Al’s WebLog

So I joined the masses and now have a Jesus phone. It’s more toy than phone really. We’ll see how it goes.

Quite how I’m not sure, but I passed my motorcycle test yesterday (DAS, Direct Access) with only 1 minor. Scarily I can now go and ride any motorcycle I want on a public road. Thankfully for my own safety and that of others I was quite scared enough on a Suzuki GS500 at 70mph and I have no desire to own a sports bike. Indeed, I’m not sure why I need a motorbike at all, as I work at home and you can’t stick a mountain bike on a motorbike… Still, its good fun

Is it just me, or was the who Apple WWDC ‘08 keynote a huge let down? I have not seen much in the techsphere that would agree with me, people seem all excited about a “new” 3G iPhone, but for me the whole thing was a let down. Sure, isn’t it nice to see a cheaper/faster/smaller iPhone, great, but its nothing all that new (similar spec to the original iPhone really) and the AppStore we’ve known about for ages, so basically other than MobileMe and the iPhone 3G there was nothing else new. Where were the new MacBooks? (ah yes, Intel delayed the platform they’d be based on for 6 weeks so I guess those got delayed) Heck, where was anything Mac?

Also, whilst I’m moaning a little about Apple, now that the UK has iTunes movie rentals that work on an AppleTV, why has the price not dropped like it did in the US when they got rentals (and thus Apple subsidized the price)? I’m glad I picked up my AppleTV in the US when I was over there, ‘cos at the moment the price differential is unjustifiable.

The better half and I headed up to see Korpora and Purple Chaos (there is something odd about using LJ names in Wordpress…) this weekend. The drive up was quite horrible, but I guess thats what you expect from the M5/M6 these days. Nevermind, the company up north more than made it worth it. Once again though, after playing with toys at other people’s houses I just had to buy my own, so I now have a Wii. Wii Sports, Wii Play… it’s not just me, right?

So, in the US an AppleTV got its price cut from 299USD to 229USD. With your new AppleTV you can, in the US, rent movies and such. Here in the UK though we don’t get movie rentals and nor do we get a price cut, an AppleTV still costs 199GBP. Rip-off. Thanks Apple.

Credit where credit is due as they say. So I’d like to give some credit to Dear Auntie Beeb for releasing a Mac/Linux compatible version of their iPlayer. I knew I was going to miss Buzzcocks this evening so I aquired a DVI->HDMI cable and hooked my MacBook up to the tele. It worked better than I thought it would - most watchable. Shame DVI doesn’t do sound though…

So how was your Christmas? Did you get all you wanted? I’m not sure that flu was on the list of my better half and kids, but they got it anyway. I seem to have missed out for the most part, just a head cold mainly. 3 days in bed seems to have helped the others, just in time to go back to work… Hmmm.

My sister made her flight and spent Christmas day in the air. I cooked for 6 and I’m told it was good (I liked it!). I do wish children would read instructions, as getting all stroppy when you can’t do something is a bit silly when the piece of paper you discarded tells you how it all works.

I got a nice pen from my parents and a funky looking desk toy from the other half.
The 32″ from the boxing day sales was a present from myself to me

Hope you all had a nice Christmas. Time to rest a little before New Years

I’m still pondering desktop setups, but I have had what I think is a genius idea (like all my ideas, obviously ). If I get a monitor with dual selectable inputs, and better yet one with picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture, I can connect up both the Desktop and the Laptop to one monitor and switch between them as I need. I can have the best of both worlds… but still have a sync’s issue. Hmm. Further thought needed.

So  being the Mac fanboy I am, my Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) family pack arrived yesterday morning. Amusingly the courier delivered to my sisters work about an hour later and said to her “I know what you’ve got for Christmas, its one of them new iPods I’ve been delivering all day.”. My sister put him straight; that there isn’t a new iPod, its a new operating system. Apparently TNT had loads to deliver  on Friday, which is nice.

Being busy with work during Friday day I didn’t get round to installing (onto an external drive on my MacBook) until about midnight - surely the best time of day to upgrade an OS, no? Unsurprisingly it installed fine, it booted fine, it worked fine. So this morning I swapped the internal and external drives over, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while as I was low on free space. Lovely then, all sorted.

Sadly though, in a bit, later today, I’ll be swapping the hard disks back over and going back to Tiger. This isn’t because Spaces isn’t as good as VirtuDesktops, of because the Finder isn’t all jazzy or because of anything like that, no, it is because the Juniper SSL VPN software I need for work at the moment plum doesn’t work on Leopard.  Juniper acknowledge the issue and say it will be fixed, in Q2 2008. Suck.

Its a shame, 10.5 seems nice (well, TBH it seems like Tiger with the addons I used added in.).

I’ve been pondering a PVR thingy for a while but could never justify the cost or really needing one. Tesco have allegedly had a barginous 70quid Digihome one but its never in stock (been watching for 9 weeks, apparently its 60quid now too, but again, no stock) that is the same as the 95quid one at Argos. So, yes, today I found a proper reason for needing one - Le Tour is only on ITV4 so I can’t use my VCR! Still, 95quid… but oh no! Its on sale for 80. So, toy, a Digihome PVR80 which thus far has been impressive. It works, it doesn’t look bad and yeah, it works. I don’t suppose I could ask for more. Apparently I can connect a serial cable to it and hack the software to it will record two channels at the same time, but for now I will be leaving it as it. Recorder set for ITV4 7-8pm for the next 3 weeks. Marvellous