This looks interesting. I'm hoping that the pricing is reasonable and affordable:
Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.
It seems that OpenOffice3 Beta is released with the native Mac Aqua interface. Let’s hope that it turns out all okay. I’ve not been at all impressed with OpenOffice for a while. I actually think it got worse there for a while - particularly on the Mac where everything ended up horrendously slow.
Anyway, have a look at Ars Technica for an in depth look:
First look: OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta a big step forwardThis year is a little different for me. I've become much more interested in Photography. Well saying that I've become "interested" is a little misleading. I've always been interested - but perhaps I've become more than the "casually interested" me of before - excited being a much better word now.
I've had access to a camera right since I was at least 6 or 7. In fact I recently came across an old photograph of our family with a visiting cousin from back in 1970. There I am at age 6 or so, with a camera hanging on a strap around my neck. Something like an old 35mm Ilford (or maybe Minolta) camera. These days, we'd mistakenly call them a rangefinder camera, however strictly speaking there was no rangefinding capability on it - you had to figure out focus by dead reckoning. All the way when I was growing up, I had a 35mm camera and used to take photos on holiday - using the handheld meter and trying to figure out the distance to focus with best I could. I used to shoot mainly on Agfa 64 slide film.
Having grown up, finished school and gone to University; when I had finished my undergraduate degree, I felt the need for something a little better and more usable as a camera. I'd been looking around at SLR 35mm cameras for a year or two. Finally, I bought a Nikon F301 camera and a couple of lenses. This mainly as I was involved in the creative arts (as a musician and composer) and wanted the ability to document performances, for myself and other creative artist colleagues. From here on, I ended up shooting mainly print film, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was a little cheaper (University students not being known for lots of money), secondly I could shoot faster film which was better for indoor work and thirdly the extra latitude of the film helped get over any inconsistencies that the lighting or situations provoked in getting a good exposure.
Time passes (boy isn't that the truth) and other things become important, like family, work, career etc. The photography, while not at all major, was still there to some extent. Photos of family mainly. The biggest issue, probably was that lack of consistent practice, means that one's skills and confidence with the camera are affected. I ended up not shooting because I was only putting a couple of films through the camera per year. Not enough to be confident of getting the shot or knowing really what I was doing.
Come the new Millenium and I was in a different sort of job. Working for a network development company in a fairly senior role. Travelling on business frequently and needing to document locations and events. Basically the company decided to buy a couple of the new latest Sony Cybershot F-505 Digicams. The first time I used one of these was on a trip to a conference in Europe in 2000. I was with a colleague and we had the camera with us at the time. I remember suddenly understanding the point of the immediacy that digital offered. Being able to see immediately, what had happened. I really enjoyed the experience and became quite excited by the future, until I realised how much still that a digicam cost. On that trip, I took some photos that I really liked (and would like to see again) - but that's the problem when you are sharing a camera with someone else - things get lost along the way. Over the next year or two, I borrowed one of the Sonys here and there for special occasions and found the experience wonderful.
So, somewhere around 2004 we bought a Nikon digital compact, a Coolpix 4300. The prices of digital had been coming down sufficiently that we could afford to do something about having one in the house. Of course this revolutionises how you and the rest of the family relate to photos and photography. The move to having pictures on a computer. The ease of having immediate feedback of what happens and the low cost of taking a photo of any occasion you can think of means that the who family gets much more photographically aware. What it didn't really do however, was give me sufficient flexibility and scope to feel properly creative and able to photograph what I wanted.
Somewhere around the last few months of 2006, I started feeling like I wanted to get back more to the "hobbiest" mode of photography that I had enjoyed when I was younger. To me this meant some sort of decent camera - most likely of the SLR type. Having looked around - I wondered about a so called "Bridge" camera (sometimes called a Super-zoom as they often have fixed lens zooms with a large range). I figured out that given the way photography was going, having a camera with RAW capabilities was much more flexible and most likely the better way to go. Most bridge cameras were in some way compromised, either in image quality, lack of RAW or suffered from noise issues in low light. Having realised this, I then started concentrating on finding an appropriate DSLR (in kit form) that did what I wanted without breaking the bank. Finally, just before Christmas, I went out and bought a Nikon D50 twin lens kit (18-55mm and 70-300mm zooms included). The reason for buying Nikon was simply that I already had some Nikon 35mm gear, and figured that it was reliable, good quality and I might be able to use some of the lenses I had.
This triggered a year of playing around, using the camera where I had been previously (on holiday and family gatherings) and a little bit of trying out some other things I wouldn't have (see the previous post re: comet photo). I guess that while I had the camera, that wasn't still sufficient. Making time to actually go and do things is important and also working on my skills of "seeing" the photo first, being able to work with composition within the frame was just as important.
So, then we come to this year. I had decided by the end of last year, that I wanted to know more, get involved with others in some way and basically improve my ability to "see" a photo. Basically the aim was to deliberately go and enjoy taking photographs, but also to find some creative outlet and direction for what I was doing. Therefore, this year I've joined the local Photographic Society - looking for enthusiasm, expertise and camaraderie along the way. So far I've found all of that and more. For the first time for quite a while, I've been consistently enthusiastic and excited about photography for 2-3 months now and getting out and taking photos.
I've also started contributing more to Flickr, joining a few groups and enjoying interacting with other photographers there. You will notice that this site now has, a side bar with a slideshow of my current Flickr photos. Please feel free to click through there, and leave comments on individual photos.
So far, that is what there is to say. However if you keep watching the Flickr feed you will see more. Also, I'll see whether I can document and discuss a little more on this blog, some of the experiences as I go on the journey.
Well, here in NZ 6pm on the 26th comes before everyone else virtually. So having obtained my copy having watched the unboxing at the local dealer (thanks Magnum Mac), it was home for dinner while the laptop backed up and then put the DVD in the drive.
The install went pretty well fine with only one little hiccup. Somehow it didn't detect the internal hard-drive and the installer couldn't offer it as an install target. After a little digging with Terminal looking at what was mounted where, I managed to provoke it into correctly mounting the disk and then I could select and install on it.
Everything else has gone rather sweetly. It really does look rather nice and is behaving very well for me so far (knock on wood). Outstanding good impressions so far: how fast Spotlight is now, how much faster Safari seems to be, the use of Cover Flow on folders with graphics, the better Terminal, the "Quick Look" functionality of Finder and just how good an "upgrade" install really is on Mac OS.
Questions still to be answered: Where my iCal calendars have gone (currently they're empty and they really shouldn't be), can I selectively choose some folders in the Dock not to be a stack (my Applications folder is really too big and unwieldly as a stack - however I'm used to having it down in that location), why the dock seems to have taken up more space horizontally for the same number of items and wondering when Acid Search for Safari is going to be updated.
Overall, for a .0 release a pretty good version - better than the developer releases I saw!
Well done Apple!
Well, I'm now the proud owner of an iPod classic. Having posted my ruminations on the prospects before Apple announced their new line, I watched with heightened interest a couple of weeks ago. I guess I was sort of disappointed that Apple didn't release a Hard-Drive based iPod touch - however I'm not really surprised. Probably the power budget for that sort of device would not have been at all realistic.
So the decision for me came down to a question of "fancy features" where management of the library would have become more of an issue (I have quite a bit more than 16Gb of media) vs. size and practicality. Well - my practical nature won as it usually does. Basically I placed an order on the same day of the announcement.
What I didn't quite predict was that it was going to take nearly 2 weeks for stock to come to NZ retailers. It seems that some units have arrived, but it seems that there are still not that many available. Anyway, I've now got my new toy and so far I'm really enjoying it. Probably waiting, wasn't too bad as I managed to get the new update for the firmware before I came to load it - apparently the very first users had some issues.
The device sounds really nice. I use Sennheiser PX-100 headphones (foldable portable real headphones) that really improve the sound amazingly. I highly recommend these with any portable media device (even with a laptop) as they seem to be the best sounding portable small size set of headphones I've ever come across for the price. I tend to prefer real (i.e. headband over the head) headphones as earbuds really end up hurting my ears and don't fit so well, which also obviously affects the sound.
Anyway enough for now. I'm off to listen to a couple of Podcasts while the rest of the family are watching T.V.
Blogged with Flock
So, if you at all follow the tech and gadget news, you will no doubt know that this coming week, Apple are supposed to be releasing some new products that it is rumoured will include one or more changes to the iPod line-up. This is good news for me personally, as I'm most probably a customer in waiting for whatever is coming.
A couple of weeks ago, I was ready to buy an iPod (a full iPod Video - I'm not interested in the current Nano). I went to our local Apple supplier to see and talk about it and found that they didn't have any stock, they had no idea of timelines and that it seemed that there was no stock available anywhere in NZ or even Australia! Given how Apple seem to handle stocking, backorders etc. this seemed very unusual unless there was a new model set somewhere on the way - therefore I wasn't at all surprised to hear of next weeks coming announcements.
So, I've been reading around some of the rumour sites. I've heard what the Apple pundits seem to think might be on the way. I listened to last week's Mac Break Weekly (including Scott Bourne's display of being seemingly ignorant to anything other than a "died in the wool" Apple fanboy's opinion - thankfully Leo and Merlin were making sense) which tried to predict what might be coming. (For the record, no I'm not the guy with a neck beard that lives in his parents basement either!). However as an actual potential customer, I thought I might share some thoughts about what I'm looking for.
For me, I'm not interested too much in the smaller iPod concept. The Shuffle is simply not interesting at all - I want to see what I'm going to hear. The Nano's are a bit too small for me. I'd rather carry my music collection - all of it - and still have sufficient room to carry a reasonable number of podcasts, videos and still use it for some external storage if I want to. (The argument about having an external drive for that doesn't work for me. I really don't want to have to carry even more devices. Generic storage on a device I'm going to carry is good). For me, I don't see that a flash based unit can meet my price expectations for the size I'm looking for. I know flash is getting cheaper, but I still don't see 2digit-Gig flash based storage being cheap enough. I'd really like some sort of touch interface like the iPhone. We don't have it here in NZ and it will probably take a while yet - so something of that style of device interface would be really great. The larger size screen for video content would also be great, even at the expense of more storage requirements for video. I'm not too sure about WiFi capability.
I guess, the ideal would be a Hard-drive based iPod, somewhere in the 40-80G range, with the iPhone interface minus the cellphone capabilities, costing around the same price as the current iPod Video. That would be ideal. However I guess we will see what is available in the next few days!
[composed and posted with ecto]
Flock has a new version of their browser. For any of you who don't know, Flock are a company that publishes a web browser specifically aimed on online "Social Interaction" sites. Based on the codebase from Firefox, it has a number of specialised tools that aid interaction with a number of online services and websites. In particular, it has extra support for Blogging (both reading and writing), Online Photo services and similar media streams.
They've recently updated to a new release 0.9, with a much more streamlined UI and interaction with services. This version is also the first that features a codebase based on the Firefox 2.0 browser.
Anyone who hasn't taken a look at Flock previously, should take a look - you may like it. Even if you have, the updated version seems to be quite a change and has a number of different methods for dealing with features compared to the earlier 0.7 release and previous.
Blogged with Flock
So like most people, I've been looking at Comet McNaught to see what I can. Here's a photo taken last night from my front lawn. It's quite a bit harder to see with the naked eye now. The photo's taken with Nikon D50 and 50mm f1.8 lens, ISO 1600, exposure of 13seconds at f8.
If you're a fan of the BBC Top Gear programme, you probably already know this:
TV host 'improving' after crash. Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond is improving but remains seriously ill in hospital after he crashed a jet-powered car during filming for the BBC show.The 36-year-old was thought to be driving at about 300mph on an airfield near York when he crashed on Wednesday.
BBC NEWS | UK | England | North Yorkshire | TV host 'improving' after crash
If you're not a fan - you really should have a look at this program. These guys (Richard is one of three) make some of the most entertaining TV out there. Not particularly "politically correct" and most probably therefore the better for it.
Get well Richard, there's a whole bunch of fans on this side of the world who want to see you back on the screen!
Blogged with Flock
It had become time to upgrade. My old favourite PowerBook was slowing down - mainly due to lack of memory. It seemed time to pass it on to someone else in the company (we have a policy of rotating good gear from "power users", down to "medium users" as it seems that they get a better run of it with older good gear, than with newer "not so good" gear) and getting something that will do the job for longer.
So, it's here. It's rather interesting. Not quite what I expected.
As is often the case, some things are quicker/easier than others - and as is even more often the case, predicting which will be faster can be difficult. My biggest worry of course was dealing with the issues of changing from Power PC Mac OS X and Applications, to the newer Universal or Intel binaries. Whilst Apple provide "Rosetta" a emulator for the older binaries, I was aware that problems can come from more complex applications where any dynamic linking or "plugin" architecture is used.
The first surprise was how quick it was to install the OS, migrate my Home directory, settings and Applications. This took around 2-3 hours. Add another hour to do the typical OS upgrades (only one reboot) and basically I'm ready to go within 3-4 hours of unpacking the box! Very impressive - I can't ever remember doing anything that major, that quickly before, on any previous operating system.
The second surprise, was just how much Apple have changed their concept of the hardware. No modem, no PC-Card socket, no Firewire-800 (not that I ever found a use for that), no S-Video or TV Out. The things that mattered for me out of these missing bits; were not being able to use my PCMCIA<->Compact flash reader, not having dial-up capability (Broadband or WiFi is just not quite so universally available everywhere here in New Zealand), not being able to play video files through the TV with a cable that came with the machine. All of this is simply fixed with extra adaptors, however it's a little disappointing to have to go and pay extra for the functionality that was just there on the PowerBook.
It's when you start exploring the software a little bit more, that you find a few more surprises - all of them to do with third party software. Surprisingly it wasn't MS Office that caused the problems (I've had issues with that on a previous temporary migration from a restore). The most annoying was that my Thunderbird setup ended up crashing. Now before anyone starts blaming Thunderbird, you have to understand that I had Thunderbird with around 20 extensions and a history of running various other extensions in the past - i.e. a history of severe change in my Thunderbird profile. I suspect that somewhere in one of the extensions, was some piece Power PC binary code that didn't work inside Thunderbird. The solution was to start a fresh profile, download new versions of the Extensions I was using and migrate my address-book across. This solution of course, was only after I had tried unsuccesfully to remove them one by one.
Other things just worked well. I have been looking at most of the apps I have installed (a worrying amount when I look at my Applications folder) and updating those that have updated versions to capture Universal Binary version. Some of this, has taken a lot more time than I would normally have recommended, as in each case I want to look at the apps concerned and figure out exactly what compatibility issues they may or may-not have. There are still a few bis of shareware I've bought, that haven't been updated and won't run properly - nothing major or show stopping though.
It also triggered a look around at my Web browser situation, as it has become quite clear where the drawbacks of each browser that I sometimes use (Safari, Firefox, Flock, Opera and occasionally Shiira) are. Basically, I seem to be using Flock at the moment (mainly because of it's nice UI and News Reader) with Safari as a more than creditable backup that actually runs faster with a way lower "hit" on the memory usage. Firefox seems to run a little bit faster than Flock, however suffers in the UI space as it's default theme whilst usable is a litte less "mac like" than I would like, and also it's extensions do not always work so well in the Mac space. Also it's built in RSS "Live Bookmarks" support is insufficient and Sage whilst functionally OK - is not quite as straightforward to use as the Flock newsreader.
Most other apps are just fine. AdiumX is just superb as always. Quicksilver the same. ITunes now finally has some of the features I had been wanting (have a look at some of my back posts) and most of the rest "just work" a one would expect on a Mac.
All in all, a rather nice upgrade.
