Mac’s Galore

Sitting in my high school’s library now, looking around it’s slightly surprising to me that Apple only has an 8% market share. I see two MacBooks, two MacBook Pros, and 5 various models of the iPod.* Many of you may or may not know in the end of October 2008 I bought the $1600 MacBook, and even dual booted Windows XP on it. While yes I admit the prices on their hardware is pretty ridiculous, and I could have gotten a much more powerful components, a much larger screen for the same price or even less, and the glass screen is a good warning mirror in case anyone sneaks up on me, what I got for the price I paid seems a little more fair now.

Having had it for almost three months, I can sufficiently say that I am rather satisfied. Windows runs games and such perfectly on the 70gb partition I made for it, and although the trackpad isn’t very compatible that is easily fixed with a good notebook mouse.

Yesterday, some friends and I pitched in $25 in order to split  4/5 licenses of iWork ’09. Originally I was skeptical about the software, I watched the Apple keynote revealing the revised Office suite and wasn’t too impressed. However actually trying it out on my own computer has been an experience. Initially I had used Open Office write, which while works, can be difficult sometimes, I got it so I wouldn’t have to pay more re-purchase MS Office and I considered it to out rank the suite overall. Now having tried iWork extensively, the ranks of Word Processors go from worst to best: MS Office, Open Office, iWork. For anyone who has a Mac already and is tired of using a clunky interface on such a beautiful machine, I recommend that you switch over, again you can split up the licenses as you wish.

The other software that comes on the Mac side, iLife ’08 in particular is also impressive, I have already used Garageband multiple times to create soundtracks for my videos, and I feel that they have come out with a level of professionality that a copyrighted song could not have given. iMovie is really a joy to use for short simple videos, responding to challenges on YouTube has never been easier, before my process would be slowed down over the course of about two hours per challenge.

My verdict: if you’re a fun loving student like me who games and does whatever whenever, then get a mac, you won’t regret it. If you’re just looking to get a good portable computer though just for browsing and word processing, get an HP Mini, I’ve tried them out from friends and in stores and they’re second to none in portability.

*I don’t care Zunes are still better, just wait until Songbird supports more mp3 players.

Tags: computer
Posted in Opinion | 1 Comment »

Blender is hard to use..

…and it’s winter break (at last)! So as that ancient video in that link describes, means I’m taking requests for videos, (of course I always take requests, just I don’t nescesarily come through with them). So yea, comment, message me, send a smoke signal through the stratosphere, just don’t call me or send me a letter. Any how, thought I’d re propose that, hopefully I won’t be as consumed this year with making all the requests.

Tags: computer, video
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Chaos and Madness Ensnare…

…my computer. Its been a strange last few days many of my computers recently have been under the influence of some very nasty trojans, being trojans, they’re all very deceptive. On my MacBook (the Windows side of course) something called Relevant Knowledge was installed on my computer without me knowing it. Trying to keep the 70gb partition I have for Windows celibate from cyber infections one of them evidentally piggy-backed on to the computer through a small program I downloaded.

As if this wasn’t enough of a horror story, turns out on the same day, one of my friend’s got the same thing on his computer, only worse. He got something called vortumonde which after looking it up for him, due to that his internet wasn’t working, and the program is about equivalent of stabbing the hard drive disks with a magnetized hatchet. So he spent all day trying to figure that out meanwhile I frantically searched my computer for things that shouldn’t be there. He’s afraid to turn on his computer now.

Now today, something called trojan.zlob.g infested itself rather nicely on to the main computer my family and I use as file storage the works. This file also disables browser actions and actually is really easy to remove. Once again the internet came to save the day with a quick resolution to the problem from Yahoo! Answers the post from AlexJ was the answer here. All this while rendering a new video series which I will now have to post tomarrow as I do not have enought time to really render the rest.

So the final lesson? Be careful what you download, and run spyware and malware scanners at least once a week you never know when you computer will get the technological equivalent of parkinsons disease.

Tags: computer, video
Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »