Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I just don’t get the music that those crazy kids are listening to these days but yesterday that changed. I was IM’ed a track that saved my frakkin’ lame-ass weekend and has been on single repeat on the iPod and the MacBook for most of last night and all of today. The big THX rated sub-woofer that sits at my feet has never been happier (Note to self: Stop anthropomorphising objects. They hate it!)

Despite its distinctly French sound it is actually by a German duo called Sirirusmo and Dana and it is called Gummiband, which means rubberband in some language according to the Google.

The first comment on the Youtube page on which I heard this song went something like ‘If this song went on for 12 hours I would never have a bad day ever again.’

I totally agree. If this track doesn’t make you want to get up and shake your ass then you are dead inside.

Be good, avoid assholes.

Steal the MP3 from the internets here.

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!

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.

I have also done some minor tweaking and removed the ‘Sporadic Creativity’ page because I’m putting myself out there as it is and don’t want to overdo it. So. I’m going to talk about two geeky things today.

1> I got my first real chance to play around with my ‘trial copy’ of Adobe’s brilliant new Photoshop version for the Mac platform. CS4.

I’ve always thought of Photoshop as a huge resource hog of an app that takes ages to launch and for small jobs is a bit like unholstering a Colt to kill a fly but I must say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with this new version. It’s screaming fast, light and for the first time ever it’s features are easy to get to and use even if you aren’t some Photoshop Uber-Geek with mad skillz. The speed difference must be because this is the first version of Photoshop that is actually GPU accelerated. On a mid level system like mine (2.4 Ghz Merom Core2duo, 3 Gb DDR2 and a 256MB Nvidia 8600M GT) that seems to make an immense difference. The usability is much better too, for me at least. So I spent a few hours and threw together the logo at the top of this page and ventured the courage to edit the CSS style sheets for this site to get WordPress to display the art work.

So. Two thumbs up for Adobe Photoshop CS4 for the Mac then. Interestingly if you search ‘Teh Google’ for ‘CS4 Mac’ it displays PirateBay’s link first and then Amazon’s link. LOL. Tells you a lot doesn’t it? I’m sure that gets on the Adobe people’s tits like nothing else!

2> My Apple Mighty Mouse Wireless. I am gonna throw this white piece of shit against the fucking wall one of these days.

When I first bought it, Christmas before last, things were all groovy, I loved the 360 degree scroll, the typical ease with which it paired up with my MacBook Pro and the fact that its top surface was smooth and joint free, less chance for gunk and hair from my two large dogs to clog it up. But the damn scroll ball on this thing is a vector for dirt and keeps getting clogged up. Alcohol, cotton buds, rubbing the little ball upside down, I’ve tried every way of cleaning the damn thing. Now the ball has gotten stuck and since there are no physical buttons on the device I’m reduced to a single button mouse and having to Ctrl-Click to get a right click. I feel like I’m using a Macintosh from the fucking nineties.

So. Mighty Mouse Wireless. Avoid,

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.