Yawns with boredom, and wonders quite what is *wrong* with Apple Fanatics.

Honestly, you’d think they had discovered the cure for cancer or something. These people need help.

Cleaning the Apple aluminium keyboard – don’t!

As a user of this keyboard, which frankly I am extremely underwhelmed with, I was both amused and horrified to read this article.

I make no apologies for disliking this “design icon” from the hallowed design department of Apple, and of course with it’s white keys it gets dirty pretty fast – I use a wipe over with glass cleaner to bring the keys back up to a decent appearance – and I dislike the feedback that the keys give, but hey, I am no touch typist, so when I found this article via Boing Boing I had a quiet chuckle to myself whilst also realizing that there is no way that this thing can be seen as a self-maintainable product. Mind you, one could say that of so many Apple products, sealed batteries and the arcane Mac Mini case opening procedures spring to mind.

I remember cheerfully taking a basic Logitech keyboard into the shower, scrubbing it clean under running water, rinsing it out, drying it off, and it was back to looking and feeling brand new. I doubt that I will do the same with this one.

(Picture shamelessly copied from the original article)

Apple IPod shuffles are amazing.

Despite my “hatred” for all things Apple (he says, typing on an Apple keyboard into his dual-boot Mac Mini) I admit to being amazed this morning when I fell asleep, leaving my Shuffle still playing. Bugger is still playing as I wake up – it is much  smaller than a matchbox – and so I’m listening to it for wake up exercise duties. Amazing. Just invest in proper headphones (Sennheiser PX100s in my case – unbelievably good.)

A quick moan about Apple keyboards.

So what is this thing? OK, it’s sculptured, ultra thin, looks great as an example of minimalist design and is also very robust (take my word on that one!).

So what’s not to like (to use an Americanism)? I hate the fricking keys, that’s what! I have recently, and for the foreseeable future, got a shit load of typing to do. I am no touch-typist, but also I am faster than the average hunt & pecker. I use probably 6 fingers when I’m really motoring, or only 4 if I want to be accurate on this keyboard.

It’s the oh so cute “chicklet” keys! Not enough tactile response, and a slightly indecisive feel which means I have to pound on it to be absolutely sure that I am actually creating type on the screen. Which makes it noisy, which somehow undermines the sleek, modern, oh so Apple, design. If I wanted to recreate the sound of a 1950s Selectric typewriter, I would have bought one, ferchrissakes.

Solution: Laughably, in view of the cost of this “industrially designed marvel,” is that I may shortly be going out and buying my favourite brand of keyboard, Logitech. OK, it will have Windows keys, so a little minor readjustment required with the command and option keys, but I can bet it will much quieter, give better feedback, and be more accurate than this svelte little slice of aluminium. And probably cheaper too.

OK, rant over. Rest fingers time. Go cut nails before testing new keyboards. Calm down. Go shopping.

Images shamelessly stolen from Apple’s website – because mine is dirty, and because it’s their fault! 

An early Xmas present.

When I was in Singapore recently, I bought Mrs.S. her Nintendo Wii that she has been keen to get since it was released, and which I promised to get for her birthday. Fortunately I was able to get a good deal on a Japanese imported version, with games and extra controller etc. all for a price that still worked out cheaper than buying a grey import chipped version here in Malaysia. Carrying it back on the bike, along with my weekend’s luggage was, hmm, interesting. Didn’t slow me down though! If anyone spotted a bright yellow streak on the highway loaded somewhat precariously up to the max with luggage, doing about 200km/h then you had the pleasure of seeing Suzi the Flying Banana in action.

But as Mrs.S. and I went shopping yesterday for Xmas sundries for the cafe, I decided to cheer myself up by buying myself a present. Please note that I refuse to use the term “retail therapy” because it is simply used to mask consumerist greed, and I have no issue with buying things just for the hell of it.

Modest spending was the order of the day, and with my well known preference for minimalism, and the concept of small=beautiful, I purchased an iPod Shuffle. In my favourite colour, orange!

There are many beautiful things that have blown me away recently, and this tiny marvel is no exception. Smaller than a box of matches, superbly finished aluminium casing, and of course the Apple minimalist touch, no screen or unnecessary features. I have a 6GB Creative Zen for other duties, but wanted this purely for the form factor and the sound quality which is absolutely superb – not using the enclosed earbuds of course, but with my trusty Sennheiser PX100 headphones – with richness and clarity.

And I find the shuffle feature – which I never bothered using on the Zen -  to be great fun! I download a totally random set of songs, and then just switch the machine on, and do whatever I need to do. When Ella Fitzgerald suddenly morphs into Nine Inch Nails, and the Bob Dylan Theme time radio hour playing 50’s and 60’s music before a wall of Smashing Pumpkins comes along is a really pleasurable experience.

A quick and dirty snapshot shows the extremely tiny nature of the machine, but it can really crank out the music, even for my partially deaf ears If people mumble then they might as well be speaking Mongolian for all I know, and I have now developed the appalling habit of mumbling as well. Makes for long drawn out conversations, with lots of repetition required to catch the drift of the conversation. Especially bad in clubs or bars, when I simply cannot filter sounds and voices to manage a conversation Too many loud concerts, a liking for high volume music, and probably the main culprit, noisy motorcycle helmets. 25 years of helmet noise, at speed, will definitely have a deleterious effect on one’s hearing in later life.

But I digress. I love this little gadget, it’s quality and size and ease of use, which means that I end up listening to tracks that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for a playlist, and that’s great because surprises lurk at every song change. Highly recommended!!

My 43rd Birthday, and another mid-life change!

Back in the late 80’s, I was noodling around on an old pizza box Mac LCIII, and when money permitted in the 90’s I “upgraded” to a Macintosh Performa 6400. A horrific computer, crashed continuously, even after reading just about every “Mac Secrets” book that David Pogue had written. That was running system 7.6. When system 8.0 came out I leapt at the upgrade only to find more of the same. When it was good it was very nice to use, but when it was bad it was horrible! System restart after system restart, until I developed an almost pathological hatred of the “bong” noise as the Mac rebooted. I stuck loyally to it though, until I could take no more.
I retired the beast, bought a Texas Instruments Pentium 2 laptop running Win 95, and later Windows 98, and vowed never to touch an Apple again.
Until this month.
When the Mac Mini was released even I was hugely impressed with the simplicity and minimalist design. I am a fan of simple minimalism in most things, and a desktop computer that sat sleekly in a white and aluminium box, with just the slot loader and a bright white LED on the front just about tempted me to get one. But the specs were poor, and I already had 2 decent running laptops, so the Mini, and the necessary purchase of a monitor made no sense and I forgot about it.
But recently I have been getting fed up with my Acer laptop – first generation Core Duo – which has the shittiest keyboard ever made. It ran fast, due to fastidious stripping out of bloatware and services, but was heavy, very plasticky and after trying Vista on it I was so disgusted that I decided to sell it. I got an excellent price from a friend who really wanted it, and at the same time found out that the mac Mini had been quietly upgraded to a Core2Duo processor, running at 2.0GHz for the more expensive model. By this time I already had a decent viewsonic 19″ widescreen monitor and so I decided to make the change. My wife uses a Compaq laptop, which has a superb keyboard and great build quality , so we still have both systems running- and of course with Boot Camp I can put XP on the Mac as well. Or Vista if I choose to, LOL! Yeah, right…. ;p
Well, today is my birthday, so my wife presented me with a copy of Mac OSX Leopard which has just been released.
And I absolutely love it! It runs so fast and is so slick on the Mini. True 64bit OS, with new optimization of the graphics that mean even the GMA950 integrated graphics of the Mini can show super smooth video playback, even when hooked up to my 32″ LCD HDTV. Beautiful! And I also use it mainly for photo editing, and iPhoto is a nice, simple and fast program. In fact as the advertising says, “everything just works!” And it’s true! DVD creation, movie editing, photo organization and editing all built into the iLife08 package. And the new Coverflow file preview system is just magic, such a time saver. And the computer is silent – totally. Zero noise from the fan or hard drive. Blissful for late night working/surfing.

Bought one of those new sleek aluminium keyboards as well – such a pleasure to use.

So here’s the new desktop, fast, slick, beautiful to use, and I am an Apple fan once more! Click on it for a better view.