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!

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!

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.

Here I shall digress and say that I wound up buying a DVD-Writer anyways a few weeks later, after I gave up on Ubuntu and thought I would make the box a Hackintosh. I tried everything from cloning and patching my own Snow Leopard install disc to downloading various prepackaged Hackintosh distros including Leo4All, SnowLeo, Kallaway Leopard and various bootloaders like Chameleon and some others who’s names elude me right now. Due to the pretty short list of hardware that these OSX86 distros work on and the fact that I am rocking an AMD Sempron processor with a weird Gigabyte motherboard with an ancient Nvidia Northbridge I encountered #FAIL after #FAIL. Anyone who can help me to get any version of OS X running on this system will get as much beer and pizza as they can consume in one sitting, so mail me if you think you have ‘L33T Hackintosh SkillZ‘ and you think you can ‘pwn’ this system.

So I installed Ubuntu from the bootable USB install drive I created on a Windows machine. The score so far is Microsot Windows XP: 1, Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 0. The install was super quick since it wasn’t from a DVD and at first boot everything looked great. The default colour scheme of aubergine/brown may not be to everyone’s liking but you couldn’t deny that it looked smart and cohesive and was a far cry from the eye-searing fugliness of Windows. Score a point for Ubuntu then. All my hardware, new and old,  was correctly detected and the appropriate drivers installed. So far so good then! But as I soon realised, Ubuntu still has some pretty serious issues, even for the basic user who does not have the esoteric requirements that I do.

Ubuntu does not automatically mount any secondary partitions on hard disks. Yes, you read correctly. If your hard disk is partitioned into two or more partitions you are shit-outta-luck. Prepare to spend a lot of time in Ubuntu forums, copy-pasting command line gibberish into the terminal to get some basic functionality that has been in pretty much every OS that I know of since about nineteen ninety five or so. It was at this point that I realised (after I did a face-palm) that maybe I was lucky my mom had insisted on having Windows XP preinstalled on the Asus EeePC netbook I bought her a month or so back. I had been rooting for Ubuntu quite strongly, tempting her with promises of a secure, virus free and anti-virus free computing experience but she had refused. I looked over at the German Shepherd curled up at my feet and said out loud ” I guess we dodged a bullet there huh?” As a reply he rolled over, scratched his ear and went right back to sleep. My dog it would seem, is OS agnostic.

I fixed the problem with a few hours of effing around in the terminal, typing commands that started with the word SUDO and then proceeded to configure the services I wanted on the tower, Apple file sharing with Time Machine Backup support and an iTunes Server. A few Google searches later I realised that the NetaTalk software that shipped with the OS did not support encryption (which is needed by Macs to do file sharing and Time Machine backups) I would need to uninstall the default installation of NetaTalk and download, configure, install and configure again  a custom version of the package. Could I just go into the system preferences or control panel and tick a check box that said “Enable encryption” or something to that effect? No? Fucking brilliant.

At this point my visions of Ubuntu being a free, secure mainstream OS had already been smashed to bits by the disk auto-mount debacle and the command line dicking around in the terminal so I decided to try again. It took me about a week to finally figure out how to get file sharing working properly and I also had to download, configure, install and configure again a custom version of another piece of software called Avahi, which is a Bonjour type service that advertises the machine on your local network so that other machines can see it without knowing it’s IP address. FUN!

I finally got it working in about ten days through sheer perseverance and the aforementioned employment (or lack thereof) situation. I whooped with joy and my dog gave me a dirty look, he seemed annoyed at being woken up from his post breakfast nap. I disconnect the display, keyboard and mouse and hooked them up to the Mac to enjoy the fruits of my labour. ( I know, I know. I am waaaay too heavily invested in backups and file transfers. You would be too if you lost a year’s worth of college work in the great hard disk crash of 2006)

Aaaaand nothing. I could not see the Ubuntu Box on the network.

FUCK. ME.

I disconnected the display, keyboard and mouse form the MacBook Pro and reconnected them to the Ubuntu Box after shutting it down. On rebooting it booted perfectly, all services running, I could see it from the Mac, transfer files to it, backup to it via Time Machine. All good. Shutdown the system, disconnect the keyboard, display, mouse and reboot. Same shit. This time I reconnected the peripherals to the Ubuntu Box without bothering to shut it down and was greeted with a black screen and a blinking prompt. I Googled the symptoms and realised that when booted without a display attached like I wanted to do, Ubuntu booted in headless mode and did not start a GUI which meant that all the services that I had painfully installed and configured did not run.

More effing around in the terminal ended up with me totally hosing the entire installation and having to do a clean install. This time the configuration of services I wanted went a little bit easier because I remembered the vital pieces of instruction that EVERY guide on the internet had failed to mentioned and that I had figured out the hard way the first time around. I got it all configured and fixed the headless server issues only to find out that every now and then the services would stop running and I would have to learn how to SSH into the system and restart them. I then realised that I would have to learn how to configure and use my torrent client of choice, Transmission over SSH. At this point I gave up. I am about as geeky as anyone and had learnt to use the SUDO command like nobody’s business but I drew the line here. I bit the bullet, wiped the drive clean and installed Windows XP SP3 with Avast, iTunes, Transmission and TightVNC on top of it.

I now have to use SMB instead of AFP for file sharing and I can’t do Time Machine backups but I have a stable reliable box that starts-up automatically and shuts down gracefully when power on the attached APC UPS is runing low. It torrents and downloads podcasts and shares these over my home network without any hassles.

Now I am sure Ubuntu can do all this and more without worrying about viruses, hacks and zero-day exploits but I couldn’t get it to work in a hassle-free manner and not for any lack of trying. So I will no longer recommend that people who can’t afford the ridiculous cost of Apple hardware and are tired of using Windows should give Ubuntu a try.

Don’t.

Ubuntu. It blows.

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

1> One AMD processor of unknown spec with a heat-sink and a fan missing two blades. WTF?

2> One mATX Gigabyte motherboard with integrated Nvidia graphics, a PCI-E slot and 10/100 Mbit networking. (No Gigabit Ethernet? Really?)

3>One passively cooled Nvidia 7200GS PCI-E Graphics card of unknown make. A Google search for a review of this card’s capabilities led me to a page with this heading.

Thats right. Better than NOTHING!

4> One beat-up computer case with a TWENTY pin power supply that my brother had been using with the TWENTY FOUR pin power supply motherboard. (I’ve always maintained that the kid was short a few connectors)

5>One CD-Writer that may or (more likely) may not be working. (I have 2000 A.D. on the phone here. They want their optical drive back please)

6> One original 2.5” 200GB Apple branded Hitachi hard drive from my MacBook Pro.

So, with all these super high-end components I had readily available I decided that I could get away with just buying a decent quality case and power supply and proceeded with the build. I soon realised that due to my brother’s use of it with the wrong power connectors the motherboard was dead and gave it in for repair.

One week later, when the motherboard was working I bought a discreet looking i-Ball Baby 306 mini-tower case and once again, I proceeded with the build. The case turned out to be very good value for money, it had two decent quality case fans and a half-decent power supply installed in it and the build quality seemed to be quite a bit better than the usual shit you find in the cheap cases they try to sell you where I buy hardware. The only unpleasant surprise I got was when I had everything fitted in nicely, the wiring tied down neatly and I booted the system up for the first time with a view of the front of the case.

What had looked like a thin strip of perspex running down the front of the case in images on the interwebz and at the store where I bought it turned out to be a one foot long strip of brilliant BLUE LEDs that computer-part makers love so much these days.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

After frantically checking I found out that it’s wiring was tied in with the case fans’. I decided not to fuck with it and leave well enough alone. My computer desk resembles the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise in the dark anyways with all the LEDs winking, pulsing and flashing in pretty much every colour of the visible light spectrum so one more light wasn’t going to hurt that much I reasoned. On with the build! I soon found out that the much vaunted CD-writer was in fact dead as a dodo so I removed the dusty paper-weight from the case and chucked it.

Now for the Ubuntu installation! The ‘fun’ as I can now see in retrospect and you will find out if you read the next post, had only just begun.

Stay tuned kids….

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.

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)

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.

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.

We finally got tired of rolling our eyes and sniggering at the plot and the feeble attempts at chemistry between Hanks and his emminently forgettable leading lady and walked right out of the hall when the film was fumbling towards a finalé. Jesus. It was that bad.

I kid you not, there was an ANTI MATTER BOMB in the plot. Please! I HAVE THE 80′s ON THE PHONE HERE. THEY WANT THEIR PLOT BACK!

I did watch the new Star Trek movie and though the film was all good a single line made it totally worth the entire admission price for me.

I’m givin’ her all she’s got captain!

Priceless.

I would have liked an added: I just can’t do it captain! I don’t have the powerrrr!

Definitely worth a watch for trekkies and normal people.

Also, for some reason (don’t ask) I registered Samrethsingh and Themediabitch as twitter handles. Samreth and Mediabitch were already taken. Go figure.

No, I will not be twittering. No one needs to know that I just had a great swim, bathed my dogs, or got fucked by my car servicing bills. The world shall have to do without this info. Be strong people.

On a geeky note Apple had it’s annual World Wide Developer conference and announced cheaper MacBooks and MacBook Pros and that Snow Leopard, their new OS, will only cost 29 USD. Wooo!!

The things that get me excited!

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

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.

Intel’s new ad film. Love it.

Forget about all the shareware programs you’ve been using to download YouTube videos. Simply right click on the text in red below and select “Bookmark Link”. When you’re watching a YouTube video you like, simply click on the bookmark from your Bookmarks menu and it will reveal a link on the top right of the page that says Download MP4. Save that file to disk and you will have a high quality video that you can also add to iTunes and play on your iPod without any transcoding.

Easy as apple pie!

Here’s the link:

Get YouTube Video

I’m not sure whether this is an ad for Apple or Microsoft. Notice the way the woman wistfully says “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” Geez.

I’m betting this ad campaign dies still-born, just like the Seinfeld-Gates one did. You heard it here first.

Ola to you regular readers! All five of you, including my mom. Sheesh!

This is Tone Loc‘s funny-ass hit from nineteen hundred and eighty nine. Please ignore the video.

For your listening pleasure, you may download the entire album here

or just the song here.

Which brings me to the state of content piracy on the internet. You used to have to be a bit of a nerd to know how to pirate music and movies in days past. Setting up a torrent client, finding torrent files, making sure your ports were open and mainting a decent share ratio was not for the faint of heart or feeble of mind. (Bonus geek cred for understanding the beauty and simplicity of how torrent sharing works.)

But all that has changed nowadays. All you need to do is be able to spell half decently & do a Google Search and sometimes not even that. The almighty Google suggests corrections. That and knowing how to open a .zip file opens up to you a cornucopia of copyright content, just begging for violation.

There are tons of music blogs on the web these days, most on Blogger (another Google property) that are dedicated to nothing but linking to entire albums of music, literally thousands of them, neatly zipped along with album covers, available for direct download, no shady file sharing or nasty P2P software needed, just a browser and a few mouse clicks. Here are two such sites I found this week.

http://3-2-0.blogspot.com/

&

http://thegodfathertrilogy.blogspot.com/

Google is the one, true overlord of the internet and has become as much of a verb as it is a noun. Absolutely no one has the cojonés or the money to take them to court and fight an extended legal battle. So the file sharing genie is now well and truly out of the bottle, once and for all. (If that is, there were any lingering doubts about the fact)

Copyright Associations can threaten indiviuals, sue PirateBay (and they are trying as I write this) and try to thumb the dikes, but it is all over. (I almost spelt dikes with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i” before I realised what a grevious error that would be.)

So. The point I am trying to get at, in my usual belaboured and obtuse fashion is this:

Copyright, as we know it, is dead.

So. From now on whenever I post links to music, I will also try and post a direct download link to the song. For review purposes only, of course. If you like the music, you be sure to go out and buy the record now.

And delete that dirty, nasty MP3 file…

Peace & Love

The Hobo Dock, originally uploaded by SA-7™.

So, a couple of weeks ‘mi familia’ was nice enough to get me an iPod Touch 2G for the birthday. Woot!

Since I’m too cheap to spring for a dock I used my old Western Digital MyBook external hard disk and incorporated the dock insert that came with the Touch into it’s side. It took a heated cutter, some kind of liquid cement and a whole lot of patience. The edges are fugly right now because of the extra cement on them but I’ll clean that up. What would make this mod really cool would be to incoroprate a tiny USB hub into the MyBook so I’d have only one USB cable to the MacBook Pro. Click the image for notes on what’s in the picture. The Macbook Pro is at a wierd angle because it’s sitting on a laptop stand I made out of recycled cardboard after reading an article at Unplggd.com. If you use a laptop on a regular basis do your back and neck a favour and make one for yourself. Out of the frame on the left is a keyboard, mouse and a 22″ LG LCD monitor with extremely crap viewing angles.

Sorry for the shiite quality of the picture. Serves me right for using a camera phone.

It’s strips like this, written for geeks like yours truly, that make XKCD one of the smartest, funniest web comics around. Click on the image to go there.

WARNING: Huge time vampire. But then, you’re already on this site so….

This awesome clip from the animated show, ‘The Family Guy’ is doing the rounds of the internet. They’re taking the piss outta Microsoft’s Zune MP3 Player.

First, the concert. One of the bands performing was a Bhutanese band called ‘Who’s your Daddy?‘ and they did AC/DC covers. (I am not making any of this up)

All in all, a pleasant evening and even though I didn’t hear a single really great band, I didn’t hear anyone that sucked either. Perhaps because we left before Parikrama came on. (Don’t send me hate mail, I get off on it)

I finally saw a lot of groups that people have been telling me about for a while like Shair & Func and Skinny Alley and all I can say is that none of them really rocked my boat.

What did rock my boat was the Old Fort or Purana Qila. Forts still fascinate me in a way only people who spent their entire childhood daydreaming, will understand. The entire city of Delhi is dotted with these little tombs or isolated, dilapidated ramparts (in my expert opinion) from bygone eras, built by bygone rulers. You often come upon these little fragments in the most bizarre places, in back of beyond bylanes, in the middle of abandoned playgrounds, on the fairways of golf-courses.

When you are new to the city this is brilliant, like a little treasure hunt. But as with most great things, you soon get jaded and about these forts and tombs.

But every once in a while you see them at night, lit up and it reminds you of how fucking spectacular these forts are and how craptacular your own life’s work is when compared to them. It’s like the Mughals are mocking us.

Oh wow! You made a short-film? A TV Show? Well I built this fort that’s been around for three hundred years and it will probably be around for another three hundred years after you’ve been dead and forgotten kiddo. So tell me, who’s your daddy?

Crap. I gotta build a fort.

In other news I got an iPod Touch! Woot! As birthday gifts go, the only one that has ever been better was waking up on my sixth birthday to find a Sony Z-10 Walkman playing on my parents’ bed. I didn’t even ask for it or anything. Just how gifts ought to be.

Last year, I got a 1st generation iPod Touch as a review unit for a tech show I was producing and I shot a 20 minute story about how to Jailbreak an iPod Touch. It was an intricate, multi-step process that involved a lot of command line poking around and was not for the faint of heart.

A week before the story was supposed to air, software was released into the wild that let you complete the entire process in about twenty seconds with a single mouse click.

Crap. Welcome to television.

So when I got this iPod Touch I thought I’d jailbreak it and make it do my bidding in no time.

Nope. In the ever escalating war of cat and mouse between Apple and the would be iPhone/iPod Touch unlockers it would seem that Apple currently has the upper hand. 

I’ve almost managed to brick this thing twice in the 24 hours I’ve had it and for now I’m giving up and waiting till someone comes up with an easier way to do it. If a second expensive MP3 player dies on me I’ll have to fucking shoot myself. So, for now the iPod Touch shall remain untouched.

But soon enough some nerdy teenager, frustrated at the persistence of his virginity and hopped up on Red Bull, shall come up with a crack for the latest firmware version, 2.2.1 for the iPod Touch 2G and then I will hack this thing and make it my bitch and I shall hold it in my hand and say to it…

‘Who’s your daddy?’ 

I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.

So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard? 

I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.  

Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez. 

Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.

Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.

And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.

Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.

So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?

This is the new Microsoft OS for Smart-phones (for those masochists who don’t get enough of the awesome ‘Windows Experience™’ on their computers. Thwaack! Thank you sir! May I have another?)

Notice how even in the demo the phone isn’t actually doing anything.

Oh and BTW! My favourite part of all this? This might be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPhone. It’s iPhone killer as it were.

And what have they called it? The MyPhone! LOL. This shit just writes itself! I don’t even have to try with stories about these monkeys.

Thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses. I’m here all week.