Monthly Archive for February, 2006

Hands on with the Intel Mac Mini

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 in Apple, PC and Technology. 2 Comments

Somehow, Engadget has already got their hands on the new Intel based Mac Mini and are showing it off with a Sony Bravia HD TV. Apparently the new mini has better compatibility with High Def resolutions, for which you previously needed 3rd party software. Cool. I’ll leave you the pics after the link.
On a separate note, I forgot to mention that the G4 mac mini’s are being discontinued, and that the Intel mini’s have a lousy embedded graphics card, not a ATI like in the PPC mini’s. The memory for the graphics is shared with the system memory. I think this is a step-back and that Apple included it to reduce the cost, but I would feel better if Apple offered a dedicated GPU version for some more $$.

iPod Hi-Fi ‘Boombox’!

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 in Apple and Technology. 1 Comment

ipod hi-fi

This is another new ‘fun’ product. Apple’s new iPod hi-fi speaker set starts at $349 (£249) and, according to Engadget, sounds pretty damn good. The speaker has a universal dock at the top so you can slide in your iPod, normal and shuffle too. You can remove the cover from the front to make it look cooler. It also has an optical/analog input so you can use it as your speaker for whatever system you want. It also has an Apple Remote so you can control your Hi-Fi from the other side of the room.

The iPod nano and the iPod with video will display a new Speakers menu for the iPod Hi-Fi. The menu will let you control tone (with settings like normal, treble boost, and bass boost), display large album art on the iPod while the Hi-Fi is playing, and set the iPod backlight to remain on so you can see the album art. Sorry, but apparently there won’t be a Speakers menu or tone control for older iPods. [TUAW]

The Hi-Fi is also ‘portable’. You can run it from 6 ‘D-sized’ batteries and it should go on for a few hours, but looking at the size of the thing (17″ x 6.6″ x 6.9″) it is hardly what you could carry on holiday. Seems like a good option, if you’re willing to spend the money and don’t mind its size and/or appearance (not that it looks bad).
read more (Apple Website)

New Intel Mac Mini’s are ‘fun’

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 in Apple, Noteworthy, PC and Technology. Closed

Part of the fun new products that Apple announced, the released a new Intel Mac Mini. So what are the differences apart from it featuring either a Core Solo (lower end model) or a Core Duo (higher end model) processor. Well there are an extra 2 USB ports, the modem is completely gone. The ethernet jack is now a gigabit connection, the headphone jack supports optical out and there is a line in (with optical in) jack. As far as I can see, Apple have changed the things people were complaining about to make the Mac Mini a better machine. It also comes with an Apple media remote and Front Row so you can have that Mac Mini home entertainment unit. It is 4x faster, according to Apple’s calculations. The box (packaging) has also been cleaned up with a touch of lightness.
Here are the models:

1.5GHz Intel Core Single
1.5GHz Intel Core Solo processor
2MB L2 Cache
667MHz Frontside Bus
512MB memory (667MHz DDR2 SDRAM)
60GB Serial ATA hard drive
Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
Price: Starts at $599.00 (£449)

1.67 GHz Intel Core Dual
1.66GHz Intel Core Duo processor
2MB L2 Cache
667MHz Frontside Bus
512MB memory (667MHz DDR2 SDRAM)
80GB Serial ATA hard drive
Double-layer SuperDrive (DVD R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Price: Starts at $799.00 (£599)

PSP v3.0 pictures, real or fake?

Published on Monday, February 27, 2006 in Gaming, Internet and Technology. 18 Comments

Some pictures have been circulating showing, apparently the new v3.0 firmware for the PSP. It seemed believeable at first but when I saw what was coming in the rest of the pictures, well:

Sony Mail
SonyPaint
Sony Organiser (“notice the use of an ‘s’ and not a ‘z’ in ‘Organiser’” – This is how it is spelt in the UK, so perhaps the ‘creator’ is English)
AlarmClock
Writepad
Console Security
Music Store connectivity
PS3 connectivity

So, maybe it is fake, maybe not. Looks real, but nothing is what it seems, is it? All the things listed seem a bit too much for a single update and it seems that without a touchscreen it maybe hard to operate. And the fact that the organiser had a ‘s’ not a ‘z’ it can show that the person who ‘made’ it is English, and I think that Sony would only give out a beta release to their most high valued US testers only. But who knows? It can still turn out to be real.

Video: Microsoft redesigns the iPod packaging

Published on Monday, February 27, 2006 in Apple, Microsoft, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed

This is a pretty funny video showing what the iPod packaging would look like if Microsoft re-designed it. Not much explanation needed!

watch video (via YouTube)

HOW-TO: Bypassing your BIOS password

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2006 in PC, Shorts and Technology. Closed

Some interesting options. Never tried it, nor do I know whether it works. Some other tips on the digg story.

Tutorial – Tweaking .htaccess in Apache

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2006 in Technology. Closed

In this tutorial we are going to improve our website by tweaking out the .htaccess file. Why I wrote this article? Because on the net I have found many articles about this little beast, but every one of them dealt with a specific issue and not look at the overall usage of these files, or they are just too big when you need to do a thing in little time. So I’m trying to collect all the useful bits of data in a monolithic but slim tutorial, which will be updated as I collect more information. But first, let’s see what .htaccess file is…

Make a PCB with a laser printer

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2006 in Shorts and Technology. Closed

First thing to do is make a schematic in EAGLE Layout Editor. Once you have done this you can then design the layout using Eagle too. Making schematic first helps because Eagle will show you clearly if make any mistakes with the PCB. Print it out onto some semi glossy photo paper. Be sure to select “solid black” in the eagle printing preferences and also unselect silk screen layers so that you only see pads and traces …

First review of the MacBook Pro

Published on Friday, February 24, 2006 in Apple, Noteworthy, PC, Shorts and Technology. Closed

I’ve been using one of the other MacBook Pro systems as my main system for about a day now. That’s right, I’ve taken the plunge—after a wait of a couple of hours while Apple’s Migration Assistant application copied all my files over from my PowerBook. The end result? This shiny new Mac laptop may be packed chock full of hot new technologies on the inside, but it still feels like home.
These Intel-based Macs are most definitely still Macs. For the past day, I’ve been using the MacBook Pro exactly as I was using my previous PowerBook, and have not noticed a single instance where there’s been something I’ve been unable to do because I’m running on an Intel processor. After the Migration Assistant did its thing, I was up and running with no major hitches. My windows are all right where I left them; my non-Universal-binary applications run without complaint…it’s like I didn’t switch systems at all.

iPod video pre-production shots?

Published on Friday, February 24, 2006 in Apple and Technology. Closed

This just smells really bogus to me. Apparently the image was taken by the sample people who took the photos of the new 5G iPod just before Apple’s annoucement. There is no way to tell whether it is from the same people, but if there was and it was photographed by those people then I would be more inclined to believe this is real. However, it isn’t really hard to photoshop a 5G iPod now, with two sides of the screen cut and pasted with some effort to get a large screen. The colours on the ‘iPod’ look too broght to be from the ‘iPod’ itself and seem to be ‘sticking out’ as though if the colour was not on the screen itself. And that barcode with the model no. ‘MB718Z/A’, well? That could also be faked too, but that looks the most real, I think. The chinese characters loosely translate to ‘This side up’. I’ll leave you to decide for yourself.