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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

 Gmail: ‘Offline’ is the new Online?

Last week saw the debut of Gmail ‘Offline’, a new feature from the ‘NOT EVIL’ folks at Google.(Google’s well publicised corporate slogan is ‘Don’t Be Evil’.) Read on to find out how ‘Offline’ is going to change the way a whole generation of people use email and how you can get the most out of it.

First things first. What is Gmail Offline?

It is an experimental new feature in Gmail that lets you compose messages and read old mail even if you don’t have access to the internet, like when you are on a plane, or if you are like me, when you can’t find an open wifi network and are too cheap to pay for access to a closed network.(Don’t smirk. I work in the media industry.)

So basically, with this feature enabled, you can log in to your gmail account from your web browser, while offline, view mail that you have sent and received and compose new mails to send later. Let me add once again, you can do all of this without a connection to the internet. Truly mind-bending stuff from the folks at Google then. 

Not so fast. The setup.

Before you go yanking that LAN cable out of your ethernet jack, there are a few steps you have to go through to setup Gmail Offline.

The simplest way to do this is to use Google’s own browser which is spectacularly fast and much more secure than Microsoft’s own ‘Internet Exploder’. It’s called Google Chrome and even if you aren’t interested in Gmail Offline you should definitely download Chrome right this minute and never, ever use IE again. Do it now. 

Get Google chrome here: www.google.com/chrome

Done? Now delete that shortcut icon for Internet Explorer from your desktop. You can thank me later.

1. Start Chrome and go to Gmail.
2. Log into your Gmail account.
3. Click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right corner of the window.
4. Under Settings look for a heading call ‘Labs’ and click on it.
5. The first feature in the list should be Offline by the Offline Team’. Click to enable it. Click to save changes. (If you aren’t using Chrome a dialog box will pop up asking you to if you would like to install ‘Google Gears’. Google Gears is a tiny, safe program that enables Google Offline. Install ‘Google Gears’.)
6. Next you should get a dialog box asking you if you want to allow Google to store data locally on your computer.
7. You should see a tiny green logo in the top right hand corner of you Gmail window and when you click on it you should get a status messages like this.
8. You are done. The little green logo with the arrows should look like a check mark now.
9. From now on whenever you log in to your Gmail account you should see the little green check mark in the top right corner and when you click on it you should see the status message to the right.
10. Now disconnect from the internet (turn of your wifi and disconnect and LAN cables from your computer) and try to log into Gmail. You should be able to login and view mails and even compose new emails just like normal. The only difference should be that the little green check mark is replaced by an unavailable sign. When you click on it you should get a message similar to this. Any mails you compose will be stored on your computer till an internet connection is detected and will only be sent the next time Gmail syncs.

Caveats Galore! The Fine Print.

1. Let me turn the usual warning on it’s head. DO TRY THIS AT HOME. i.e. If you want to use Gmail Offline please make sure it is working for you at home or wherever you have an internet connection. First do a dry run by disconnecting from the network temporarily and see if you are being able to log in and access your email. You definitely don’t want to find out that you didn’t configure it correctly when you are thirty thousand feet up in the air with some smelly, fat guy snoring next you or when you are in a hotel room where internet access costs as much as the black market rate for one of your kidneys.
2. Smart as they are, the boffins at Google haven’t been able to defy the basic laws of the internet. You can compose mails but they will obviously be sent only the next time you have a connection to the internet. So if you need to send an urgent email you can compose it but it will just sit there in your outbox silently mocking you till you next connect to the internet. Rule of thumb: If your subject line is something like “Emergency All Hands Meeting! 2:50 PM” you probably don’t want to rely on Gmail Offline.
3. Currently you only get access to a month of old mails though that should be good enough for about my 97.3 % of people out there. (My utterly scientific percentage guesstimate). But if the mail you want to refer to isn’t available, well then it just isn’t. You’re out of luck.
4. Despite the fact that almost every man, woman and child has a Gmail account, Gmail is still in Beta. So this new feature is an experimental feature on top of a service that is in Beta. That means it WILL crash every now and then. When I was trying to enable Gmail offline my browser crashed twice and Gmail itself behaved quite funky while my messages where being downloaded in the background. Your mileage may vary but you really ought to do this in Google’s own Chrome browser as it will make things much simpler. Honestly, save yourself a lot of trouble, get Chrome. If you are on Mac OS X like me, Safari is your best bet.
5. Privacy has always an issue with Gmail. With this new feature the privacy-nuts are definitely going to raise a stink soon because now your emails are stored on the computer and how long is it going to be before some smart teenager in a basement figures out a way to read them? Your guess is as good as mine. You have been warned.

Finally. this is NOT a replacement for a proper desktop mail program like Outlook Express on Windows or Mail.app on the Mac. For people who need access to every single email that they have ever sent or received, a proper mail client program is still the way to go. Gmail Offline is limited by the fact that it has to run in a web browser and it only downloads a month of emails. So think of this more as a something you would use on a second computer or laptop while away from home. 

If you understand the terms POP mail or IMAP, GMail Offline is not for you.This more as a step forward for people who normally use web-mail quite happily and hate email programs.

The Bigger Picture.

For people who are interested in these kinds of trends Gmail Offline is yet another piece in the puzzle that is Google’s plan at the mythical Cloud OS. A computing device where almost everything you do happens in a web browser. You have very few dedicated applications and the operating system you are running doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Google has previously introduced features like Google Docs and Google Calendar that are in direct competition to Microsoft’s expensive office suite of applications. I’m guessing that this feature is going to be more of ‘killer app’ for the simple reason that mail is one of the foremost activities online today and absolutely everyone has a Gmail account.

Also unlike people from my generation who were frustrated by the bugginess and lack of speed of early web-based email services such as Hotmail, kids these days (I love saying that) have grown up with Google and Facebook and are totally comfortable with doing everything in a browser window. 

As you can imagine, Microsoft hates the idea of being sidelined liked this and its handsome CEO, Steve Ballmer (seen here with his game-face on) has famously vowed to ‘Kill Google’. Microsoft is also making an effort to move its applications online with its ‘Windows Live’ service but in typical MS fashion its efforts are half-baked, lame and generally unusable till three years after their release date.

Apple is also making a play for online apps with its MobileMe service and iWork.com but despite the success of the iPod and the iPhone the California based company is still a bit player in the computer industry with its single figure market share.

So the big fight is between Microsoft and Google and the next round starts now.

1. this is all gonna end in tears samreth

2. obama bush same clinton sheeple

3. barkha dutt bitch

4. dating love site lv

5. body searches

6. coz i’m cool

7. indian bitch

8. mighty mouse fucking piece of shit

9. obama is bs

10. satyam fucking company

11. happy singh.com

12. video footage of george w. bush waving to stevie wonder

This is Microsoft’s official infomercial for SongBirdSmith, their <cringing> GarageBand Killer. While you watch it please remember that Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies in the world and this is the best it can come up with.

For those not in the know GarageBand is Apple’s entry level music production software that comes preloaded on every Mac. It makes it very simple for anyone but the most tone-deaf moron to quickly throw together a jingle or soundtrack like this one here. Try sitting through the entire film. I couldn’t.

P.S. Those shiny silver laptops in the Microsoft ad? ALL Apple MacBook Pros. MICROSOFT FAIL!

P.P.S. Thanks to Aditya for the tip. Its SongSmith not SongBird. In my defence MS’s naming isn’t the most intuitive in the world. Look at Windows’ names: 98,ME,2000,XP,Vista,7 i.e. A year,two letters, a year, a word and a random number. Geez.

One of the greatest things about a Macintosh notebook is that you never, ever need to shut it down, ever. One things Macs do really well is what the PC world calls a suspend state or in Mac lingo is Sleep. This is particularly important on notebooks because once you are done with your work, say in a library, in class, at work or wherever, you drop the lid on your MacBook and get up and go. Once you’ve got where you want to be you pull out your MacBook, open the lid and you are right back where you left off. Immediately. No boot up, no login, no restarting applications or opening documents, everything is the way it was when you last closed the lid.

You pull out your MacBook and start doing what you have to with it while people with Windows notebooks sit and look at boot-up screens resignedly and if they are running Vista you’re normally done googling, mailing or writing half a page before they hear their Windows startup sound. 

Its also fun to just close the lid and drop the MacBook into your bag and have people say “Don’t you need to shut it down?” and answer “Meh.. It’s a Mac.”

 
From here on things get geeky.

Macs ‘Sleep’ by dropping into a suspended state where the RAM is kept powered up and your applications and the OS itself is kept ‘frozen’ in the memory. When Apple moved from IBM’s PowerPC chips to Intel’s CoreDuo they added an additional step to the sleeping process that involved writing the contents of the memory to the hard disk as well as keeping the RAM active. They did this ostensibly so that one’s session would not be lost in case the battery died out while the Mac was in Sleep mode. In this case the memory would lose power and hence lose its contents but once attached to a power source and started up the system would simply reload the memory state from the hard disk and you’d be right back where you left off, albeit not instantly as the process would take a few seconds. 

Apple calls this ‘Safe Sleep’ which is the Mac equivalent of a PC hibernating.

The only problem with this is that once you have a large amount of RAM. In my case, 3 GB of it, the process of writing the contents of this memory to the disk before going in to Sleep mode takes a while. Previously, if you didn’t have the patience to wait for a few seconds every time you closed the lid on your MacBook you could disable Safe Sleep through a terminal command but you did lose the safety of a non-volatile copy of your system state if your battery died on you.

Obviously the smart thing to do would be to go into Safe Sleep mode if the battery was precariously low else just go into normal Sleep mode but Apple made the setting all or nothing (even the ‘nothing’ setting only available through an obscure command line hack)

But a few days ago I came across a brilliant little utility called Smart Sleep that gives a system preference that allows you to switch Safe Sleep on, off or let the system decide based on how much battery power remains. This should have been part of the OS itself but it took an indie developer to do Apple’s job for them.

This brings me to the second part of this post. The future of Mac hardware. Safe Sleep is a case in point.

Back in the PowerPC era you could take the battery out of a PowerBook and put in a new one and not lose the contents of the RAM. There was some sort of capacitor that would keep the RAM charged for about a minute while you swapped in the new battery.

Apple could provide this hugely useful feature only because they designed their own northbridges. With the move to Intel Apple began to use Intel’s standard northbridge design and that is the root of a lot of what is wrong with Apple’s hardware today.

With the switch to Intel came Apple’s first huge step back. Integrated Graphics. Low-end desktop systems and MacBooks all use Intel integrated graphics. The Intel GMA 950 to begin with and the X3100 later on. For a graphically intensive UI like Mac OS X that uses 3D acceleration for so many tasks like drawing windows and animations, integrated graphics by Intel are just not good enough. 

Luckily this has been remedied in the latest line of Mac portables where even the low end MacBooks get decent Nvidia GPUs. But the latest line of MacBooks and MacBook Pros have a bigger problem. Especially if like a lot of Macintosh users you do a lot of video or audio work.

Apple is killing firewire.

Firewire is much better than USB in every way. First of all it is peer to peer, you can daisy-chain devices, it doesn’t put a huge load on the CPU and it supports target disk mode which by itself has helped me fix more Macs than I can remember.

But firewire hardware is expensive or at the very least not as cheap as USB hardware which you can find just about everywhere these days. Firewire is also not very common in the Windows world that Intel designs its chipsets for and hence I fear for its future.

The new MacBooks don’t have firewire of ANY sort. So If you are a video professional you can just rule them out immediately. The new MacBook Pros only have a firewire 800 port that is backward compatible with firewire 400. So if you want to capture video from a DV camera to an external firewire hard disk you’re shit outta luck.

Steve Jobs has been answering e-mail telling people that all new cameras have USB connections to capture video which is quite true but he hasn’t taken into account all the institutions that already HAVE a lot of money invested in expensive camera equipment that uses firewire. Production houses large and small and more importantly film schools, which don’t upgrade their equipment very often. For students the entry cost for a Mac than can capture video over firewire or attach to an external audio device, has just become 2000 USD which is a stupid amount of money.

So, to end this rather long post, let me just say, Apple please don’t kill firewire.

1.  36K INR. I dont want to be identified with the type of douchebag that would pay that much for a cellular telephone.

2.   36K INR.  That is about 30K INR more than I am willing to pay for a cellular telephone no matter how cool it may be thankyouverymuch.

While we are on the subject. Click here.