surryskingdom.co.uk

Finally, after selling a fair amount of my old kit on Ebay I saved nearly enough money to buy me a MacBook from the Apple store. I found myself £250 short but couldn’t resist the call any longer. So this morning I marched down to my local Apple store and splashed out £950 on a new MacBook.
This model comes with a 2ghz Intel core 2 duo processor, 2gb DDR3 memory and a reasonably sized 150gb hard drive. Graphics come courtesy of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card with 256mb of memory.
My first impressions are good, very good. Boots up quick, runs great and looks so sexy it makes working with the laptop on my lap a pain.
Once I’ve put in some serious hours with this new toy I’ll write more but until then, all I can say is so far so good.

As some of you may all ready know I’m selling on my redundant gadgets to rake in enough money for a new MacBook.  Ebay is my auction site of choice but I’m not sure why I bother to be honest.  In the early days of Ebay it used to be a pleasure to use but recently it’s become a head ache.  Here’s a recent example of why I think it’s now painful selling on Ebay and why I think their Feedback system needs a serious rethink.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a great game to play this halloween?  An excuse to shit your pants and not feel bad?  May I suggest you buy EA’s latest game “Dead Space”?

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game on the edge of my seat, fearing what I might find round the next dark corner but boy does this pull it off well.  The atmosphere is dark enough to make you feel on edge but not too dark making it hard to see what’s going on around you.  Sound effects also had me stopping in my tracks to make sure my weapons were fully loaded and ready for action.

Read the rest of this entry »

At this moment in time I’m desperately trying to sell enough of my old gadgets to buy a new MacBook.  Quite a challenge as the one I want is £950 but after using it in the Apple Store last week it’s going to be hard to resist the urge.

Beautiful is an understatement, the new aluminium case and glass screen make this latest editition to the MacBook line look gorgeous.  The buttonless track pad worked extremely well and all though made from glass didn’t feel like I expected, it was textured but felt so right.  This new glass touch pad also allows for multi touch functions such as scrolling, zooming and expose.

My Ebay auctions end on Friday night and I’m hoping to make at least £50 so I can go and buy my new laptop.  That’s right people, I don’t care how much or little I make, that MacBook is going to be mine, one day, you’ll see!

I’ve been toying with the idea of trying audio books.  You can pay a monthly subscription on such sites as audible or buy from places like the iTunes store.  Looking for a Michael Crichton book called Prey was easy enough, iTunes had a copy for sale.  Nothing could have prepared me for the price tag though.  £21.95.  Holy shit, that’s expensive, especially as the paper back version is only £6.99.

I think I’ll carry on reading rather than listening to my books.

After making the decision to move my broadband to BT about a month ago the idea of having a wireless router with an “N” rating appealed to me.  For a small amount of cash they offered me the BT Homehub 2 with wireless N on board.  Of coarse I took it, faster network speeds and greater range.

Read the rest of this entry »

There were celebrations in the Surry house last night.  My Lacie hard drive is alive again.  Turns out it was the power supply that had failed, not the actual drive.  Thanks to J for the loan of his power supply.  I can now order a replacement in the knowledge its money well spent.

The one good thing that has come out of this ordeal is my recognition of the importance of backing up data.  I’ve now left the Mac backing up all my data to the new 1tb networked hard drive.  As a secondary precaution I’ll be backing up photo data to mobileme (cloud based storage).

Since playing with the new Genius feature on iTunes I’ve found myself downloading more than my usual quantity of music.  It’s costing me a fortune, thanks Apple.

I have to admit the system has recommended some great albums so it’s not all bad.  I simply highlight a tune in my library and click the Genius button.  iTunes then lists recommended albums and tracks down the right of the window.  I can’t describe how good this feature is.  To say I was a little doubtful would be an understatement but after using it was left amazed.

Nice addition to the iTunes program, thanks Apple.

Oh dear!  After a few months of contemplating whether or not I should back my data up the inevitable has happened.  I’ve suffered a hard disk failure.  Oh bugger!

So what have I lost?

Well, I had 20gb of music stored on this external drive.  Lucky for me I synced my iPod 2 days previous so have my entire collection on there.  I simply download an application from the internet and copy it all back to a new drive.

Over 1600 photos were also stored on this drive including our wedding photos.  Lucky for me our professional photos were on CD.  All other wedding photos were synced to my mobileme account which means they’re available still.  To be honest I think the majority of my photos are on mobileme.  I have my entire photo collection on the iPod but they’re reduced in size before copying over.

I had copied backed up about 20 movies from DVD to my hard drive to enable my Apple TV to play them back on demand.  This isn’t so bad as I still have the original DVD’s.

My first port of call will be to return the drive to Apple and see if they can help out.  I think this particular drive has a 2 year warranty on it which means at worst they’ll replace it.  It may even be a simple fix like power supply replacement, fingers crossed!

I’m not sure why people still use portable CD Players.  They’re not that portable really and they only hold one CD.  OK, that CD could contain MP3 files which gives it the potential capacity to hold about 10 albums but still, it’s so 1980’s.  What confused me either more was a guy on the train this morning who’s odviously not short of a few quid as he was wearing a watch that I want, a Breitling of about £3000.  Anyway, he pulls out of his rucksack a Sony CD Player then sorts through half a bag of CD’s.  Dude, buy an iPod or similar portable media device, you’ll save space, weight and possibilby have your entire music collection stored on one device.

There is only one reason I can think of that would allow for the use of a portable CD Player on a train.  You’re an audiophile, a real music nutcase who appreciates music on a higher level.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts digital music is heavily compressed in the majority of cases which reduces the quality of what you’re listening to.  CD’s don’t compress the data as much so give a higher quality listening experience.  Touble is this guy was using some crappy Phillips ear buds so I’d hedge my bets on the fact he’s not an audiophile.  Instead, he’s a cheap fraudster with a fake Breitling.