Early this morning, New Zealand time, Steve Jobs took the stage in a special Apple event where he announced a bunch of notebooks. I got up at 6am to read the up to date news on these new systems. As I said during the last event about the new iPods, I find myself less excited and feeling a little disappointed after the announcement. I feel this is not because the products suck or are just minor updates, but because rumors about these are getting released months, weeks, days and hours before the event, and they turn out to be true. I would enjoy the keynote a lot more if the releases were a complete surprise, something i hadn’t seen before, but that seems to be impossible nowadays, unfortunately.

If you want to know about the new MacBooks, you can go to Engadget, MacRumors, Ars Technica or any other tech site that reports on Apple news. If you want the specs and more detailed information, you can go to the Apple website or store for that. They both looks pretty cool and they both are pretty expensive, which is a shame. I had plans on getting a MacBook before, and I still would like a MacBook now. They also announced a 24 inch Cinema Display. The thing that makes this product so special is that it was made for MacBook, Pro and Air. It has 3 cables on it, MagSafe for power, USB for data and Mini DisplayLink for graphics. I think this is a great solution for connecting your notebook to a monitor. It is similar to some kind of docking solution, except with cables. The monitor has power USB ports for those desk items like keyboard, mouse, external drives etc.

The new MacBook is made out of Aluminium instead of plastic. The case looks really nice, much nicer than the previous one in my opinion. The screen is glass and features a LED backlit monitor. It would have been nice if it was capable of 1440×900 instead of just 1280×800. It also has a backlit keyboard on the high end model which is something that I would love because I do type in the dark and have difficulty seeing the in that setting. They have also ditched the Intel integrated graphics with a nVidia GeForce 9400M which is a much better graphics option. I also noticed that it uses DDR3 RAM instead of the DDR2 that most other notebook computers use.

I do love the new MacBook over the old one. The only problem is the increase in price point. The old custom configuration I had would have cost me $2500 with AppleCare and an Educational Discount. My new custom configuration is going to cost me $3000 with AppleCare and Educational Discount. I’m starting to wonder if a $3000 notebook computer is a smart thing to do. Should I just give it a skip and go with a cheaper Windows PC? I really want this MacBook but I’m not sure if I could do it for $3000. Only time will tell if and when I own this beauty…

After hearing Kevin Rose mention Photosynth on Diggnation, I thought it sounded cool so I checked it out. Photosynth is a project in the Microsoft Live Labs where you traverse through or look around 3D landscapes that are built using 2D images. The first downsides of it are quite apparent as you enter the site and use it. It requires you to install software on your computer to get this to work, and it is Windows only. I decided to go ahead anyway. I had a look at some of the featured Synths on the home page and they looked pretty cool.  It was cool to have a look around a city using this thing. It was also cool to see how it did this weird 3D dotty thing to represent an object from a 2D environment, such as a statue.

I decided I would try and make one. I spend a bit of time thinking of an interesting scene or object to take picture of that would work in Photosynth and look pretty cool. After a little while thinking, I remembered a spot close to where I live where I could see my whole suburb and the houses and surrounding. I decided that I would go up there with the camera and take heaps of shots, the way the instructional video said. I took 74 shots from up there. I decided to put them into Photosynth. It takes quite a while to do its magic and upload it to the internet, so don’t expect results straight away because it can take 1-5 hours. Mine took under 3 which wasn’t bad. I could wait.

After it had done everything, it was available for viewing online. I like to think I had done a good Synth, and the thing told me it was 100% Synth. You can check it out on the Photosynth site, it is publicly viewable. Photosynth is a really hard thing to describe. It is really something you have to see, and play with for yourself. This technology is really exciting and I look forward to seeing it evolve and get better, and then applied to useful applications, such as a mapping application or a virtual store or something of the sort. This is just the beginning of what this technology can offer and bring to the table.

It only took me one hour of playing with Google’s new web browser, Chrome, to realize that its just a web browser. I already have 2 web browsers installed on my machine (on good, the other not so much) so why do I need a third? The very short amount of time trialing Chrome was enough to give me a good feel for what Chrome is. To conclude here, I like the browser, but it just doesn’t offer me the same experience I get from Firefox, or the experience I expect from a traditional web browser. Although I have to say, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The things I like about Chrome is the way it manages tabs. Each tab is a new process. This is something I wish my main browser had so I can figure out what is causing it to use all my resources on the machine, and also protect the other pages I have open in case one causes a crash. Another thing I like about Chrome is its speed. It works pretty fast, although after importing my bucket loads of Bookmarks and History, it did effect the way Chrome handled, which could be why I have trouble with Firefox at times.

To be honest, I don’t really feel this as a true competitor in the browser space. I feel this is a spec browser which is to force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and whatever to adopt Google’s features to make the browsers better. Google’s platform is the internet, so pushing out their vision of an ideal browser which enables access to their services makes sense that they want to make it a good experience from both the access program and the web service.

Even though I love Firefox and will continue using it as my primary web browser, I will still keep Chrome on my system. This is a perfect secondary browser for when you just want to quickly access a webpage without waiting for your browser to load and the two dozen tabs that come with it. Just click, wait a second and you’re all ready to zap onto a page. It’s really that fast and simple, which makes it the perfect quick and go browser. Other than that, it’s going to be interesting to see what else they will bring to the table.

A fortnight ago, it was the first of September. At the start of every month, it has become routine to change my desktop wallpaper and take a nice screenshot which I then uploaded to Flickr. I only have a few icons permanently on my desktop, such as My Computer, TV Shows, Podcasts, Notes and the Recycling Bin. I do however use my desktop as a temporary place to put files, which either have to be used, or sorted and put somewhere else. I use the desktop because I see them there everyday and remember the task yet to be done.

So anyway, I had some extra stuff on my desktop. Some TV shows and podcasts that had to be watched and some files that needed to be attended to soon. Now I didn’t want these files on my screenshot to be uploaded to Flickr so for some reason I moved them into the recycling bin. Well the total size of all the files exceeded the recycling bin space, so most of the files I moved there got deleted. Normally I would put them in a folder and put that folder in one of the other folders that is on my desktop, but for some reason I didn’t do that this time.

As an person online would, I tweeted my stupidity for the Twitter world to see (or the friends that follow me.) I wasn’t expecting to get any of these files back and I would have to re-download the files that could be downloaded again, and the others (either unrecoverable to I forgot what I had) would just be my loss. To my surprise, my good friend Rowan replied to my tweet with a link to a piece of Windows recovery software called Recuva.

After you download and install Recuva, when you execute it, you are greeted with an easy wizard to guide you through the recovery process. You can get it to find only certain types of files, such as Pictures, Videos, Music, Documents or all files. This is good for say if you delete all the pictures off your camera memory stick. Next you can specify where the files were. If you are unsure, you can do a full scan of everything. There are two types of scans, a normal scan and a deep scan. The regular scan is faster, but it finds far less than the slower deep scan. I required a deep scan to recover my files. Then after the scan is done, you select the files you want to recover from the ones its found and you are all sweet.

Recuva managed to save most of the files I had lost, with the exception of a folder with a season of a television series, but that is easy enough to download again when I actually have time to watch it. I also lost my Notes text document. The document the software recovered was somehow corrupted and had text from an html/css document. I don’t think there was anything of great importance in it anyway. Thanks to Rowan for helping me recover, or at least identify what I had lost. The most annoying part about losing files isn’t the fact that they are gone (although it is annoying,) it’s the fact that you don’t know what you have lost. Well that applies for me anyway.

A couple of days ago, when I was browsing the deep space of Tumblr, I stumbled across an interesting post. I thought it seemed pretty cool so I gave it a try to see what results I would get and here is is as follows. If you would also like to try it out, and maybe post it on my blog or tumblelog or whatever, the instructions are also below. If you do, please pingback or leave a comment so I can see your results.

Type your answer to the questions into flickr search
-Using only the first page, pick an image
-Copy and paste each of the urls in the Mosaic Maker

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. What is your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to do when you grow up?
10. Who / what do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word that describes you?
12. What is your Flickr name?

1. Jonathan Coulton’s GlaDOS Rock Band, 2. Melting Chocolate, 3. Robotic Lego, 4. Berlin blues, 5. Masi Oka and Hayden Panettiere – Interview (1), 6. Raspberry Coke, 7. Berlin, Germany, 8. Miniature Cakes, 9. My Computer, 10. Internet!!!, 11. ultimate geek nook, 12. Leopard

After the big blog update a week ago, a few more updates have happened elsewhere. The first is the yum9me.com main page. The old page has gone and been replaced by a simple page, written by TheSkorm in a few seconds. I like it over the older one because it is much cleaner, it works correctly on more browsers (curse you Internet Explorer!) and there is less clutter and jankness to it.

The second update was to my tumblelog theme. After using the dashboard theme for a little while, I started to lose interest in it and wanted a new theme, I just hadn’t seen any that I liked. That was until I saw a theme ported from a WordPress theme on Alisha’s tumblelog, that’s when I knew what I wanted. I decided that I would use the WordPress theme on this blog, and hopefully one day, she would be able to release the theme to the public.

Well that day did come shortly after, and managed to get back on my radar so I grabbed it. It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it so I modified it a little. The main modifications are the removal of the Disqus comment integration, and the Last.Fm and other site integrations. I also removed the followers down the sidebar. My intentions were to have a few links down the side for Mobile, Archives, RSS ect. I did have this working for a moment until during some other edit of the theme, it broke, so I completely removed it.

I also changed the description down the bottom of the theme to match that of the one on my blog, except with a couple of appropriate word changes and rearrangements. This is also where the about button will jump down to, if clicked. I also decided to have the links under the title be for my main page (or as I decided to call it, Portal,) my blog and my tumblelog. I also applied this to my blog.

I like how they both use the same theme because now they seem more unified and part of one system, which they are, instead of two separate unrelated sites. So hopefully all the changes can last a year or so before I decided to change them.

Last week, the small group of us doing the Polytech computing course finished our second unit, which was on Operating Systems. For this we looked at two different operating systems, the first one being DOS (where we actually used Command Prompt because most of the commands are the same) and Linux (Kubuntu if you need to know the distro.) The reason we looked at these two is because for the standard, we are required to look at a single user and multi user operating system.

The first section involved a bit of research and learning the terminology of how Operating Systems work. We weren’t tested on any of this stuff. Then we were messing around with basic commands in cmd. Then we were trying out some basic commands in the Linux console. For this we used a Kubuntu Live CD. We didn’t get into anything that technical, basically only file manipulation stuff, and this was mainly due to the time limits. For example, we only had 5 hours on Linux, 4 if you exclude the test week, 3 if you exclude the week everyone was away/sick. It’s very difficult to learn anything advanced in that short amount of time.

The unit seemed shorter than the first one but I think it was because it was broken up into sections, so it seemed like we weren’t working on it for long. Anyway, now we move onto our final unit, System Programming. For this we were given Atmel AVR Butterfly’s, which we get to keep, for programming. I’m not really sure what we are going to be making the things do but they seem like pretty sweet gizmos. Can’t wait to get into it!