The Australian dollar is nearing parity with the US dollar.
You wouldn’t think it to look at Apple’s prices, which are even more out of whack than usual. Take a look at the middle-of-the-range Macbook Pro (15″ display, 512MB VRAM, 2.5GHz CPU):
US price: US$2499
AU price: AU$3399
That’s ~$900 more to buy locally, or a 36% markup. I’m not entirely sure that it’s worth $900 to buy from a local dealer.
Popularity: 17% [?]
I have a need for a laptop, but also have fairly poor vision. So while I mostly don’t need a screen magnifier on my desktop machine I almost certainly will on a laptop, and colour-remapping — swapping light for dark and dark for light — is also helpful.
There are two basic hardware options: an AU$1500-2000 15″ generic laptop from Dell, Asus, Lenovo, or whoever, or a AU$2500 Macbook Pro. The cheaper generic machine could reasonably run Windows or Linux.
I already have an old Mac desktop machine so I’ve been fiddling with the screen zoom and “white on black” display mode for a while. Both work quite well. The magnifier is controlled using control+scrollwheel, inverse mode by hitting control-option-command-8, which is a bit inconvenient but not completely impractical.
ZoomText — which easily adds US$400 to the price of that cheap laptop, by the way! — has what feels like a slightly nicer zoom in terms of image quality, and the inverse-mode hotkey is rather more convenient. The “jump to focus” stuff feels more effective, too. It does a fair bit more than the built-in OS X tools do and is much more customisable, but on the other hand it “supports” Vista by completely turning off the compositing window manager.
Linux, ah.
Compiz has a pretty decent magnifier, but for the life of me I can’t get it to activate using just the touchpad and keyboard on the test laptop. And while it has some colour-filter options none of them seem to do quite what OS X or ZoomText can. On the surface one might think that all that needs doing is to select the “high contrast” white-on-blue Gnome theme and maybe make the fonts a bit bigger, but of course that isn’t really the whole story. A proper screen-inverse feature gets everything, so for example those annoying bright white web pages are suddenly a lot easier on the eyes, and it also fixes the “we have ten thousand different GUI toolsets — many of which don’t honour your Gtk+ settings — and we’re not afraid to use them” problem.
You can work around this by fiddling with Firefox plugins like Stylish to apply custom stylesheets to specific (or all) websites, or using the high-contrast stylesheet that ships with Opera, but those will break some websites. Simply switching the colours around at the display level is a whole lot easier, requires almost no configuration work on the user’s part, and can be toggled on and off at will.
So it looks like it’s coming down to cheaper hardware+much more expensive software or more expensive hardware with the required features bundled. The former is probably still cheaper by one or two hundred dollars but the overall experience is still going to be less productive for a Mac-weenie like me.
But at least I’ve come out of this exercise with a newfound respect for ZoomText, if not for the obscene price the vendor asks for it. It’s quite in line with what other AT costs, but is completely still unreasonable.
Popularity: 23% [?]
I’ve been using GNU screen for a long time. Probably something like 15 years. But I’ve pretty much always used it in a fairly naive way, no custom configuration, and when working remotely I’ll typically log in to the “gateway” machine, run screen there, and wind up with 20-30 sessions sitting in it and eventually go nuts trying to figure out what exactly any given session actually is.
Which has motivated me to learn a bit more about what’s going on, and, admittedly, to cargo-cult a bit too.
So here’s my .screenrc as it stands now:
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= BW}[%H] %{= BW}%-Lw%{= RW}%50> %n%f* %t%{= BW}%+Lw%< %{= BW}% -=%c%{-}'
defscrollback 1000
vbell off
term xterm
The nifty bit is that “hardstatus string” line. What it does is give me a line at the bottom of the terminal which looks a bit like this:
[prod01au] 0* bash 1 sqsh 2 log 15:39
Except generally with a lot more “screens”.
In addition to this I have a few aliases of the form:
alias sqsh=screen -t sqsh sqsh -Usa -S`hostname`
to make it easy to fire off what I need with the right labels. Of course that ’sqsh’ example is grossly simplified, and for sqsh itself I actually use a wrapper script because the database names are not always the same as the hostnames, but anyway…
So now I make a point of running screen directly on each system I touch, which means that:
All this is usually running in a tabbed terminal emulator (Apple’s Terminal.app at the moment, but in theory any will do), one tab per host. And it’s dead easy to pick these sessions up from anywhere, of course, which was the reason I was using screen in the first place.
Popularity: 19% [?]
A few small comments with respect to the 2008-09 (Australian) Federal budget:
Nelson continues to look like a fool in his response. It’s too soon, really, to expect the Liberals to have regained their balance after losing last year, but they’re going to have to start shaping up soon and it doesn’t look like Dr Nelson is the man to do it.
Popularity: 17% [?]
The question of “which Mac?” has been resolved. In the first instance we’re going to pick up a cheap Macbook, because the old Dell laptop is kinda crappy. My partner can use it for classes, we can use it when traveling, and should my employment circumstances change such that I’d be needing to work both out of the office and occasionally away from home, well, it’d suffice.
Later on I’ll take another look at a Mac Pro, though, as a kick-arse desktop+server-replacement combo.
Fixed the Toppy, which has been giving us trouble pretty much since the ABC renamed to ABC1/ABC2. Nice to finally have that sorted, really just required sitting down and stuffing about with it for a bit. The next step is to chuck on an autoexpiry addon that’ll do things like “delete 7:30 Report older than 48 hours”.
I’ve gotten fairly bored with Warcrack. Don’t have time for the end-game content, so it’s all just more of the same. We’ve renewed our City of Heroes subscriptions to play around with that for a bit, shall have to see how it goes. We’ve spent some time playing today (both sides) and have been enjoying it.
Am considering the merits of cancelling my WoW account until the next expansion comes out. Will give it a few weeks and see how I feel about it.
Popularity: 26% [?]
When I log a case and explicitly write in the notes “I am not in the office today, please contact me by email” what exactly leaves you in any doubt that phoning me at the office is useless?.
As a general principle I want you to send me email rather than call me anyway. If you call me, you have to try to comprehend my accent, I have to try to comprehend yours, and chances are we both end up feeling frustrated. Sending me an email, as I asked you to, saves us both a lot of time and irritation.
Dude, I am the damned customer! We pay your company way too much money to be spending months chasing you around to let us generate a damned license key.
Sybase ASE: an expensive but primitive toy, legacy software at best. And lest you think it’s worth paying for it to get decent support, forget that too. If you really want to give someone money for your database, give it to Sun/MySQL or Oracle. Their software support probably isn’t much better, but at least the software has seen significant improvement in the past decade.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Think I’ll probably be buying myself a new Mac in the next few months. The question, of course, is “which one?”. It was fairly simple — Macbook Pro because it’s not as insanely expensive as the Mac Pro but it has a real GPU — but the recent iMac refresh made that more complicated by giving the iMac a real GPU option at the top end.
A bit of poking at the Apple Store, though, shows that one can spec a Mac Pro for similar money to the top-end iMac. That’d be a quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon, 2GB RAM, and an 8800GT for graphics compared to a dual-core 3.0GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, and an 8800GS. The iMac provides the big shiny screen, the Mac Pro provides double the CPU cores and plenty of room for more disks.
Right now the Mac Pro is appealing a lot. Four cores and a few hundred extra dollars on RAM would let me run an XP VM in the background that would be pretty much unnoticable. It’d also be able to take over “house server” type duties, effectively condensing three machines into one. There’s a 300GB SATA disk in my current game machine which could go in a Mac Pro for Time Machine purposes, and there’s a 300GB ATAPI disk in the server that could go into the gametoy, which could then be donated to a not-for-profit.
As much as a laptop appeals in other ways, my vision is such that I’d rarely use it as one, and it’s not really suitable to take over the “house server” type tasks. And my eye doesn’t really agree so much with the current iMac displays either so if I bought one of those it’d probably wind up hooked to the current display anyway.
Ah well. This time last year I was sure I was about to buy an MBP…
Popularity: 21% [?]
The latest addiction here is AudioSurf. Great fun, but I am a little cautious about making an unqualified recommendation because it seems to be a bit buggy.
The general drift, if you haven’t already heard of it, is that it creates a track from a music file, and then you drive along it doing a colour-match puzzle. Tracks and tiles (”cars”) are calculated from the music. So if you put on something like Joni Mitchell’s River you’re in for a smooth ride, but the Beasts of Bourbon’s Ten Wheels for Jesus is rather trickier.
Bugwise, we’ve so far come across one where minimizing crashes the game, and rather more frequently anything that needs QuickTime to decode doesn’t work from a network share.
Yesterday’s little experiment involved renting I Am Legend from iTunes. This works fine with store credit but you do have to tie the AppleTV to your US account — merely being authorised to play via your iTunes installation doesn’t suffice.
The movie itself was surprisingly good. I am always dubious about remakes, but this was (a) quite different to The Omega Man — Neville is believable as a scientist, for a start — and (b) better than it too unless you’re after a 70’s Charlton Heston strutfest.
Will use the rental service again. The experience was pretty straightforward. If more content were captioned — and captions on AppleTV weren’t tiny — we’d probably buy/rent a lot, but as-is it’ll do for cases where my partner is out of town and I want something to watch.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Been probably two weeks or so since I switched to using the old G5 iMac as a primary home machine, and my only complaint is that it’s a bit on the pokey side. Opera and Firefox each sometimes go bonkers and try to eat the CPU, and Opera in particular is prone to stuttering. Now that I’m using Airfoil to transmit iTunes (and in theory other things) to the Windows box that has the real speakers attached things are pretty nice. Except for the bit where Airfoil itself chews ~15% of the CPU.
Which brings us back to “pokey”.
The new top-end iMac is looking pretty tempting. I’m still dubious about the merits of a 24″ display, and I didn’t really like the aluminium iMac they got me at work last year, but then again this is a dimmer environment with rather less natural light so the reflection issues may be moot. When the time comes — whenever that may be — I think I’ll have to go and look at one in a store and see how the display goes with my eyesight.
For anyone who has been living under a rock, the big deal with the new iMac refresh is that the top-end model (selling for about AU$3000) has a real GPU. A 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800GS. Much much better than the fairly dreadful low-end ATi parts they’ve been using previously.
They also top out at a 3.0GHz Core2 Duo CPU, and you can now specifiy a 1TB SATA disk. With the biggest disk and 4GB of RAM that’s almost AU$3700…
Which is an awful lot of money.
Australian tax law being what it is, it’s still cheaper to buy a Macbook Pro. Those don’t have anywhere near as spiffy a GPU — though they do have a “real” one — nor as fast a CPU, but they’re rather more portable. And start, effectively, at under AU$2k thanks to the ATO.
Perhaps waiting to see if the next Big Apple Event includes Yet Another MBP Refresh, as I am beginning to see some merit to a portable machine.
In other “news”, I finally got around to hitting our AppleTV with a patchstick today. After installing Perian and copying some font files over, it now plays DivX/XviD natively, with extra bonus big-arse subtitles. Which is exactly what we want.
The motivator was fairly simple: sometimes converting DivX/XviD->H.264 results in loss of A/V sync. Which is rather irritating and seems to happen regardless of the tools I use. Not having to do the conversion at all is a nice bonus but not really the point.
Popularity: 30% [?]