the machine and that fact that it has no critical moving parts is also very attractive.

This machine is also equipped with USB 3.0 and has an SD card reader built in. The USB is of interest because many of my portable backup drives are USB 3.0 devices. The SD card slot means that I have one less thing to carry with me if I’m on a photography expedition.

I haven’t run the machine on battery yet, but plan to tomorrow. Apple claims up to 7 hours I’ll be interested to see how well they live up to that claim.

Without sounding like an Apple fan boy. I must admit that I in general like the Apple products. I like the fact that I tend to get about 4 to 6 years out of an Apple machine where with a Windows machine I’m lucky if I get 2 or 3 years of useful life. In the case of the Windows machines it’s not that the hardware fails… it’s that Windows runs slower and slower until the machine is all but unusable.

That’s whats happening with my little netbook, If the machine is in sleep mode, it typically will not wake up and be useful without doing a restart.

Between all the checks that Windows does regarding how long the machine has been asleep and if updates are available or if maintenance has been done or needs to be done.

The machine is effectively useless for 5 to 7 minutes after it’s waking up. I’m the user and I opened the machine NOT to have it do all these checks, I opened the machine because I needed to use it.

The solution is to reformat the netbook, re-install Windows, and then restore all my information. Honestly… That’s a real pain in the ass.

In contrast, my MacBook has been in use since 2008. It’s been reloaded from its backup one time. That was because I was cleaning up some files and deleted a chunk of stuff that I later realized I shouldn’t have.

If this new MacBook Air lives up to it’s lineage I expect that I’m going to be using it well into 2017.

Damn! As I wrote 2017 I thought no, that can’t be right but sure as hell, 2017 is just 5 years away.

Now ain’t that a kick in the pants!

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A friend of mine has an Apple TV and…

One of the problems with iTunes, and video formats, and DLNA is that there’s not much in the way of cross platform compatibility.

Since this household is a mixed platform house. That means that we have multiple video formats, all of which play just fine on their respective computers.

The problem is that if you want to play a video that you’ve purchased on iTunes you can’t play that video directly on your 55″ DLNA enabled flat screen TV unless you have an appliance (Either Software or Hardware). Or you can root around behind your big ass tv that’s hanging so neatly on the wall and connect your computer to it then hope that you can get decent audio out of your computer to an amp or something.

I’ve done it. It’s a serious pain in the ass.

The other alternative is to reprocess all of your video files into whatever format IS playable from your DLNA enabled player. Time consuming, prone to error, and often you end up with degraded audio and video.

Here was my situation.

I have video stored on a main drive that acts as a media server. The video is shown as available to all the DLNA devices. In this case, the Xbox, the TV, and surprisingly the DVR satellite box. What’s annoying is that not all of the video will actually play on any single one of the devices. And NONE of them will play any of the video that I purchased from Apple.

So I’m playing around with my computer at a friends place and notice that he has an AppleTV thingy. Sure enough, if I can play the video in iTunes… I can direct it at the AppleTV and bang… I have video and audio. The really cool thing is that Once the link is made between my computer and the AppleTV, I can navigate the whole library from the AppleTV, I don’t have to mess with the computer other than to make sure it’s on and running iTunes.

LESS THAN 24 Hours after leaving my friends house…

I have an AppleTV connected to the TV in the bedroom. I’ll probably end up with another AppleTV in the living room connected to the big ass TV too.

As I’ve explored the AppleTV i’m impressed… I can access anything on Netflix, I can access not only my purchased Apple video on my computer, but I can also access those videos from the cloud.

AppleTV also has various networks pay per view offerings available. Which has lead to a discussion about the merits of keeping the Satellite service.

It breaks down like this.

I watch, exactly one sitcom.

Two or three adventure / drama programs from the networks

and BBC America

I’ll tune into The Simpsons but most of the other shows on Fox Sundays are… well Crap!

I watch the news, and SciFi channel. The news is always annoying, talking heads breathlessly decrying the latest atrocity or providing second by second commentary on the latest high speed car chase. (High speed?!?! Most of these morons never get above 100!)

I’ll watch the National Geographic channels, the history channel, and several of the learning type channels.

I’ll watch comedy central for SouthPark, or Futurama

I pay for Stars just so that I can watch Spartacus

I pay for HBO just so that I can watch True Blood.

So the question I find myself asking is this…

Am I getting value for the price I’m paying?

Survey SAYS!  Not really. At over 100.00 a month, it’s not really worth it to me.

Of the 300+ channels available to me I don’t watch most of them. I couldn’t care less about BET, or ION, or the Spanish language channels.

I’ve long thought that as a PAYING CONSUMER… I should be able to pick and choose those channels that I wanted. I shouldn’t have to buy a package or packages just to get the one or two channels from each package that I actually watch never tuning to ANY of the ones that I don’t.

I’m considering doing what my buddy and so many other people I know have done… I’m thinking that pulling the plug on my satellite box might be reasonable.

I was raised on TV I’m a child of the ’60s. I’ve never known a life without broadcast TV. I find myself wondering if taking complete control of what I watch and when I watch it isn’t a better option.

If I re-allocate the 1200 a year from satellite to Netflix, Hulu, BluRay, or iTunes purchases… That’s a lot of entertainment that I can suddenly afford to see, on my terms without commercials.

Of course I’ll miss the local news broadcasts… But I can get most news on the internet… Who knows I might just start reading the newspaper again….

Oh and to my friend who is the cause of all this, laughing his butt off in his office…

LAUGH WHILE YOU CAN MONKEY BOY!

Remember I’m the one who usually causes the chaos… Be careful or I’ll remind you of a certain LaserDisk purchase…