Another Pair Of Eyes

Shiny

I am now the owner of a shiny new 24″ monitor for my aging PC, which has meandered its slow and steady way to my Southampton home. It will rest here for the duration of 4th year, that I might better be able to game. It’s functional, still, but the step up from 15″ *wince* CRT (the 15″ TFT broke years ago, see) to the 1920×1080 resolution of the new one has hurt its confidence and it has some serious issues running things like Mass Effect 2 at full resolution and god forbid I even whisper the name Crysis. As such, next year it will be in for a revamp starting with the power supply and graphics card and eventually, funds pending, the motherboard and processor. Can’t be doing with shoddy looking things that should be beautiful (in some areas of Mass Effect 2 I was having to run it at 1024×768 which on this screen was like having your eyes beaten in with a broken pencil). And frankly, I like games and it’s been too long since I got to enjoy playing things which are less than 3 years old. It’ll be good to be able to watch films without huddling around my laptop as well (we have no TV in our house).

Never let it be said that I am all play and no work however, because it will also function as a big boost of screen real-estate for my laptop, for the readings and writings of papers and essays. Not, admittedly, the prime reason for the appearance of this display but still a valid one, I feel.

So there. And yes, this post is basically just justifiying the expenditure to myself.

Being sensible all the time is boring.

Steam

Today I was a-surfing the interblag when all of a sudden the world was brought to a sudden sharpness – [geek] Steam, a game distribution service (it makes computer games available to an account which can be signed into anywhere to download and play) which for the last 6 years has been purely PC, is now available on the Mac.

Sea change, much. Mac has been ridiculed as a gaming platform for a long time and rightly so considering the range of games actually available to it. Writing to a different OS is a huge hassle for companies and so the ‘why bother’ approach has been dominant for the decades in which practically everyone used Windows. Windows users are still far and away the majority, but there is a slowly-increasing share of the market using Mac products. Mostly, I should think, driven by the iPod and iPhone’s spectacular popularity. But that is a discussion for another time.

Anyway, result! The bigger companies are taking notice. The advent of Wine, an open-source cross-platform project aiming to make all games available on all platforms kicked things off a long while ago, and more recently Transgaming’s Cider brought companies a much easier method of ‘wrapping’ games so that they ran natively on the Apple OS. Crossover, another Wine-based project, has allowed me to run games which previously wouldn’t even allow me to run the setup.exe. Everything has been rather hit-and-miss though, and more than once I’ve had to tinker with parameters and settings and put up with navigating menus by sound and similar irritations. There are a number of big PC titles which have been illegally wrapped and pirated and are not available in the shops, which I find rather amusing.

Now Steam, a gigantic international gaming service, has turned it’s sights on capturing some of the nascent Mac market. The games available for Mac on it at the moment are limited – 63 at last count, with the majority being indie games. Portal is up there (free, I should add for both Mac and PC – download it for nothing if you will until May 24th) and Civ IV (which never really interested me), but otherwise it’s a bit limited. Steam have promised more releases each Wednesday for the next month, so should be interesting to watch, but for now it’s small fish. Despite this, it’s a big step in the right direction and one that hopefully will help usher in a more varied and fairly distributed range of non-academic pastimes for Mac users.

[/geek]

Limited now, yes, but in future hopefully things will change for the better…

iPad

Nope, I’m not convinced that there is a sturdy  market for this. I may be proven wrong, but frankly I don’t think it adds anything other than size to the iPhone.* I can see potential uses in labs for viewing images, specifically in my mind X-rays off of the hospital intranet, but other than that and a few commuting people who don’t want a laptop per se I don’t think it’ll make a big splash. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a pretty cool item, with a huge quantity of gadget cred, but gadget cred isn’t worth the £££.

The eBook reading function is a good try but I’m not sold on the idea that it will outpace, outmatch or out-pretty-much-anything the Kindle; being specifically designed for books and with a battery life to support that function makes it a vastly superior choice. And it’s cheaper. eBook functionality seems more of a tag-on feature for people who are going to get one anyway rather than a central pillar of the device.

Yes, the iPad is functional as a portable computing device, but I’d argue that it doesn’t have the same ease of use as a netbook when it comes to typing – it is not tactile, and watching the screen and typing is much harder on a surface that is completely flat as opposed to one that has a screen at a separate angle i.e. any kind of note/netbook. Obviously I’ve not actually used one, but I may go down to the apple store next time I’m in town and have a look at one. Currently, though, the idea has not sparked fireworks.

Thoughts?

*and it’s actually a lot more similar to a giant iPod Touch.

Primed

Yesterday a parcel arrived for me, and in it was a 50mm fixed-focal length f1.7 lens and it’s beautiful. I bought it off eBay second hand, and it’s an old lens which is always a slight risk (although the whole Pentax use-any-lens-ever-made thing is always reassuring – just leaves dust/fungus to worry about) but my concerns were unnecessary and it’s all fine and dandy – clear glass, smooth focus and an aperture dial that works. What more could I ask for?

Well, it’s an old lens, and it doesn’t have autofocus – I knew this when I bought it but it’s going to take some practise. I’ve taken a bunch of out of focus photos already, even with the camera helpfully beeping every time it notices that the lens is sharp. Practise will make perfect though (or it better!).

The gallery I said would be on this site should finally go up when I can get my laptop to an internet connection. Been a long time in the running, and finally you get to criticise heavily my inept imaging (and use of english).

=)

Procrastination

On Friday night, it rained. Several feet of rainwater fell through thousands of feet of sky, a few feet of earth, through a foot or so of concrete and finally the precipitous inches through metal casing into the ISS dedicated servers which run the University intranet, campus internet, and halls internet. Yup, for the past few days there has been No Web.

As I’m sure you can appreciate, this makes procrastination a lot harder. In fact, I was even forced to do some revision, especially as being without a phone for that time period meant that I had literally no way of contacting anyone short of physically going and finding them. However, I managed to waste huge reams of time (without the advantage of facebook) by:

• Cooking a complete roast meal
• Spending hours setting up my phone, once I received it this morning*
• Taking my old phone apart using my dissection kit, an tiny leatherman, white-tac and a fork**
• Going to the vending machines and spending all my 5p coins.
• Writing out 64 questions on respiratory anatomy, and answering them
• Highlighting where the answers came from in my book
• Numbering the pages of my notes
• Watching my eco-lettuce grow***
• Writing this convoluted post (surely not, a post of this kind of wandering aimlessness simply MUST be the result of a focused, efficient mindset)

As you can probably tell: productive.

Anyway, back to the point. With no phone, and no internet, I actually felt quite isolated. I couldn’t text one of my friends to co-ordinate revision, or indeed the ‘quiet drink before exams’ (which resulted in me being more inebriated than I have ever been in my life). Trying to organise anything with my friends in Monte (another set of halls a mile or two away from the ones I live in) was completely impossible. I couldn’t look up the lecture notes on the web, nor could I see what lectures I had to read up on once my night out kicked in the following morning. I couldn’t search for reference information or articles for questions I couldn’t answer. It just made me realise how much the internet has integrated itself in my life, and how much I rely on it during my day to day activities. Effortless communication is a huge benefit and like many things, you don’t really appreciate how much you use it until it is gone.

Much, in fact, like the inability to use my left thumb after I smashed it into an unspecified solid object in a dancing-related injury. But that’s another story.

*I am incredibly pleased with this phone. It is a phenomenal piece of kit, and really does begin to blur the boundaries between the net and phones. I can skype, msn, facebook, google search, everything…from my phone. And properly too, not the craptastic WAP of yesteryear, but proper 3G-speed access to decently designed web pages with an interface that isn’t the clunky scroll-though-every-possible-object approach that so destroyed the flexibility of phone internet before. Colour me impressed. It also doesn’t have a joystick =)

**The dissection of my old phone, once I put it back together, resulted in the screen being fixed so that it now works like it did before it broke, but after it started breaking, which was a big improvement. However, it also resulted in the lower half of the keypad no longer responding to anything at all. Never mind.

***I was given a pot of compost and seeds by some green types at the eco-fair which was being held in the Union as I was passing through to buy vegetables. I was presented with these items together with a cotton bag and an energy saving light bulb. The lettuce is growing, and is now bout 6cm high. All well and good, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to actually consume them – I’ve grown quite attached to the lil’ buggers and don’t think cutting them up and eating them would sit very well!

Contract

In regard to this entry, I have decided to take the plunge and get a contract. According to my manifold, scrupulous calculations this will save me a grand total of about £5-6 a month, as well as the cost of a new phone which would be a (relatively) major outlay. This is good, although not a little scary – call it commitmentophobia, stereotypical man-behaviour, poor financial organisation, whichever excuse you wish! Somehow the word ‘contract’ has a similar impact to the word ‘responsibility’ accompanying a door key when you were about 10. It has a weight far disproportionate to both its letter count and the item which accompanies it.

On the plus side, it gives me a credit record which I can wave proudly at passing mortgage companies when I’m older. And 1100 free minutes/texts. The latter is the important one really, I’ll be much older (and richer, hopefully) than I am now before the mortgage component comes into play.

I’m also leaving O2, with whom I have been since they were BT Cellnet. The nice man on the phone tried to sell me all sorts of things when I rang up to get my PAC code, but using my research I argued his sales pitch into the proverbial mud. I still felt a bit like a deserter though – funny how brand loyalty works…

Quality

You regularly hear people complaining that things just “aren’t what they used to be.” In some cases this is true, in some not, but it is definitely the case with a broad swathe of consumer goods. Especially, it seems, mobile phones.

I am one of those who was blessed with one of the Nokias which was the first really popular phone about. Can’t remember what particular 4-digit number the model was named with (I’m VERY glad they’re beginning to stop that with the N-series. It just made every Nokia sound the indistinguishable from every other one ever created), but it was the one with the aerial and was fairly…solid. It would withstand anything – I heard from people who’d dropped, flooded, immersed, thrown, flushed, sparked, run over and even boiled (albeit for a short time) their handsets and they were still functioning. One of those phones would last you years, and indeed I believe that my old handset still worked fine in the hands of my grandmother until her death a couple of years back. I don’t know where it is now, or whether it still works, but I’m confident that if it were accessible by me it would still function.

New phones do not have this ability. I’ve not had a phone last more than a year since that one, and to be perfectly honest the vast majority don’t last 8 months before faults start developing. My current phone, a Samsung U600, has a huge variety of malaises, from sticky buttons to a screen that mostly doesn’t work, or appears in any combination of negative colours, upside down/back to front and split in half. Sure, it’s got a camera and an mp3 player, but I own a camera and an mp3 player for those purposes and the battery life on this phone is so poor anyway that attempting to use these functions would reduce my battery life to minutes. My phone is 7 months old. Asking the guy in the shop, he said that he’d only expect a phone to last about a year. Not impressive.

I’m going to have to get another one, an expense I can really do without, however good the deal is. Unfortunately, my phone is the only method of contact I have at university outside of my room and I can’t really get by without one – it’s my link to home and friends outside of uni which would be gone in the near future when the screen finally packs up 100% of the time.