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% [?]
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: 27% [?]
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% [?]
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% [?]
Useful discovery: iTunes will authorise against multiple iTunes Store accounts, and this flows through to AppleTV. If the lack of useful captioning weren’t an issue I could absolutely see subscribing to 10 or so TV shows — the price is similar to buying a season on DVD but you get ‘em as soon as they air in the US, with no ads, and no mucking about converting for playback. 10 shows a year is cheaper than even basic cable here, and much better value too.
Last weekend I got fed up with Vista making things break and nuked the PC, installing XP and using it only for games and video encodes. The “main” machine is my old first-generation G5 iMac hooked up to a decent display, and it’s perfectly usable though I can really notice the difference between this old machine and the first-gen Core2 Duo iMac at work. Not going to do anything in any great hurry, but this does rather confirm for me that I should be looking to update to a newer Mac at home some time this year.
We had a large bin delivered on Wednesday and have spent some of the long weekend clearing out accumulated rubbish. I’ve finally chucked the last remaining big box of cables and we’ve gained maybe 1/3rd of our study back. The kitchen is also looking much better. By spreading this out over the weekend we’ve been able to get stuff done without feeling like we’ve given up much time to do it.
Weight-loss continues, slowly. I’ve lost about 7kg since we started this 3-ish months ago. Our scales have given up, so we’ll need to buy new ones. 7kg is a drop in the ocean — overall I want to lose 60kg from my starting point — but hey, 10% is 10%. It all feels quite viable, I’ve quit with the obsessive calorie-counting now, but that stage is useful for getting your head into the right place.
The new Portishead album sounds a bit mechanically goth. It reminds me a bit of Switchblade Symphony, but with more drum machine. Not sure how I feel about it, will have to give it a few more listens.
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Transmission is very nifty. And I thought uTorrent on Windows was good!
Also, good e-commerce experience of the day: Book-a-Bin. Nice simple straightforward “specify what sort of bin you want, when, and where” system, handles the payment, the bin simply arrives when you asked for it and goes away as booked. Have used it before, and have booked another bin to cart more of our accumulated rubbish this weekend.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Gave up on Synergy2, leaving aside the issues with daemonizing, having the server running on OS X was resulting in wacky Warcrack mouse behaviour. Have dug out an old Belkin USB KVM. It too has its issues — in particular it takes a few seconds for Windows to notice devices when I switch to that machine, and in the past it used to do annoying things like automatically flip inputs if the monitor was put to sleep. Which is a bit of an issue when you’re dealing with system reboots/etc.
Otherwise, so far so good. Except for iTunes+AppleTV. Streaming is fine, syncing video is fine, but trying to sync the 10k+ music files causes the system to eat itself after about 500-600 tracks. Suspect it may simply be that 1GB of RAM and a G5 is not exactly what you’d call “current” and iTunes is gnawing its eyes out trying to cope, but it’s tricky to track down when the system runs so slowly that you pretty much have to reset to get control back…
I had hoped to move the video encoding work over to the Mac. It’s a slower machine, but OS X is pretty good about running this sort of thing in the background with limited impact on interactive stuff. But the mplayer/mencoder bug which screws up subtitle support appears to be extant only on OS X and in every build I can find that’ll support H.264 as a target codec. Having tried a few randomly-selected SVN trees I’ve been unable to make it build at all, each time for different exciting reasons. Same deal with the ffmpeg kit. So for now that task is back on Windows too.
Will see how this goes. My experience has been that most computing environments irritate me within a few weeks at best, and while I’m quite happy with Leopard at the office this dual-system scheme is probably going to get on my nerves after a while. Longer term I may simply wind up buying a more modern Mac and putting everything on that, worst case with the video stuff would be a GUI-less Linux VM, and everything else I care about (WoW, Spore, Puzzle Quest) seems to have a Mac port. But that’s probably end-of-the-year stuff, so We Shall See.
Popularity: 34% [?]