Say it ain’t so! Ah Lorax, we hardly knew ye! (For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, Apple announced new laptop models.)
Well, I announcing Lorax’s demise is an overstatement in any case. Don’t get me wrong, the new machines look pretty sexy and I think they are going to be great value for the money. But the difference between what they are selling now and what’s inside Lorax is pretty minimal. The changes to the Macbooks (as opposed to the Macbook Pros) are more substantial and I think all to to the good. The Pros get a new shell, a bigger hard drive, and some new video chips. (Actually the Pros can get a CPU boost at the high end as well but the default MBP now is the exact same CPU as what Lorax has.)
The video chips sound nice, but Spore runs just fine on Lorax and that’s all the laptop game playing I’m likely to do in the near future. The chipset in Lorax is good enough for light development work and that’s what I wanted. (I’ll note that when I bought Lorax a large part of my model selection was hinged on the fact that the Macbooks had the shitty Intel “integrated” chipset. It’s a major win now that all the laptops have real video hardware. And this could become more important next year when Snow Leopard comes out and suddenly you can run “general purpose” code on a GPU.)
The new trackpad sounds nice, but I’m not going to buy a laptop for *that*, or even whine too much about it. And Lorax has a multi-touch trackpad anyway. It’s unclear to me whether the new four-finger swipes are only for the new hardware or whether they’ll show up for the older machines, but at the same time I have trouble imagining I want to app switch by using the trackpad anyway. (As opposed to the two-fingers+plus click=right click.I use that all the time on Lorax.)
The new case sounds sweet, and it’s ecologically friendly and all, but I don’t have any issue with Lorax’s case.
All in all I’m happy with the laptop I have now. I mean I wouldn’t turn down a new MBP if somebody offered me one but I don’t lust after one. The new Macbooks are much more compelling to me than the old ones - it’s down to more a question about 13″ or a 15″ form factor. But I like the 15″ MBP. I think for me it was the right choice. The fact that this new model is a tweak as opposed to a major new version I think is more a confirmation about how much about the “mid 2008″ version of the MBP was solid. Except maybe the graphics chip reliability.
Read moreFlip Mino and OS X
I bought Karin a Flip Mino video camera for her birthday. These cameras come with built-in software for editing video on both Windows and OS X, but you don't want to do that. I knew it was a solvable problem, but I wasn't sure exactly what the solution was. After some quick research I have an answer and I'm willing to share :-)
The Mino stores its video in as 3ivx encoded MPEG-4 video. Perian supports 3ivx files, along with a lot of other formats. Download Perian, install the preference pane and Quicktime can now playback the 3ivx files. iPhoto and iMovie HD (aka iMovie '06) can both process the files directly with Perian installed. iMovie '08 won't process them without another step to convert the file to DV format, but Karin uses iMovie 06 anyway, and if I was going to start editing video I'd probably buy Final Cut Express. I read on the web that QuickTime Pro and VisualHub can both do the conversion and those are both highly recommended for anybody doing video anyway, so I'd look at one of those if you need iMovie '08 compatibility.
Read moreOut of the pool!
So that's it then. My Windows Boot Camp install started doing that "boot to a black screen" thing again, as bitched about previously. Now I'm suspicious that it's due to my OS X reformat and/or a VMWare Fusion upgrade but I've just had it with Windows. If it won't behave like a grown-up piece of software then it's going to get treated like a second-class citizen. I'm setting up a brand-new Windows install in a VMWare machine and once it gets all upgraded, patched, and activated I'm going to save the whole stinking virtual machine, burn a DVD archive. Next time Windows blows up I can just clone a working install. Shades of Norton Ghost, years later.
I haven't decided if I'm going to try to resurrect the Boot Camp version or not. I'm sure the whole restore thing would work. And I further suspect that if I just resurrected the Boot Camp version and left it alone it would be fine. Except ... I think the last time I "activated" the obnoxious DRM I was in VMWare and so I'm not sure if the restored backup is "activated". Feh. I throw up my hands.
Anyway, I'm going to try life without a "real" Windows install for a while. I don't think I'll really miss it.
Read moreFinally!
Shares of TiVo jumped Wednesday after the San Jose company said it will launch a new high-definition digital video recorder under an extended agreement with DirecTV Group, reigniting a once-cooling relationship.- from TiVo, DirecTV to offer new HD DVR to customers About time. Actually, it's about two years late, since the new model won't be available until "mid to late 2009". But it is pretty good timing for upgrading my leased HR20.
A week with Wii Fit
I feel like I should talk about the results of having Wii Fit for a week. What complicates it is that I'm having back problems, and I don't think it's due to Wii Fit (in fact I think it's helping), but I can't rule it out.
Here's my basic capsule summation of the Wii Fit: I think it is fun and I think it's a great addition to an existing fitness regimen. If you aren't exercising I think trying to get a real workout out of the Wii Fit is just going to be frustrating.
In both my case and Karin's we already have exercises that we're doing, so the Wii Fit is mainly for tracking and for a little variety in exercises. There's also the yoga portion, which impresses me. I've never done any yoga study, although there's some overlap with tai chi in terms of the breathing exercises. I think the balance board really helps with yoga because the virtual trainer can tell when you're doing something wrong balance-wise. Eyetoy:Kinetic was much less effective, since it was trying to see you, as opposed to measuring weight shifts.
I was (well I still am) tracking my weight manually and updating a spreadsheet every month, but the Wii can give you daily feedback. That's sort of a double-edged sword and frankly I think they could have done better with some of the commentary. The truth is that a shift of a pound or so in a day may just be random fluctuations. They mention that but it will still express disapproval over a half pound gain, which could easily be just a few extra glasses of water over the last day. It's also a bit odd because it asks if you are wearing "light" or "heavy" clothing and it considers "light" clothing as 2 pounds. Well my sneakers are 2.5 pounds by themselves, so I have to use the "heavy" option, even if I'm wearing T-shirt and shorts. It does have a custom option as well, but that seems like a slight hassle to weigh everything. It also doesn't track completely accurately versus my digital scale. It does most days but I've had one day where the Wii said I lost weight and the scale said I gained. Maybe my T-shirt that day was extra light, I dunno. It also uses Body Mass Index (BMI) which I gather can be somewhat inaccurate. According to it I should be trying to lose almost half of my body weight, which can't be that healthy. I'm overweight sure, but I don't know if a doctor would sign off on me losing over 100 pounds. I suppose I could go ask one, but who wants to do that?
The biggest problem with Wii Fit is that there's no real exercise program. If you do some exercises it will suggest they pair well with another exercise, but they don't even tell you where to find that other exercise (So far I've only seen like three of those and they were always pairing a yoga exercise with a "strength exercise". I suspect that's the case because the other categories are aerobic and the balance games.) There's certainly nothing you can do that amounts to "give me a half hour workout". For instance I'd like to gently stretch this back muscle that's giving me grief, but I just have to pick and choose exercises based on overall muscle groups, or based on prior experience. The aerobic exercises seem particularly fruitless because you only get a couple of minutes of exercise and then you're back to the menu to pick something else. Getting an actual elevated heart rate for a significant period of time would either be really difficult or a real danger sign of poor physical condition.
The balance games are fun, but there's an odd neither fish-nor-fowl problem here as well. You can't say "OK we're going to have three people take turns on the Slalom and compare the scores". You have to just keep hitting retry and comparing the scores yourself. It tracks high scores for Karin and I, but that doesn't work if we were wanting to play at the same time.
It does seem spot on in balance analysis. I was pretty close to centered left-to-right when I starting using it, but I really stood with my weight back on my heels. At first I thought I was standing on the board wrong, but over the last few days I've realized it's correct and that I'm a little more comfortable if I consciously shift forward more. I'm not convinced there's a real health benefit from that, but it's certainly interesting to know.
The final analysis is this: I haven't really been losing any weight this year, in fact I went up a little bit (around 2 pounds) over the holidays and I've held pretty firmly at that mark for about 8 months now. The Wii Fit sees a slight downward trend over the last week and my manual chart seems to agree. I think adding half an hour or so of Wii Fit work has A ) gotten to some muscle groups that I wasn't exercising, and B ) been the final kick to my metabolism that may actually trigger more weight loss. At least I hope so :-)
As a peripheral the Balance Board is certainly neat. I'm not sure how many really good games will actually use it. While the Fit is selling out in the US, I'm not sure how many units that really amounts to. I sort of doubt it's really enough to really lure 3rd party developers to do really good work for the board. I'm know there's been at least one other game that uses it (We Ski) and there are a couple coming up that do. But I suspect it's going to be a lot of half-assed "you can play like this if you want to" implementations where some programmer spent a week on it right before alpha.
I guess at the end of the day I'd love to see a Mario game that used the board, but I'm not sure if that will happen.
Read more