The Daily Bits

Here are some predictions for 2008. It’s not exactly a huge list but it’s enough to get started. They are tech based for the most part so here we go:

1. DRM will die. With 3 of 4 major music labels selling music without DRM on Amazon it’s only a matter of time.
2. In concert with Amazon selling DRM free music, iTunes will lose some marketshare. They won’t slip to second but they will lose some.
3. Microsoft somehow, someway, will be slapped with another anti-trust lawsuit.
4. We will start to see smallish web 2.0 companies being acquired by large companies in order to compete with one another. Similar to what happened when Google bought DoubleClick (Microsoft bought some unknown advertising company)
5. Firefox’s marketshare will continue to increase.

There are some quick predictions for 2008. We’ll revisit this post next year

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PS: Also take a look at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist.

Well here’s Flashy Friday. Early for once

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This one’s my favourite. It’s a real slam against Bill Gates… although it is true. Pretty much everyone I talk to (advanced users mind you) are sticking with XP. Most people I know getting Vista are getting it with a new PC…

There are a few more new get a mac ads on Apple’s website.

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No no no… We’re not docking a starship, even though I wish we were This is a post about the customization of the Leopard dock. Upon poking around the macrumors forums I came across an interesting post about the Leopard dock. The dock backgrounds for the 3D glass dock are simple png images which can easily be replaced. Replacing them can transform your dock from this:

To:

Quite frankly it looks better than the original glass dock.

You can also take this pretty far from the ordinary_[1]…

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Well yesterday when I got home I had two much desired packages waiting… Leopard and my battery. I havn’t installed the battery yet as I want to follow the battery calibration procedure. I have installed Leopard and it’s exactly what it was thought to be.

I havn’t had a chance to test out time machine yet as I don’t have a dedicated external hard drive that I can use. I’m not sure if I will get one or not seeing as I am away most of the time. Apple advertised Leopard as having “over 300 new features.” Most of the 300 are smallish type things. My favourite out of them all has to be the upgraded Finder (including coverflow and quick look).

MattVortex will have an article about Leopard in the November Informer which should be out sometime late tomorrow. Here are some pics to hold you over

This is what a Windows share originally appears as in Leopard. It’s a nice inside joke and all but it really should have been removed for RTM.

I updated the image to look like this via an article on digg.

Oh and a desktop shot:

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PS: MQ gave me this great gift.

Today I was doing some work on my MacBook Pro as usual. The battery got down to 30% (was using wifi, bright screen, etc…) and just died out without warning. When I got home I looked up the problem and it appears to be a battery issue. I phoned Apple customer support, I’m still in the 1 year of hardware warranty but the 90 days of complementary AppleCare has ended long ago.

After waiting about 15 minutes in line for a support rep I lasted about 2 minutes on the phone. Basically I was presented with 3 options:

• Buy the AppleCare extension which I’m sure Apple wants me to do. This would cost about $300 and extend my support for another 2 years. It would enable them to do the “software troubleshooting” and fix any hardware issues that come up.
• The next choice was to spend $69 to spend some time with this representative and go through some troubleshooting on my system. I’m assuming this would include checking battery health, cycles, and any strange settings. Then if this was leading to a hardware problem I could have the machine sent away to be fixed. This is not an option. This is my main computer and can not be without it for an extended period of time.
• The final option was to simply take a URL and troubleshoot the problem myself. This is of course the route that I took as I don’t want to pay $69 just to find out it’s not something hardware related.

After poking around Apple’s support site, macrumors, and Google I am pretty sure that it is a battery problem. The problems described in Apple’s battery exchange program such as shutting off when the battery is still measured to have a charge in it. The options at this point are to either buy my own battery ($159) or keep pressing on Apple support to replace it seeing as it does exhibit those symptoms.

I will be keeping this updated as this issue develops.

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I’ve had the MacBook Pro for slightly over 6 months now. I can tell you that it is the best computer I have ever had. It’s just as fast as the day I got it and very reliable. You may remember I made this post about how there were a few things that bothered me. I’ll go through those now.

• System settings: Pretty much found where everything is and learnt the “control panel” back in April.
• Keyboard shortcuts: There’s still the odd occasion when I’ll press Win + D to hide my windows and see the desktop. But for most cases I find F11 ok.
• Office: This is the only PowerPC remnant on my system. I am waiting with eager anticipation for Office 2008. Beta is due sometime in January. I tried the new iWork but there’s just no comparison between it and Office. If I didn’t have to open up and be able to deliver Office documents I would definitely be using it. I know you can, but I just want it to work.
• CS3 came out and it works at a reduced standard for some things. Photoshop is decent, but Dreamweaver is a overloaded POS. The FTP doesn’t work sometimes which is really problematic. To top it off it really just feels like a port of a Windows application. To remedy this I will be using TextWrangler from Bare Bones software. It has built in FTP with a SFTP option which is good for when I’m at school or on an open network.
• Browser: Still using Firefox as the RSBandB forums don’t display properly in Safari.
• 2GB RAM has really paid off. I am able to run Windows/Linux in VMWare or Parallels without much of a decrease in general performance. Not that I need to run it all the time but it works.
• Screenshots: I have wrote two apple script screenshot applications. Basically all they do is use the built in screencapture unix program and send the output to a folder with an incremented file name. They get the job done but I was unable to add a date into the filename.

One thing that I wish I had Windows for was Messenger. It just is so much nicer on Windows. The mac version is about 2 versions behind the Windows one. It doesn’t even have support for audio clips. This was the first version where “emote stealing” was added (6.0). Adium never worked properly for me. It would drop messages and it was a paint to start group conversations. Not to say that MSN doesn’t have faults… it does.

Aside from MSN my mac experience has been great. I would highly advise anyone who wants a new computer to get one. In my mind if you just play Runescape, do school work, surf the web, and check email a mac is fine for you. This is the majority of the market out there.

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As I said on Friday my Mac Book Pro arrived Thursday. Most of the weekend was spent working on some sql and Java programming and getting everything moved over. It’s only been 3 days and I feel that I am already adapting to the different keyboard shortcuts, locations of system settings, and just the operating system in general.

I’ve not yet had the opportunity to test a new recording setup with Brad. I hope to get this done before Thursday. If the results are not satisfactory then I can probably just continue recording on Windows.

Here are some of the applications that I am using:

• Internet browsing - Firefox (Safari for playing Runescape)
• Messenger - MSN Messenger for Mac. Adium didn’t feel right…
• Transmission - Bit Torrent client.
• Cyber Duck - FTP Client

I am also using Microsoft Office and am eagerly waiting for Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop CS3. One thing I can say about Firefox is that it definitely uses more ram on mac than it does on XP. I may have to look into an alternative browser. I also plan to use parallels for testing new parts of the rsbandb website, so because of this I have ordered an upgrade to 2GB of ram.

Lastly I am looking for a way to automate naming and saving of screenshots of a certain active window to a folder other than the desktop, this one should be interesting.

And no… just because I got a mac doesn’t mean I hate Windows now.

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