iDay

Yes, it is iDay. I am very excited, and a little depressed. I am very excited because the coolest thing ever, or at least in a long time came out today. The Belkin Mini Jack Converter for that one thing from Apple. Is it the iFoam? Some packing material I heard. Anyway, I want an iPhone very badly. Fortunately, I am going to get one. I just have to wait like 8 months. And if I am at all lucky, there will be 3G by then. I am OK with all of its "flaws" except for the 3G. That should be better. I have to say I am a little surprised it is not there. There have been reports of people noticing that their Cingular EDGE networks have seemed a little faster and one guy even took a snap shot of his screen on his phone of the results of a speed test. He got 200k or something. And the normal for EDGE is like 150-180k. This could mean that AT&T is doing some work to make their EDGE network a little ore bearable. But still, 200, even 250k if they managed to get their EDGE speeds that high, would not be much of an improvement. If Apple were to put a 3G chip in the iPhone, and who's to say they didn't already and it is a software update away, you would have speeds of 400k-700k anywhere you had AT&T coverage. Not just in that lame little wi-fi hot spots. When I saw the keynote and saw Steve introduce mobile safari that was the "Real Safari" I was excited thinking that omg, the iPhone is going to be the Internet in your pocket. But no, not exactly, he comes along not to long later to tell us that it is only 2G. He had better be glad he is Apple, and that there are still some VERY cool features on the iPhone, because that would have been enough to loose my interest if they were say . . .Sony. I think Apple would make tons if they didn’t get into the phone market. They just had a wi-fi safari browser and a touch screen iPod, and sold it for $299.99, or even $249.99. I would go out and buy it that day. The whole phone thing, I just don’t know. If they had left that market alone, things could have gone well. Or if they had less mobile features and it was more focused on being an iPod and internet device. If it were unlocked, and you didn’t need a new contract, you just needed to take it to your Verizon store, your T-Mobile store, and they would activate it for you, that would in my opinion sell just as well without the carrier lock in. My reasoning I personally think that people are all hyped up about this iPhone is this. People at this point in time, are pissed off at their cell phones. This may be true more or less, but on average people are not 100% satisfied with their phones. But carriers are different. Carriers, people are not only pissed off at, most people hate their carriers, carriers, and their phones. People think of Apple as the company that does things right, the company that makes things beautiful, simple, and easy to use. Now when such a company announces that they will be producing a mobile phone, this is what makes people so excited. Apple technically is going to have their iPhones running on the AT&T network, but is going to keep the interference between AT&T, and their iPhone buyers, to a minimal. For example, the activation of the iPhone is done in iTunes. This basically says to AT&T, “We want our costumers to have the easy of use that they have grown accustom to when activating their iPhones, so you are obviously not in the equation, kay?” AT&T agreeing to this is not a bad idea. Although AT&T might not have much control, they are going to make huge profits. For those of you who did not know this, Apple originally went to Verizon, a much stronger and more reliable network (sorry AT&T fan boys if there is such a thing) and Verizon did not agree to the terms Apple was proposing. Now I don’t blame Verizon entirely, they had no idea what this phone was going to be capable of; they didn’t really get to know anything about it. All that Verizon was told is that Apple would have full control over advertising, and control rate plans, but it would be fair. Naturally, Verizon did not want anything to do with that. AT&T (then Cingular) knew about Apple, and what they were capable of doing. AT&T was able to see that giving up control of one of their phones could bring in large amounts of profits. AT&T eventually agreed, and we are going to see how things play out over the next few months. But for now, we are going to have to just wait. More about me though, I am going to Great America on Sunday, and tomorrow I will be doing iPhone stuff and homework all day. Hopefully I will get to touch one and do a short write off of the multi touch system tomorrow as well. Let’s move slightly away from the iPhone, and on to networking. Out of the box, Macs are fully open to talking to other Macs, I print to other Mac’s printers in my house, and I save files on another Mac’s drive. But I have never actually tried to network my Gateway laptop to any of the Macs. I only wanted to today because I do not have a printer in my room, and needed to print something. I only print once in a blue moon, so this never really came up before. But today I wanted to. I am able to print to the iMac in the basement from anywhere in the house on the MacBook, but I would like the same capability on the Gateway. Well, five minutes on a mixture of google and Mac Help, and I found out that if I installed Bonjour on my PC, it would recognize the shared printers and set them up in the windows printer utility for me. That worked instantly. But then I wanted more. I decided that I wanted file sharing as well. (btw, I used it to transfer this post which I was typing in word from the Mac to the pc) So I went onto google, I went onto Apple’s help page, but eventually got my help from some forums that I was to excited to take note of the name of. (Sorry unknown forum) Long story short, I am able to not only see, but read, write, delete files on my pc from my Mac now, and on my Mac from my pc. Of course, Apple makes it much more beautiful. Good thing I have an XP pc too, because I would not have done this on a Vista pc.
-Ryan

6/20/07

Good Morning Yall! This is Ryan Brooks reporting from the Apple Store and am making this post on a press release iPhone. The store has since closed, and I am here with Steve Jobs and he just gave me all access to Apple's Cupertino headquarters to walk in on otherwise top secret meetings and all. How does multi-touch work you ask? I typed this with out a single error. Steve Balmer is trying to break in and get one now. Gonna go help Steve kick that guys ass.


-Ryan

6/18/07

Today was a good day I suppose. I will start with my day, but if that doesn't matter to you, scroll down to some format war news. Ok, I woke up to find that my family had left to my mom's sisters son's 6 year old birthday. So I had the house to myself all day, which was nice. I went down, made a Stouffer's casserole thing in the microwave, and ate that. Then I went upstairs, took a shower, and then I went down to the treadmill and fell asleep power walking. Not literally of coarse. I had my eyes shut and held on adjust kept walking. I got in 3 miles, and burned 350 calories. I Got my heart rate up to 209. It was fun. So I finished that, I started some homework. I did about 15 minutes of homework and then I got a call from my mom telling me that she was bringing me some steak from the party, and asked me to get bo ready for a walk. I said yes, and put my homework away. When she got home we walked bo, I rode alongside her on my bike. About 50 feet from my house, I decided to do a fishtail in a sandpit, and I did, and then when I went to pull out of it, the chain slipped off, so I had to walk out of the sand and walk the bike home. The bike is a nice one, it is only two years old. It has disc breaks and everything. It is not the first time this has happened either. So I am a little upset at Mongoose for building such a bad bike. But that was cool, cause I really don't care and have a hundred other bikes all over my garage. So I went in, ate the steak my mom brought me, and then I got back to homework. I did homework until like 20 minutes ago while talking t Derek. Then I took the MacBook to were I am sitting right now and pulled up Google Reader. Not much struck my eye until I found out that Blockbuster chose Blu-Ray as the HD disc format they will be marketing. This angers me because Blu-Ray players cost more, and it has been what, 8 months that you can purchase a Blu-Ray disc? And the coating on them is beginning to rust already. I like Blu-Ray more in theory, and I was on the side of Blu-Ray for a while, it has more capacity, has a cooler name, and Microsoft doesn't like them, whats not to love? Well, the players. They cost too much. An HD-DVD player is almost 50% cheaper. Half the capacity, meant you have to package your movies with 2 discs if it comes down to it. I am just mad because Blockbuster deciding to go with Blu-Ray is a pretty big punch in the face for HD-DVD. I hope the producers have chosen one of the two by the holidays, because my family is planning to upgrade out TV, out Player, and our sound system. And I don't want to have to old off because the effing producers are still throwing baby fits about why this is better, or this is better. Just shut the fuck up and choose one! If Blu-Ray does become the standard, I would hope that Sony is able to build a quality Blu-Ray player that is not lacking in features and is affordable. If Sony is unable to do this, I will not be buying, I will just stick with the HD on-demand Comcast movies for the time being. I used www.urltea.com today, and I like it much better than www.tinyurl.com. It is prettier, but it seems faster and more reliable. Plus, it automatically copies the shortened url to your clipboard.

Good Night All,

-Ryan

6/17/07

Ok, so I put google adsense adds on my site, feel free to click them, or not. I get paid when people click them, but there is something about taxes that doesnt make any sense to me, so I am not sure if I am ever going to get anything out of it. But they are not too obtrusive, and are supposed to be relevant to what I write about. I made an iPhone out of paper today, and made a video of it, which is the post right below this one. If anyone has any knowledge of how to handle the google adsense tax thing, please let me know.

tty all later.

-Ryan

My Paper iPhone

6/12/07

I am disappointed by WWDC07. I was hoping for new hardware. People who say it is just a developer's conference, there shouldn't be hardware, are right. But i have a right to be hopeful because there was a new Mac Pro introduced at last year's WWDC06. I tried safari for windows, and it looked nice, it froze up on me though. I am not a fan of apple's decision to put safari on PC. Maybe it is faster. Then just give us those facts and let the PC users feel bad. Oops, I meant to say make them feel like switching. (he he, no i didn't) I don't use safari anyway, and I don't intend on switching anytime soon. Although I have used it in the last 3 months. I haven't touched IE in like 3 years. And that was because I came across something that could not run in firefox, but now with the IE tab add on I can do everything in firefox, so I leave it alone. I have to say IE is the one of the things I hate the most about Microsoft. But everything Microsoft has built a pretty good reputation for sucking really bad. I have a PC in my room. It is a Gateway laptop running XP, it has a 1.3GHZ processor. I installed Ubunto and was up until 5 in the morning installing it the other day, and when you boot into it, the computer shuts off. I saw the video of WWDC07 and I saw Leopard. A quick thank you/shoutout to Apple Inc.

Apple, I want to thank you.
I want to thank you for making your software seamless.
I want to thank you for making your machines beautiful.
I want to thank you for Aqua.
I want to thank you for leopard which appears to more beautiful than all versions before it.
I want to thank you for being so reliable and a 6 year old mac that runs bug free to this day, and a 17 year old Performa that is now retired but ran just as well.
I want to thank you for giving me an alternative to crappy Microsoft products.
Thank you Apple.

I could continue with a list of things I wish Apple could improve on, but I dont have the time. I spent 2 hours trying to get a Linksys WRE54G to work, and it turns out, just like everything else I have ever ordered from Linksys, the install CD is a piece of shit and should be recycled. The directions do not tell you how to set it up at all. They just assume you have a linksys unsecured router. And that it is right next to were you will be putting this, (not sure why it would be, it is a range extender, it should be far away. So i gave it a poor review on cnet, and that is actually were I got tips and hints to hacking this thing to work. Ahh well, it works really well so far. I have a 90% signal right now, and I am 2 stories and a few walls away from the router. I wonder if the microwave is still going to kill my signal. gtg, I am back in school, and have homework again. ttyl.


-Ryan

6/10/07

too, but they just are not the same. Maybe one day I will love Oh, what an exciting day. I didnt really do anything exciting, but I feel excited. I have Ubuntolinux installing on the gateway at the moment. And I am ordering a 320GB 7200RPM hard drive for all of my storage needs (i could use a couple terabytes if I were to use it for ALL my storage needs) and that makes me very happy. I will be moving it alot though, and I know that is bad for a spinning plate hard drive. I will be moving it from computer to computer with gigantic files. Wait, i am thinking as i write this, i could network it through the imac in the basement, and just put it behind the desk in the basement, and access it over my wireless network. I am so smart, i just have to lay my ideas out on paper, or in this case lay them out on an LCD screen. I saw Pirate of the Caribbean today, it was the best pirates I have seen so far. But you might disagree. And I dont really care, so dont bother to tell me. I have noticed that I have a whole shitload of typos on the gateway, but one in almost every word on a desktop keyboard. But I almost never have one on the MacBook keyboard. I think we are a perfect match. It is to bad we are not. She may have a great keyboard, but I need way more power. I need an Nvidia graphics card with plenty of Joost power. And a processor that is 2.2 GHZ. I need a MacBook pro. I know there are people complaining that their macbook pro's batteries are blowing up, and dumb stuff like that. But i am choosing to ignore that and just pretend that we really are meant to be. I was researching the server that my home school uses, and it as an Apple X serve. Which are truly awesome servers and I honestly believe are the best way to network a large group of computers. Linux based servers are second, and microsoft ones are third. They have two G5 processors, which I hold a special place in my hart for. I love the PowerPC processors. If I had money to throw around I would buy a mac pro with a G3, another with a G4, and another with a G5 and just put them away in storage to seal that wound in my heart that longs for one. I may keep the G5 Mac Pro out for its power though. I like the intelsintel . . . what the fuck am i saying. Shut up ryan. You cant love intel. Intel processors are not made with that apple touch. They are just, well, made. To work. Like I said, I have Ubunto linux installing on my gateway. I have an 18.6 hard drive on that old thing, and 4.2 GB free, and u need 5 gb free to install this thing, so I went into CCleaner and got rid of everything and anything that I didnt think i needed. And then I emptied the recycling bin, and now i have 5.6 GB free, so i decided to go ahead with it and get an external HD because I cant live off of 600MB of free storage. I have more on my flash drives. BTW, I put an encrypted disk partition the size of my 1gb flash drive and used 128 bit encryption, which i am sure can be broken, but it is currently the standard for the FBI to use. So it would take many years, or a super computer to open it. And there isn't anything inside worth anything anyway, i just did it cause I can. but if you have a mac, and needed a place for some files. A place nobody can ever see, do this. Get the usb drive, plug it in, clear everything on it, and check how much memory there is one it. Then open up disk utility and click new image. Save it on the desktop, and name it whatever, but were it says 40mb, change it to what ever the free space on the usb is, and then click make, it should take a few minutes to make it, it will ask what pasowrd, (btw, click for security AES 128 bit) and enter whatever password u want. It will make, and then go to were u saved it and drag it to the usb. Eject the image, and the usb, and then put it back in. Open the usb, click the image, enter your pass, and then you are in the vault. Eject it at anytime to lock it again. It is your private storage location. I may do that with the 320GB one. idk yet. anyway, ttyl.

-Ryna

Thoughts on iPhone

Ok, so the iPhone is supposed to be all that. But will it be? I don't think so. I think it will most definitely be the most awesome phone on the planet. But for sure Apple cut some corners. 4, and 8 gigabytes? That is way too small to replace my iPod for sure. And that is just music. If this is going to be a revolutionary post-PC device, running a full version of OSX, hold your videos, well, i need at least 40 gigabytes. I do not remember details, but I know that about a week or a month after Apple unveiled it, some company introduced a 16 gig flash based memory chip the same size. Which would have been a little more acceptable. It it doesn't have 3G?!?!?!?!?! What the hell was Apple thinking? No 3G holy crap. No over the air downloads. It would be cool if you had iTunes and the iTunes Music Store over the air. Even if you had to pay a premium for each over the air download, it would make the iPhone a little more worth the price. The battery life is supposed to be 5 hours. That sucks. But you can not change the battery yourself. With Apple's history of shitty batteries, this is bad as well. Sure, the device may not be as sexy as it is not if there were a battery door. It has awesome software from what I've seen so far, and it looks like a pretty sexy phone, it screen has super high resolution for its size as well. But will the touch screen be as good as Steve says it is. Like I said, even with all of its downfalls, it is still a really cool phone. But it is not at all worth the price. Unless there is not a price on looking cool. But when all of these short comings become apparent to Apple in sales figures, as well as to AT&T, I think there will be discounts. When you look at the other "smart" phones on the market, all of them have a retail price close to the price of the iPhone, but they are being sold for much less with a 2 year contract. Can we expect to see this with the iPhone? I think so. I think Apple might have a few easter eggs, surprises, extras built into the iPhone as well. It would not be unlike them. I think Apple will have a second generation iPhone sometime soon as well that is finally up to standards and actually worth the price they are asking. The most I think I would pay for one is $399, and it would have to be as god as it is advertised, if not, I would only pay $249. Time will only tell. So we will have to wait and see.


-Ryan

6/6/07

I realize I have not posted in a while, I have been busy. If I told you what I was busy doing, you would call me lazy. But I can take it, and I need something to write about, so I will tell you anyway. I have been finishing up a year of school. I will never again see many of the people there. Some I have known for 2-3 years. So that has been sad. I have done a lot of sleeping (that is the lazy part) but only because I am very tired from being up late and getting up early waiting for news to break. Specifically Apple rumors. There was a rumor that there would be new MacBooks yesterday. That was not entirely accurate, there were however updated MacBook Pros. Which is cool. I am waiting for an upgrade to the MacBook line that includes a 15 inch screen and 2 gigabytes of RAM. It is true, that I can get all that in a MacBook Pro, but I don't want to pay extra for all of the extras included that I don't need in the MacBook Pro. I need a better graphics card than is offered in the MacBooks as well. So I might just end up getting a MacBook Pro anyway. But it would be nice if they made better MacBooks, The MacBook Pro line is designed for media editing professionals. The MacBook is designed for the consumer. This day in age, people do more on their computers than what the current MacBooks are built to handle. I could settle, if they added a better Graphics Card, and a 15" screen. I like the aluminum body construction of the Pros, but I can settle for a pretty little white book. Anyway, It is 2:55PM, and at three, next years cab driver is supposed to show up and talk to my mom and i can meet him if I were to want to. I am hoping very much it is not a minivan, I drive far too much to sit in an uncomfortable minivan to and from school two hours a day. I hope he has either a Ford Crown Victoria, or a chevy caprice classic. I prefer the ford, I have had drivers with them before and they are the nicest and closest I am going to get to riding in a Lincoln Town Car. They are built on the same platform, (not the same comfy suspension though.) Ahh well, I have nothing t talk about. I have a week off before summer school starts. I shaved my beautiful mustache off. I did it after the year ended to avoid all the attention I would receive. It looks good, I don't think I look as old anymore (or as masculine) but I like the way I look.

ttyl,

Ryan