Archive for the 'Computers 'n' Gadgets' Category

Myths

Friday, September 8th, 2006

Sometimes people make really annoying posts “like this”:http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/08/the-little-things-anti-aliased-fonts-help-mac-os-x-shine/.
As the author was clearly corrected, XP does support anti-aliased fonts. And even his screenshot is a poor example, because the title bar of the shown window has anti-aliased text.
Without ClearType turned on, XP doesn’t anti-alias your font until it hits a certain size. If he’d done a […]

Mid-range desktops from Apple

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006

I’ll just say that I think the new “24 inch iMac”:http://www.apple.com/imac/ only strengthens my theory about Apple not working on a low-end Mac Pro.

The real problem

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

Here’s the “real problem”:http://www.geekpatrol.ca/blog/138/. I probably would have been a lot happier if the G4 powerbook just had a real CPU.
As it is, the G4 is probably slower in some ways than my P4 1.8ghz (which has access to faster memory). I have this bad history of switching from desktops to notebooks of roughly equivalent […]

Windows Media Player

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

In preparation for returning to lots of windows usage at home, I decided to try out WMP 10 on my work machine. To my surprise, it seems a lot better than older WMP’s and WMP 11 looks even better, maybe almost to iTunes parity.
Then it got me thinking about the various reasons why the whole […]

Custom built desktops are for Ricers, and Apple doesn’t care about Ricers

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

As part of my purchasing process, I can’t happen but wonder if Apple is going to come out with the expandable desktop solution right after I finish building my own. If so, it’ll be in the $1000-$1500 range and have a good price/perf ratio, just to spite me. There’s a lot of speculation on the […]

Poderosa

Monday, August 28th, 2006

I finally found a terminal program that has the feature I’ve always wished for: Split Windows (i.e. A single “frame” that’s divided into multiple terminals. You can tile multiple terminal instances together without wasting any space between them, and manipulate them as a whole.)
It’s called “Poderosa”:http://www.poderosa.org, and apparently it’s written against .NET/C#, which should make […]

To build or not to build

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

So here’s the deal. I want a desktop/workstation to do photo stuff, but I think the Mac Pro is too expensive.
My general requirements are a good price/perf ratio new CPU, 2GB of RAM, 500GB+ of hard drive space, a mid-range graphics card, and nice looking, quiet case.
I can take the base Mac Pro, reduce the […]

Wireless Mighty Mouse Reviews

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

You know, I spend so much time googling for reviews of things, that I figure I might as well collect them so that I could save some people some time. Yes, I know you can just google for “Wireless Might Mouse Reviews” and get most of these links, but in time, the google results […]

Cost and Worth

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

When I ask myself, “Is this item worth the price?” how am I supposed to answer that question? An even harder question: “Will this item be worth the price in the future?” or “How will I feel about this purchase after I’ve made it?”
I can’t decide on how to decide whether a MacPro is worth […]

Mac Pro, and other thoughts

Monday, August 7th, 2006

Well, it’s over, and to be honest, it wasn’t very surprising.
I’m not sure what to make of the Mac Pro’s yet. On the one hand, they seem very well designed and more importantly, a product that I’d be happy with. On the flipside, the cheapest one is $2200 (dual dual 2.0ghz). It’s not a question […]