So I found a gem of a little App in the Mac App Store that really simplifies my workflow and saves me time everyday. The App is called Cloud. I know, the most generic name possible that is made even worse by an icon that looks just like the icon for MobileMe, Apple’s short lived and much hated service. This will get worse when Apple starts their new iCloud service. But apart from that little problem this App is absolutely brilliant.

To illustrate the utility of Cloud let me give you an example of a situation most people face many times a day. You are chatting with someone on iChat, Skype or your IM service of choice and you want to show them a file on your computer whether it is a picture or a sound. Most people (myself included) don’t use the file transfer options on instant messengers because they tend not to work most of the time.

So you find the item in Finder and either drag it over to Mail or open a browser tab and log into your Web based mail account and upload the file. You then type in the mail address of the person you are trying to share the file with and if you don’t have it you have to ask them for it in chat.

Once the file is sent they have to log into their own mail and find the message you just sent them and view the attachment. All of this takes about five minutes or so and is a pain to do if you have to repeat it many times a day.

This is where Cloud comes in. You install it from the App store and it shows up as a cloud icon in your menu bar.

Now, say you are chatting with someone and you want to send them a file or just show them a picture or share a screen-shot of  your Mac.

You highlight the file in Finder and hit Ctrl+Option+R and Cloud automatically uploads the file to the web in a few seconds. This works for files in iTunes and iPhoto as well. You don’t have to right click and locate the file in Finder first. Just select it in the App, hit the shortcut and you’re done.

Once done Cloud gives you a Growl notification and plays a sound to say that the file is ready to be shared and it pastes a URL for the file right into your clipboard so all you do is hit Cmd+V to paste the link in your chat window and the person clicks on it and sees your file.

If you still aren’t convinced you should try using it for a few days and see how much easier it makes sharing files from your Mac with others.

Also, did I say it’s free? You can’t argue with zero dollars.

Some would say that they use DropBox for this but I think DropBox is nowhere as simple to use for  file sharing. Even though I use it constantly it is mostly as a means of having a web based backup of the most important files I am working on for when the shit hits the fan. <Dead computer>

It’s the most well thought out App I have used in a while. Your mileage may vary, caveat emptor etc.

Here is a link. Enjoy!

Random, Tech app, Cloud, Cloud.app, DropBox, Mac, Mac App Store, Mac OS X

So, I have just spent most of the last couple of days playing the single player portion of Valve Studio’s long awaited sequel to Portal, the imaginatively named Portal 2. If you aren’t into gaming you can just go ahead and skip this post because it is going to be #UBERGEEKY.

For those of you still reading, here is a quick review.

Quite simply, if you loved Portal you will love Portal 2. If the idea of a first person shooter without even a single gun in it confused you then Portal 2 is not going to interest you. Go back to your regular shoot-at-anything-that-moves type games. If however you loved Portal, do yourself a favour and get Portal 2 now!

You can do this in two ways. You can pay 50 USD for a digital download on Steam or you can do the smart thing (like I did) and have Flipkart.com ship a disc to you for INR 622 all inclusive.

By the way, I played the entire game on the little 11″ MacBook Air I got earlier this year and it handled the game like a little champ. So far the Air has handled everything that I have thrown at it including Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2 with no fuss and since it weighs just about a kilogram I don’t ever want to carry a heavier laptop again.

For lovers of the original game Portal 2 has a lot of new tricks up its sleeve while retaining the same puzzle solving basic game play as its predecessor. There is now a propulsion gel, a repulsion gel and much, much more fun stuff to master and enjoy. Portal 2 is every bit as witty, smart and challenging as its predecessor.

Also, Portal 2 has one of the funniest people alive as one of the characters in it. GladOS’s nemesis is an AI called Wheatley, voiced by Stephen Merchant, a comic genius who co-created The Office, Extras and a ton of other gems with Ricky Gervais. Stephen alone, playing essentially an evil AI version of himself is worth the asking price of the game. He is that good.

Which brings me to the entire point of this post. Portal 2 has a single player mode which I have just finished and a 2 player co-op mode which I have no one to play with. (I know, I know, I have no friends. I’m just a loser with an internet connection)

So, if you too have zero friends or even if you do and you just want someone to play co-op Portal 2 with (no that is not a euphemism, behave!) add me on Steam. My user name is Macfragga and I want to be your internet BFF. So hit me up yo!

Random, Tech 11" MacBook Air, Extras, Portal, Portal 2, Portal 2 Review, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Team Fortress 2, The Office, The Ricky Gervais Show, Valve

The first part of this post can be found here.

With the hardware part of my new/old desktop tower running I went to Ubuntu.com and downloaded the disc image for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Once the 700ish MB download was done was I proceeded to try and burn the disc image to a 1 GB USB drive I had lying around and this is where I ran into my first problem. I tried about 5 different ways to do this on a Mac without any success and finally I gave up and read the instructions on the Ubuntu site that said that this was not a ‘recommended’ method of installation. Windows apparently, was needed to create the USB installer. So a few days later I got hold of a Windows laptop and created a bootable USB drive from the image.

At this point I should clarify that in all fairness my inability to create a bootable disc from the image was due the fact that I use Mac OS X and there is apparently NO way to do this on a Mac except for some weird terminal commands that did not work for me. Also, I could have easily avoided the trouble I had with the disc image by just burning it to a CD but if you read the first part of this post you will have noticed I had a CD-Writer that I doubted was still working. Long story short, it wasn’t and I didn’t want to buy another drive for what I thought would be a one time use only. Read more…

Rants, Tech AMD Sempron, Kallaway Leopard, Leo4All, Nvidia, OS X, OSX86, SnowLeo, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.04 review, Ubuntu Sucks, Windows XP

That’s right all you free software loving losers and nerds. Send your hate mail to the address on the right. Also, if you don’t like reading about tech you should probably skip this post coz I’m about to get my geek on here.

So recently two things happened. Ubuntu launched, to much fanfare, the latest version of their operating system 10.04 LTS (Horny Heron or whatever lame-ass name the freetards gave it though in all fairness, Apple’s Snow Leopard moniker is hardly better) and I sold the Mac Mini, for three reasons;

1> I gave up the idea of ever buying a television and using the Mac Mini as an HTPC, there is just not enough content available to warrant my ever spending money on an LCD television. TV is dead to me. (The irony? I work in the television and film industry)

2> I needed/wanted a tower again, I want to buy cheaper, faster, higher capacity desktop drives and components to use in a system, no more pricey laptop components on a desktop system just because it is the size of a frakkin’ lunch box thankyouverymuch. The Mac Mini just wasn’t cutting it anymore as a file server and a back-up computer to the MacBook Pro and the other systems in the house.

And finally 3>Due to a recent unemployment (HIRE ME!) I had some free time on my hands and wanted to build a desktop computer again, something I had not done in almost half a decade and used to enjoy very much.

So, I sold the Mac Mini to an Iphone app developer on Craig’s List (I also dealt with a scammer who wanted to send the payment to me from the United Kingdom and have me ship the computer to and-I-kid-you-not, NIGERIA. I responded with a cordial, business-like BLOW ME!)

I then gathered the bits of computer hardware scattered around the house like pieces of flotsam and jetsam, mostly hardware abandoned by my brother when he got his first Mac last year (A white Macbook) and this is what I came up with

Read more…

Rants, Tech apple, better than nothing, Gigabyte, Hitachi, i-BAll, Nvidia 7200GS, Sanjam Singh, TV is dead to me, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 10.04 review, unemployment

So. While the whole tech/blog world is caught up in Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated storm of leaks, guessing games, waaaay-too-elaborate renders/mock-ups and general breathlessness about the heavily rumoured but never officially acknowledged Tablet/Slate computer I’m sitting here cursing this piece-of-crap operating system they pooped out last year. Yeah, I’m talking about Snow Leopard (hereon called Slow Leopard)

Wasn’t this supposed to be The world’s best operating system, finely tuned?

Why has boot time gone from a snappy 25 odd seconds to a minute or more? Why does Slow Leopard need to restart every couple of days when Leopard could easily go for weeks without a reboot?

Why do both my screens get a grey tint and my keyboard and mouse stop working when I try and logout instead of restarting to save time? Which then necessitates a hold-down-the-power-button-and-hear-the-sickening-clunk-of-the-hard-drive as the system shuts off while you get Windows ME flashbacks.

And all this grief for what? No new features besides the ability to play movie clips in the icon itself! Thanks Cupertino. Thats real useful. Slow claps for you. Windows users… eat your heart out.

Is anyone else hating Snow Leopard as much as I am? Is there anyone else who just wants the 10.6.3 update to fix the myriad bugs that make Slow Leopard painful to use? Are there other users who don’t give a flying fuck about a freakin’ tablet computer and just want their expensive aluminium (yes thats the way the English speaking world spells that word) bodied computers to just work, as advertised?

Also, Superdrives. Fuck Superdrives. Mine seem to die on me every couple of months at the exact time I need to burn a few copies of my showreel to send out. This has happened so often that staff at my Apple reseller avert their faces and try not to make eye contact with me every time I walk in with a broken Mac. I feel like it’s my fault sometimes.

Anyhoo…. Rant over. Happy thoughts now.

There is nothing that can cheer you up after spending hours stuck in traffic like looking over into the next car and seeing that a girl you used to date looks like she has spent her life, post-you, stuffing fatty foods into her face with both hands.

Fucking.           Priceless.

Rants, Tech apple, exes, iPad, Leopard, Mac, Slow Leopard, Snow Leopard, Superdrive, Windows ME

That and the beeping and booping. Can you imagine using a computer that constantly made some sort of sound for every UI interaction?

Geeeez…

(via unplggd.com)

Random, Rants, Tech

A slight fuck up on my part as this domain name expired left visitors to this site looking at ads for penis enlargement etc (“Yaay! Improvement!” you say) Anyway, trying to fix the problem ended up with me having to pay both my hosting provider and my domain registrar for the domain coz one of them was being a difficult douchebag. I’m not bitter or anything but lets just say Santa is gonna be taking a dump this Christmas in the stockings of a certain person from a company “India Internets” (I know, what an original name, right?)

Moral of the story: Always buy your domain and your hosting from the same company. It shall save you money and yelling into the phone while you pull out your hair.

Anyway, normal programming resumes now. If you were one of the people who would rather look at penis enlargement ads click here. If you are reading this and thinking “Wait. What? You were gone for a while?” Eff you too.

Random, Tech douchebag, India Internets

Wallpaper.com has an excellent gallery of tart cards up on its site. It is enough to warm the heart of any type fan or closet perv.

What exactly is a tart card? Lemme quote from the site.

“Tart cards are the means by which many London prostitutes advertise their services. Step into almost any central London phone box and you can contemplate up to 80 cards inviting you to be tied, teased, spanked or massaged.”

Click the picture to go see the entire gallery.

I also got dragged, kicking, screaming and cussing to go see the new Tom Hanks starrer, ‘Angels & Demons’.  After unanimously declaring that Dan Brown’s previous rag, The Da Vinci Code was the worst book I had ever read (And I’ve read some utter garbage) I swore to avoid this film like the swine flu. I succesfully dodged a gracious offer from a friend for free passes and was headed for the finish line when the mother pulled rank and said “We’re going” a couple of nights back. It gives me small consolation to know she hated it as much as I did. Serves her right for having such poor taste in films. Read more…

Films, Random, Tech Angels & Demons, Angels And Demons, Anti Matter Bomb, apple, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Snow Leopard Pricing, Star Trek, The DaVince Code, Tom Hanks, twitter, twitter.com/samrethsingh, twitter.com/themediabitch, Wallpaper.com, WWDC

Couldn’t resist. Click the pic for the source and How-to…

Random, Tech apple, Flickr, iPod Nano 5G, Kate Moss

The brother just got himself a MacBook and was going through the usual switcher phases and it reminded me of this ad from almost two decades ago. To this day it takes great self control to keep from blurting out the last line from this ad whenever a PC user is bitching about computer problems.

Films, Random, Tech apple, MacBook, Microsoft, Sanjam Singh, Windows 95