Tomorrow I’m having the carpet replaced in my room because the one I have is all moth eaten and yucky and we want to sell the house some-time in the not too distant future (betya it doesn’t happen). So you know what that means, I’m having to clear the room out completely, moving desks, wardrobes and all sorts of heavy lifting mayhem. I’m totally pooped right now, sweat is dripping from my forehead in almost rain forest proportions. Thankfully I’ve also a Guinness to sup, but somehow it isn’t helping too much lol.

I’m not looking forward to the wwdc keynote at all. Intel have released the core 2 duo faster than anyone could have anticipated, and apparently its 20% faster than the cpu I’ve got in my iMac, which I’ve only had for about 3 bleedin’ months!

Sure, I positively absolutely do not need that 20%, you probably wouldn’t even notice it most of the time. Just in games I guess, and I don’t play PC games very often anymore due to them all being sucky FPS wanky nonsense, and yet still, I want that 20% I am so going to cry tomorrow.

I always make the worst purchasing decisions I swear!

A scatterbrain entry just for kicks

At Five! I’m trying to avoid tomato based dishes but it’s tricky, it more or less halves what you can eat, especially from Italian cuisine. So occasionally I’ll allow myself just a bit as a treat. I’ve just had spaghetti and meat-balls. Already I can feel the tomato meanies rushing through my veins. Ugh.

At Four! I’ve ordered a Nintendo DS Lite. Oops. Ha ha. Buyers remorse and i haven’t even received it yet. Just ordered New Mario with it for now but it’ll be enough I’m sure! I absolutely adore the old 2D style mario games. I’ve probably mentioned before how mad I am about SNES Mario world. It’s pure charm.

At Three! I finally got around to packaging up my busted hard drive on wednesday. We cleared the loft out because sheffield is had a collect your unwanted stuff day, you could dump just about anything, like old bikes and chairs and shit outside the house and they came to collect it. Nice of them huh? Anyway, I found amongst the stuff in the loft a box and some polystyrene that was just perfect for packaging the hard drive exactly as hitachi demanded. Quite incredible though, the post office only dispatched it wednesday, to reach hitachi on thursday and yesterday (friday) I received an email that they have dispatched a new hard drive to me. I was damn impressed. Almost makes up for the cufuffle with the packaging.

At Two! I forgot to mention that a week or 2 ago I tried out Neooffice 2 for intel. I’m sure the people at Neooffice are nice chaps ‘n’ gals but I’m going to find this very difficult to word without sounding cruel and hateful. It’s just, I can’t help wondering if the Neooffice can possibly be proud of their product? The intention of Neooffice is to improve Openoffice and make it more mac-like. But, they’ve managed, once again to actually make it worse! It’s slower and more clumsy even than running Openoffice via X11. You can actually see it redrawing the window. Oh yeah, and the only thing as far as I can figure out that they’ve improved for mac-likeness is the menubar. The rest is the same! Even the open/save dialog is as it is in openoffice. If I worked for Neooffice I would demand that they bin the whole thing and attack the project from another angle. Something fundamental is wrong.

And straight in at number One! I’ve nothing else to say today really.

Well I’ve had a downright annoying week, so I let myself have a week off blogging duty. Last Saturday was the main culprit, I think i’ll put it in a list in order of events.

1. It was always going to be a sucky day because it was the day we had to return from our little holiday. You know what, even though it was only devon, not the most exotic of locations and not even abroad, it barely seems a holiday if it isn’t abroad in this day and age of cheap travel. But d’ya know what it was one of the most enjoyable weeks i’ve had and its all because of Eddie. Holidays with dogs are soooo gooood! It’s worth getting a dog just to go on holiday with them. So yeah, I was quite down at having to leave.
2. Being in the car for such a length of time isn’t much fun for a dog so we made stops at every service station on the way to give him a potty break and stretch our weary legs. At one such break I noticed something in the fur on Eddies forehead, it was sort of a faint orange small pea sized thing and when I took a closer look found it to actually be attached to him. Then I noticed it had legs! I was horrified! I didn’t know at the time but it turns out it was a tick, would you believe I’ve never seen a tick before? You don’t tend to see them in this country and what with the the heatwave at the time. I almost died though, I was shaking and all sorts was racing through my head of what diseases it might have passed to him and it was quite close to his eyes so I was all OMG what if it makes him blind?! Eddie was no use at all, he hadn’t brought it to our attention, no whimpering or anything, it could have been there for days. I cursed nature and all her evil insects.
3. We made an early start so that we would get home in time for the england game, we only just made it, immediately having to grab a beer and jump on the sofa, no time to unpack. Oh and wasn’t I so glad to have made the effort? Yeah. Never liked rooney. Twat.
4. I’d missed my wholesome iMac, and straight after the long long punishment. 120 minutes + penalties of slow torture I figured I’d say hello to him (lol most people call their mac’s her’s, not me I guess). I knew that during holiday apple released 10.4.7 and some other paraphernalia so the first thing I did on logging in was to check for software updates and tthere was a ton of the bleeders. They downloaded quite swiftly thanks to 10Mbit cable and installed one by one, but half way through the actual 10.4.7 (intel) update it failed, telling me its kept the update so I could try again later and would I like to restart for the others to complete. Sure I guess, and it did and it sadly passed away.

All that suckiness in one day can’t be good for ones health, surely suckiness should be spread a bit more thinly, not all thrown at you in one go. Regarding the mac thing, what happened was that it would boot to the login screen fine but afterward only part of the menu bar appeared and that was all, no dock or clock or even most of the menu. And the beach ball span indefinitely. Even the force quit menu wouldn’t appear when doing its keyboard shortcut. As luck would have it (the only luck of the day) enough of OS X was working for File Sharing to have started in the background and I was able to log in via the iBook and get my files off. It took me the rest of the day and most of the next to get all my stuff off though, I’ve just way too much stuff. And with the spare 240GB HD still out of action I haven’t got 1 big storage device to backup onto. I had to do it piecemeal style onto a spare 60GB HD (doesn’t even cover my MP3 Collection) and what’s left on the iBook, neither being quite enough and so had to resort to a load of cdr’s as well. Took freaking forever and its so messy having to do it bits like that I’m always worried I’ll have missed something.

It’s inconclusive but I’m 75% sure the update failed and fucked the os up because of my Vista misadventure, that is, having deleted the EFI partition and causing a little confusion to the partition tables. I knew it would come back to bite me, but I was hoping it would happen after my 240GB Backup HD had been fixed.

Oh yeah here’s a little warning. After erasing my drive and re-installing the OS I wasted about 6 or 7 hours because I had chosen to format the drive as case-sensitive. As seen as all Unix based OSs that I know of use a case-sensitive FS I figured it would be best and a no-brainer option. Well it turns out that Case-Sensitive was only introduced with Tiger and is incompatible with some software. Thing is most of my software worked fine, it was only after installing Adobe CS2 that problems started, none of the Adobe apps would load, they’d just bounced in the dock a split second and buggered off. I had not a single clue what was going on and it was only after trying out a million different things, reinstalling the OS another time and spending what felt like hours staring at google not getting anywhere when I discovered the Case-Sensitive FS issue.

Reinstalled yet again without caseness and everything was fine. So, thanks apple for not being arsed to put some kind of warning into the install dvd. Humph. Actually I was quite surprised to discover that OSX hadn’t been sitting on a case-sensitive FS all this time. I’d always just presumed it was, I figured only windows was crap enough not to be.

I created a diagram to accompany todays post, I hope you find it useful and it should also serve to summarise the post’s information in a quick manor.

For the long trip down here and any other passages of isolated boredom that may strike I figured some movies may come in handy. Playing DVD’s is quite a battery drain, partly because of the power being used by the optical drive, and I think also because the low compression of a dvd’s video is a fair amount of data that has to be wizzed around the machine’s guts. So I downloaded Handbrake which is a really easy to use dvd compression/converter app, its easier and more straight forward than I think any of the free ones on the pc were, that i had used before.

I first tried converting the dvd’s to 1000kbit H.264, but unexpectedly when I tried it later on the iBook, even with the standard definition of a DVD movie it struggled to play it back, pausing here and there to take a breath. Which is a shame because they really did look almost identical to the original. So I did them in xvid instead, which isn’t too shabby anyway, except in the odd fast moving scene where xvids tend to look grubby.

I encoded them on the iMac and it really is silly fast, came as quite a shock actually. Handbrake does the whole thing in one pass, it doesn’t even have to dump the dvd’s contents on the HD first, does it all in one go. And managed to encode xvids at an average of 34 FPS, with PAL films being 25FPS thats much higher than real time! Probably even more incredible it encoded h.264 at about 24FPS. Crikey.

My iMac configuration is now a 100GBP cheaper than when I bought it, them swine’s. I hope this is in response to intels recently announce drastic price cuts in the core duo, otherwise if it gets even cheaper soon I really will be feeling queasy. Haha. I guess you just have to expect these things, tech goods come down in price all the time don’t they, you just have to buy things and be happy.
Paul Thorrott’s mini write-up of parallels isn’t entirely positive, and I emailed him because i don’t feel his experience quite mirrors my own. This wouldn’t be anything extraordinary, except that he emailed me back, with quite a well thought out reply within the hour. Gosh, that guy must be a grade 70 typist (or whatever they call good typists haha) ‘cos I’m sure he must get shit loads of nutty emails from us neanderthals constantly all day long.

Speaking of parallels, if you have an intel based mac, or are soon to be getting one, unless you’ve already missed the boat now is a wise time to register a copy because its half price until the official release date.

Re-Frederator the podcast is great, it’s an offshoot of Frederator and it shows a classic/antique cartoon every single day. The other day they presented an ancient episode of Casper, and in one scene, whilst the camera panned across a dark room of drapped belongings I spotted an object that can only be described as phallic, so suggestive does it look that I cannot imagine it being unintended. Those dirty animators.

The other night I was itchy intensely the entire night. It was one of my worst flare-up’s for some time and I felt absolutely terrible. When it was time to get up in the morning I just didn’t want to move, had the whole feeling clammy and yet dry, and sore and creaky. I didn’t want to move a single limb an inch. Looked so red and blotchy, I took a photo, cropped it to a tiny segment for embarrassment reasons, but suffice it to say my skin was as that photo all over my body. Thankfully, it gradually wore off throughout the day and by the next my skin wasn’t too bad. Hope the photo doesn’t put you off your food. Hmm, wonder if I can find a point where it can tile/repeat, could make a great gross out texture for a game.

Hey scan.co.uk is going straight to the top of my favourite online retailers. When I ordered the RAM I knew it was out of stock and didn’t mind waiting a few weeks. When I ordered they sent an email, separately to the confirmation to tell me its out of stock but that they expect a new batch to arrive on the 25th. Then they sent me an email to tell me the item has arrived and is awaiting to be despatched to me… then a few hours later an email arrived to tell me it has been despatched. It arrived on Friday! How is that for service! They tell you exactly what’s going on at every stage, plus you’d ordinarily expect to pay a premium for such a service and yet this memory was less than half the price of most places. Awesome. After installing the RAM (which is easy peesy lemon squeesy on the iMac CD) the first thing I did was check “about this mac” to see if it was running at the proper 667MHz speed, it was. Next I booted into Apple Hardware Test and did the extended system test, this Passed. Then ran MemtestOSX which this time managed to lock 1715MB for testing, I left it going and went downstairs ‘cos this is a really in depth test and takes freaking hours. I let it complete 3 test cycles and it didn’t make a single mistake. Next to check its running fast enough. Ran XBench and the memory actually scored ever so slightly faster than it did with the 1GB, this is possibly because it can take advantage of dual-channel optimisations when there are 2 sticks inside. Also, for completeness sake I rebooted into windows (boot camp stylee) and ran PCMark ‘05, just as with Xbench it scored slightly more than when it was 1GB. So hey, you don’t always have to pay the extra! Now all i’m regretting is that Apple don’t allow you to buy the iMac with no memory installed, would have saved about 75 GBP per GB. Sure I could have got the iMac with 512MB, but i would have had to sell the 512, otherwise end up with a mismatched pair adding up to 1.5GB.

Still no universal ecto in sight. Big smelly poopies, or maybe even poo pies. Haven’t had a good pie in months me. Hey despite not being in stock my memory purchase was dispatched today, so that’s good, wonder if the delivery people will be working saturday, otherwise i’ll be waiting till Monday no doubt. I sound a bit like Russell Brand today by jimminy cricket.

I was bored earlier, and whilst the sun was bright and pouring into the room hitting the mac on its rear I took a photo, straining my skills with casting light to the max.. haha, with a compact camera, sheesh. Though hey, it still looks kinda stylish. Do you like my TOSlink cable with the TOSlink-mini-jack adapter clipped on the end? Bet you don’t seem them every day. Trust Apple to be so design conscious, wanting not to have too many holes on the back that they decided to hide the optical behind the mini-jack by using a technique that was actually meant for small DAT portable recorders.

Anyway yeah, other memory misadventures, I tried to get memtest86+ working on this here iMac core duo and did it work? Did it *beep*!. Downloaded it and burned the bootable cd in preparation of testing the new memory when it arrives. All it did when I rebooted and held ‘c’ was poop “Loading………………” on the screen and blink its hellish cursor at me indefinitely. I even took a photo I was that peeved. Anypoop, there does appear to be an alternative flavour geared for macs, but isn’t a bootable cd affair, instead it runs in OSX and you have to clear as much memory by closing all the running apps as possible so that it can lock a decent continuous amount of physical RAM to test. It really doesn’t seem to be entirely useful IMO, it only managed to get access to 256MB worth of RAM, not much good that is it now? I suppose, as long as the mac allocates the new stick of memory to the top end of the memory it might be ok. Hmm, but is memory allocation really so considerate of such things? I can’t image it is

The wacom tablet i swiped off ebay arrived today, it’s actually not too bad, and being so small didn’t seem such a hindrance after all, well, you seem to get used to the sensitivity quite quickly, plus being small means you can be lazy and rest yer wrist in the same position most of the time. The buttons on the pen are annoying though, I keep catching them by accident, so I might assign them to do nothing. About the sensitivity, if you’re going to be working on something for a long time and don’t want to be zooming in and out you can sneak into system preferences and limit the extents of the screen it draws across. Its ideal, but it would be a lot more useful if there was some intelligence behind it. For instance, it really should be built into photoshop so that it automatically adjusts to the size of the current canvas/windows size. Tell yer what though, even things like tracing around the outline of an object, to extract it from the image feels a lot more natural with a pen tablet than with a mouse. Wouldn’t like to use it for actually navigating a GUI though, apparently some people do, they must be nuts.

Why did I hyperlink hindrance?

I fancy upgrading my iMac’s memroirs to 2GB, I fear it would be an improvement to certain scenarios, particularly when several large apps are running via rosetta (some eat up memory like clients with their slappers (???)). So yeah, I took out the stick of RAM which I might add is SO freaking DIM! In order to check the brand and shit, took a picture of it too as you can see. Took a while to figure out the brand because I only had a never seen before logo to go on. Turns out its by Micron, who it also turns out are the same people as Crucial. I guess Micron is the company and Crucial is the retail brand, they probably think it sounds hip and MTV-like. Problem is Crucial charge an absolute fortune for this particular spec, 117 GBP, which is only around 20GBP less than Apple themselves charged when kitting out the iMac.

Reason I would prefer to get the same brand is because quite a lot of peeps say you should always match brands when using 2 or more sticks in the same machine. But d’ya know what, I reckon they’re just talking bullshit, I bet they’re sys admin dudes who always have their employers paying twice what they should for the company’s IT dept just because they’re techno snobs. Anyway I found this at Scan, it’s exactly the same specs as far as I can tell, but its over half the price! It’s out of stock at the moment but I’ve ordered it anyway. We’ll see.

I’ve really fancied getting a graphics tablet for quite some time, don’t really need one but i just really fancy giving one a try. Problem is they aren’t really “giving it a try” type prices. It’s all because there’s only one company making them, Wacom, so they can basically charge what the hell they like, and because its mostly profitable design firms buying them they get away with the inflated prices. Only A6 sized tablets are anywhere near affordable. I would really only want an A5 tablet but they cost at least 140 GBP. Wacom have an A6 tablet with a retail price of 75 GBP, the Graphire4. So anyway, in one of my weird impulsive moods I discovered a slighty older model; Graphire3, still only A6, but going on ebay so I gave a conservative bid and ended up winning it. Was only 35 GBP, bet yers I never use it though. haha.

My iMac actually arrived a day early last week, Monday morning, whilst I was still asleep lol. So I had a lovely surprise waiting for me when I got up. Came in a spiffing box in Apples usual consumer white design, and “designed by apple in California” being the first thing you see as you open it up. The only oddity of course is the intel badge on the side. One thing i’ll point out about the packaging; the printed material is lousy, the booklets are all tiny square things, smaller than a cd booklet, and quite cheap looking. My iBook came with much nicer literature, including a glossy full colour welcome to tiger thing. The welcome to tiger that came with the iMac is like a 50% scale black and white photocopy.

Oddest thing, the iMac itself as I lifted it out of the box was freezing cold and covered in damp, soaked in fact! Where the heck had the irish eejits been storing it? Had they kept it with their guinness supply? I’m blaming the irish ‘cos thats where Apple ship their stuff from in europe. So I gave it a careful rub down before powering it on, the poor thing, it was shivering you know?

…Like my own little Apple Store, only an Apple store that also deals in shoes. It felt so good to rip out all the paraphernalia associated with my old PC, all the wires, the great lead filed CRT that always brakes my back lifting and was probably -that- close to collapsing through my glass desk, the big beige noisy box from under my desk. Plonking the sleek iMac on my desk was like entering a new age of computing. “Where has the computer gone?” was their original slogan for this thing, I’m asking “Where has the PSU gone?” Some may not realise this but the iMac doesn’t use an external power brick like the mini, even LCD TV’s need them. The PSU inside my old PC was enormous, so how in the heck does this iMac actually work? lol

Powering it on the first thing I noticed was how bright this screen is, next to it the iBook screen looks so dim it’s almost as if it has broken. The iMac’s screen is even brighter than my CRT was, it looks a lot brighter in a lesser lit home than it does in the stores or a brightly lit office. Almost the first thing I did after turning it on was install boot camp, I figured it be best to get it over with. The first stage of the XP install looks rather out of place on this thing. In the end it wasn’t such a great exciting start to my iMac, XP takes soooo long to get all sorted, even after installing it. All the updates and app installing you have to do to get it as you want it.

Had to take a photo of it saying “An exciting new look”, well you just have to don’t you, they should put expire dates on installation messages such as that, so that they only appear in the first year of release. I haven’t had a single issue running XP on this thing and it plays Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion just fine
I re-arranged my room today so that the window is in front of me rather than behind, this is for the iSight camera, all you get is a silhouette of me otherwise. Gosh, it’s so nice to be running OSX full time now, rather than just on the iBook. The OS feels lovely and responsive in such a way that it rarely appears to be having to do any work. It just is. If that makes sense.

Front Row is heaven for lazy late nights, because this thing is in my bed room I have some headphones with a nice long lead, when I go to bed I stick a film on the imac, if I get bored of the film, I can switch to playing some music. All controlled with the remote without having to get out of bed. Best of all, when I feel myself nodding off I hold the play/pause button for a few seconds and the iMac puts itself to sleep. How genius is that!??!!?

There always seems to be some downers with screen technology, and I have some issues with this one. As I’ve mentioned, its beautiful, extremely bright and very colourful. The colour balance seems just right as well, whites are white, not slightly blue or slightly yellow as with some screens, I’m also quite pleased with the black, the funny not quite black strangeness you get with LCD screens is in the most part quite minimal on this. What is noticeable, but only late at night when it’s pitch black in the room is a grey smudge in the corners on dark/black images. I don’t actually have a tremendous amount of experience with LCD screen’s so I don’t know if this is normal. And because it’s only visible in certain conditions I wager a lot of ppl don’t even know about it. So whether it’s a manufacturing flaw, or an iMac thing, or a problem with all LCD’s is hard to tell. My second problem with the screen I’ve only just discovered and has put me in a right bad mood. I’ve got a dead pixel… right in the middle of the screen!
Does anyone know Apple’s policy on dead pixels? double
Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention the internal sound processor. I’m well impressed with it, so much better than on-board sound i’ve witnessed before. According to “About this mac” it’s “Intel High Definition Audio”, I haven’t seen any actual specs on this thing but I’ve discovered it can do 96KHz, which I’ve never known on-board sound to do. And, the latency seems very low indeed, i’m not sure what I had the latency set to but when I plugged in my midi-keyboard it felt at least as low as 40ms, maybe even 20ms. I couldn’t sense any delay at all. So yeah, it’s just a shame my stereo can’t go any higher than 48KHz from the optical lead.

Woohoo, so should arrive on Tuesday then. Wonder what it’s doing right now, hope it isn’t too lonely. Just had a peep on futuremarks 3dMark ‘06 result browser and hey presto, there’s already a benchmarked iMac Core Duo 20″ on there, a couple in fact. Seems it’s hitting a score of around 1707. But guess what? My PC only gets 1350! I was expecting the iMac to score slightly less than my current PC so this is great news, should play games perfectly respectably. It really is going to be an all round perfect machine
I can’t wait, this is unfair. Waiting is unfair. I think i might go to bed and sleep until Tuesday. Shame i haven’t got any pills to knock me out. Gosh I’m a bit late why my song podcast this week. I’m not in the mood to post it haha.