The Guy Goma / Cuney Mixup
May 17The Story is ALL OVER the internet , so we carry our bit .. Just read the little intro below and click play. See how one of the biggest company's in the world (Apple) is represented by .. A random sollicitant coming in for a job at the BBC! (Don't miss the first second of the introduction and check out the face on poor mr Goma). " Guy Goma, a graduate from the Congo, appeared on the news channel in place of an IT expert after a mix-up. But Mr Goma, who was wrongly identified in the press as a taxi driver, was really at the BBC for a job interview ("
Related Posts
the new macbook pro.
May 16Its here ! Its HERE !
I'm a calm person. Introvert, quiet, not easily impressed. Years on the edge of real and cyberspace have left me jaded and therefore not likely to be amazed or star-struck by new technology. As trends evolve and gizmos and gadgets whizz by I raise the preverbal eyebrow and sigh. BUT NOT TODAY !
Today i am jumping up and down with the release of the new Mac-book. Nono ! Not the i've-got-money-to-burn-so-what-the-hell macbook PRO ! (an overpriced over-pimped version of the powebook line) I'm talking about the next generation (long overdue) incarnation of the Ibook. I am NOT going to delve any judgement on the little machine until i actually have one in my hands ( and am surely not one of those who thinks that no matter WHAT Steve Jobs thought up , has to be fantastic ) BUT I am going to run over the specs of this baby before I slam my Visa card down and BUY one. `
The New Macbook
I admit, I have been waiting for this new laptop by Apple. When the Macbook pro line came out I knew I was in over my budget and that one of those shiny things where not likely to appear on my lap anytime soon. ( And i sure as hell was not going to be Steve's personal 2000 + euro personal beta tester.) So i waited and waited for what was going to come. Since I bought my first Ibook some year and a half ago I have been pleased with it beyond belief. I love the little bugger. The best 1200 euros ever spent on a laptop. And now its successor comes along. Lets all take a moment and drool together shall we ? Widescreen 13,3 inch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. 1,83-GHz Intel Core Duo 512 MB Ram (i'm personally opting for 1 gigabyte if money permits me to.) A 60-GB serial ATA hard drive on 5400 rpm (Bummer ,this should have been a 7200 rpm disk) A Combo drive (dvd-rom, cd-rw) Isight built into the display (owwwkey) Front row with apple remote.Now this looks pretty amazing for a laptop with a price-tag UNDER 1300 euros. you can also go for the 2 gigahertz version OR the BLACK 2 gigahertz version. The 2 gigahertz version is about 200 euros more expensive and to be quite honest , I don't think thats worth the money. The BLACK version is 200 euros extra (but you get a 80 gig hard drive). Now the first reaction Nyana gave to this was : "black ? What do you mean .. black ?" A Black Mac ? Well she was right. The black Ipod had made me frown , cause to be frank , the white Ibook I have is babe-magnet numero uno when you use it in a café. 'ooh look its white , its cute etc'. I'm not an Apple snob but .. black ? no thank you. But black or white at first sight this baby looks like a tough nut to crack for same priced competitors. From personal experience I can tell that laptops around the 1000 euro price-point by for example Acer or Siemens have much poorer quality of design layout compared to even my "old" kevlar-coated (yes-yes) Ibook. Its like comparing a throw away tin foil barbecue to a concrete super deluxe backyard super-stove.
One thing to rule them all.
But time for the cherry on the pie when we look one step beyond the designed specs and see what loops we can let this baby jump through in the future. If we take BOOT-CAMP into account that lets us run Windows XP on this machine AND we look at the Linux versions that are compatible with the macintells we come to the next conclusion. This is the sole and single sub 1500 euro computer laptop that will run the three biggest operating systems on the planet.
Needless to say .. as soon as I get my hands on one.. An elaborate review will follow.
Related Posts
The rise of user generated content.
May 14Nothing on YOUR tube .. what about YOU-Tube.
There is nothing on TV, I hear it over and over again. Somehow mainstream tv entertainment is indeed turning into brainless putty these days. Endless reruns of sitcoms, shamelessly repeated head-to-tale make the viewer believe that he either needs a lobotomy .. or has just had one. Recent trends in commercial television include hopeless star searches like Idol, X-Factor and what have you, where we zoom in on the rise (or attempts to rise) of countless wannabee pop stars who claim their 15 minutes of fame and are upsett to find out nobody even remembers them in the next series. But somehow that is not even enough. After a hard days work we come home and try to relax in front of the television but instead of this mindless crap we get fed OTHER peoples misery in a never ending string of reality series about the most idiotic subjects. There are the Ego driven ones (Osbournes, the Pfaffs etc), The location driven ones (Airport, life at the Zoo) and the Subject driven ones ( The Nanny etc). What strikes me in all of this is that besides other peoples misery, we get to see content that is actually made by people like you and me. Of course its edited down for maximum-drama-factor (sorry , was that entertainment-value perhaps) but the core is the same.
User generated content.
The great thing about the internet though is that it is the great equaliser. If we are replacing professional actors with ordinary people anyway, if we are replacing drama-plays with real life anyway. Why the heck don't we replace cameramen, producers, and broadcasters by normal people. That is to me the next step. While the masses are slowly making the transfer from linear entertainment to time-shifted (tivo-style) couch lounging (where they watch what they want , when they want) the early adopters are already bathing in the dawn of the new day in entertainment : User generated content. Lets take a site like You-tube where people can produce their own movies ( with stuff as simple as digital photo camera ) and put it on line for everyone to watch. No money-making producer, no add-riddled schedule.. Just plain old home-brew entertainment. Ok , so 80 percent on YOU-Tube is crap (now) but the 20 percent that’s left is hilarious, addictive and just plain old FUN entertainment. Its wonderful to see how creative people can be and its fantastic to see them use a medium like this. YOU-Tube is more then just the next blog-full-of-funny-video's we've all seen before countless times. Lets call You-tube an entertainment station where you decide what to watch .. and others like you decide what they want to produce.
And finally , some parody.
The little movie below cracked me up, it shows you what people can do with the simplest equipment, time on their hands and a medium like You-tube to distribute it. Ok , I might think its great because I'm a Star Trek Fan .. but still you don't see THIS on Fox everyday.
Related Posts
Congratulations on the Baby !
May 12
And then there was another talent scout born !
There are more people working behind the scene over at Knightwise.com than one might initially expect. For those of you who have been listening to the Knightcast podcast for a while know that we even have our very own (well.. not ours alone) talent scout ! DaInfaMousJinx is a Dallas Dj roaming the Gothic scene organising gigs, looking for bands to promote and is basicaly spilling his creative vibe all over. DaInFaMousJinx (or Jinx as we call him for shorred) had dropped of the face of the earth the last few weeks. We thought something was amiss but nothing was farther from the truth. Jinx had just become a dad. So we take this little moment to congratulate Jinx and His lovely wife Alleycat on the birth of "Robert John-Coltrane Scarbrough" (or Cole for short). The whole gang is doing fine and its time to put our talent scout (and his wife who gets to do his stuff when he's to busy) in the spotlight. Congrats to the happy family. Be sure to check out Jinx's MYSPACE site for tons of info on the Dallas Gothic scene.
Related Posts
MAC OS X – Learning the OS X Ropes
May 11MAC OS X – Learning the OS X Ropes. Posted by Sebastian Prooth
A small lesson from a beginner MAC user on how to optimise your MAC OS X system!
A few days ago I told you about buying the iBook G4 and some of the problems with the airport extreme wireless system. Yesterday, I found myself reconfiguring the iBook as I felt like it was running way too slow!
found the program activity monitor (click picture on the left), for those of us still using PC's that would be the TaskManager, it showed all the different attributes of programmes taking up system resources such as CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, Disk Usage, and Network Traffic. I was checking the programmes that were running and I discovered to my horror that the Dashboard widgets actually take up absolutely huge amounts of system memory and resources even if your dashboard is not being displayed at the time! If your dashboard looks like, this, this article applies to you.
I did some hunting around on Google and I came across several people who were talking about ways to optimise the speed of OS X Tiger. The obvious such as turning off animations and turning off the minimise “genie” effect, freeing up Hard Drive space, and the not so obvious such as removing the dashboard from active running and taking all the widgets out. Once I removed the widgets I freed up over 150 meg of system memory and instead of 100 meg free ram at idle the iBook now has 339 Meg free.
I continued to explore the settings of OS X and as new MAC user I was pleased when I found I could change the system colours such as the highlight colour, which is now a brilliant orange, and the menus to a lovely chromy grey. There are also settings that you can alter the “warmness” of the display so that colours appear more true, or to more suit your personal preference of how you like to see the colours. Just because it is an accessibility function doesn't mean you have to be disabled <!–[if !vml]–>
<!–[endif]–> to use it.
One last thing I want to talk a little about its the Spotlight feature (picture click picture on the right), spotlight allows you to search for things on the MAC from options and settings in the OS to actual files hanging around on the disk. It was really helpful yesterday to find PC only files and remove them as they are superfluous. The spotlight worked perfectly for this!
As a result of actually reading and exploring my new iBook I now understand more fully how it does and doesn't work and can use it more effectively as a tool for business which is its sole purpose in life.
