It's the end of the world as we know it...

Good Morning, and Happy End of Days to you all!

I hope everyone got showered and shaved and all cleaned up this morning, we gotta look our best for the end of everything.  And please, plan your outfit, I mean do you REALLY wanna be remembered as the guy who went out in a pair of khakis and a white tshirt.

End of the world, doomsday, apocalypse.  There are lots of ways to say it but there are even more ways it could happen.  Let's think about that, just a few.  The sun could supernova, rogue asteroids strike the planet, God just says "get lost", or maybe the 144,000 good people will finally go to heaven and stop knocking on our doors.  What's scary is that those are the ways where humanity can still say "I didn't do it!"  There are a lot more we can't say that with.

Let's consider some.  The greenhouse effect could turn the entire planet into a giant microwave oven.  World War 3 could turn the world into Mad Max 4 (please please no).  Some bio-engineered disease weapon gets out and kills everyone who has to breathe air.

Then there's the idea of computers taking over the planet.  I mean come on, Arnold warned us in '84 that it was gonna happen, but no, we didn't stop our tech shit, we just kept going, building, designing, making blogs like this one, and now look what happened.  We're going to be killed by humanoid shaped liquid metal things that still use old fashioned guns.

Ok, more seriously, just for a moment, instead of technology trying to kill us, imagine life without it.  Through evolution of intelligence, tools became electronics, which became computers.  They were meant to make our lives easier, but now they've made our lives dependent on them.  And I'm not saying I'm any better than you, my livelihood is programming, and my pastimes and hobbies are largely things that get plugged in.

I want you to stop and think for a second.  How many friends could you contact if you lost everything electronic this very moment.  No computers, no cellphones.  When I was in high school, I had all my friend's numbers written down, and memorized from calling them so often.  Now I just say a friend's name and my phone calls them.  I could drive to my friend's houses back then, now I use my GPS.  How many of you could see friends that live more than 15 minutes away without checking a GPS or looking up their address.

One more thing to mention.  The Mayans that everyone keeps talking about didn't say this was the end of the world, just the end of an age.  Just like so many hours ends a day, so many days ends a month, and in this case, so many years ends an age.  Everything doesn't end when you buy a new calendar each year, does it?

So go out, have a Happy New Age party today!  This is the perfect time to make a new age resolution, to make a better you.  Visit the friends you don't see often, talk to your family, or donate to charity.  This is a new beginning, not the end, so make yourself something even better than you were yesterday!

Besides, the world can't end today, I didn't get my damn Christmas presents yet....

Happy Holidays everyone!

Kindle, an E-Reader of a different Calibre..

Today we'll be introducing the mega-sale concepts to my Blog.  This article will be discussing three products, all for the cost of the usual one-item blog, isn't that amazing?  I'll be discussing why I got a Kobo e-reader, and why I would suggest just about anything else, Calibre and why I can't live without it, and Kindle, the e-reader that has this skeptic completely sold.  All I ask is that you show the true christmas spirit and slug at least two people on the way to reading this blog...

So to the meat of the story, as I got more and more into reading, it was suggested to me that I get an e-reader.  I didn't care for the weight of tablets and LED screens, though, and liked the feeling of reading off of a page, not a screen, so I was hesitant.  I have to admit, after using my girlfriend's Kindle for a few pages I was sold on the E-ink concept, just not the price.

When Borders bit the big one a few years back I went and picked up a Kobo Wireless, and as in true geek fashion, I got it, cheered, loaded some books onto it immediately, played with it relentlessly for an afternoon, then set it in the corner of my office and didn't touch it for 6 months.  Horray, new toy, ohh.. look, shiney...

So I finally thought I'd like to read something, remembered my Kobo, and pulled it out.  It worked well, had a decent page turn speed, and was easy to load with books in ePub format.  I thought I was happy, it was a geek to geek-toy romance made in heaven... just a really small, fake-gold plated heaven.  About 2 months into using it, I bumped it with my foot one night.  No, I didn't stomp on it, I clipped it.  I picked it up and with a flurry of curses, from me not the kobo, I learned that it was entirely fubarred.  It turned on, but the screen was toast.  And not even with butter, this was like... toast with maple-flavored engine oil, and who wants that?

So I scoured the internet, working very hard in my simple ebay search and found another Kobo at a relatively cheap cost.  My thoughts were that perhaps I hit the device harder than I thought.  I got another one, new in box from ebay.  This time I had a case, and every time I went to bed I put it in the case, then slipped it against the side of my nightstand on the floor, out of the way.  If I kicked it this time, I'd need to be quadruple-jointed, not to mention 2 inches wide.  Well low and behold, I picked it up one night to read, not two months after I got it, and the screen was toast again, same as the first one.

So end of chapter one, Kobo is stable, useful, and a decent e-reader if you never plan to move... ever...  It is highly recommended that all breathing be delayed until after the reading is finished.  You might want to consider zen meditation to lower your heartbeat too, the vibrations might mess it up!

Chapter two, Calibre, the most amazing book management software I've ever used.  Ok, it's also the only one I've ever used, to be fair, but it really is more than I ever expected.  It recognizes a plethora of different devices, from Kindles to Kobos to even my Android Phone running Aldiko.  In addition it converts just about every format I've heard of to every other format, from epub (generic e-book format), to mobi (kindle), to lib (obsolete Microsoft e-book format) and more.

All the E-books that I have I keep in calibre, rather than on the e-reader I'm using, so I only have a dozen or so to sort through while reading.  I mean really, yes you can store 4 gig worth of books, but do you need to read 2000 books at the same exact time?   Personally I'm not bug-eyed, so I have to focus on one at a time, so having more than a dozen books on my e-reader at once kinda sounds like overkill to me.

Finally, the main point of this article.  This past birthday I got the new Kindle Paperwhite.  This reader is by far the most advanced I've ever used.  Let's go over the basics first.  The page turning is lightning quick, with left or right swiping to turn pages.  The best part though is the light.  It uses a crystal refraction of some type to front-light the e-ink page from inside the device.  While it does have a glow, it's far less than any phone or tablet I've used to read, and it feels like I'm reading a lit book, instead of a back-lit screen.

In addition, there are a number of other features this e-reader offers, though the most convenient is the way that Amazon handles e-books you've bought.  All you do is purchase a book on amazon.com, in Kindle format, and then connect your Kindle to your Wi-fi, or enable the Whispernet connection if you got the 4G model.  It will connect and tell you congrats, here's your new book, now go read.  Once you've done this, you can even use Calibre to migrate the mobi file back from the kindle to your computer, to move back and forth at your leisure.

Looking at the more advanced functions, holding your finger over a word brings up a dictionary definition of it, which on occasion is exceptionaly propitious.  (see?)  Also, on kindle-bought books you can check out the "bones" of the book, giving you details on how important various characters are, synopsis of plot and the like.  Moving onto the "Why" category, you can even browse the web using this e-reader.   Remeber, though, it's just black and white and e-ink, so it's more of a novelty, or an in-a-pinch tool, but it wouldn't be your first choice.  I mean really, do we need to have EVERY device browsing the web?  Your phone does, your computer, your tablet, your television, your playstation, xbox, or wii.  Google's making glasses, so now you can even browse while you WALK!  Come on, people, we already know you can't text and walk at the same time, now you're gonna full-on browse all your web porn while strolling through Starbucks?  What's next, your watch?  Oh wait, they're gone now, everyone uses their phone instead.  Is anyone else getting confused here?

So where was I?  Oh right, the paperwhite.  Well the moral of my story is that I tried to cut corners and buy cheap ereaders, but in my personal experience they were just that, and since Amazon's newest product seems to take the price of their older product's top-line, it's really not escalating that cost all that much, so spend the extra $30 or whatever the difference is, and get a really good product instead of a just decent (or worse) one.  Is it worth years of wishing you had bought a better product, or replacing the lesser one enough that you could have bought the good one anyway, just to save enough to eat at TGIFridays once?

If anyone wants a more detailed look into any of these products, GO TRY IT!  Or if you're really too lazy, just ask, and I'll do a focused review of one.  Looking forward to hearing from you guys soon!  See ya next time.

Shredding the White Flag - no more MAC

I think it's about time to talk about my change in love of MACs.  Normally I make more of an editorial, but this particular blog is a narration of my battle.  If you want to skip the story and go to the commentary, jump to the bottom you impatient jerk, and no cookies for you!

---

Years ago, before OSX, I would never even dream of using a MAC, PC all the way.  MAC was all proprietary, cost too much, had no noticeable reason to use them over PC, the OS was unstable, there were no games on it (yeah, that was a reason too) and many more things.  Graphics were always top notch, but everything else suffered as the CPU was not meant to handle it.  Word processing could have the text still showing up for as much as 20 seconds after I finished typing, the one time I used one.  I was just dead-set against them.

First I heard that OSX was a unix base, then I wanted to start developing for iPhone.  Both reasons to try the Mac OS.  The company now annoyed me even more.  I needed to own a MAC to do both, because the iPhone SDK was free, but not multi-platform, and the OS wouldn't run on non-mac hardware.  So I tried a Hackentosh (For those of you who are not as pathetic as me, I will explain that a Hackentosh is a standard PC running MacOS) and after probably a week of fine-tuning I got it working, went to install the iPhone SDK and it didn't work because I had an AMD and the Intel CPU was required to run the SDK.  I was, at this point, ready to throw in the towel.

Then my job, at the time, told me they would get me a Macbook Pro.  I was floored, and said yes, of course.  It was a Work-owned machine, but I could take it home and do personal projects on it.  Finally I had my way to work on iPhone apps.

I had the Mac for just under a year, and the fan started making this intensely loud buzzing sound.  Took the computer to the apple store and they tried to tell me the fan in the middle of the motherboard was probably broken because there was a hairline crack about 2 inches long back of the computer (on the flat part in the back when the lid is closed).  I said just take it, that's not the problem, so the "Genius" did, and lo and behold, the problem was a faulty fan, fixed under warranty.

I left that job, they kept the computer, but I had really started to like the interface for OSX anyway so I got myself my own Macbook Pro.  At this point I was still liking Mac.  I was liking them so much I was willing to get an iPhone 4 on release day.  Mac ran great, phone worked great, everything was happy. They sync'ed together and everything, no problems in the world, right?

Fast forward 2 years.  The beginning of the end of my affair.  My computer has issues.  To clarify, I was using it, and it turned off.  Dead, nothing happening, no reason, no warning.  The power button didn't do anything.  Dead as a brick.  This is about 9:30 or 10 in the morning so I call the Apple store.  I say I've got a computer that just died, no reason or warning.  I've looked up on line what the basic troubleshooting steps were, nothing helped, and I need to bring it in.  They say great, we've got an opening at 2:30 today, or late tomorrow.  I was a little annoyed that the store was so busy I had to wait 4 hours just to see someone, but whatever, it's not like it was in warranty.

So I take it in, he looks it over, tries the same basic troubleshooting I did, and nothing.  So he takes it in the back and does something.  What he's doing I have no idea, maybe he was using it for a pingpong paddle, or seeing what it weighed, or maybe just trying some freaky zen-based holistic computer repair (I hear it works in india), who knows, but sure as hell wasn't fixing it.  Then he comes back out and says everything looks good, doesn't know what's wrong.  I say it's not turning on.  He says yeah, other than that.  He tells me he can send it off to some repair shop for a flat rate repair of like 200 or so, I think it was.  I say yes, because the other option was to fix it in-house at a higher number.

So I'm waiting my 5 days without a computer, finally get it back.  I go in and he hands it to me, says it's all fixed.  He doesn't even say what's wrong, just that it's all good to go, and they waived 99% of the fee, so I owed less than three dollars.  I said thanks, and was about to come home and praise Apple for being so wonderful, then I read the repair bill.  They replaced my rubber feet (they had fallen off), and tested everything.  It worked, so they sent it back.  That's it.  The FEET?  No, clearly it wasn't that, so they took it apart, which the guy at the store SHOULD have done, then put it back together, and all worked.  Likely pulling the battery out reset it and all was good again.

This annoyed me, but let's step back a little.  While I waited those five days, I read a lot of articles on my stand-in laptop from work.  I read about Apple, and MacBooks, reliability, life expectancy, etc.  I was floored.  The accepted truth was that you should get the applecare warranty which takes your 1 year warranty to a 3 year one, so that you are guaranteed 3 years before your Mac dies.  That's ACCEPTED?!   Are you kidding me?  I spent two thousand dollars on this laptop, and it's only supposed to last about 2 years without the warranty, three with?  That's a thousand dollars a year.  Think about that!  It means you're paying $83 a month on your computer!  Come on, I've had car payments like that!   I bought a year old HP laptop for 700 bucks, then used it for about 9 years.  Now I need to buy a new Mac every two, and people are ok with this?  For $2000 I want this damn thing to be running for 10 years!  That or make me coffee!

Ok, so I'm already getting fed up with Mac, but my girlfriend had already gotten her iPhone 4s before this mess.  A week into owning it, it was turning itself off without warning or reason.  She'd miss calls and texts because of this.  Eventually at one point it shut down and wouldn't go on anymore.  She took it to the apple store and they said "yeah, it's dead, here's your new phone."  So she got a new phone and came home.  Inside an hour, this one was shutting down too.  That's an hour from when she got it, not from when we got home, which, by the way, is an hour drive from the Apple store.  She doesn't even Sync it, she just uses it stand-alone.  Well we didn't have time to go back to the store right then.

On another issue, my iPhone, being 2 years old, was having home-button problems.  It wouldn't work all the time.  I called the apple store and said that the home button didn't always work, and I wanted to know if they did repairs on out of warranty phones.  She said she would have to diagnose it in the store, and offered me an appointment.  I said I just want to know, do you do repairs if it needs one.  She said she couldn't say until she saw the phone.  So I called in and made an appointment for my phone and my girlfriend's phone both.  Tried to make one appointment for both, but the lady on the phone said we couldn't, so I said fine, consecutive?  She said sure, and got my name and my girlfriend's, told us both times, and hung up.

The fated day arrived, 4 days later, and we head over.  Since we're an hour drive, we left early, got there 15 minutes before the first appointment.  Guess what, they didn't even MAKE that appointment, they only made the second one, for her phone, but not mine.  So we had to sit there for 40 minutes waiting for her's, instead of 10 for mine.  While sitting there I got to hear all these fun happenings.  One person came in, said they bought a phone the day before, and it was broken, wouldn't turn on, no idea why.  They said I'm sorry, you need to make an appointment and come back tomorrow.  You need to make an appointment to exchange the 24 hour old phone?  You can walk in and buy it, why can't you walk in and exchange it.  When you can't have walk-ins at your storefront, you're too damn busy, make a new location!  And for a phone exchange, they don't even DO anything.  When our appointment finally happened, and they were nice enough to see both phones, I learned that no, the apple store never repairs phone hardware for any reason, they just swap it.  Seems that was a pretty cut and dry answer the phone girl could have told me.

So my girlfriend gets a new phone, again, and the guy insinuates that it might be her fault that it's not working and breaking so fast, that hacking and jailbreaking phones can cause that.  Did he think she was jailbreaking it with a hairpin in the car?  She doesn't even plug it into a computer to charge, just the wall!  We left very frustrated and frankly, let down.

---

So finally to the moral of my story...

I am shredding that damn white flag I hung up.  Yes, I'm using a MAC, and I will keep using it until the day it dies because it nearly cost me my left arm, but I'm not paying them a dime more. Apple has taken what I am told was amazing service and turned it into a mockery.  The store is overheated, overcrowded, and just haughty.  The brand was built on prestige and I understand that, but it became arrogance and that's not good anymore.  There is nothing I've seen that you can do on their phones, and not on an android phone.  Hell, I can even put an "Apple" logo on your android if you want, it's called a background image.

Their OS is intuitive, but now you can get mods for Windows machines that copy most of their higher end functions, even multi-touch.  And the OS was the last straw.  When I got Lion, I saw that it was crap, that they had now OFFICIALLY blacklisted any "PowerPC" applications, which included the only game I played, Diablo II.

Side note: Blizzard said sorry, but MAC changed, not them, and Lion will not support Diablo II as it was a PowerPC game and they'd have to, likely, rewrite the whole game to get it to run on Lion.  There's a published listed of games from them, Warcraft 1 and 2, Starcraft, etc, that won't work.

Lion also killed my NTFS drive accessing program, so the windows partition that the OS let me make, it couldn't read anymore.  Took me almost 2 days of tinkering to get my computer functional after my Lion "upgrade".  It was like I was using windows 95 again.  The only thing I learned back then was stay the hell away from upgrades!

For the record, I've already changed to an android phone, and my next laptop will be something with a windows logo, likely dual-booted to some flavor of Linux like the old days, but you've got to be out of your gourd if you think I'm gonna buy any more Apple devices, or give them a penny more.

I had my fling with Apple, but you changed, lady.  You were hot, sexy, sweet, and charming, but, in the words of Ash:

Honey, you got reeeal ugly!

Techno-shock...

So, here we are at the 21st century.  Been here a while, actually.  So where is all the super tech, the fantastic, beyond realistic super science that we see in the movies, that the older generations have been told for 30 years would be here, 12 years ago?  Come on, Paul Moller, where's my flying car?!

Seriously, I've been thinking about this a lot over the past few days, and I really have to say that the answer is that we're never getting it.  It's not going to happen, at least the way the stories always talk about.  Think about it.

Let's make up a term, Techno-shock.  No, this isn't what happens when you take a bath with your laptop, let's say this is what happens at that pure moment of epiphany, not creating an invention, but seeing it.  When you step back and say "Wow, we finally actually have.. that.."  Everyone who's involved in the technology field has Techno-shock happen now and again, but not as much as the non technical, and we'll get into that in a bit.

Let's take a standard Techno-shock example from science fiction.  Time traveler from the future goes back in time to collect a delicate little knick knack that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dwayne Johnson is the 75th generation descendant of Napoleon's college roommate.  Well he goes back, grabs the letter opener, and doesn't notice the curious kid who jumps into his time machine as he's headed home.  Now, heavens above what is this?  A child who knows only horses for travel sees cars, busses, and even flying cars zooming past.  He's only seen the rich in weather-survivng homes, but now every house he sees looks like a mansion to him, and everyone has one.

Of course he'll be amazed, his entire world is different.  But that time traveler, while he might in a textbook sense understand why what he has now is better than what his culture had before, nothing he's seeing is all that special.  The advancements that happened during his life were incremental, managed, and in their own sense nothing shockingly new.  Sure, the time travel car is safer now, maybe it can go back 15% farther in time, but that's improvement, not innovation.

Look at modern times.  How amazing is a car?  We can get into a vehicle, pour some minerals into it, and it will take us easily 3 times the average speed of a horse (which is, give or take, about 15 mph at a canter, or jog).  That horse's gallop is I believe around 35 mph, and a car now can easily double that, and sustain that speed for.. 3, 4, 6 hours?  That's just amazing, but to us, it's normal.  As a society, we know that we had horses, then horseless wagon, then Ford's Model T, and so on and so on.  I'm not a car aficionado, so I'm sure I likely disordered that, but you get the idea.  Yes, that first day when someone said "that's amazing, a carriage with no horse!" yes, they had Techno-shock, but the rest was unimpressive.

To me, I experience Techno-shock when I realize I'm already using science fiction toys.  Let me explain.  Remember Star Trek:The Next Generation?  Do you remember how amazing the computer was?  You touch a screen on the Enterprise wall, and say "Where's Sick Bay" and it guides you there.  Or ask "Computer, where is Mr. SoAndSo" and hey, there you go.  Isn't that just wow?

Who, reading this article, has heard of Siri, or sVoice from Samsung, and I'm sure there's many more out there.  Congratulations, all we need to do is get Majel Barrett's voice and a lapel pin instead of a cellphone button and congratulations, you've got the super computer of the Enterprise.  Right now, today, in your pocket!

This leads to why I say people more into the technology of today are less likely to get Techno-shock.  You see the increments.  You don't wonder how we got from A to B.  Yeah, sure, it's impressive, but so is the weight of the world's largest lint-ball.  It's not magic, just a lot of time and effort.

I was so jaded by my technology, that when I saw Moller's flying car prototype, and he talked about how it was taking technology similar to a helicopter's and putting it into a lighter built car, for a split second I said wow, and almost immediately after I was wondering why someone hadn't combined those two things sooner.  I mean we've had cars for over 50 years, and helicopters just as long, so why didn't someone put a bunch of tiny helicopters on a car and make it fly.  I logic'ed myself right out of my Techno-shock without even realizing it.  (yeah, I used logic as a verb, I like it)

I ask all you Techy people out there to step back just every now and then, and really think about how we got where we are.  Programming languages, server hardware, laptops, anything.  I mean really, my cellphone, you know, in my pocket, has a CPU over 80 times faster, and over 160 times more storage than my first desktop computer!   How is that not amazing?  But today we just grab our phones, and most of us don't even think about how far we came.

Give yourself some self-inspired Techno-shock.  Enjoy just for a few minutes where we are now, compared to where we were 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or 20..  And just think,  we've only seen 12% of what this 21st century has to show us.  Don't forget how amazing the destination is, because the road to get there was so long..

Waving the White Flag.. AKA My Macbook

This article I wrote some time ago, and my opinion on MAC has recently changed a bit.  I will go into it in more detail later on, but for now, enjoy the read!

I've been a geek for many years, and bought, used, and drooled over hundreds of products, but recently I became interested in one that I never thought I would want.  Recently I got a MAC because of some development I wanted to do that could only be done on a MAC.

I already hear all you PC hardcores screaming me, "You trator!  How could you, you can't game, you can't even right click!  We're going to renig your Unreal Tournament Ranking!"

Ok, ok, ok, calm down... The reason I'm writing is to talk to all you skeptical whine-monkeys and let you know what I've learned, and why I actually LIKE my mac, along with complaints/problems I suspect you're believing in.

I can't right-click...
First of all, they DO have a right click.  It's a "control-click" in windows terms, or you can just pick up a two-button mouse and it works just like it should. (or on the new multi-touch pads, press with two fingers)

The OS is proprietary and/or unstable and/or unreliable and/or etc.....
Well OSX made a huge shift from the original MacOS (as far as I understand, I'm not an expert in MAC history) by using a BSD base.  That's UNIX, if you're not familiar with it, and you can even get to a command prompt if you want to.  It doesn't get much more stable than that. As for proprietary, yeah, it is.  So is Windows.

Most games aren't available for MACs...
Ok, this one is a big one, I just love gaming, and the first thing you do when you get a new machine is try all the games you wanted to play but couldn't on your old machine, right?  Well I got the MacBook Pro, 15 inch monitor, 2.4 core2duo, 2 gig ram, 250 gig HD.   Well in answer to the complaint, no, MAC doesn't support most games out there.  But it DOES support windows, via a software package titled Boot Camp.  Just run Boot Camp and it will ask you to insert your valid Windows XP or Vista installation CD.  It will ask how big a partition you want (I made my 32 GIG so I could keep it FAT32 and readable by OSX), then followed the instructions.  This is NOT a walkthrough, but basicly my experience was to install windows, reboot like usual, put the OSX disk in (in windows mode) and it installed all the proper Hardware drivers, then reboot again.  Done, fully functional Windows XP running native, choose your OS at startup.  I've been playing the Windows version of Bioshock a lot lately and it runs perfectly, without any problem.

Now the down side...  MACs do tend to cost more, but they also have features that you can't get elsewhere, so they're not the perfect product.

So here's your down-n-dirty... is a MAC better? no.  Is a MAC worse? no.  Is it a good idea to check it out for yourself?  Yes.  This is a review column of things i like, not things I think everyone likes.  I know for a fact that there is at least one person that would never buy a MAC, even if it came solid gold plated, with a coupon for 15 free hookers, so the choice really is up to you...

(or you could reverse the offer, but i don't know what you could really do with 15 gold-plated hookers.. yeah... go think about that one for a while)

See you next time!