The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘apple’ Category

Man, am I pissed off!

I’m still sit­ting here with­out an iPhone and I think every sin­gle one of the many peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to at 02 have lied to me about it, repeatedly.

I’m fuck­ing fuming!

Imag­ine if I had to take Fri­day off because I was told IT was com­ing, only to be told on Fri­day that IT was com­ing on Mon­day. Imag­ine if today was my sec­ond day of miss­ing out on work, to wait for a deliv­ery that’s near as I can tell, not coming.

Now imag­ine I was look­ing at tak­ing a third day off to actu­ally receive my iPhone. Wouldn’t you be feel­ing homicidal?

I have the urge to crush, kill and destroy! Thanks O2!

Luck­ily, I haven’t had to take any time off work; I was off on Fri­day any­way and while I am work­ing tonight, Mrs. H is off today, so it wouldn’t have been a prob­lem if it was com­ing today.

But its not grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

This morning’s O2 liar is “inves­ti­gat­ing” why my order hasn’t been shipped yet. She says the “stock hasn’t been released”, which is bull­shit, because I was told on Weds that it was fol­low­ing my credit check. She says it could be still sit­ting in their ware­house, await­ing clear­ance for shipment…

As fuck­ing if!

There prob­a­bly isn’t a 16gb iPhone 3G to be had right now in the entire coun­try. The chances of a stray one, just sit­ting on a shelf in a ware­house with my name on it, await­ing someone’s green light is laugh­ably absurd.

I’ve just had a call back from O2…they still don’t know if I have an iPhone wait­ing for me. Their “sys­tem” is giv­ing them mixed sig­nals and its not clear what’s going on. How impres­sive is that?

The woman who phoned me back says she will keep an eye on my order all day and will phone back if it is shipped out today for deliv­ery tomorrow.

Put it this way, I’m not going to sit by the tele­phone wait­ing for that call.

I don’t think I’ve ever put so much effort into spend­ing my own money. This is beyond a joke. I wish I could go to another net­work and get one, O2 appear to be shite!

I have iWor­ries over my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G.

iDon’t think its com­ing today.

And ok, ok, enough with the iWord jokes. They are wear­ing a bit iThin now.

As I pre­vi­ously posted, I was assured on Wednes­day that my iPhone would be deliv­ered today, but that now appears not to be the case.

Accord­ing to O2’s web­site, I should have had a text mes­sage before 6pm yes­ter­day, con­firm­ing deliv­ery today. I didn’t get that text. Fur­ther more, a mate of mine who is get­ting an iPhone 3G as an upgrade has been able to track his pack­age all the way to DHL. My order is show­ing online as still “in progress”.

I’ve already phoned O2 this morn­ing. Yes I am sad.

The rep I spoke to told me they are still hav­ing prob­lems with their web­site and data­base and she couldn’t con­firm if it was com­ing today or Mon­day. She said the stock had been allo­cated, but it didn’t appear to be shipped yet, but because of their inter­nal prob­lems, she couldn’t be sure. Her feel­ing was that a Mon­day deliv­ery was much more likely, but again she assured me I was def­i­nitely get­ting one and told me not to buy one at the shop.

As if the shops have any left by now! I’ve had reports from my spies of small (10–30 peo­ple) queues at every O2 and Car Phone Ware­house shop they passed this morn­ing. With the very lim­ited stock num­bers, I’m not the only poten­tially dis­ap­pointed per­son in the UK today.

Of course, I could be pleas­antly sur­prised by the arrival of my brand new tech-toy, but I am not feel­ing con­fi­dent at all.

It seems like O2 screwed this up roy­ally and they should never have attempted to pre-sell them online. If they kept all the stock they had for the shops, I’d prob­a­bly be stroking mine right now. Instead, I fool­ishly believed that pre-ordering as soon as they went on sale would secure me one on launch day. Oh what a twat I am!

Instead of hav­ing a huge cel­e­bra­tion of gadgetery-geekery, I’ve spent the bet­ter part of this week suf­fer­ing from a bad case of tech-stress and cus­tomer ser­vice rage.

So there you go, its 9:30am on the 11th of July, inter­na­tional iPhone day and rather than play­ing with my new toy, I’m sit­ting here play­ing with myself and that’s no where near as sat­is­fy­ing as it sounds!

Please Mr. iPhone man, deliver mine today! I’ve waited oh so long and I’ve been oh so patient! I deserve to have all my iPhone 3G dreams come true!

Don’t I?

Doesn’t every­one?

That’s not wish­ful think­ing, the title up there. That’s what O2 told me on the phone today.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I man­aged to get a real live human on the phone, pro­vided the info they needed for my credit check and had it con­firmed that a black, 16gb iPhone 3G will be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Friday.

I’ll believe it when I see it, and so will you, because I’m going to post some pic­tures of it once its here.

Tune in again on Fri­day to see if O2 make one par­tic­u­larly demand­ing cus­tomer in north Lon­don very happy. I’m count­ing the sec­onds already.

Back in Sep­tem­ber, I wrote a lit­tle piece on why my phone was not an iPhone, yet.

But soon, my phone will be an iPhone.

iHope.

iPray.

iDream.

iPre-registered…

…for the brand new, shiny lick­able iPhone 3G just as soon as O2 let me. Yes­ter­day, I received an email advis­ing me that I could pre-order one of these lit­tle babies online and it would be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Fri­day, which is the offi­cial launch day for this lat­est ver­sion of the world’s favourite touch­screen mobile.

Sorted!

Or so I thought.

I placed the order before 8:30am yes­ter­day, put in all my details and saw the con­for­ma­tion screen with my order num­ber. They said I would receive an email with all of these details as well.

I’m still wait­ing for that email to arrive.

In O2’s FAQs, they say you can email them your PAC code, from your pre­vi­ous net­work and they can add it to your account, so I did.

The reply I received was a bit surprising.

I need to men­tion that this reply to my email wasn’t spot­ted by me until many hours later, because I slept all day, because I was between shifts.

I still am, so there will be another snooze very soon.

While I was sleep­ing, O2’s entire online order­ing sys­tem was melt­ing down into a steam­ing pud­dle of poo.

They were over­whelmed by the num­ber orders being placed, or “vic­tims of their own suc­cess” as I am sure some O2 spokesper­son will be stat­ing in front of a TV cam­era very soon. That’s what all com­pa­nies say when they can’t keep up with demand; its an oldie but a goodie.

So any­way, I wake up and wait­ing for me is an actual reply from an actual human O2 employee, who apol­o­gised for the lack of a facil­ity to input my PAC code when I placed my order and then explained what I needed to do with it (all after I receive the iPhone 3G) AND then went on to share an extremely impor­tant fact…

“Your order (on-xxxxxxxxx) for the 16Gb (Giga­bytes) iPhone 3G is cur­rently out of stock. You’ll receive your order on or after 11 July 2008.”

The key words in that sen­tence are:
– out of stock
– on or after

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

FUCK!

You have no idea how deeply my lit­tle heart sank at this most dis­tress­ing and unpleas­ant turn of events.

I ordered my iPhone 3G less than 30 mins after they went on sale and it sounds like there’s a bet­ter than aver­age chance I will be sit­ting here all day on Fri­day, star­ing out my win­dow for a courier that will never come.

Oh the horror!

I’ve been wait­ing a seri­ously long time for my iPhone 3G, for­go­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion which I could have had last autumn…and if I did get that one, I would be get­ting a free upgrade to the new model, just for sign­ing a new 18 month contract.

These ain’t tears of joy stain­ing my key­board, trust me.

So I wait and I won­der. Is there an iPhone 3G sit­ting in a ware­house some­where with “the northlon­don­hippy” on printed on the label!

I hope not, because there’s no way they’d know where to deliver it, but my real world name and proper address might be better.

You get the idea any­way, either I ordered early enough to have them allo­cate me one, or they have so few that they ran out in like 10–15 min­utes of online trad­ing and I’m screwed.

No one knows for cer­tain how many iPhone 3G’s are even avail­able, O2 and Apple have remained silent on this issue, at least accord­ing to the var­i­ous news­pa­per reports I read this morn­ing. The clos­est I got to any sort of detail was that one news­pa­per thought half the iPhone 3Gs were being pre-sold online and the other half were head­ing to O2 shops around the UK. How do you play the odds on that one?

So here’s my next quandary, do I can­cel my online order and gam­ble that I will have bet­ter luck at 8am on Fri­day at my local O2 shop? Will there be a queue? Will there be enough to go around? Will I get mugged on my way back home, because crim­i­nals read the news too?

I don’t have the answer to any of those ques­tions, except that last one…I would die or kill to pro­tect my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G, so you best think twice before you attempt to pil­fer it from me!

I’ve got mixed feel­ings about O2 already and I’ve only been a (non active) cus­tomer of theirs for only 24 hours.

On the one hand, I’ve had a per­sonal reply to my emailed ques­tion, but on the other hand, they have not con­firmed my order by email, as they said they would, nor given me any sort of update on my order’s progress.

In light of the mas­sive media atten­tion this launch has seen and will likely see over the next week, you would think O2 would be pre­pared for a sit­u­a­tion like this. Hold­ing emails and press state­ments would be out there already to coun­ter­act all the neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion I’ve seen about short­ages and poor cus­tomer service.

Maybe they should hire me to do their PR.

Then again, they don’t have to do any­thing. It seems we’re all slaver­ing like rabid dogs at the prospect of own­ing the lat­est iPhone and no mat­ter how badly we’re treated, we still want one.

It’s not like we can get one else­where, thanks to O2’s exclu­sive deal with Apple, we have no real choice.

I’m no dif­fer­ent, I’m will­ing to jump through mul­ti­ple hoops of fire and swear an oath to satan if I have to, as long as I’m clutch­ing mine this Friday.

Ok, I know I’ve already sworn sev­eral oaths to satan, one more’s not going to make a blind bit of difference.

As long as I get my god­damn iPhone 3G on Fri­day, I don’t care about any­thing else!

Please oh great gods of high tech­nol­ogy, may you be smil­ing upon me, your most wor­thy and devoted disciple!

Just gimme my god­damn iPhone, goddammit!

I pur­chased a full copy of Logic Stu­dio, Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of appli­ca­tions and loops, at the end of Octo­ber, when I bought my copy of Leop­ard. Around a week after that, I started installing Logic Stu­dio; yes­ter­day I finished.

Yes, you are read­ing that cor­rectly, it took me 6 weeks to get all of the soft­ware prop­erly installed and func­tion­ing on my iMac.

Why?

Sim­ple, because one of the instal­la­tion DVDs was no good.

The first time I tried to install the entire pack­age, the sixth DVD of seven was spit out by my com­puter, around 7 hours into the process. The DVD in ques­tion, Jam Pack Con­tent 2, had some prob­lem and my drive couldn’t read it.

Being the resource­ful sort, I decided to give it another try before con­tact­ing Apple. At the same point, around 7 hours in, the 6th DVD crapped out again. I phoned Apple.

Phon­ing Apple is never fun, they are always busy, you need to wait a while before you speak to the first human being and rarely can the first per­son you speak to, help you, neces­si­tat­ing a fur­ther wait. I was more relaxed this time, because I was armed with a fresh ser­ial num­ber and a recently pur­chased, boxed copy of Logic Studio.

After leap­ing suc­cess­fully through all the right hoops, I finally got to speak to some­one from the Logic depart­ment. I described my prob­lem to him in detail and he agreed I had a duff DVD. He con­firmed my details and said that a replace­ment DVD would be with me in 3–4 days. This was six weeks ago.

Like a twat, I sat by my front door, day in and day out, await­ing the knock of the post­man or courier with my replace­ment DVD and every day, it did not arrive. I stayed cool, I stayed calm, I waited a cou­ple of weeks and phoned again.

On sub­se­quent calls to Apple, you are armed with some­thing even bet­ter than a ser­ial num­ber, some­thing they call a case num­ber. A case num­ber from Apple refers to the spe­cific inci­dent you’ve con­tacted them about and it makes it much quicker to nav­i­gate through the hoops to get to the per­son who can help you.

I got the same guy in the Logic depart­ment, he has quite a dis­tinc­tive accent and that’s how I knew. He put me on hold to check on the sta­tus of my replace­ment and after a few min­utes, he returned to tell me that it would be with me in 3–4 days. This was five weeks ago.

I con­tin­ued to press my runny nose against my front win­dow, patiently wait­ing for the deliv­ery to come and mak­ing nasty, gloopy marks on the glass. I remained chilled, I was relaxed and as the hol­i­days approached, I for­mu­lated a plan of action.

I also did a bit of research on the inter­net and dis­cov­ered I was not alone with a dam­aged instal­la­tion DVD. It turned out many peo­ple had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence to mine, with the instal­la­tion fail­ing at the same point.

I’m guess­ing Apple had a seri­ous qual­ity con­trol issue with DVD num­ber 6 and get­ting them remade took a lot longer than expected. Or they just lied to me. Or both. It’s all very un-Apple.

I waited four more weeks, before decid­ing to phone Apple again and that was yes­ter­day. Just as I was look­ing up their num­ber on the ‘net to phone them again, there was a loud knock on the door and guess what it was! A courier with the replace­ment DVD. Yipppppeeeee!

I spent five more hours installing all the con­tent for Logic Stu­dio and at the end of it I was rewarded with a fin­ished instal­la­tion and all the loops and sounds in their proper fold­ers on my hard drive. Result!

Though, to be hon­est I was hop­ing to have a long, drawn out argu­ment with Apple which resulted in me receiv­ing some form of com­pen­sa­tion for my lengthy wait, but they stole my thun­der with their well-timed deliv­ery. If only I had phoned them a week before, per­haps I could have beat them out of some credit, or a free copy of Final Cut Express 4. Now, we’ll never know.

Now that I’ve got a full, work­ing copy of Logic Stu­dio cook­ing on my iMac, I can start think­ing about my next big exer­cise in futil­ity; my first northlon­don­hippy album.

Ladies, gen­tle­man and ston­ers, I’m pleased to announce that com­ing some­time in the 2nd half of 2008, I will be releas­ing the come­back record from a career that never was!

I present to you for the first time any­where, the title of my upcom­ing release:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins — songs about sex and death”

My back-up band, “the seven deadly sins” are actu­ally only a six-piece…Sloth keeps miss­ing rehearsals.

I’ll be writ­ing and record­ing the record over the next sev­eral months, aim­ing to release it for free on my web­site some­time this sum­mer. I already have the bare bones of 5 songs in the works and ideas for the rest. The whole thing will be down­load­able, along with cover art.

If 1 mil­lion peo­ple down­load this puppy, besides bank­rupt­ing my band­with for a decade, I promise I’ll take my band and go on tour. No joke, no lie. I reckon if one mil­lion copies of this album are out there, spon­sor­ship for a tour would be a piece of piss.

No DRM, no credit card num­bers, it will be com­pletely and totally free. I might make you han­dover your email address, so I can keep you up to date with a newslet­ter or some­thing, but I would never sell, loan or give your details to anyone!

Here at Hip­pyCo Indus­tries Ltd (a divi­sion of Hip­pyCo Enter­prises plc), your pri­vacy is impor­tant to us, just as is ours. For that rea­son, we’ll never phone you up at home for a chat or show up unan­nounced for a cup of tea.

Recently, I pur­chased a Sling­box Solo. I ordered it from Ama­zon and set it up a cou­ple of weeks ago.

For those of you who don’t know what a Sling­box is, please allow me to explain. A Sling­box is a device which you con­nect to your audio/video sources and to your home net­work and it allows you to place-shift your view­ing on a com­puter, in your home, or any­where in the world where you have an inter­net con­nec­tion and it also allows you to con­trol the source device.

I’ll elab­o­rate: I have a SKY+ satel­lite receiver and DVR (Dig­i­tal Video Recorder) in my liv­ing room, con­nected to my flatscreen TV. I’ve con­nected the Sling­box to the SKY+ and my net­work and the Sling­box takes the raw TV sig­nal and com­presses it, then streams it onto my home net­work, to be received by, say by my lap­top, wire­lessly in any other room in the house.

Are you get­ting the idea? In the­ory, I should be able to view my Sling­box out­side of my house, but I am hav­ing some port for­ward­ing issues which I’ve yet to resolve, because it goes through two dif­fer­ent routers before reach­ing the internet.

The Sling­box Solo is a very sim­ple look­ing device, with con­nec­tors on one side and some blinky lights on the other side. There are no but­tons or con­trols, the idea is to con­nect it, con­fig­ure it and for­get about it, every­thing else is done via the soft­ware you down­load, called SlingPlayer.

I con­nected my Sling­box Solo to my SKY+ via an S-video cable, as its the high­est qual­ity out­put sig­nal avail­able. My SKY+ is an orig­i­nal V1 Pace unit, feed­ing my TV via SCART, but the S-Video out­put mir­rors it. This means the Sling­box Solo only sees what­ever the SKY+ sees. If some­one is watch­ing the TV at the same time, you both have to watch the same programme.

I used a nor­mal RCA stereo phono cable to con­nect up the audio from the SKY+ to the Slin­box Solo and con­nected the power sup­ply. I also put the IR blasters above and below the SKY+ IR receiver as these pro­vide the remote con­trol functionality.

Finally, I had to con­nect the Sling­Box to my net­work. The Sling­Box only out­puts eth­er­net, there is no built in wi-fi, which is fine if your router is next to your tele­vi­sion. Mine isn’t, which meant using some sort of bridge.

My first try was an Air­port Express from Apple. They are nor­mally very robust and depend­able units and this was a cost effec­tive way to do it, but it didn’t work very well. I don’t know why.

I con­nected the AE to my net­work in WDS mode, con­nected the Sling­box Solo to it and within a minute, the Sling­box was con­nected to my net­work. I was able to con­fig­ure the Sling­box quickly and was watch­ing my SKY+ on all my Macs in fairly good quality.

It didn’t last, the band­with dropped dra­mat­i­cally, and at least once a day, the Sling­box would lose its net­work con­nec­tion, though it appeared the Air­port Express was still con­nected to my net­work. I had other net­work prob­lems as well, los­ing con­nec­tions to my dif­fer­ent com­put­ers and other Air­port Express units, used for music stream­ing, were hav­ing dropouts too. Reset­ting the Sling­box and asso­ci­ated AE unit restored my con­nec­tion and got the net­work work­ing again, but the same prob­lem hap­pened every day.

When I dis­con­nected the Sling­box and AE, my net­work per­formed fine, so I decided to con­nect the Sling­box another way.

I bought a set of Net­Gear Home­Plugs, which do eth­er­net over pow­er­lines and they are a total rev­e­la­tion. You plug them both into the elec­tri­cal mains and they find each other auto­mat­i­cally and cre­ate a durable and robust eth­er­net bridge between the two loca­tions. Once plug is con­nected to my Air­port Extreme, the other is con­nected to the Sling­box. Within sec­onds, they were con­nected and so was the Sling­box and its held the con­nec­tion con­tin­u­ously since I con­nected them. These things are very cool!

I’m still hav­ing slight prob­lems with my net­work; it grinds to a halt and loses the inter­net about once a day, but then comes back. I think I need to set it all up again, as my base unit is still look­ing for an AE in WDS mode and its not there any­more. When I have the time, I’ll reboot all the units and reset them up from scratch. That’s how it was before the Sling­box, so it should go back to being per­fect again.

I’m also deter­mined to sort out the port for­ward­ing, as it would be cool to watch SKY+ from out­side my home, either live TV or recorded pro­grammes. The Sling­Player soft­ware includes a vir­tual remote for the SKY+, which means you can dupli­cate any remote com­mand with a sim­ple click of your mouse. Very clever!

There are other mod­els of Sling­Box avail­able, some offer­ing more con­nec­tions for more devices, oth­ers offer­ing dig­i­tal and ana­logue TV tuners. For my needs, with one main TV source, the Solo was per­fect. I’ve got shitty free­view recep­tion here, so a tuner was point­less and there’s no need to con­nect it to a DVD player, because most com­put­ers are already DVD players!

If I wanted to watch SKY in another room, I could have a sec­ond box installed, which I would have to pay for and I would be charged a ten­ner a month for the priv­i­lege. It wouldn’t be con­nected to my main SKY+, which means it would only receive live tv. Also, it would be in one fixed loca­tion, like my bed­room. What if I wanted to keep an eye on the news, while cook­ing dinner?

The Sling­box is a cheaper, more flex­i­ble solu­tion, it offers great pic­ture qual­ity, at full screen res­o­lu­tions, any­where inside my home. When I can view it over the inter­net, which I am cer­tain I will do one day soon, it will com­plete the pack­age. It’s a wel­come addi­tion to my A/V arsenal!

Thank you for drop­ping by tech-geek corner!

Hey.

Yeah, you.

YES, YOU!

Hi there.

Thanks for drop­ping by.

You’ve reached the northlondonhippy’s hap­pen­ing web­site and that makes you very cool.

If you’ve come here today for some­thing gen­uinely enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive or inter­est­ing, you’re bound to be dis­ap­pointed. Today, all we are offer­ing is lame excuses and an invi­ta­tion to explore the rest of the site. There’s some good stuff buried just below this apol­ogy and even deeper if you can be both­ered to dig.

I’m let­ting the 100 posts thing get away from me, I can see my post count slip­ping away. I’m off for the next week, though and I’m bound to come up with some­thing in the next seven days. I’m aim­ing for 10 posts of an inde­ter­mi­nate length and sub­ject, but we all know how well my aims pan out.

I’m still adjust­ing to exist­ing in day­light and I’m still catch­ing up on my sleep. By the time I’m feel­ing nearly nor­mal, it will be time to get on the night­bus again, metaphor­i­cally speak­ing, of course.

I’ve just been chill­ing out for the last cou­ple of days, sort­ing out real life bull­shit that is as tedious as it sounds. I’ve still got more to do as well and I want to have some fun too.

I need to have some fun! I’ve earned it!

Fun, this week is not going to involve hard drugs and whores, no mat­ter how much you beg me, but play­ing around with my new copy of Logic Stu­dio. I spent most of yes­ter­day try­ing to install it, but one of the 8 instal­la­tion DVDs was cor­rupted, so I’m not there yet. Apple were cool when I phoned them and the DVD they think is dam­aged is to be replaced. I should have it in my hot lit­tle hands in a few days. Then, lucky me, I get to re-install most of it again. It will take around 4 hours, but once that’s done I’ll have all the con­tent I should have, loops, instru­ments, etc. Groovy!

Now, all I need is some tal­ent, but I’m sure they have a pill for that. They have pills for everything!

Wel­come to a lazy Sun­day with the hippy.

I fin­ished my last shift Sat­ur­day morn­ing, which tech­ni­cally means I worked the first 7 hours of my first day off. That, in my mind makes it an actual 1/2 day off. I’m off all day today, but back at work again tomor­row night. Does this make sense? I’ve got a day and a half off. So what am I doing with all that time?

Sleep­ing mainly.

I had a 4 hour nap on Sat­ur­day in the late after­noon into early evening, woke up for a few hours (and for a Japan­ese take­away) and then went back to sleep around mid­night and up again at 6:30am this morning.

If you are won­der­ing why I haven’t posted any­thing until now, I hope that answers your ques­tion. I also hope I’m not approach­ing proper blog­ging with detailed expla­na­tions of my fucked up sleep pat­terns and take­away menus. At least it wasn’t lunch!

As today is my only proper day off in the last week, I’ve got to do all the real life shit I’ve neglected while I was work­ing. I’ve got to run a few errands, do some stuff around the house and I’m hop­ing to have the time to fin­ish installing the last of my big soft­ware pur­chase last week.

Specif­i­cally, I’ve got a full, boxed copy of the new Logic Stu­dio, pur­chased at the upgrade price, because I have Logic Express. I think there are 6 DVDs or so to install, which means its prob­a­bly going to take a cou­ple of hours or more to trans­fer all that on to my hard drive.

After my next 2 shifts, I’ve got 9 days off and my plan is to put a fair bit of time into learn­ing this new appli­ca­tion and lay­ing down a song or two. I even have a cou­ple of things in my head, so I won’t be start­ing from scratch.

I haven’t done any­thing prop­erly musi­cal in around 20 years, though I’ve recorded some inci­den­tal music which I’ve used in videos and things. For exam­ple, the back­ground music on my nlh deluxe graphic promo is taken from some­thing I recorded around 3 years ago, when I first got Logic Express. It was a test record­ing and not meant to be any­thing more than that, but it worked for my pur­poses and there were no copy­right issues, since I wrote it.

The cool thing about the music I am hop­ing to record next week is that I have some lyrics and melodies already that I want to play around with and I’m going to try to sing.

I’m not a singer and I can’t sing a note, so this should be fun. I’m going to attempt to find my voice.

The most inhibit­ing fac­tor to this is that singing, unlike gui­tar or key­boards, can’t be hid­den with head­phones; you have to sing out loud. That means my neigh­bours will prob­a­bly hear me, only with­out the ben­e­fit of any guid­ing back­ground tracks. Oh, they are going to get a right laugh out of me!

If I really do come up with any music, I’ll post it here, don’t worry and you all will be able to down­load it for free. It’s not like a record company’s going to give me a con­tract! I’m not that deluded.

I brought a new kitty-cat home yes­ter­day and I don’t mean the fuzzy vari­ety. I pur­chased my very own copy of Leop­ard from my local Apple Store!

I did debate going last to the Apple Store last Fri­day night at 6pm, when they launched their lat­est and great­est oper­at­ing sys­tem, but I hate crowds and I hate peo­ple and quickly thought bet­ter of it. Besides, did I really need a free tee-shirt?

When I bought my first iMac, nearly 3 years ago, it came installed with Pan­ther, but a few months after that, I upgraded to Tiger, which I ran on all my Macs until yesterday.

Tiger is a great OS, sta­ble, easy and intu­itive to use and it brought me 2 and 1/2 years of com­put­ing bliss. Leop­ard appears to be the next log­i­cal step in the devel­op­ment of OS X.

The “300 new fea­tures” Apple keeps tout­ing is prob­a­bly a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion, but over all the changes appear to be welcome.

I spent yes­ter­day upgrad­ing my 3 main sys­tems, my new 24” iMac, my Mac­Book and my Mac mini. Each sys­tem took around an hour and I upgraded, rather than clean-install or archive-and-install. Apple soft­ware tends to be sta­ble and trust­wor­thy, plus I had the weekend’s field reports online to warn me of poten­tial instal­la­tion hazards.

One of the issues flagged up by the first installers, was some­thing called Appli­ca­tion Enhancer, a 3rd party frame­work, utilised by some 3rd party soft­ware. This frame­work causes a con­flict in the instal­la­tion which bricks your Mac, leav­ing you with the dreaded blue screen of death! Updat­ing to the lat­est ver­sion of Appli­ca­tion Enhancer will pre­vent this and if its too late, there are fixes posted on the net which show you how to rem­edy the situation.

Only one of my Macs, the Mini, had AE installed and I caught it before upgrad­ing, so no wor­ries there. The Mini was the first sys­tem I upgraded, because at a year old, it’s the old­est of my 3 systems.

The upgrade was a breeze, the installer walked me through a few screens, rebooted from the DVD and presto-change-o, it rebooted into Leop­ard, with all my orig­i­nal set­tings and files right where I left them.

After that, I did the iMac, which was extremely quick, around 40–45 min­utes from start to fin­ish. I fol­lowed that up with the Mac­Book, which took a lit­tle over an hour.

As each sys­tem booted up into Leop­ard for the first time, I had the chance to explore the new sys­tem. The first thing you notice is the login screen has a new back­ground, the Leop­ard desk­top photo. That makes a nice change from the plain blue back­ground, though I know there’s a sim­ple Ter­mi­nal com­mand to change it.

The sys­tems all boot up faster under Leop­ard. I don’t really know how Apple do this, it was the same with Tiger. Appli­ca­tions also seem to launch faster and in gen­eral all three sys­tems seem slightly more responsive.

I like the new look, the change in folder icons, the slightly translu­cent menu bar and the redesigned dock, all work very well. The Stacks con­cept is also very cool; when you click on a folder in the dock, the con­tents are quickly revealed for easy access. Put your Appli­ca­tion folder on the dock, if you haven’t already and you’ll have a very quick, easy way to launch any App you have installed. It’s sim­ple and clever.

Speak­ing of sim­ple and clever, the new-look Finder win­dow is much bet­ter too. The side­bar has been reor­gan­ised and is much more use­ful, with group­ings that make explor­ing your hard drive and other com­put­ers on your net­work that much easier.

Cov­er­flow, a fea­ture added to iTunes last year, is now part of the Finder and it makes brows­ing through files a pain­less task. Even bet­ter is Quick­Look, which does exactly what it says on the tin — select an item, hit the space bar and you can see just what’s inside the file, whether it’s a text doc­u­ment, spread­sheet or video — it’s all preview-able!

By far the most use­ful new addi­tion to the Finder is the screen-sharing func­tion, some­thing I do quite a bit with my Mac Mini.

My Mini is con­nected to my LCD TV and I use it pri­mar­ily for media, music and video. When I want to down­load some­thing on Bit­Tor­rent, I nor­mally con­trol the Mini from my iMac via an open source pro­gram called “Chicken of the VNC”, but I don’t need to use that any more, because a bet­ter, ver­sion of it is now part of the OS.

The screen shar­ing is fast, faster than Chicken of the VNC, but by far the best thing is it can repro­duce my Mighty Mouse’s right click. I could see how this func­tion would be of use to peo­ple with fam­ily and friends who have Macs, you can effort­lessly con­trol their machine and show the per­son on the remote Mac how to do some­thing, with­out too much trou­ble. If you have more than one Mac on your home net­work, I’m sure you will find this a use­ful tool.

The other major change I’ve noticed while using my Mac Mini is the com­pletely redesigned Fron­tRow. The user inter­face now matches the Apple TV, it’s more respon­sive and reacts to the remote con­trol faster. It’s also organ­ised more log­i­cally and you have finer con­trol over media play­back. This is a very solid and wel­come upgrade, espe­cially for me because I use Fron­tRow so much.

Another wel­come change is the new Down­loads folder, which is a new cat­e­gory of Home Folder. It lives on the Dock and I’ve already set up my Bit­Tor­rent client to use it. It means never hav­ing to hunt around for a down­loaded file again, that’s a very good thing!

In gen­eral, all of my Apps are work­ing well, as is every­thing on all three com­put­ers and I’m lik­ing every­thing I’ve seen so far.

I’ve yet to get my head around Spaces, the vir­tual desk­top tool, though I can see how it would be use­ful to man­age and run groups of related appli­ca­tions. I need to exper­i­ment with it a bit.

My one dis­ap­point­ment so far is Time Machine, which I haven’t set up yet. I upgraded to the new Air­port Extreme last sum­mer, in antic­i­pa­tion of Leop­ard and Time Machine, because of the AirDisk func­tion. AirDisk is the abil­ity to attach a USB hard drive to the Extreme and have it func­tion as a net­work attached stor­age (NAS) drive and use it for Time Machine. Apple touted this func­tion right up until recently and then all ref­er­ences to it disappeared.

I’m guess­ing that the func­tion­al­ity is still not work­ing prop­erly and at some point, it will be added back to Leop­ard. I hope so, any­way. Until then, it will only work with dri­ves attached to each Mac, locally and that makes it just too involved and expen­sive. My plan was to have one cen­tral drive work­ing with Time Machine on all 3 Macs and I’m prob­a­bly going to wait for this fea­ture before set­ting up this great new auto­mated back-up sys­tem. It’s a minor dis­ap­point­ment and one I am sure they are work­ing hard to address.

If you’re con­sid­er­ing an upgrade to Leop­ard and any of the new fea­tures appeal to you, then go for it! It’s solid, sta­ble and adds lots of cool new fea­tures to your already very cool com­puter! Apple will con­tinue to tweak Leop­ard over the com­ing years, with bug fixes and new fea­tures, just as they have with Tiger.

Rumour has it that Tiger is due for an update as well, which means Apple will con­tinue to sup­port it for some time to come. That means there’s no rush to upgrade to Leop­ard, but there’s noth­ing stop­ping you from tak­ing that next step in Apple’s OS evo­lu­tion! Fol­low in the hippy’s foot­steps and you’ll be run­ning the most advanced oper­at­ing sys­tem in the world!

Here is my slightly delayed, but finally com­plete review of my brand new iMac!

Two weeks ago, I took deliv­ery of my brand new, shiny, super­fast iMac. It’s my sec­ond iMac and 5th Apple com­puter in the last 3 years. You could say, I’m a bit Apple-mad!

You could be onto some­thing if you did…

I fell in love with my last iMac, I’m talk­ing seri­ous techo-geek devo­tion. The pre­vi­ous one I had was a 20”, 1.8mhz G5 model, which I still have and is still going strong. I might try to sell it, or it might become the media cen­tre in the bed­room. I haven’t decided yet.

The sys­tem replac­ing my old iMac, is a 24” alu­minium, 2.8mhz Core Duo Extreme model, with 2gb of RAM and a ter­abyte of hard drive. It’s quite a tech­no­log­i­cal leap from my old one.

First of all, it’s big…considerably more screen real estate than my 20”, around 30% big­ger I think. The screen is glossy, the same as my Mac­Book and I do like the way it makes things look. It’s very bright and the colours are very deep. The down­side is that it shows smudges very well, but Apple give you a cloth to keep it nice and shiny. I haven’t found glare to be a prob­lem and I do have a double-window right behind me.

It’s also con­sid­er­ably thin­ner and sleeker than my pre­vi­ous model. The ports run along the bot­tom of the back and not along the side.

It is also much qui­eter than the last one, with the fans barely audible.

I pre­fer the alu­minium case much more than the plas­tic. It has a more sub­stan­tial look and feel.

I miss the sleep light, which has been omit­ted from this ver­sion. I liked the way it pulsed, almost like a visual ver­sion of snoring.

Unbox­ing my new com­puter took no time, as it lifts out in one piece. All I had to do was con­nect the power cable and plug it in. I also had to put bat­ter­ies into the wire­less mouse and wire­less key­board, but that wasn’t com­pli­cated either.

I plugged a firewire cable into my new iMac and my old iMac and used the Setup Assis­tant to trans­fer all my data and accounts and that was the only hitch I expe­ri­enced. The old iMac rebooted about 2 and 1/2 hours into the process and I had to start again from scratch. Had that not hap­pened, with would have only taken 3 and 1/2 hours to trans­fer around 120 giga­bytes of stuff.

When I finally started OS X on the new iMac, my desk­top looked iden­ti­cal to the old one in every respect. My desk­top pic­ture was there, so were all my files, appli­ca­tions, home fold­ers, even my login photo! It worked per­fectly and was rel­a­tively painless.

It was actu­ally kind of strange, hav­ing a brand new com­puter, but it look­ing and respond­ing like the old one.

My new com­puter is light­en­ing fast, and will only get faster when I max out the RAM to 4 gigs. It was a bit pricey to do that now, but in 6 months of so, it will be a lot cheaper. Even with only 2 gigs, it still per­forms excep­tion­ally well.

I’ve played with some of the new appli­ca­tions that shipped with my iMac and from what I’ve seen, I’m very impressed so far. The new iPhoto ’08 is amaz­ing and a giant leap for­ward for the pro­gram. I’ve also had a look at the new iMovie, and I can see the direc­tion they are try­ing to take with it. I think, in time, it will be regarded more highly than it is now, but it will take sev­eral revi­sions to get to that point.

I haven’t had a chance to use the other iLife app’s yet, but will get there even­tu­ally. I have used Final Cut Express and Logic Express and both run exceed­ingly well. I’m going to be upgrad­ing Logic Express to the full ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio 8 in the not too dis­tant future, which will give me the full ver­sion of every­thing in Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of software.

I’ve also been test dri­ving iWork ’08 and I like it very much. I’m using Pages right now, to write this and I think I’m going to drop MS Office in favour of it. I’ve also used Keynote and think it is very pow­er­ful, yet sim­ple to use and could see using it for sim­ple ani­mated graph­ics again in the future. I’m going to buy a copy of iWork before my trial runs out.

Over­all, I’m glad I upgraded my desk­top sys­tem. I can see huge per­for­mance gains already and I really do appre­ci­ate the extra screen space. Leop­ard is ship­ping later this week and I’m sure it will run like a dream on my new machine.