Recently in hardware Category


Dell and Linux, Sitting in a Tree

[ rakaur on Mon Apr 07 at 11:00 AM // category: hardware, technology, unix // comments: 1 ]

Dell might be stupid, but Linux users aren’t as smart as they think they are.

Seriously, who cares what software Dell offers on their machines when the machines themselves are well below par?

-- rakaur // 2008.04.07 @ 11:00 AM

Viva La Revolucion

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 02 at 10:56 AM // category: games, hardware, technology // comments: 4 ]

So, I finally did the irresponsible thing an purchased a Nintendo Wii. My game selection is currently limited to Wii Sports and a borrowed copy of Super Mario Galaxy. I have a few virtual console games as well.

And thus, I shall not post as frequently or pass classes.

-- rakaur // 2008.04.02 @ 10:56 AM

Steve Jobs Allegedly Insults Customer

[ rakaur on Sat Mar 29 at 09:48 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

I found this story on digg, and it seems a little fishy. Customer spills water on a brand new laptop. While supposedly accepting full responsibility for the incident he for some reason “emails Steve Jobs” who supposedly somewhat insultingly replies.

The customer, an owner of a recently water-damaged MacBook Pro, called Apple customer care to get information about repair costs. Accepting full responsibility for the water damage, the customer was still subjected to confusing and contradictory information about the repair. Frustrated with his experience, he took matters into his own hands, emailing sjobs@apple.com (a widely acknowledged direct line to high-level Apple customer care).

-- rakaur // 2008.03.29 @ 09:48 PM

Inside the Apple IIc

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 27 at 11:21 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

PCWorld has an interesting look back at the “MacBook Air of 1984.” It’s on a million separate pages. They have no shame.

At 7.5 pounds, the Apple IIc portable computer was the MacBook Air of 1984. Ever wonder what makes up a vintage classic? We took one apart to find out.

-- rakaur // 2008.03.27 @ 11:21 PM

Ding-a-Ling

[ rakaur on Mon Oct 16 at 10:01 PM // category: eastgate, hardware, subway, technology, work ]

So, Helio is pretty awesome.

I’ve been taking full advantage of the unlimited data. I use it to check sports scores (go Cards!), send tons of SMS and MMS, upload photos to Facebook, etc. The service is great, and the phone calls actually sound pretty good, which is high praise coming from me (I think all phones sound like varying degrees of shit). The Internet is fast when on Sprint’s 1xEV-DO, and really, really, just terribly and utterly mind-blowingly slow when on Verizon’s 1xRTT network. It was a nice feature after having used Sprint’s Vision service.

The phone itself, the VK650C, or Kickflip, is pretty sweet. The interface is beautiful, and just as polished as the phone itself (which is more than I can say for the RAZR and friends). It has a two megapixel camera, which I paid $250 for three years ago. Of course, the opening device is also cool.

Alas, this would not be written by me if it didn’t contain complaining somewhere. The phone has its quirks, which is disappointing because I have the second rev, and I would have thought they would have had to time work this stuff out. The internal photo album gets corrupted from time to time. It’ll list one picture under one name, but when I try to MMS it to someone it’ll send a different picture. I have to go in through the PC software and reset the memory. The camera takes pretty good pictures outside, or where there is a lot of light, and it takes really, really shitty pictures otherwise. The “flash” is just a light that shines for a little while, which is pretty crappy. There are also various bugs in the software that are just enough to irk you. I also loathe the fact that I can’t add words to T9. Obviously, none of these are deal breakers.

Being that it uses Sprint’s and Verizon’s network, I tend to have coverage everywhere. My old Sprint phone barely held onto a signal in my basement, and I have 4/5 bars on the Kickflip right now. I’ve also been told that the phone itself has a fantastic antenna. In fact, the only place I don’t get service is in the storm shelter basements in the buildings at my school. Unfortunately, I’m subject to the same retardedness that I got from Sprint. Things like getting voicemails from people that my phone never rang for, or getting voicemails two days after they’re left.

So far, I’ve dropped it twice. Once onto grass in my backyard from about three feet up, and it flipped open and got some dirt on it, but that was it. I stopped carrying it in my hoodie pocket after that. The other time was out of my pants pocket from about a foot up (I was sitting in a theater chair) onto carpet, and that somehow managed to make the battery fly six feet away. It’s still undamaged, and unscratched. I need to buy a case to keep it that way.

The PC sync software is… shitty. I was disappointed to find that it requires special software to do things. The software isn’t all that terrible, but I’d prefer something standard. The phone also has media playback, but I haven’t tried it out since I just use my iPod. If I could purchase a sufficiently large transflash card for a sufficiently low amount of money, it might be worth it, but otherwise my iPod wins. The headphones that came with it were apparently designed for elephants, because I’ll be damned if I can fit the things in my ear.

Anyway, it’s cool, check it out. Be sure to use me as a reference if you decide to sign up!

On another note, I got fired from Subway. There’s a guy there that talks about how attractive the younger girls are, and he’s like 45. I was joking with one of the girls there, and said “oh yeah, he’s kind of a pedophile.” Well, someone heard me, and told him. He didn’t care; he knew I was joking. He told the manager, and he fired me.

Kind of sucks. Now I’m back at hellho—Eastgate until I can find a better job, again.

-- rakaur // 2006.10.16 @ 10:01 PM

Apples vs. Oranges

[ rakaur on Mon May 08 at 11:19 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

I am so ungodly tired of the “Apple MacBook Pro is $x more than a Dell with the same specs!” argument. It’s just wrong, and here’s why.

This post on some kid’s blog made it to the front page of Digg somehow. Let’s ignore the fact that it’s just blog spam. I’m just using it as an example of the billions of idiots out there making this argument.

The guy claims that “A new MacBook Pro with identical features and specs to a Dell Inspiron E1505 costs $1395 more.”

First off, I’m going to go into why comparing an Apple laptop to a Dell laptop is stupid in the first place. I’ll go into the actual wrongness of it all later. That’s not as important as why it’s stupid to compare them.

When comparing these things, people often use analogies. The analogy I find most people using most of the time is the “comparing Apple to Dell is like comparing Toyota to Lexus” argument. I think this argument is stupid, but it holds some validity. I’m not going to use an analogy. It’s way more simple than that. You can’t compare Apple’s top-of-the-line laptop aimed at business users (MacBook Pro) to Dell’s low-end bargain-bin crap aimed at average home users. Of course, you can counter with “it doesn’t mater what the market is if the specs are identical,” but they aren’t (Dell sells cheap components, that’s why they’re cheap). Just for fun, I went to Dell and built a custom XPS system (which is more in line with high-end hardware) which is “identical” to the 17” MBP. The MBP comes out to $2,699 and the XPS comes out to $3,344. The simple fact is the basis for comparison is wrong.

Unfortunately, people are stupid, and so they compare them anyway. Fortunately, people are stupid and never get it right. The guy compared the following specs, and deemed them “identical”:

Ok, but, you know, that’s not everything. He fails to mention, off the top of my head:

And that’s off the top of my head, there’s probably more. The guy also has three years of AppleCare in the price of the MBP (which is like $350) because “Apple only provides three months for free,” which is not true. The warranty on all Apple hardware is one year, with three months of free phone support. Apple’s phone support is likely much better than Dell’s, which is outsourced to India (though to be honest I’ve never called either). Saying “the MBP is two thirds the thickness!” is misleading, because that two thirds amounts to only half an inch. The half a pound less is somewhat important, though. People don’t figure eight ounces makes a difference, but when you’re carrying it around along with books all day, it makes a difference. The Dell has none of the Apple extras, such as iSight and fiber optic keyboard backlighting, etc. The LCDs are often compared, but from what I understand Dell makes quite good LCDs, and are probably comparable to Apple’s Cinema Displays. I’m willing to wager the screen brightness on the MBP trumps the Dell’s, though. Both the available video cards on the Dell use shared memory, which means it’s absolutely worthless as a video card anyhow (note that the X1600 on MBPs are shipped underclocked, though). The case is a big one also. I’d much rather have heavy-duty aluminum (read: metal) over a shoddy plastic case that’s far more likely to break and/or crack. Then again, instead of breaking or cracking the aluminum would probably dent. I don’t know which one’s more unseemly.

And then there’s the software factor, which is a whole other can of worms. I happen to prefer Apple’s software (and I’ve just recently started using it, so I am by no means a fanboy) over Windows and Windows software any day. Getting OS X and iLife over Windows XP and whatever crapware Dell preinstalls is worth a few hundred to me.

Also, the prices are way inflated because he adds a ton of crap such as AppleCare, which is a not insignificant price addition. My MBP was $1,799 (before tax, shipping, after student discount, default configuration) and it’s $1,999 for the upped CPU, and probably another $100 for the RAM, which is still no where near his $2,897 quote.

Stop comparing this shit. It’s not even apples vs. oranges. It’s like apples vs. rocks. I’m not a fanboy. I just hate stupid people.

-- rakaur // 2006.05.08 @ 11:19 PM

On Mac, Windows, and Storage

[ rakaur on Thu Apr 13 at 01:29 AM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]

(If you haven’t noticed, I’ve given up on witty titles late at night).

I dunno what’s up with my laptop. Well, nothing, really, it works fine. It seems that after installing WinXP with Boot Camp it’s been a little flakey. When I boot it from power-off (which is rare, and I’ll mention that later) I get a question mark, then the Apple logo. It also takes longer for some reason.

I think the culprit is that when Boot Camp partitions it seems to be into a logical partition instead of primary (which is dumb, ‘cause I mean, they know it’s only two partitions anyhow). When you have Boot Camp revert back to one volume, I don’t think this undoes the logical-ness. Then again, it should only be the second partition, so I dunno. Google isn’t my friend in this case.

Also, when I was forced to reinstall the other day, I noticed it installs a lot of shit I don’t need. Like, a lot of shit. Like, a bajillion languages that no one even speaks anymore. I think there’s a Latin.lproj file somewhere. I found some program that removes everything but American English from all installed programs, but I think the files for the stuff on OS X is still there. It’s a big deal because this shit is huge. It’s not gzipped or anything. I don’t know the format of the .lproj files, but it sucks. I freed up over five gigs of space by zapping these from my applications. How sad is that?

I’m thinking about reinstalling from scratch (backing up /Users/ and /Applications/ somewhere else, of course) and customizing my install. Also, I’ve installed and removed just about every piece of software for OS X out there, so I have a mind-blowingly huge amount of little application turds laying around in /Library/ and shit. I’m a filesystem clean freak, so I’d like to get rid of all that stuff.

“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyway” is usually a good policy. One of the few things ESR has uttered that I happen to agree with.

This doesn’t really fit here, but I said I’ll mention it so I will. Evidently, my MBP uses two watts of power while powered off, and two watts of power while in sleep. It has a 60 watt-hour battery. I’m not sure on the math here, how long can it go powered off or asleep at that rate? System Profiler says the full charge is 5846mAh. So, right, my point was I almost never turn it off, I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. If it draws the same amount of power, then who cares?

I’m also thinking I’m giving a great big “fuck you” to Gentoo and killing it and installing WinXP on my desktop, mostly for games. I’m really fucking sick of having to edit ten files just to do anything in Portage. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about all my shit though. I’d hate to squander a 200 gig drive on Windows. I store all my stuff on it, and I’d like to keep it on something other than NTFS. Maybe I should swap it with my backup drive in cyndane or something. I’m not sure on this. I don’t want my stuff on some MS filesystem, that’s for sure. Hopefully soon enough most of it will be gone though, since burning DVDs from AVIs actually works on my laptop (as opposed to Nero Vision) I plan to just burn all my video to disc, and delete the AVIs. Just about 60% of my stuff on that drive is video. The rest is mostly music, and that’s on iTunes anyway.

Good luck finding time to do this stuff though.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.13 @ 01:29 AM

More Drama Than an Episode of Montel

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 05 at 04:43 PM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]

So, as I’m sure you all know, Apple released Boot Camp this morning, which is software that allows you to install XP natively on an Intel Mac. To be more precise, the firmware update they released just prior allows the BIOS emulation XP needs (in fact, the XP cd will boot and run fine without even touching Boot Camp). Boot Camp serves to make drivers and partitions for XP. First, it burns you a CD with (almost) all of the drivers Windows needs to operate on Apple hardware. Everything works, excluding the Apple Remote, ambient light sensor, sudden motion detector, and other minor things such as this. All the big stuff works: Airport, Bluetooth, the eject button, the trackpad (though I have yet to figure out how to right click in XP with just the trackpad on my MacBook Pro). Well, the trackpad kind of works. Scrolling, acceleration, etc do not.

So of course, I had to try it. Pictures (and a movie of it booting) are here. It’s the fastest XP’s ever been for me, but then I haven’t used it in ages. I installed it, and it got around to nagging me about antivirus and 38 Windows Updates and blah blah, so I promptly booted back into OS X and haven’t touched it again. I’ll probably delete it soon, as on an 80G drive I need those 10G back.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.05 @ 04:43 PM

MacBook Woe

[ rakaur on Mon Apr 03 at 12:38 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

Apparently Apple has acknowledged most of the MacBook Pro issues, and is actually silently fixing them with new hardware revisions straight from the factory, but didn’t bother to tell anyone. The latest revisions have serial numbers that start with W8612, and apparently shouldn’t have any of the reported problems.

But there’s a problem: my MBP serial starts with W8612, and I still have issues. Thankfully, none of them are issues that bother me enough to drive into St. Louis, sit at an Apple store, have some condescending guy tell me what I already know, and just give me a new one. A new one that probably has the identical problems. The only reported problems I have is that a) it gets really fucking hot, and; b) the CPU whine, which has been acknowledged by Apple as “normal” for now, but will probably be fixed with a Software Update. The heat issue is a non-issue because it was probably my fault for putting it on my bed (“do not rest on a soft unstable surface”). It’s barely warm on my desk.

So how about them Apples.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.03 @ 12:38 PM

On Computers I Don't Know What to Do With

[ rakaur on Mon Apr 03 at 01:02 AM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

So, I have too many computers.

Right now I’m writing from my desktop, daedalus, which I pretty much haven’t touched since I got my MBP, praxis. I’ve been trying to reason out where I should go from here. There’s several possibilities.

I could ditch Gentoo, and put Windows on daedalus, and use it for gaming or Windows-critical stuff, and just use my laptop for desktopping. The good thing about this is I would have an OS that 95% of shit is designed to work with. The bad thing about this is that 95% of shit is designed to work with Windows. Another thing is, well, do I even need Windows? I’ve been using Gentoo without any access to Windows (excluding the once-a-month trip to my mother’s computer) and not really had major problems, so, I don’t know. Games, yeah, but honestly, what games do I play that need Windows? I mostly play UT and Quake, both of which run on Linux. It’d be nice to be able to play DirectX games like Homeworld 2 and Starcraft again, though. There’s details to be worked out though. If I’m going to be using my laptop for desktop stuff, where am I going to stash the 200+ gigabytes of crap I have? I have a ton of video content (mostly downloaded TV shows that I rewatch a lot) that I don’t have room for on the laptop. It only has an 80G hard drive, and I have more than that in video alone. All of my music is already over there on iTunes, and I sync it back to daedalus to play on real speakers. It’s all in the details, but this is the likely story.

Option two is to replace cyndane, my server, with daedalus, and just plug my laptop into my monitor/etc when I need to use it as a desktop. Kind of a pain in the ass, unless I get some kind of dock (which there doesn’t seem to be for MBPs yet). Might be worth it though. Requires me to disgard one of my computers, which is kind of silly, as it’s perfectly good at what it does. I could even put X on it, but I’d never use it. I have a KVM switching to it now, and I never switch over unless daedalus has died for some reason. Though, another form of this idea takes hold in the next option.

Option three is to sell daedalus. Option three point one is to sell it and put the profit into my loan, and use my laptop as a desktop a la option two. Option three point two is to sell it and save the profit, and slowly save until I can afford an iMac. This would be kind of cool, but it’s not very realisitic, and I can’t honestly do something that irresponsible.

Both option two and three leave me without a gaming system. Well, sort of. My laptop has a card that’s pretty much on par with daedalus (laptop has a radeon x1600, daedalus has a geforce 6600gt), but how many games are seriously ever ported to Mac? A fair amount, but any that I’d want to play? Any that are popular enough to show up on, ahem, alternate distribution methods?

Update: After actually looking, it seems as though I could run Quake, UT2004, and HW2 on OS X. UT2004 is Universal, but I don’t know about the rest. None of them would be playable under Rosetta. Update Update: Turns out UT2004, and all the Quakes are Universal. HW2 is not, and probably never will be since it’s thoroughly dead.

A bad thing about the “plug laptop into desktop stuff” options is that my laptop’s monitor is widescreen, and my desktop’s isn’t. Dual screening would be kind of hard, seeing as how they’re on different playing fields. I could always enable mirroring, which is fine, but I have to switch resolutions from 1440x900 on my laptop to 1280x1024 on my monitor, which is “down” a bit. After using my laptop for days, everything on this computer seems huge and ugly. I’m sure some of it is Linux vs OS X rather than resolution, though.

The big problem with using my laptop for desktopage is, again, storage. I have 260GiB on daedalus. I have 80 on the laptop (for some reason I have issues just calling it anything other than “the laptop” in words, even though its name is praxis), and 40 on cyndane, plus a 40 for a backup drive in cyndane. I could always throw the 200 in cyndane and use NFS or something. That’s kind of crappy though, ‘cause I’d constantly be transferring files over wireless, which sucks. I could try to find the biggest laptop SATA drive I could, and stick that in, but I’d have to reinstall OS X and everything (not that big of a deal, but man, I just got it how I like it). [Update: Turns out that’d be a 160G, and it’s $300, so that’s a no.]

If anyone actually bothers reading anything I write these days, please let me know what you think.

Also, I’ll hopefully be getting around to cleaning my room tomorrow so I’ll try to post new pictures and update the toys stuff.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.03 @ 01:02 AM

« apple | Main Index | Archives | microsoft »