OS X Software

Apple has recently upgraded their whole line, Macbook Pro, Mac Mini, Imacs and Power Macs.

The upgrades bring core duo 2s to the Mac Mini and general upgrades to the Powerbooks, iMacs and PowerMacs.

The PowerMac also has a core i7 option available I believe to get the most top of the line spec for your Mac.

The pricing is interesting though. The USA pricing seems about right, still a bit expensive, but nothing out of the ordinary for Apple.

But Europe on the other hand…

I was actually looking to buy a Mac Mini to use as a Media PC capable until I found out it was 500£, and thats the basic one with no extras.
Why would I want a 120gb Hard drive, 2ghz core duo 2 and 1 gig of RAM for 500£ when I can get a 2.6ghz core duo 2, 750gb Hard drive and 4 gig of ram for 400£.

Lately there have been a lot of rumours revolving around the newest revision of the Mac Mini.

This new revision hasn’t yet been released and speculation about the design and specifications have been rife.

The rumoured specs are a 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of DDR3 RAM accompanied by a SATA Hard drive.

Whats unusual about this is that Apple have always hinted working towards a smaller platform, such as the Intel Atom seen in most Small devices at the moment.
However, if these specs are true then the implications of such a system are pretty decent.

For example a system of that spec will easily be able to become a well rounded 1080p capable Media PC for the living room, which I’m sure many HTPC enthusiasts will be very interested in if the Mac Minis price remains fairly cheap.

It will be interesting in the coming months to see how far off the mark these rumours are.

The M110, the eventual replacement of the M24 has just got the coolest upgrade in the world. We have all seen the US army in the films and on TV with their ipods during their chill periods, and we have obviously seen them with their sniper rifles. But what about both at the same time?

After you’ve managed to mod your sniper rifle with a nifty iPod casing that just so happens to attach to your trusty Sniper Rifle, you are going to need software.

The app is on iTunes now for $11.99 and is called bullet flight.

So to summarise, if you have an ipod or iphone and you like shooting people in the face from miles away, I suggest you check this out to improve your accuracy during windy days.

edit: I actually found out that the case came from http://www.otterbox.com/ipod-touch if anyone is actually interested.

Yes printers. The most important peripheral. To think we once had to go out to get photos developed.

Over the years printers have got better and better and have started to specialise in single jobs such as quick document printing and photo printing.

However, even after all this time printers can still be a right pain. Why is it that the photo printers drink Ink like the Americans consume Oil? And why is ink so expensive. It seems a bit pointless that getting third parties to develop your photos in bulk, comes out cheaper than buying ink cartridges and fancy paper, and thats after the delivery costs of the developer.

This is the exact reason I decided against getting a fancy photo printer and instead went with a good old black and white Laserjet. I picked it up from ebuyer in the end with some Toner Cartridges.

For my photos I’m still using Bonusprint, worst GUI and picture sending feature in the world, but its cheap and cheerful and thats what counts. Some times I’ll send off some of my touched up masterpieces to a more expensive developer where I can even decide to get it framed or not, but I’m way to cheap for that, even if they are my masterpieces.

Not wide enough according to Phillips.

Their new TV is a 56″ widescreen with an aspect ratio of 21:9 (the usual is 16:9 on widescreen screen).

Now you can watch and make your movies in the originally intended format.

The 21:9 is due to be on sale in Spring 2009 in europe, which is good news for us Brits.

Phillips say that included programming will allow regular widescreen footage to scale accordingly so it still performs well with 16:9 and 4:3 footage.

I’ve recently been looking at the newest range of ipods to buy, either the Shuffle or Nano.

I do have an iPhone currently,  but I am wanting to have something to permenatly setup in the front of my car.

The Shuffle is an option due to it being so cheap, however I’m not so keen on the lack of individual song picking that obviously the new nano has, due to it having a screen. The Nano, although more expensive has individual song picking and I also found some gadgets that allow the Nano to be controlled from the cars headunit, which would prove pretty handy when driving along.

In the end I decided on the Nano. Firstly because of the larger storage size which allows me to keep my whole music collection in the car and secondly because I found a holder for the nano that allows me to attach it securely to the dashboard.

Before I went to the UK Apple store to place an order, I thought I’d shop around a bit for some late January sale bargains. In the end I didn’t find a lot, but Googling around brought me to a site that keeps a collection of Promotional Codes that I ended up using to save 5% on my order.

Okay, so the Macworld expo news wasn’t as vast as I originally thought. With CES going on at the same time it’s not surprising theres less news than any other expo.

So I got this mouse, before you say it, I’m aware now it says there are no drivers on the Mac, but it was more of an impulse buy whilst out shopping.

Rather than taking it back I thought I’d put it to use on my Vista system. Upon installing it everything went fine, the usual loading bars, then it tells me to reboot. After restarting my system the mouse doesn’t actually work showing a driver fault in the system panel.

Long story short, the newest drivers that fix a load of keyboard interupt issues don’t work on vista 64 as of yet due to WHQL reasons and have since been removed completely from the website. To fix the problem I just rolled back to old drivers that were WHQL certified and all was good (still with the annoying bugs though that got hotfixed).

Don’t get me wrong this mouse is amazing for gaming and desktop work, but it would of been nice for Roccat to expand on the problems at their webpage a bit more, or better yet, make a support forum of some sort.

PS. If anyone can make this work properly on my Mac, let me know!!

PPS. Article is semi off topic, but it could of been OS X Hardware related with better driver support!