An Apple Geek Speaks Out

So, unless you have been asleep all day or are reading this from another country; the main chat of the day has been “did you feel it last night?”.

I am of course referring to the Earthquake/tremor that happened at around 4 minutes to 1 this morning. The epicentre of the event was near Lincoln, which is about 105 miles from where I live - but not far enough that I didn’t feel the earth move and rumble for about 6-8 seconds.

I was just getting to the best part of reformatting my PC at this point (the bit where I realise that XP won’t validate its serial key as genuine again) when I mistook the ground shaking and windows rattling to be a ghost suddenly appearing behind me and tugging at my chair! By the time I had realised what was going on, my wife had jumped out of bed thinking it was a burglar trying to break in through the upstairs window and then rushed into see the kids to make sure they were ok.

We pulled ourselves to our senses, settled the one child that woke and my wife popped back into bed whilst I went back downstairs to see if I could find any information about the tremor on the Internet.

01:03 - My first port of call was the BBC News website. This was totally lacking any information - but bearing in mind it was only just after 1am and a few minutes after the event, I was not surprised that nothing was there.

01:05 - Reuters, Sky News and ITN news were then visited - but again, nothing to be seen.

01:06 - I logged onto my Twitter account and sent the following message:

I then jumped to the Twitter Public Timeline and picked up a message from Chris Alcock:

I did send him a reply, but he never replied to me though. I then saw a message referring to the tracking of tweets with the word “Earthquake” in on the TwitterSearch.com page and headed on over to see a glut of messages from various parts of the world reporting the quake and reflecting on the experiences of the people in the UK. Some poor chap was being sick at the time and missed it all - but he later informed me it was not a self inflicted sickness

01:15 BBC news page shows a “Reports coming in of earth tremor in west midlands area” ticker message but no real story to be seen. Still no word from the other news sites either!

01:16 I followed a link from the TwitterSearch.com list to TwitterVision and kept an eye on the BreakingNewsOn user based in the Netherlands who were providing the most information throughout the evolving news.

01:20 Twitter keeps serving up good links and information from people including the real information about the quake:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008nyae.php

01:20 An old BBC news story about a UK quake from 2007 makes the top of the “most read” section to the ridicule of Twitter users:

01:25  The BBC post a Breaking News article with basic information about the quake and “more to follow” appears but it is all very vague and information lacking.

Conclusion

Twitter users beat the major news networks on the head last night!  I appreciate that any news story being reported by someone such as the BBC has to be checked, validated and double checked and validated before it even gets anywhere near being reported - but nearly half an hour before anything was put up is pretty poor.  The messages on Twitter were reporting the quake being in different places at different times and strengths, but until quality links were provided to actual data, this is par for the course.

Twitter might not be to everyones tastes, including mine at times, but it was very good at getting information quickly and easily from a large variety of people and services.  Twitter can be good fun if you know people on there but it can also be a lonely place too.

If you want to learn about Twitter, read the excellent guide by Caroline Middlebrook and then follow me!

photo credit: Dylan Parker

Of the main reasons why I have to reformat my Windows PC every 12 months or so, registry bloat is the usual culprit.

“RegBloat” coupled with the deterioration of hard disk performance brought on by an over active torrent client makes my PC slow, sad and not much fun to be around. I was also getting a little annoyed with the “features” and “issues” that Windows Vista presented on a daily basis, something that grates against me after using my MacBook all the time.

I decided that I would take some proactive action and reinstall XP and as many “portable applications” as possible, freeing up the opportunity for registry bloat to take hold too soon. For those who are unaware, Portable Apps are applications that can be stored and run from a USB device or folder - without installation. This means you can take your applications anywhere and run them knowing they will have all of your settings saved and tweaks applied. The Portable Apps can also be copied to a folder on your hard disk and run from there.

No MSI installation routines - no InstallShield needed - just a folder with the required files in. Perfect.

After the reinstall, here is the current setup I have with the portable apps highlighted in bold:

Windows XP Pro
AVG Free Anti Virus
Microsoft Office Professional 2003
Microsoft Visio 2003
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended
Adobe Illustrator CS3
Firefox
VLC
7-Zip
DeepBurner
FileZilla FTP client
uTorrent
Adobe Acrobat Reader 8

Thats a good chunk of the applications that are portable!  And If you don’t want to use a portable version of OpenOffice to do your writing and spreadsheets, Mr Google will even tell you where to find a portable version of Office 2003!  From past experience, after installing Office - that is when the performance of the PC takes a nose dive.

The beauty of using portable apps is that you can add and remove them as you see fit without too much impact to the operating system.  You may need to associate your AVI and MPG files to start with VLC and your PSD files to open with Photoshop - but other than things like that no extra information is inserted into the registry.

The whole process is similar to installing an application on OS X where you drag the “application package” into the Applications folder and run it from there.  Changes are made to the system (such as the open with options) when you first run the application, but 99% of it still resides in the Applications folder.  On OS X, you can also use tools such as AppZapper to delete the application and associated links, preference files and information quickly and without any fuss.  How many times have you uninstalled an application on Windows and then realised it has left great chunks of unwanted information in the registry and folders scattered around the disk?

Head over to PortableApps.com to get a wide range of freeware portable applications and use the “usual sources” to obtain the others!

Fresh from the rumblings that disturbed my late night Photoshop session, another rumble has appeared on my screen this morning!

WHERE THE HELL DID THIS APPEAR FROM???????

It opens this weekend apparently - and was supposed to open last year before xmas!

Where the hell have I been???
Going to find it hard not to buy an iPhone now!!

I think i’m going to cry…

I was expecting to have a nice relaxing Sunday, but after a friend dropped off his new super-duper-SATA machine for me to load XP onto for him, I was dropped into a spiral of despair.

The drivers for the SATA RAID controller on the motherboard needed to be installed from floppy disk during the XP installation, but the machine did not even have a floppy drive. XP was also being anal enough to insist that the drivers came from the A: Drive and did not allow me to obtain them from anywhere else!

I spent a little time trying to fool the BIOS into thinking that the A Drive was actually one of the memory card reader slots on the front panel - but this did not work at all.

In the end, I had to download the driver files to my PC and slipstream them into my installation of XP for the system to use them. At the same time, I made the installation totally “unattended” by entering the licence number, regional settings and options. I also slipstreamed in a copy of XP SP2 for good measure!

To do all of this I used an application called NLite which allows you to add all of the previously mentioned features plus extra patches, software and settings. It copies down your XP install disk, makes the changes you asked for and then burns direct back to a bootable CD!

Excellent!

Thanks NLite, you saved my sanity!

It’s official. I am a new man.

Yesterday - I bought some computer software - that wasn’t a game!

If you know me, you might think that this is a little odd and it may give you the impression that I never buy stuff for my computer (which I hardly ever do - working in the IT industry does have some benefits) - but this was almost too good to turn down.

Each year, Macheist sell bundles of Mac OS X software which would usually cost in excess of several hundred dollars - but under their offer, only costs around $40. Also, a portion of the profit from the sales goes to charity!

Simply put, this is the best Mac software deal in history.

This year, the bundle includes 12 applications for $49 (£25):

1Password - an application for storing your secure information - not just your web based passwords and information.

CoverSutra - a desktop based app for iTunes control and alot more!

Cha-Ching - a money/finance management application

iStopMotion - for recording stop-frame animations to the Mac. Something for me and the kids to do one rainy sunday afternoon.

Awaken - an alarm clock which starts up your mac and plays you sweet music from your iTunes library - or Barry Mannilow - which ever..

Speed Download - if you go anywhere near Rapidshare and you use a mac - this is really invaluable.

AppZapper - kills apps and associated settings/preference files with drag-and-drop efficiency

TaskPaper - a Mac based application for Getting Things Done. Something I definitely need!

CSSEdit - an application that provides a visual take on CSS file editing.

Snapz Pro X - a screen recording application for when you want to demo how to hack into something to all the other spotty kids on YouTube

PixelMator - A new(ish) image editing application

Wingnuts 2 - a fighter plane style game

So, whist not all of these are “must have applications” the majority such as CSSEdit, Pixelmator and Speed Download are worth the $49 alone!

I have been quite inspired by this act of “giving back” rather than taking. I am writing this post from the 21 day trial of Ecto - the best Mac based blogging application. With a new blog based project in the pipeline - I think I will be buying a license for this too!

So… it’s come to this.

I just finish Call Of Duty 4 and get ready for some serious online multiplayer killing and my xbox decides to go tits on me and display the dreaded Red Ring Of Death when I power it on.

Like a good corporate Microsoft bitch I logged it with their Xbox Repair website knowing full well that this particular issue is a common one and therefore forced Microsoft to give an extra 2 years warranty on top of the usual year.

I now await the Xbox Coffin to arrive to spirit it away to the Xbox Hospital to be mended. Hopefully they will seek pity on me and send back one of the slightly newer hardware revision models with a nice juicy HDMI port on too!

I can only hope.  They will probably pre-load Vista 360 onto it and that will be the end of my gaming days, as the included joypad won’t have any working drivers!

Wow, a major milestone has passed in my life.

I have actually completely finished a computer game in Single Player mode!

Call Of Duty 4 is a totally excellent game and the graphics look amazing when running in top-notch VGA mode on my LCD TV. Even though the single player mission only lasted 4.5 hours - it was still a great story, good fun and bloodthirsty.

The image above is me sniping the brains out of Damo on COD4 Multiplayer. Your man-cold can’t save you now Derby-boy!

I recently posted about my upgrade week encompassing installing OS X Leopard on my MacBook and also the new update for the Xbox 360 that allowed DiVx content to play.After spending a few weeks with OS X Leopard, I have decided to uninstall and move back to using Tiger, the previous version instead for the following reasons:

• Too slow - I just found that with my measly 512mb of RAM, my MacBook was just not as responsive and as quick as it used to be. Even with the Dashboard disabled and the 3D dock busted back to 2D it was still sluggish.
• Wifi Issues - since the update to Leopard, my wireless connection seemed to be searching, connecting, scanning, searching… all the time. There are grumbles about this issue on the web but all of the fixes I attempted never worked. Back to Tiger - all is fine again.
• Unused New Features - the features like Quick Look, Stacks and Cover Flow were all very nice, but not essential to my use of the MacBook. I was able to quickly search through all of my JPG files to try and find one particular image using Cover Flow, but I could have achieved the same result by using the normal search results. The new version of Safari is nice and I will miss that most of all. Both Spaces and Time Machine were not anywhere on my radar.

At the moment I am running a very basic OS X installation with nothing apart from the following applications installed:

• Transmission - The best OS X BitTorrent client - link
• Perian - a collection of codecs for Quicktime - link
• Burn - for converting videos and creating DVDs - link
• Quicksilver - an application launcher - link

Whilst OS X Leopard is a good and solid update for the Apple systems, it’s not for me at the moment.

Much like receiving rough prison-style anal sex, the thought of getting an iPhone was not very high on my agenda.

Although I am an Apple fan I had not even seeked out the device to play with whilst Mr Spotty Teenager sales assistant at Carphone Whorehouse hovered round me like a priest round his "young flock" - waiting for the weakest to fall, and then pouncing for the kill.

The iPhone is certainly one of those things that is best stayed away from, lest you fall under it's magical spell and succumb to a life of £35 a month contracts and endless "i-monikered" peripheral devices.

But I have seen one.  I have touched one.  And I want one!  My colleague traded his Girlfriend for one and seems much happier as a result.  It really does change lives!

It's much better than I even thought.  Quicky, zoomy, fadey and most of all, Appley.

As Shakespeare once said… "give me a fucking iPhone for Christmas now… forsooth!"