Bad bad bad bad bad bad news

This won't be a happy post. It won't be long neither. All I will say is that today I was working on a PR thing for the company when my Mac suddenly froze so I had to kill it by shutting it off. Now I see how some of you laugh: "haha there you go, even your fantastic Apple computer died!". Yeah, maybe it did, cause when I reboot all I see is a pretty neat icon with a blinking question mark, which represents "I can't find any disk to boot from". And that's true, my hard drive appears to be dead. Damn..great timing. Just for your information, the hard drive isn't original Apple, it's a 250Gb Toshiba drive I put in two years ago, and I knew it would die some day. Luckily I have Time Machine backup, which means it will be easy to get up and running again. Badly though, the last backup is 5 days old...

So tonight I'm going to Jerusalem to look for a) a new hard drive and b) some screw drivers cause I left my set back home in Sweden. Great. Sweet. Fantastic. I love this. Pray for me.

And I will pray. I'm a bit confused to whom I should pray though, considering I'm European, currently stay in Egypt and hope to find everything I need to fix this in Israel...

WTF Microsoft?

The Redmond software giant have been airing their two new ads recently, certainly as a response to the long-running series of "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC"-ads from the Get a Mac campaign. I watched both and seriously, what are they talking about? Is it really a good idea to bore people out... I was hoping for something better when they announced Jerry Seinfeld would be featured in the ads, but this is not good. Check it out for yourself.

Can somebody explain to me, please? I feel confused... 

Why it's critical to put something into the right context

Good morning (yeah I know, but it's Ramadan and I like sleeping late nowadays)! Here's a random thought for you. Buying a computer is often seen as a huge expanse. Especially when it comes to a Mac. I don't know why but I hear it all the time from people that "oh those Macs, yeah they're sure nice but too expansive". Erm, well not so sure about it, take a look at the consumer MacBook or iMac and compare it with a Dell or something – and see what you get for the money, I'm talking about the build quality – and think again. And I haven't even mention that you get rid of the probably most irritating thing with new PCs: the Windows Operating System. But check out this story.

About 26 months ago (or 780 days if you count like 26*30) I bought a than brand-new MacBook. A year later or so I wanted to upgrade it a bit with bigger hard drive and more RAM, so I bought additional. Total cost for this 26 months is something like 12.000 SEK (that's about €1200). It's 12.000 SEK/780 days, that is something like 15 SEK a day, or €1,50! €1,50 a day for using an amazing machine every day in two years. Still think it's expansive? Think again!

Update: Oh yeah, almost forgot: the second season of Californication is out, get the two first episodes now! From Wikipedia: "The premiere of season two is set for September 28, 2008. The first and second episodes of season two leaked to the internet on September 8.". Sweet! 

A short vacation

Today I'm leaving for Poland for some time (rather short than long visit). That most probably means no updates, as I will be busy visiting family and such. I'll post the pictures from Borlänge when I'm back. Maybe something else as well...

Meanwhile, Apple has released new, Santa Rosa based, Macbook Pros. If you happen to have too much cash, OR if you just need a really really good notebook computer, check them out at Apple. Speaking of which, I guess we'll see some Apple related news during this and next week as the WWDC is approaching, with a feature-complete demo of Mac OS X Leopard. Stay tuned!

Back, for a little while

Hi folks!
Just recently, I returned from the short vacation in Borlänge. Beautiful scenery, I've got tons of pictures which I'll try to upload during the next few days. As I returned, I read a couple of interesting news stories that I'd like to share with you.

First of all, there's a new "thing" on iTunes Store called iTunes U. It looks like a co-operation between Apple and some universities and colleges in the States, and the result is a lot of classes, from schools like MIT, PennState or Berkeley, available online - for free! There's a broad range of classes availeble and if your interessted I recommend you to check it out at iTunes Store->iTunes U.

The other news is the introduction of something called Microsoft Surface. I saw a demonstration of this kind of device about a year ago at some Internet TV Channel on Democracy. Then, it was a scientist introducing a working device, and it made a huge impression on me. Now it looks as Microsoft is rolling it out in the winter of 2007. Go to the website and check out those three short video films now! It's seriously cool stuff...

A big update.

The second time I woke up today was at 2pm - exacly the same moment as Apple introduced its new , speed-busted MacBook update. You see the connection? No...? Neither do I. Anyway..

The first time I woke up today was about six hours earlier, at 8am. You might think that's late, but considering the amount of work I've lately put into a damn project at school, and the fact that I came back from school at 1.30am that night, you may understand. The project was pretty much done today at 11am, so after handing it in to the project leaders, I felt that a quick nap might be just what I need.

What else can I say? My life has been circling around that project lately. Wake up, workout, think about what needs to be done today, get to school, work, eat, work, eat, work, get back home, think about what else could have been done if there was more time, eat, try not to think about the project, fail not to think about the project, eat, hit the pillow, try not to dream about what needs to be done tomorrow...

Aw, I just figured out that there's a short description of the project online. Feel free to check it out over here, under "Student Projects" -> Health Check.

I feel kind of guilty about not updating this blog in almost a month. As I realized the visitors number dropped to below 1 person/day I thought it's time to lighten things up again.

One more thing (I almost forgot that one): photos from the "celebration" of Valborg, over two weeks ago, are online. You should see them in a box below. These are un-edited so don't expect too much quality this time. I just wanted to put them online so I could get rid of them and stop answering those "when-are-you-gonna-upload-the-pictures"-questions.


That's it for today!

One of those must-see videos

While reading my daily RSS feeds today, I ran across this video. Featuring Jobs & Gates, and some other special guests, definitely worth watching, if so for the Finder song. Not as geeky as one might think, so give it a go!

Why? Because I'm forced to!

Okay, so just so you know: I'm not doing this voluntary. I'm not doing this because it's fun. And I'm not doing this because I want to.
Nope..the reason is..school. Sure, I could design an interface in Macfriendly applications such as Flash, but seriously, if it's got to be, it better be got! So the prototype will be build the same way as real applications are. For that to be possible I need to install something I can run at school (i.e. Windows...). So here it is, those of you who didn't know already: Macs are perfectly capable of running whatever you need (need is not the same as want in my case) them to run.

Running Windows 3.11 on Mac

This one goes out for all the geeks out there ;)
Here's what's possible to do with a Mac nowadays:



Kinda ol' school feelin' ;)

Microsoft Norway Demos Vista on a Mac

As The Unofficial Apple Weblog wrote earlier this week...

"Some things just speak for themselves. In this video on the Norwegian site VG TV (apparently associated with Norway's largest newspaper), a Microsoft Norway executive demonstrates Vista on what is clearly an Intel iMac (they don't even bother to hide the Apple logo)."

Now this is great!

iChat, MSN, Jabber - A big mess

So I thought it's time to solve the problem. Here in Sweden everyone uses MSN (except from some "geeks" who go with a way better alternative: Jabber). "So what?", you think, "all my friends use MSN too and there's no problem with that". As long as you stick with a Microsoft products - MSN and Windows - everything works pretty good, I agree. But here, on Mac OS X, although it exists, the MSN client from Microsoft sucks really bad. I'd like to compare it to...hum, let's say Windows Messenger version 4.5. You've got the text messaging. You've got emoicons. And...that's pretty much all. Well, there is some file transfer support, but it uses the old MSNP4 or maybe 5 (or maybe something else?), which means that the files are transfered via MSN's servers insteand of peer-to-peer as in the newer versions of the protocol. The result? Speeds like 4-5 kb/s. That worked in 1999 perhaps, but try sending a gillion-something megapixel photo image with it today. Add no support for all the new "cool" effects as well as no audio nor video support. That's the reality for Microsoft's official MSN client for Mac OS X, 2006. No wonder folks try to go different ways.

Yesterday I found this excellent tutorial which I had time to follow today. To sum up: it gives iChat (the default Mac OS X messenger client) an ability to connect to a MSN account via Jabber. I'm not going to get too technical here so if you want more detalies, just read the first paragraphs of the tutorial.

The result? I'm not sure, but it looks like everyone I ever had on my MSN contact list and everyone who ever had added me on their got notified about me adding them (requested authorization). Since I haven't changed MSN account since 1997 you can imagine how many people got affected.

I'd like to say sorry for the inconvenience, it was completely unintentional. I'm not blaming anyone, I just hope you all understand now that even if you are happy with Microsoft and their products, it is still concerns you whenever they can deliver quality products for all supported platforms (after all, MSN on Mac OS X is officially supported by Microsoft), or not.

Oh, and by the way, since MSN - like it or not - is the de-facto standard for IM in many countries, why can't Microsoft just open up the protocol? It's not like they are making any money on this... Or are they?

First post

End of a long and busy day. Trying out a new Blogger widget for OS X which I found on Google's Mac-site . Not much to add for now, so I'm just going to post this now. Bye!