Convenience or investment?

New tech post at Arrogantics!

Convenience or investment?
What would you choose:  the convenience of a subscription service, or the investment of purchased music?

Since when am I a Mac snob?

As some may know, I pride myself on being an equal appreciator of both Windows and Macintosh operating system.  I have the Mac Mini which I do most of my computing on, and an XP laptop.  Lately I’ve been writing a lot of papers and doing a lot of work (i.e. anything other than watching fansubs and movies and chatting) on my mac over my laptop.  So today I go into lab and I’m typing up directions in word on the sucktastic Dell boxes.  I finish and look at it and think “Good god that’s ugly”.

Since when am I so spoiled by things being pretty?  Since when am I a Mac snob?

How many hard drives makes too many hard drives?

Let me start off with one fact: I love my Mac Mini.

Let me add in another fact: I don’t think it’s perfect.

As a college student I am subjected to an insane amount and insanely tiny apartments. The Mini fits me well for many things, and I wouldn’t change it to a G5 or iMac for anything. However, it has draw backs that range from irritating to it needing to die.

My main issue is the lack of USB ports. Oh, another fact to throw on the table: Apple? I hate you for removing firewire support on the 5G iPods. The Mini is great as a basic little student computer, and I can deal with the lag when I open up Illustrator and Photoshop together. What makes me wish that I had a bigger computer? I’m a media packrat. Music, movies, photos, fansubs, you name it. My mini only has an 80GB hard drive which is barely enough memory for all my apps and my music. I have no room for all my video to be kept on it.

When I opened up the stats widget I had to laugh when I saw this and just had to laugh.

So I have to ask: how many hard drives does it take to count as too many hard drives?

Added bonus, my pathetic setup.

Google answer session 10/20/06

Yup, another google answer session!

pioneer ipod controller sucks
Well, I wouldn’t say it sucks, but you do have a point that it could be better.

“you got me”
Boo!!!!!!

how to take off a ipod faceplate
My dear, iPods do not have faceplates, they have….the thing that is the front of the player. Your search should have been “how to open ipod” and the answer would be “guitar pick”, or at least back in the day it was. The mini (and I guess the new nanos) are a bit sketchy to open…so ya. Either way, iPods do not have faceplates. *ahem* IPODS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!!111!!

send photo cingular cripple motorola
You might assume that cingular crippled moto phones for this feature, but nay, it is simply a bit cracked out to figure out how to do. Reference your manual, you basically have to use the ‘copy’ function.

iPod Integration for Volkswagen jetta
AVOID!!! It’s all about the aftermarket baby.

Review of the past few weeks

I haven’t written for a while due to school, netflix, tivo, and reptile conventions.  However, this does not mean that I have been neglecting my blogs.  I’ve kept up, of a fashion, but just haven’t quite felt as if anything that interesting has happened to require a post.

Okay, okay, the new ipod nano, I got it.

To recap the last few weeks:

Apple’s going to kick ass no matter what.
There’s a new nano, I hate it less, but at least no one can sue due to the lack of shinyness.  The only exception: 8GB in a few mm?  Props.
Sandisk is going to own like whoa at second place.
Creative is going to fall, although I don’t see how they could get any worse at this point.
Samsung…well…you still suck.
Dell and HP are whores, but we knew this long ago.
The PS3 will be expensive, but what isn’t?
Grandmothers across the country will be confused as to their grandchildrens’ requests to urinate for Christmas.
OMG of the thousands they’ve sold your laptop is defective?  Ya, welcome to technology, get over it.
If you own a laptop, you might want to donate some sperm because your laptop will most likely fry your manhood.
Speaking of which, of all the reports of blowing up batteries, how come everyone’s lucked out and not received fried genitalia?
If myspace was a bar, you’d….well, insert something vulgar about molasses.
Facebook is becoming big brother, again, we knew this long ago.
OMG people can readz your infoz onlinez!!!  Excuse me, but may I slap you upside the head for not understanding that which is reality?  Get over it.
Zune dropped like a bomb because it sucked, not that Apple somehow has the hand of death up its ass.  It sucked.  Get over it.

More updates soon, I promise!

New Yorker picture mishap

The complete New Yorker, available on DVD or external hard drive.

Interesting? Not really. Not unless you see the firewire cable in the picture and see that the specs says USB 2.0.

Apple: kiss your ass goodbye cause SanDisk’s got ya

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2006/08/21/afx2961842.html

An 8gb player for $250? No, this isn’t even part of their cheap-ass M series, this is a full out E series with video/radio/recording/etc.  Meanwhile, where the hell is Creative in this?  A year ago they were gung-ho to take Apple down and SanDisk was just the player you got because you couldn’t afford anything else.  Creative hasn’t really moved anything new, but SanDisk has really started to put the heat on by actually making players decent enough that not even I can sell the ipod over them.

Apple, my friend, if you ignore this you will lose this battle. I’m glad to see this competition finally start to take off. Your move Apple.

Need ram? You can actually find it now.

Kingston RAM finder via Gizmodo

Can I please give a big shout out to “Where the hell has this been all my life?!?!”?

Okay, now that that’s done, I can move on to telling you that you soul has just been saved by the vast l33tness of the internets.

Seriously, the only way they could make this better was to make it a chart wheel you spin around on the back of the RAM boxes.

Dell scores with AMD: comperable love child on the way

In the chip wars of the past few years consumers, if given the choice, could go with Intel or AMD. Pentium chips have been the favored contender from what I remember, but AMD was the buddy of the budget minded builder. Being as I’m an underdog snob, I’ve always favored AMD (also because of their price points) when I was able to pick which one I was to get. From what I understand, I don’t really know why Dell hadn’t been using AMD chips previously aside from perhaps waiting for contracts to run out. There are plenty of people that want a computer that just ‘goes’ and don’t care about benchmarks or numbers of any kind (pr0n!). Hopefully this new deal will ease the cost for Dell and return to us the days of vast coupons running free across the prarie.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/18/dell-goes-with-amd-its-official/

Movies for purchase in itunes…and then?

http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/18/lions-gate-ceo-confirms-itunes-movie-downloads/

Movies on iTunes, I was so totally right last year.

Oh come on, you knew they had to do it. Just as there are apparently people who will spend $2 on music videos, I’m sure there are people willing to shell out the big bucks for renting movies on their ipods.

Every week we hear about new contracts for TV shows to be made available for purchase in the iTunes music store, and every time I flip open a magazine I see an ad telling me to download a new show’s pilot episode for free from iTunes. It will be interesting to see their method of DRM as well as their price point for the movies, but my general reaction to this is “Why took you so long?”.

To quote an old drive thru lady: …and then?