People keep moaning that us Brits are being ripped off with the iPhone but I don’t think they have been doing their sums.

A lot of companies use the classic Clinton Era exchange rate of 1.6 dollars to the pound when pricing goods for the UK market.  Probably because you can’t keep changing the RRP month by month as the US market fluctuates like a mad thing.   So I worked out what Apple used and it seems close to a quite generous 1.74 dollars to the pound. See…

399USD * (1/1.74) = 229.43 + (VAT) = 269.58GBP

Actual Price: 269GBP

For fun, lets have a look what Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium Full would cost if Adobe used the same sums as Apple.

1599USD * (1/1.74) = 919.425 + (VAT) = 1080.32GBP

Actual Price: 1404.12GBP

So knock at Adobes door, not Apples.  (Yes I’m still obsessed with Adobes pricing)

This probably isn’t important… at all, it’s just that it’s confused the hell out of me.

Adobe have given Photoshop a new logo. Why would you change the logo in between releases? And will the dock icon no longer suite the rest of creative suite? And why should photoshop have a logo and none of the others? And why does it remind me so much of the Open University?

Well I dunno what to write about, but I reckons I ought to say something so I guess I’ll just throw a load of random shite at yerz.

My friend who got married last sunday was someone I’ve known since primary school.  When I was 7 or 8 or some nonesense.  They now live in the South and I hadn’t seem them in years,  only spoke online.  So to suddenly see them at their wedding and being their best mate was mighty weird.  Was supremely fun though.  And although doing a speech was scary frightning I’m glad I did, and all the folk there were wonderful about it, telling me it was great and being all supportive (I think they got the message that I was stressed about it all).

This friend now lives in Woking and the wedding was in some middle of nowhere idealic place near Guildford.  I’ve never been to Sussex before and my god is it lovely down there.  Kind of makes the “north” seem a bit crappy all told.  Another world around there.

I’m rather miffed because i’ve suddenly noticed that lots of jpg’s have somehow had their timestamp  mangled on my mac.  Dunno how but the jpgs underneath my “pictures” folder now have “24/07/07″ as both their created date and modified date.  How the heck am I supposed to know when things were taken now?

Strangely, DNG’s, ORF’s, TIFF’s and PSD’s under the same folder are OK. Gonna take some sorting out.

Amongst the Apple announcements the other day was the renewal of the iWork bundle of apps.

This is the version of iWork I’ve been waiting for as it finally includes a spreadsheet app. Boy was it worth the wait, it’s everything I could have hoped for and more, I love the way you can stick mutiple smaller spreadsheets on one sheet. So easy to throw things around.

They’ve also added a contextual bar to the apps, rather like the “ribbon” thingy in the latest MS Office, except unlike microsofts it doesn’t look like it was thrown together by someone enduring a fit. Instead it’s nice and svelte.

Finally a spreadsheet on the mac that doesn’t run like a dog. Wooo.

I’m now using lightroom after all

I originally poo-pooed lightroom because it didn’t offer any obvious way to share your library over a network, and I want to be able to edit photo’s upstairs on my iMac and be able to show people photo’s occasionally on my iBook downstairs.  It doesn’t let you open a library over a network either.

I’ve been using bridge for a while because it doesn’t use a central library.  But after a few weeks it becomes very very slow, beach balls all over the place. It doesn’t seem to have a very efficient cache, it ironically seems to make it slower rather than faster.

So I thought, well what now, and grudgingly gave lightroom another go. Turns out lightroom is freaking great and I was totally dumb not to realize how it can work perfectly over a network.

All you do is store the photo’s in a traditional folder layout on the HD, and alway import them without moving them to the catalogue.   Set a preference to always write changes to the files metadata and you’re away.  It’s even got a folder list, clever enough to have the parent of the most high level folder of a photo existing in your library.

So what you do is create a different catalogue on each comp and import the photo’s over the network without copying them.  Then each time you want to update lightroom on the other comp all you have to do is right click the folder in the folders panel and select “synchronise” it doesn’t take long at all and it works just great.

Also, for some reason it doesn’t seem to be affected by Adobe’s policy of ripping off people in europe.  RRP in the US is 299USD, in the UK it’s 205GBP including VAT.  Not only that, amazon.co.uk are selling it with 50 quid off!  Bargain!

I dunno if this makes even more angry that people are forced to import creative suite from america though.

Discovered a pretty nifty online backup service courtasy of macbreak weekly.

The service is called Mozy, and I do think they should check they’re safe using the Orange logo so blatantly.

Well despite that it’s a fantastic service.  I already make backups onto a usb hard drive but it’s kept in the house which means that if there’s a fire, or the house implodes or possibly more likely for Sheffield, the house is flooded then I’ll lose everything.

The great pain is doing the initial backup because if you’re internet service is anything like mine then your upload speed sucks big time.

But after a week or so of having to leave yer comp on all the time to upload you’ll have yer stuff all snug and safe and further backups are minimal because of a smart little app they have which not only skips files that haven’t changed but compares the difference block by block on files larger than 1MB.

The app also gets on with it in the background and keeps a low profile, it’s never nagged me about losing connections or sticking the mac to sleep without telling it.  It just logs the problem and gets on with it.

Haven’t tried the windows app but I wager it will be fine too.

You get 2GB for free, but paid membership for 2 years is 100 dollars and it’s unlimited (I don’t know exactly what unlimited is but it’s more than your HD will be.)  That’s only the price of a typical backup drive plus you get an app and the safety of it being off-site.

Installed the developer preview of leopard onto an external drive yesterday.

Bullet points shall convey my thoughts…

• It feels faster than tiger, which is surprising because my iMac is a 32bit core duo and leopard is stuffed full of 64bit stuff.  It might feel faster because I hadn’t had a chance to stuff the drive full of crap.  But still, peeps with 32bit mac’s need not worry about a speed hit.
•  I was underwhelmed by the features.  I’m hoping i’ll be pleasantly surprised by hidden nuggets, but right now i’m not holding my breath.
• Finder is hugely disappointing.  Quickview is good, but despite the iTunes-esq appearance the rest of finder still just feels like finder.  It just isn’t a shell you expect in 2007.  There’s no paradigm shift.  No breadcrumb bar.  No tagging.  No editable extended attributes support.
• Yeah quickview is pretty nifty, it opens files incredibly quickly, even things like spreadsheets open in a flash, and I was impressed that it showed tabs for the different sheets in an excel spreadsheet I tried.
• Spaces is going to come in useful for those times that I leave an app on my TV and don’t fancy turning it back on just to drag it back to the main desktop.
• Time machine is so so easy to set up and it works well.  However, I choose a network location.  Then went back to leopard today and tried Time machine and it complained that it hasn’t been set up.  Reason was that I hadn’t yet in that session visited/mounted the network location.  So you still need to be careful of that, and create automounts for network locations.  Which I might add finder still offers up no help for.
• So yeah, I get the feeling network support ain’t going to be any better in leopard.
• The new dock looks nice and flashy at first, but it didn’t take long for my eyes to grow tired of it, it looks a tad cluttered.
• Still no way to turn off display outputs at will.
• Apple seem to be moving away from having pop-out sidebars for setting attributes.  Such as in iCal.  Now when you create a new event you double click it and a nice looking floating palette emanates from the event.
• The menu bar doesn’t look any better in real life than it does in the screenshots.  Even worse, when you click an item the drop down menu is more opaque than the menu bar and looks completely out of place.
• And that’s all the weather.

Hey, my priest has dinged 40. Woohoo.

Only, I thought I’d get a mount at 40. But it seems I can only get a mount once i amass a wealth of about 90 gold. WTF! I’m devastated. I thought getting a mount was the reward for reaching 40.

And i’m totatlly penniless.

I hate warcraft!

So yeah, ages ago I went mad and spent an unspeakable amount of money on a bundle of music software by Native Instruments. I guess I was feeling frifty.

Thing is, I have certainly not had my moneys worth. Although from scratch the bundle only shipped with 3 of the 12 components being a universal binary (that is compatible with an intel processor based macintosh computer) they had promised (including in print on the box) that they would all be ready by updates within a couple of months (I read that as 2 months), and as such the bundle was sold as being for owners of intel macs, it even had the universal badge on the box, as you can see. Heck as well that was november 2006. It is now March 2007, 4 months and counting since purchase and I am still waiting for 4 components of this bundle to be made compatible with my machine.

It is completely disgraceful for this company to have promised, nay, sold a software bundle for intel machines if they were not confident of having the whole thing running within good time.

Whats worse in my opinion is that they haven’t even apologised. You can check all over their website and there isn’t an ounce of regret.

Getting to watch our own domestic football live in the UK is very difficult.  You have to pay stupid money to Rupert Murdoch and even then you only get live the 1 game they deem will be the most worthy.

Well Footie has been brought back to the people thanks to p2p streaming.  Sure the quality is only average, it’s tricky to set up and you have to wait an eternity for the stream to start but even so, a desperately obsessed fan is going to be in heaven.

Theres about 5 popular p2p streaming apps and you need all of them because you never know which is going to be used for the particular game.  You can download them all here but the likelihood of the page being taken down is probably high, I don’t know what the legalities are.  Search for the likes of “TVAnts”, “PPMate” and “Sopcast” if that page is down. They are all for windows, but work OK in parallels.
Once you have the software, you need a community to give you links to the games when they air.  There’s a good forum called Streaming-lounge who will do that for you, check the day of the game.

When launching a channel my advice is to wait, wait and wait some more.  None of the apps seem to give you much indication whether or not you are connected to anything and it can take a good 10 minutes before you have connected to enough peers to get the live stream going.  Also, once you start getting a picture, it will be choppy and cut off a lot for probably a further 10 minutes.

Another thing is that most of these channels are from china and other asian countries where they are big english football fans and get all the games (unlike us).  So a lot of the channels are in foreign.  There is often though an international english language channel amongst them, it’s always a case of trial and error to find the english one.