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 Apple confirmed that the new NYC store, located in the Meat Packing District will be opening this Friday, December 7th at 6:00PM. This is the third store in NYC and it will mark another place for me to visit when I go to the city. More than anything I think image is fantastic! Clever boys… clever.
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I had posted last week my latest want [link] list, and yesterday I got something that I’ll be crossing off the list… my EVDO Rev A Modem. Thanks to Pinoyboy’s help, I decided to go with the Novatel Ovation USB727 USB EVDO [link] modem. I chose Sprint’s service and I have to say this thing is AMAZING. I get about 1Mb down and about 500kb upstream with it. It was sickly easy to set up on my MacBook, not so much on my PC. I am really happy with it. As a matter of fact I’m in the car, blogging on it, and I can’t tell a difference over being on my home network! This is amazing!!! Wow think of all the productive time I’ll have now. Hahhahaha, yeah right! [UPDATE] fixed 1 MB to 1Mb and 500MB to 500kb This is the mantra I repeated to myself over and over for the past week in respect my weekend project, and to be honest it was true… Today, I tackled the task of building my own PC for the first time. I know it’s lame that a person who professes to be as big a geek as I do has never built a PC, but I switched to Macs right about the time that PC building became popular. I have of course upgraded plenty of PCs in my life (I was a PC technician for quite some time) and figured that doing a complete build could not be that much harder, and I have to say that was a good assumption. But why would I want to build a PC? Especially since I’m such a Mac boy? About a month or so ago, I was beyond fed up with my networking issues [Why Me, Straightened Out?], a few frustrated calls to Pinoyboy, and he suggested that I take more control over my network and install an IPCop box. IPCop is a Linux Install that provides a Firewall, DNS Services, DHCP Server etc. It replaces all the functions of my Linksys router. The install was super easy and thanks to Pinoyboy’s help, I even got some Firewall rules written. The nicest part of the IPCop install is that since it’s a very specialized Linux OS, the system requirements are very modest. I pulled out my now 7 year old Gateway out of the closet and used it to install the OS and it ran without issue. The only problem? The Gateway PC is a full-sized tower and it was LOUD, very loud, so I decided that I wanted a new, very small system. I figured that since the system requirements for IPCop were modest, I could do this on the cheap and I decided to build a Bare-Bones system myself. After many hours of discussion with Pinoyboy, he helped me sort thru all the stuff I don’t know about PCs anymore, such as what processors go with what motherboards, what chips were good value and what I truly needed for this machine. I decided on a case that was about the size of two reams of paper, all black with a hidden floppy and DVD drive. This was important to me because I wanted to harvest what I could from the Gateway. Here’s the case I selected… The total cost of the box was 202 dollars before shipping. I went with an AMD Sempron 64 2600+ Palermo 1.6GHz for the processor, 512 MB of Corsair memory. I harvested the 10GB HD, CD burner, Floppy and NIC from the Gateway. The build went well, the only issues I had were that I’d never applied thermal paste before and the cabling for the HD was so tight that I bent a pin on the hard disk. After that was sorted I spent about a total of an hour putting the machine together. The IPCop setup was a bit more time, as I did a back up and a restore and it was fine except the one NIC had changed. Once I had that sorted, everything was fine. The unit is super quiet and boots so fast. Another nice bonus is that it fits on TOP of the Mac Pro! No… this is not a post about the iPhone. I’ve said my piece about that gadget and my opinion has not been swayed by the massive Apple marketing machine. Now if you know me, or if you read this blog you know that aside from being an Apple fanboy, I’m also obsessed with Ferraris. I know it is a ridiculously overpriced, first world status symbol, and even if I really wanted to, I am never going to own one, but I like to look at them! I’ve seen only a few up close and personal and I’ve only TRIED to drive one. After the first big lurch and stall, that voice in my head said… “get out before you total a car worth more than your home”! (too bad Eddie Griffin’s inner voice didn’t say the same, if it had… maybe there wouldn’t be one less Enzo in the world.) Anyway… years ago, I feel in love with the Ferrari I ever saw, I remember I was just a child looking though an old stack of Road & Track when I saw the Ferrari Dino. Back then I knew even less than I do about horsepower, torque and over-steer, but it was the curves, the lines that caught my attention. Even today almost some 40 years later, I still think it is beautiful.  My lust of the Ferrari has not dissipated over the last decade, it’s gotten much strong with models like the 360 Modena, the F430 and the 599 GTB Fiorano and today, while reading Autoblog, my lust for the marque has been pushed up notch… they’re rumored to be creating a new Dino…   I know it’s not for everyone, but for me… Drool. This past weekend, I rediscovered how much I enjoy the game of Scrabble. I am not particularly good at the game, and to be honest, I’ve not really found anyone who wants to play the game with me. That was until this weekend. I discovered that Pinoyboy also likes the Scrabble and furthermore, we both have an older Windows(R) copy of the game, and guess what? You can play together over the Internet! We set out to have a meetings of the minds over the Scrabble board, but as with most things, it was not that simple. Two evenings later, Pinoyboy finally sorted out all the ports and glitches in DirectX and we were able to play. I don’t understand HOW he just figures it all out. I am truly in awe of him! We played 3 games of Scrabble, which took us until the WEEEEE hours of the morning to complete. He came up with some amazing words and he’s much better than I since he actually looks for the Triple Word Scores etc. I really enjoyed the game and I can’t wait to do it again. This one DEFINITELY goes into the “cut me some slack, i am a geek you know!” category.  I swear I have a technology black cloud over my house. I’ve been having issues off and on with my home network for MONTHS. It has to be more then half a year since my trouble started and this week… it got worse. My setup is not an simple one, but it’s also not a complex one. I had a linksys setup, a cable modem, a wireless router, a VoIP box, a switch and an AirPort express. I suspected the Wireless Router, which was old as dirt, was going bad so I replaced it with a Belkin wireless router, which then lead me to think maybe the cable modem was bad too, so I replaced that as well. Things seemed okay but I’d lose my connection to the Belkin router often. I was frustrated to say the least. We recently acquired a Slingbox as well, which requires an Ethernet cable connection, so I grabbed another Belkin Wireless router and bridged them together. And that’s when the trouble just doubled. The bridge would go down often and then finally, the other day, one of the Belkin routers, just lost it’s power. It won’t stay on. It’s dead. I hooked up all of the old Linksys stuff (I’m such a pack rat) and that’s when the latest drama began. For some reason I could NOT get the VoIP box to work behind the old Linksys router. So I put it in front of it and then… the internet would go out every 20-30 minutes. Sigh. Last night was spent on the phone with Pinoyboy, troubleshooting, testing and triaging my network. The final decision? New router, again. So far so good. Next… the wireless bridge for the Slingbox. Wish me luck boys and girls! I miss Firewire. I know it’s not dead, but I specifically miss it on my iPod. Ever since I got my iPod nano and my 5th Generation iPod Video, my iPods no longer support Firewire. Now I can understand why Apple made the switch, all PCs and Macs have USB2 but not all PCs have Firewire. And I know that theoretically it makes no difference. Firewire’s output is 400Mbps/sec and USB2’s output is 480Mbps, but Firewire offers one important thing… better power distribution. Why do I care? It’s simple. I miss charging my iPod while my Mac sleeps. That you can do with Firewire, but with USB2? Not so much.  I am so crazy about this new Firefox extension that Ed told me about. It’s called Firebug and it’s great for debugging HTML and CSS. It allows you drill down thru your code and even turn styles on and off to see if your CSS is causing problems. Sad it only works in Firefox, this would be great considering how poorly IE displays CSS. If you’re a coder check it out. Firebug. This is good news I think. It appears that AirCell is going to offer WiFi on US flights as early as next year. It won’t be free, about 10 dollars they claim. They also claim a DISCOUNT if you have T-Mobile Hot Spot account, which I have. That might not be bad. I’d love to be able to get my email (work and personal) and chat it up with some friends while flying cross country. Also could make getting a Slingbox a priority.
Today March 24th is OS X’s 6th birthday! It was March 24, 2001 when OS X 10.0 was released. OS X 10.0 was code named Cheetah and was the first official release of the OS. There was a public beta prior to it but this was the first official release. It was sold for 129.95 USD. Although the OS was somewhat buggy and was not as polished as it is today, it was an important milestone for Apple and the Macintosh community. OS X was many years in the making, it was a complete overhaul of the Mac OS, a process which had started in 1996. Though the OS was buggy, it was praised as a major step forward and a good start to a brand new Mac OS, there were however, legions of Mac OS 9 users who were not so happy about the change in the OS. OS X 10.1 (Puma) was released just 6 short months later and was given as a free upgrade to anyone who paid for 10.0. Yesterday in the Mac Rumor world… there was a rumor (a pretty silly one if you ask me) that OS 10.5 “Leopard” , which was announced to be released in “Spring 2007″ would be delayed until October of 2007. The rumor claimed that Apple needed the extra time to make Boot Camp Vista compliant. This seemed like a ridiculous story to me because:
The rumor was debunked by Apple today and Digitimes, the source of the story has apologized for starting the rumor. That being said…when is Leopard coming? I’m not saying it’s late (it’s really only the first week of Spring), I’m just saying I want it already! |
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