No brainer?

You probably don't need me to mention this again, but I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy. But however beautiful, intuitive and user-friendly their hardware and software is, it still goes out of date. Technology does that unfortunately. You can have the most up-to-date, bleeding edge kit one day, and it's relegated to second-best the next. If there's an upside, it's that Apple kit does stand the test of time. The hardware's built to last and the software gets support for quite some time before its completely obsolete.

As I've mentioned in passing already, my iMac is a G5 Power PC running OSX 10.4 Tiger. Both the hardware and the software were superceded quite some time ago. I've resisted the lure of 10.5 Leopard for some time (so long in fact that I thought I could miss it out entirely and just jump straight to 10.6). This isn't to be though. 10.6 is for Intel processors only, so I've hit the upgrade wall with that one I fear.

I could save up my pennies and opt for a whole new machine preinstalled with 10.6 when it finally arrives, but I think by the time I'd saved up enough we may well be on 10.9 and I'd still be lingering in the unsupported software dark ages in the interim.

So what to do? If I can't afford a whole new machine, and my current one won't run the new OSX, I think my only option is to upgrade this iMac to make it as good as it can be to tide me over until funds allow something better.

So far as I can tell, the best way of me doing this is threefold. 1) Install a great big hard disk - this current one is stuffed to the gunnels, 2) cram in 2GB of RAM and 3) replace Tiger with Leopard. That would take this machine to its technological ceiling - it can't get any better than that.

Something else that came to mind was that my iLife suite is currently the '06 version (and that, in computer terms, is practically prehistoric). Apple have just released iLife '09. I was never tempted by '08, as it never got very good write ups (particularly iMovie 08) and seemed a bit of an incremental update rather than anything genuinely new, so I never felt the need to change. (There was never an '07, in case you were wondering.)

However, this new iLife 09 looks the business. Already people are raving about it, and it does look very tempting. And the best thing? Apple are bundling Leopard, iLife 09 and iWork 09 (their latest productivity package) for £149. If you bought Leopard and iLife separately they would set you back £152. iWork costs £69 on its own. Erm... is that a difficult decision? So I can have the two pieces of software I want for £3 cheaper than buying them separately AND you'll throw in iWork for free? Can I phone a friend?

When I finally get round to this mammoth upgrade, I shall be documenting the process (maybe even with photos) for your delectation. Mind you, I'll probably change my mind six times before then. That's half the fun though. Isn't it?

*** UPDATE 30/01/2009 ***

I've decided to bite the bullet and start the upgrade process, but rather than do it all at once I've opted for the "little by little" approach. I figured that changing the hard drive and upgrading the OS would best be done together, so the logical (and less expensive) first step is to max out the RAM. The iMac can handle 2GB, so that's what I've ordered. The down side is that because PC3200 DDR RAM is a fairly niche market now, the price is comparably high. If I had wanted DDR2, it would be half the price. Typical. Anyway, I've secured myself a shiny new matching pair of Crucial 1GB sticks for £50 and they'll be arriving next week.

OSX Address Book & gMail contacts - import workaround

My OSX Address Book is usually my most up-to-date list of all my contacts. Every so often I iSync my Nokia N73 with it, and my iPod Touch syncs every time I plug it in via iTunes. I also, from time to time import my Address Book into my gMail contacts list as well.

In order to do this - because gMail can't seem to get its head around a native Address Book importer - you need some third party software to export your contacts as a CSV file and then import that into gMail. I have used A to G in the past, but I've recently found AB2CSV which offers more functionality.

However, I came up against a bit of a problem this morning. Every time I tried to import my latest CSV file, I just kept getting an error. Try as I might, gMail was just not playing. So I turned to the internet for help - someone must have cracked this problem. And sure enough, they have, over at Breakitdownblog. Turns out the new "improved" gMail interface is the problem. If you click the link at the top of your gMail window to revert to the "older version", and then try it, your CSV file will import just fine and dandy. How very backward.

Test Post for Twitter Auto Update

Ignore me...

Tweety Pie

After becoming increasingly disillusioned with the chav-tastic mess that Facebook is becoming, I decided (rather than delete my FB account completely, although I was sorely tempted) to take the plunge with Twitter. So I've got myself an account, and I've set everything up to update Facebook using my tweets. No need to constantly go to Facebook anymore, but not cut off from it completely. Ideal. Also, my most recent tweets should show up over there in the sidebar... hopefully. If you're a Twitter user, feel free to follow me here.

*** Update 25/01/09 ***

No, sorry. It's no good. I've had to take it a step further. I've stopped updating Facebook entirely, opting to steer people towards my Twitter page if they're even remotely interested in what I'm doing. I figure those tech-savvy enough will do it, and everyone else won't bother. Which is fine by me. I think I've become a technology snob. Frankly, Facebook is now largely the preserve of Sun-reading Jeremy Kyle fans. And that won't do at all.

Physicality

A curious notion has been swilling around in my head for some time now regarding "our" relationship with the physical media I love so much. Were it not for the books, CDs, DVDs, computer games, photo albums and vinyl records (yes, VINYL!) there would be so much more space in my house. I'm very attached to this stuff, and it got me thinking about the brave new digital world we're living in now.

My good friend Rich did one of the most brave and awe-inspiring things I can think of a while back. He jacked in his job, sold his house and waved goodbye to almost all his worldly possessions - and then upped sticks to the other side of the world.

Whilst I am incredibly impressed with this exciting (and slightly extreme) take on downsizing, I was thinking the other day that I don't think I could be without all my "stuff". However, I constantly think we have far too much of it, and that it could be streamlined and much better organized.

I've ripped nearly my entire 300-strong CD collection into iTunes, so why don't I just sell/donate/bin the discs? Surely I don't need them any more? They're just taking up room?

I could buy a huge hard-drive, rip my huge DVD collection as DiVX movies and then ditch all the discs that are filling a floor-to-ceiling set of shelves next to me as I type this.

All the books in the house have been read over and over - surely we could donate them to a library?

As for the vinyl - I must be living in the dark ages.

But no. It's not going to happen, for two (maybe more) reasons.

1) I like having this stuff. "Physical" items are reassuringly real and tangible. Files on a computer just don't seem the same. The feel of the pages, the colourful artwork, the fidelity of the sound and pictures. It all adds up to something quite distinct, and something that I really enjoy.

2) What if you DO ditch all this stuff, and then - god forbid - something happened to the backups? Hard drives fail all the time. Now don't get me wrong, I'm fairly anal with my backup routine, but there's a nagging (irrational) voice at the back of my head saying "but what if the backup failed as well?!? Had you thought of that?"

The thing that's really been making me think, though, is that - for me - the ownership experience is just evaporating. I used to cherish going out and buying an album or a DVD that I had been looking forward to for months. I knew the release date well in advance, and the expectation was something to be cherished. I realise that we're only talking about relatively cheap items, but I selected my purchases with care. DVDs were always released on a Monday, and I'd even go so far as to pre-order items because I knew other people coveted these things as much as I did, and not to get my hands on them on release day would be sacrilege. I knew exactly when the "2-disc director's cut special collector's edition DVD with remastered footage, DTS sound and all the extras" was going to hit the shops, and I'd make the pilgrimage into town during my lunch hour to get it. I'd get back to work and occasionally take the sacred item out of its carrier bag and look at it, even going as far as to open the cellophane packaging so that I could wonder at the gatefold packaging and inlay cards.

Now I realise that you can still buy these things in real high-street shops, but I just don't any more. Whilst I enjoy/enjoyed the "retail" experience, I'm not so attached to it that I can afford to burn money. Internet retailers undercut prices by massive margins - why would you spend an extra fiver just so you could have the item in your possession on "release day". Just stick your order in on the website, and in a few days your faceless postie will manhandle a scruffy jiffy bag through your letterbox. You probably won't even bother opening it straight away.

We're so inundated with "stuff" these days that it's impossible to keep track of it. Who knows when that new album's being released, and honestly, who cares? And, as the volume increases, the quality goes down. Do manufacturers put the care and attention to detail into their releases these days? Do they hell. Stick the disc in a box and shovel it out as cheap as possible. No-one really cares these days. Better still, make it a digital download and we don't even have to worry about a box.

"Back in the day" there would only be one major DVD being released on the hallowed Monday, or computer game on the Friday. Now you don't know where to look - JUST TOO MUCH STUFF.

As far as I can tell - to my mind at least - there's only one retail experience that still lives up to my rose-tinted view of the world, and that's console releases. They still are real events. Witness the queues at midnight, the frenzied pre-ordering, the internet "unboxing" photographs. Ordering on the internet doesn't gain you anything - prices are fixed, and delivery will take positively AGES.

Funnily enough, the best products that still live up to my peculiar ideal recently have all been made by Nintendo. First there was the Gameboy Advance, then the Gamecube, then the Gameboy Advance SP, then the DS, the DS Lite and the Wii. I watched their development with feverish excitement, consuming every last bit of news I could get my hands on, then got excited when the release date was announced. I pre-ordered as soon as I could, and then the day would come where you I walk into a shop, slap the cash down on the counter and walk out with a real, tangible item that I had just bought there and then. Take it home, set it up - marvel at its shinyness. Bliss. But saying that, even hardware isn't that exciting any more - it's just a means to an end.

Quite honestly, the "ownership experience" is going, if not already gone. Digital downloads, streaming media and BitTorrent - why would you need anything else? The youth of today measure their musical and cinematic appreciation in how many gigabytes they've got, not whether it's actually any good - both in terms of content AND quality.  Will they ever understand or appreciate the wonder of buying, owning and using something "real"? I doubt it. The physical world is dead. Jack in grandad, and shut up.

Wholly unnecesssary

Much to the despair of my better half, I've just spent ten US dollars on a piece of really cool - but utterly pointless - software called Delicious Library. You may be aware of it already (it has been around a while) but essentially it's a cataloguing/library management tool for keeping track of DVDs, video games, CDs and books. It's Mac only (because it's too cool for Windows) and the killer feature - purely because it's so beautifully geeky - is that it scans the barcodes on your media in order to import it into the libray. You can do this via a firewire camera or if you're lucky enough to have a Mac with a built in iSight camera then you can use that instead.

I can't begin to tell you about the unadulterated peurile joy I've been having scanning in all my DVDs and games. I still need to do my CDs, but that's a mammoth task for another day!

At the moment, due to being stuck in the Mac dark ages with OSX 10.4 Tiger, I've had to limit myself to version 1.66 as opposed to the new and very shiny version 2.0 which only runs on Leopard.

And whilst I'm on the subject of OSX upgrades, I've been reading that OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard" will only be for Intel-based Macs. So that's me stuffed then. I was going to miss out 10.5 altogether and jump straight to 10.6, but that now looks like it won't be possible. So is 10.5 the end of the road for my dearly beloved G5 iMac? It certainly looks that way.

Controversial?

After getting my new HDTV just after Christmas, I decided that the DVD playback from my Sony DVD/HDD recorder (which I've had for five years, so it's practically prehistoric) wasn't really up to much on the new screen. The player had no option for any kind of upscaling and was plugged in via SCART so the picture really wasn't looking very clever.

I decided that an upgrade in the DVD department was in order and it came down to two choices. First - the expensive option - was to go down the Blu-Ray route. A decent "entry level" player currently stands at about the £175 mark. The DVD playback is supposed to be good as it handles SD upscaling pretty well, and then you have the brave new world of HD blu-ray movies to get into. However, BD discs are pretty expensive at the moment - in the region of £15-20 each so things would get pricey fairly quickly, even if I only got 2 or 3 discs to start with.

The thing that I had to consider was not only the cost. The TV I bought was not a particularly expensive one - in fact, really quite a bargain choice. It's not 1080p, and only 32" and I sit about 3.5 metres away from it. With that screen size at that distance on a 720p set I wasn't entirely convinced blu-ray was the way to go.

Option two therefore, was to go for the budget option - a DVD player with HDMI and upscaling. You can get these for anything between £50 and £100 and the results are supposed to be pretty good. I had heard good things about Toshiba's latest foray into DVD upscaling, called XDE, but their first XDE player - the XD-E500 - was supposed to be £120 so I discounted that as too expensive (almost into blu-ray terroitory really).

However, I'm a regular visitor over at AVForums.com and I spotted a post about the XDE player that said Comet were selling it in the January sales at half price. That's more like it, I thought, and promptly headed out to get one.

I have t0 say I'm extremely impressed. The picture quality, upscaled to 1080i via HDMI with the XDE trickery switched on, is fantastic - really crisp and sharp. Much, much better than what I had been getting on a five-year old player via SCART that's for certain!

My DVD collection is fairly sizeable (250 discs) and I'm pleased I can wring out some more enjoyment from it. I'm going back through favourite movies just to watch them in new and improved XDE-Vision! Another bonus is that the player came with a free 12 month subscription to LoveFilm so that's about £60 worth of rentals too.

The real icing on the cake though is the price of DVDs at the moment. I picked up a 2-disc special edition DVD of Mission Impossible at Sainsburys the other morning for £3. The equivalent blu-ray is £20. Case closed.

All Cabled Up

My 360 audio dongle arrived today, and I've just plumbed it in - HDMI and optical audio living side by side in perfect harmony! Wonderful.

I also indulged in a Nintendo component cable for the Wii, rather than using SCART. Although it produces a 480 line picture as opposed to SCART's 576 lines, it is progressive scan so looks lovely and crisp. The step up in quality from composite to RGB SCART was good, but this is a step further - pretty much as good as you're going to get from a humble standard def Wii.

So there you have it - all cables now in place, and raring and ready to go. I had a bit of a fight with my Harmony universal remote to make it work with all this new kit, but I've cracked it now.

With the exception of swapping out the HDMI lead that came in the box with the DVD player for something a bit better, I think that's it for cables and interconnects now. Good job.

Optical Illusion

I've just been on the mighty fleabay and got hold of an official Microsoft audio dongle so that I can use both HDMI and optical digital outputs of my Xbox 360. Bizarrely, Microsoft have opted to have the optical out built into the AV lead rather than the Xbox itself. There is an optical audio output built into the standard component hi-def lead which comes in the box, and there's even one on the SCART lead, but if you opt for HDMI then you're scuppered. Weird. Obviously it's not an issue if you're plugging the HDMI into an AV receiver that accepts audio over HDMI, but I'm not. I still need "old-fashioned" optical. And the other thing is Microsoft bundles the dongle with the top-of-the-range 360 Elite, but not with the lower models, meaning you have to shell out extra. Typical.

Anyway, it is bought now, so I'm looking forward to an HD picture and 5.1 Dolby Digital any day now.

Happy new year

Well, it would appear it's 2009. Let's hope it's a good one! There should be some interesting tech out this year, along with some top software, games, apps, movies and tv shows. Rest assured, we'll undoubtedly discuss and review them at length here. Bet you can't wait.