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

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

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.

Random, Tech apple, Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft

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.

Random, Tech apple, iPod Touch 2g, LEGO, LG LCD monitor, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, My Book, Speck case, Tiger Beer, Unplugged.com, Western Digital

So, I got an iPod Touch and I just got back from some Asian Band Festival at the Old Fort in New Delhi.

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.

Read more…

Music, Random, Tech apple, Asian Band Festival, hacking firmware 2.2.1, iPod Touch, iPod Touch 2g, Jailbreak an iPod Touch, Jailbreak an iPod Touch 2g 2.2.1, mughal emperors, New Delhi, Old Fort, Parikrama, parikrama sucks, Purana Qila, Shair & Func, Shair and Func, Skinny Alley, 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?

Rants, Tech apple, I hate MS Word, Microsoft, MS Word Sucks, Open Office, Pages, Text editors suck, Wordpress

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.

Random, Rants, Tech apple, iphone, Microsoft, MyPhone

So, thanks to the drivel you read here, I got offered a sort of gig to write a few pieces for the Hindustan Times’ Mumbai Supplement called ‘HT Café’ and I took them up on the offer. The first piece came out today and I’d have linked to it but HT’s online version (or epaper) requires a (free) user account to view. I know most people can’t be bothered to go through the hassle of setting this up (I wouldn’t) so I’m posting the article right here, after the jump. To the powers at HT please get with the program and remove the login requirements for your epaper. Even The Times of India dropped their login for the epaper sometime last year. Imagine that!  Welcome to the year Two Thousand and Nine.

The piece I wrote was about Gmail Offline, a new Google labs feature available in your Gmail account. The article is refreshingly free of cuss words and snarky euphemisms (mostly) for those who’s fragile sensibilities are offended by such stuff. If HT’s readers like the piece (and more importantly, if HT ‘shows me the money!’ I’ll probably do this occasionally) Read on..

Read more…

Random, Tech apple, Gmail Offline, Google, Google Chrome, Google Gears, Hindustan Times, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Safari, Steve Ballmer, The Times Of India