The northlondonhippy

Archive for July 12th, 2007

Who’s a lazy hippy?

Me?

Sort of!

I know it appears that way, what with me not post­ing any­thing in 10 long days. I guess it’s kind of true.

But look, just below this post, is my rather lengthy review of my new Mac­Book and a bit more on the role Apple plays in my life. I said I would do it, promised even and there it is!

I’ve been work­ing on the hippy FAQ as well. It’s not ready just yet, but when it is, I’ll have it added to the site.

And I haven’t for­got­ten about my promise to pro­duce a new “best of the hippy” list of posts. That will come, so all you new hip­py­fans can learn quickly why I am a “mes­siah for a new mil­len­nium” and the “biggest inter­net celebrity you’ve never heard of”.

I really am a “mes­siah for a new mil­len­nium”, you know and I can prove it. Look up at the top of your browser!

But by far, the coolest thing I’ve done in the last week is sort out the brand new, com­ing soon, “RooR Cus­tom 5.0 – northlon­don­hippy deluxe” bong!

Yes, I’ve been threat­en­ing to do it for a long time, but now I’ve actu­ally gone and done it! I’ve designed my very own RooR bong and it will carry my name!

I’ve finally got my legacy!

As the designer, I’m get­ting the very first one, but you, my beloved hip­py­fans will be able to buy my bong too!

The “Cus­tom RooR – northlon­don­hippy deluxe” will be for sale exclu­sively via my part­ners in the ven­ture, www.everyonedoesit.com or EDIT as they are known. The ban­ner adverts on this page will all lead you to EDIT as well. They are my favourite wes­bite and stock a wide vari­ety of prod­ucts that cool peo­ple like you and me dig!

EDIT already have one of the biggest and best selec­tions RooR prod­ucts on the planet, they also have one of the biggest and best cannabis seed banks in Europe. Legal highs – they’ve got ‘em, rolling papers? More than you’ve ever seen! Pipes, stash boxes, you name it. Have a look; I can’t rec­om­mend them enough! And I shop with them a lot, myself!

I’ve had some very high-level nego­ti­a­tions to pull off this hippy-bong-coup. Thanks to Ben at EDIT and Neal, the MD, we man­aged to visit the nor­mally, high-security and secre­tive RooR fac­tory in Ger­many to sort out the par­tic­u­lars of this major busi­ness deal.

It was awfully good of EDIT to let us use their cor­po­rate jet, because I hate fly­ing commercial!

The RooR guys were cool, they really know their glass, but as the best man­u­fac­tur­ers of glass bongs and pipes in the world, the bet­ter do!

The design team were very demand­ing and wanted me to jus­tify each and every choice I made. In the end, they all saw the ele­gance, sophis­ti­ca­tion and beauty of the “northlon­don­hippy deluxe” and they signed off on the sketches.

I’m not going to tell you any­thing about the actual design of the bong, not now any­way. Though you might have worked out already that it’s going to be 5.0mm thick. The rest will be revealed when I post the first pic­tures of the bong, the same time it goes up for sale on EDIT.

Start sav­ing your pen­nies, kids! The “northlon­don­hippy deluxe” will be the best bong in the world! As soon as you see it, you’re going to want to buy one for your own bad selves!

I’ve now had my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 2.16 Core2Duo, 2 gig, black Mac­Book for 2 weeks and man, oh man do I dig it!

What’s not to love? Apple have out­done them­selves in the design and exe­cu­tion of this very high-end con­sumer lap­top. I’ll say it right now, for those of you con­sid­er­ing a lap­top pur­chase in the near future…buy a Mac­Book and you won’t go wrong!

I’ll also state, for the record, that I am a big fan of Apple prod­ucts. I owned an Apple com­puter back in the mid 80s (an Apple //c for you true geeks out there) and returned to the Apple fam­ily in 2005, with the pur­chase of a 20” G5 iMac. It was the smartest and coolest pur­chase I ever made.

I saw how amaz­ing Mac’s oper­at­ing sys­tem, OS X worked, how sta­ble, easy to use and intu­itive it all was, I was sold.

Once I put my entire music col­lec­tion into iTunes, I knew I was onto some­thing. When I synched my con­tacts with Address Book and my diary with Cal­en­dar, all paired with my Blue­tooth phone, in less time than it takes to brew a cup of tea, I knew my life changed.

Apple makes the things you actu­ally want to do with a com­puter, eas­ier. Like set up the sys­tem. Edit video. Store and organ­ise your music, or pho­tos. It all just works, right out of the box.

For exam­ple, take my new Mac­Book. Guess how long it took to go from the time I signed for deliv­ery to the point where I was online, look­ing at the Google home­page on the gor­geous 13.3 inch LCD screen?

6 min­utes and that included unbox­ing it slowly and care­fully. OS X walked me through the set-up process, set by step, includ­ing join­ing my exist­ing wire­less net­work with straight­for­ward ease.

If com­put­ers intim­i­date you, or you’re tired or wrestling with bull­shit Win­dows pref­er­ence screens and Bios set­tings, come over to the light! You’ll never see that dreaded “blue screen of death” again.

My shiny new Mac­Book replaces an iBook that I sold a few months back.

The iBook I had, the 2nd to the last revi­sion sold, was a good, solid lit­tle lap­top and had the Mac­Books not come along, I would still own it. It was a very portable size, reli­able, and easy on the eye, but the Mac­Book just offers more.

A faster proces­sor, a bet­ter brighter screen, built-in iSight, mag­netic latch, MagSafe power adap­tor, thin­ner, lighter and it came in black – I had to have one!

The design is very sleek and min­i­mal, and typ­i­cal for Apple. I paid the extra for black, which many of you will think is silly. You can get a sim­i­larly spec’d white one for around 70 or 80 quid less.

What can I say? I like the black bet­ter, so I spent the extra money. Rac­ing stripes don’t make your car go any faster, yet peo­ple pay extra to have them put on. Is this any different?

Using the Mac­Book is a dream. It is very fast and respon­sive and I espe­cially like the “multi-touch” track­pad that can sense when you are using 2 fin­gers or one.

Tap the track­pad with 2 fin­gers and you pro­duce a right click, which is a rev­e­la­tion for me. I use con­text menus quite a bit and being able to repro­duce a right click with one hand on a lap­top is a very good thing. Drag 2 fin­gers on the track­pad and the dis­play scrolls, up, down or side-to-side if the appli­ca­tions allows. Very cool.

I wasn’t sure how I would like the glossy dis­play, but after using it for 2 weeks, I think it is great. I was con­cerned about glare and see­ing my face smugly reflected back at me, but this is not the case. The screen is so bright; even with the bright­ness reduced to con­serve bat­tery power, that it remains stun­ning and sharp.

I down­loaded some trail­ers from the Apple site, in glo­ri­ous 720p Quick­time HD good­ness and they played back with­out a stut­ter and looked pos­i­tively amazing!

I haven’t done much with the built-in cam­era, but I’m not much of an inter­net chat­ter or web­cam­mer, so this is not sur­pris­ing. When I was set­ting up my user account on the Mac­Book, Pho­to­Booth came up and I was offered the chance to take a photo, right then and there, to use as my login and sys­tem pic­ture. A cool fea­ture, that shows you right out the box, how user-friendly this com­puter is.

The mag­netic latch clamps shut with a sat­is­fy­ing, firm thud and the MagSafe power adap­tor lit­er­ally leaps from your fin­gers into the socket on the Mac­Book when you bring it very close.

Bat­tery life seems decent, I’ve had the Blue­tooth turned off, but the wi-fi on most of the time and I’m get­ting nearly 5 hours.

Rip a CD, or play a fea­ture length film from the hard drive and you can see the bat­tery drain faster. I’m guess­ing you could prob­a­bly watch 2 fea­ture films back to back on a full charge, but if you’re con­cerned about using it on a long flight, they do sell a MagSafe air­line power adap­tor as an optional accessory.

As far as every­thing else goes, what can I say? It’s a Mac, it’s as sta­ble and solid as my iMac and that goes for the hard­ware and software.

I’ve been on OS X for com­ing up on 3 years and I have never had a sys­tem crash. I’ve had appli­ca­tions crash, sure, but the actual oper­at­ing sys­tem doesn’t go down with it. I don’t know any­one with a Win­dows com­puter who can say the same thing.

I ran Win­dows at home for years and I still use it where I work. I was never a fan, but now that I am a Mac-head I pos­i­tively despise it! I restart my PC at work repeat­edly, because it’s always crash­ing or freez­ing. When some­thing goes wrong, the IT guys (who seem to travel in pairs these days), spend a lot of time scratch­ing their heads and going off to thing about what the prob­lem is, rather than actu­ally fix­ing it.

Look, if you like Win­dows, and you think its great, and you are happy with it, fan­tas­tic and well done you! But if you’re like me and you think it is bloated, messy and about as sta­ble as the SS Posei­don on New Year’s Eve, then I implore you to inves­ti­gate Apple computers.

Have you ever met any­one who enthuses over his or her Win­dows PC? Or Win­dows? Find some­one else who has a Mac and ask them if they like it. Pre­pare to have them go on and on, in glow­ing terms just as I have.

There’s a rea­son why peo­ple are enthu­si­as­tic about Apple. The toys they sell live up to the hype. Have you got an iPod? I bet lots of you do. Do you love it? I bet you do. Well, Apple com­put­ers are even bet­ter than their iPods!

Got an iPhone? Want one? I think we all fall into one of those two cat­e­gories, with the sec­ond one cur­rently being the larger of the two. Wouldn’t a match­ing Apple com­puter be nice?

You have no rea­son to fear Apple; Steve Jobs is your friend. He makes stuff to make your life eas­ier; to make your life better.

Bill Gates makes stuff to com­pli­cate your life and frus­trate you; at home and at work. He is very suc­cess­ful at this, that’s why he is the rich­est man in the world. You don’t have to buy what he sells; yet you do, anyway.

Apple com­put­ers are not more expen­sive, when you fac­tor in all the soft­ware you get. I have read count­less com­par­i­son stud­ies done on com­pa­ra­bly spec’d sys­tems, with sim­i­lar soft­ware pack­ages and the Win­dows ver­sion always costs more. By the time you add all the extra crap you need to bring a Win­dows PC up to the level of a Mac, you’ve ended up spend­ing a lot more money.

Let me describe my cur­rent home set-up:

- My 20” iMac, my main sys­tem, a desk­top. I use it for surf­ing and writ­ing, some down­load­ing and I dock my iPod with this sys­tem, so it has my mobile music library on it. I also use it for my seri­ous heavy lift­ing, like video edit­ing on Final Cut Express and record­ing music on Logic Express. The G5 proces­sor is show­ing it’s age though, espe­cially com­pared to the Mac­Book and even my MacMini, so if the rumours are true about a major over­haul to the iMac line…I could be replac­ing it some­time soon.
– My MacMini – con­nected to a 32” Sony LCD and my stereo, it also streams music to two Air­port Expresses. Used for all things media, it has my com­plete music library (my tunes, plus Mrs. Hippy’s), it also han­dles all film and tv down­loads, stream­ing video con­tent and video play­back. This sys­tem gets used a lot, I like my media

- My shiny new Mac­Book – surf­ing on the sofa while watch­ing TV and all of my mobile com­put­ing needs. I write on-the-go and it will be going to work with me. Now if I can access the com­pany wi-fi net­work, my work-porn needs are solved!

- Air­port Extreme – brand new, pur­chased with the Mac­Book. Only set it up a cou­ple of days ago and I have to say, the set-up was a bit Un-Apple. I’ll do a sep­a­rate post on this, but in the end, it’s now work­ing flawlessly.

- Air­port Express num­ber 1 – used to be my wi-fi hub, it is now in my bed­room, con­nected to a set of speak­ers, which receives music from iTunes via a wi-fi con­nec­tion and is rebroad­cast­ing my wi-fi net­work upstairs. I think that’s called WDS.

- Air­port Express num­ber 2 – Is in my kitchen, con­nected to a 2nd set of speak­ers. All this one does is receive music.

- My 60gb black video iPod – holds my entire music col­lec­tion and a few videos. I can’t say I have used the video very much, but as a music player, it sees loads of use. I have a dock in the car that is an FM trans­mit­ter, which lets me play it thru the stereo. It’s a Macally FM Cup and it works very well, even in cen­tral London.

I’ve edited films, turned them into DVDs, recorded songs with real musi­cal instru­ments and MIDI, I’ve writ­ten 2 nov­els and blogged my moth­er­fuck­ing socks off, all on Apple computers.

I can play the same music, at the same time, through­out my entire house. It makes blitz­ing the place with the Hoover a lot more pleasant!

I’ve been rec­om­mend­ing Apple sys­tems to all my friends for a lit­tle while now and every sin­gle one of them is grateful.

If you take my advice too and end up all grate­ful, a lit­tle gift wouldn’t go amiss. This hippy likes presents, so please send me some­thing cool and prefer­ably expen­sive! Just post it off to “the hippy” in north Lon­don and let the post­man do the rest. I’m famous, just like Santa Claus, I’m sure the pack­age will reach me just fine!