mcfall.geek.nz

I was watching some Top Gear and they were talking about a new Ferrari that broke the record at the Nurburgring (only to have it thrashed two weeks later by the new Zonda… pwned) and they pointed something out in the background of the picture Ferrari sent them.

… Not quite the Top Gear “Top Tip” I’m used to…

Apologies for the terrible pun, but there is truth to that phrase all the same.

I’m getting so sick of people going “Bitch moan, iPhone Flash iPad Flash can’t watch Youtube complain whinge”.

There is a very good reason why Apple aren’t allowing Flash on their handheld devices… Flash it entirely and utterly redundant.

Flash has been the bane of the web for a long time. ActionScript isn’t so much a programming language as it is excrement in text form and flash is always a hindrance when it is used for any kind of interface.

Why would you want to use Flash when HTML5 supports native video? what does that mean? It means video is just another part of the markup. I don’t know how to say that in non computer speak. Essentially it means you don’t have to install Flash when you set up a computer, and you don’t have to continuously Read the rest of this entry »

Whenever people ask me what laptop to buy I have historically always pointed them in Dells direction, however over the past couple of years that has been changing.

I’ve had a very bad history with a couple of brands, and Dell has always been good to me. Every Acer laptop I’ve bought has died within 6 months (granted it’s only two laptops, but back to back it gave a bad experience. I however currently own 3 Acer laptops all of which I haven’t purchased (Two of these came from my work, one was dropped and needed its entire screen assembly replaced, and the other had stopped working) and aside from the parts to fix them and get them running again, they cost me nothing. These laptops (one is 5 years old and the other is a Timeline series Travelmate which is about 6 months old) have been the most reliable laptops I’ve owned to date. My opinion of Acer however is still tainted.

I’ve owned a couple of Dells. My last one being a Dell XPS M1210, which was a fantastic machine… until Windows XP decided not to put the computer to sleep when I closed it. Given it was a 12″ performance laptop with a dedicated graphics card, it cooked itself to the point of being too hot to touch. It still continued to work (althought it was much slower then it was originally) for another year until I sold it to my brother.

That computer ended up having the entire of the internals replaced by Dell multiple times after that. I think the motherboard was replaced three times before one of the cats knocked it off a desk and broke it.

Insurance covered it and he then bought a Dell Studio XPS 13, which has also needed the internals replaced multiple times. One of his friends had the same machine, which also had the motherboard replaced at least three times. Since then I’ve been constantly hearing similar stories, the latest being published in APC magazine of a guy who bought two studio XPS 16’s for his daughters, only to have them both need the motherboard (and more) replaced so many times he lost count.

This is really worrying. Given that Dell do offer great value, solidly built machines, to hear from so many sources that they’re just so unreliable is a concern.

It’s not going to be a problem for me as any laptop that I’m going to spend my own money on is going to be an Apple, but for the average PC user who doesn’t want to make the switch I’m almost stumped as to what brand to recommend now because I’ve only spent a lot of time personally on Dells and Acers, and all the other laptop brands I’ve tried and played with to a limited amount just don’t do anything for me.

I used to say if I ever bought another PC it’d be a Dell, but now I’m not so sure.

I work at an online book store. As a result I have bookshelves at home overflowing with books. Most of which I haven’t made the time to read. This takes up a lot of space, which I’m fine with, but whenever I get a chance to read I’m nowhere near my books.

The iBooks app on the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad sounded like a brilliant idea. It’s actually really great on the iPad in particular (the grunty A4 chip and the big screen makes it much more usable than on my 32GB 2nd gen Touch).

The problem with it is there is nothing on the iBooks store at all. There’s a few thousand free titles… no modern stuff (at least this is in New Zealand. I believe Apple are looking at getting a Books manager for South East Asia and somehow we fall under that category. So hopefully that’ll resolve this).

After doing a bit of reading I noted that iBooks uses the ePub format for their eBooks… not some closed Apple format (which I’d expected).

So I had an idea. I obtained an ePub format copy of a couple of the books I already own physical copies of. Once I’d done this I dragged them into the Books section of iTunes and they immediately showed up… with covers and everything. So I opened up iBooks and sure enough they appeared in there and you can read them.

So if you already have some ePub format eBooks for another device, you can pop them on your favorite Apple portable device and read away.

I’ve been pondering when I should upgrade my iMac. As if I don’t have enough computers as it is. At this point in time, I have an old Acer Travelmate (in a drawer somewhere), an Acer Timeline series Travelmate 8371 (2010), an Asus eeePC 900 (2008-2009) and my trusty  2008-2009 24″ iMac.

With the release of all the new Apple goodies recently I must admin I’ve had a hard time keeping my wallet shut. I’d love an iPad. I think they’re fantastic (I only came to this conclusion after using one. I thought they were silly previously). But now my iPod Touch is getting old and slow (2nd gen) and my phone is just about scrap, so I want an iPhone 4 as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, I have my own server now. None of this “shared hosting”, $20 a month hobbyist crap that so many people seem to use.

After installing and configuring the software I needed and setting up a few of my own websites (migration of all my clients sites is going to take ages and I have to bill them more for it as leasing a server isn’t cheap) I realized that I’d just configured and set up a webserver. This is something I had never done before and it hadn’t even crossed my mind that I’ve had all the necessary knowledge to do this for a long time.

Every day at Fishpond.co.nz I’m exposed to Linux, multiple servers, a varied array of applications used to maintain/monitor them and I realized all of this has rubbed off on me in a big way. Everything makes sense, Read the rest of this entry »