Blackjack II
We have been scoping the market for a half decent carrier of late, and high and low we searched without success. Had to weigh all options and some carriers offered an attractive package with roll-over minutes, but then the rest of the family is with another carrier that doesn’t offer much in the way of "bang-for-the-buck", "value-for-money" – what have you. Rissa and I finally found the carrier that makes most sense for us, and it’s AT&T. We finally started a family plan with them on the first of this month. By the way of phones we had the natural first choice of an iPhone. But that is a tad out of our price range right now, both in terms of initial and subscription costs. With AT&T making a data plan mandatory for an iPhone, the monthly costs for us as a family would be $129.99 a month. Way too expensive I am afraid.
So I decided to go for a Samsung Blackjack II, a Windows 6 based Mobile, similar in design to a blackberry. So far my experience with the device has been highly positive. My initial worry had been whether it would sync with my Mac. Missing Sync from Markspace came to my rescue with that. It works only with my Macbook Pro. It refuses to work with my Hackintosh installation, crashing my OSX each time. To be quite frank though, it has been rather difficult adjusting to a WM6 based mobile after having owned an iPhone for so long. Oh well, some things I do miss (touch & intuitive interface, native integration with Mac, the apps), and some absolutely not (the keyboard, worrying over the screen and scratching it, abysmal battery life).
But I have a phone at long last!
Successfully navigated back
A post my Rissa surmises was coming, and indeed she’s right, as always. I am back on Vista, having converted my Hack.in.t0sh back to a Vista machine. The reasons I will revisit once again, and are nothing new. I grew tired after a while of the slow response my behemoth of a machine gets from 10.5.x in general, and by software installed as well (Microsoft Office 2008 mind you). Leopard felt sluggish at best, and burning DL-DVDs used to halt my machine to a grinding stop, in spite of boasting four Gigs of RAM.
The move back was quite painless indeed – all it took was copying my stuff over the Gbps network to my server and formatting the HDDs from the GUID to MBR mode, and I was installing Vista x64. As of now, I sit here, getting reacquainted with an old friend – Vista and associated software. One thing that was apparent almost immediately – the OS and the apps therein are just so much snappier, with hardly any waiting periods (compared to the spinning beach ball in OSX and bouncy icons on the Dock). My favorite app DUMeter has been updated, as has Ultramon. Joy! I have not faced any x64 related issues with regard to drivers or applications till now. I installed SP1 and noticed the network speeds jump from 10MBps to nearly 50MBps in some cases.
I am back to Newsleecher in lieu of my Unison setup on OS X, and Live! Messenger instead of Adium X. Unfortunately one app I will desperately miss, is Qumana for my blogging needs. Word 2007 is good, but somehow it doesn’t cut it as a blog editor. But I shall adjust – for if it is the only penalty I must pay for a snappier and responsive OS, it is well worth the shift.
Well time to wrap up this post, and head with Rissa for our daily jog/run!
Firefox Adblock Plus and Flash on Mac, Twinkle iPhone and all that.
As a Firefox user on Mac, I make use of the plethora of plugins available, best of which I find Adblock Plus to get rid of the ubiquitous Ads that plague the net. If you haven’t installed ABP already, stop reading now – and sully not my site. Oh well just kidding. Since the very beginning though I have had this recurring problem where the Flash content on any of the sites I visited would not show up or would show up as a blank frame with controls enabled. For the life of me I could not figure out whether the issue lay with the browser or my Installation. Never really did I give it much thought, since hey it is Flash and I can do without that.
Today though, being bored out of my skull I decided to "Google" around to find if there were others who had this problem and ran across a blog post that suggested that the problem lies with ABP, and unchecking "Show Tabs on Flash and Java" will correct the problem. And voila, doing that, I have my content back. Not bad.
I am waiting "sehnsuechtig" for Firefox 3 though. It is blazingly fast even in the Beta (5) stage and offers a fantastic array of options dealing with tags, bookmark organization and not to mention speed. I must however wait till June for the same. What I love most about it, is the OS customized look and feel. Firefox finally looks tamed for OS X. The best I could find for FF2 was a theme that makes it look a wee like Safari:
An inelegant workaround at best. But oh well.
The past week has been rather taxing on both motivation and energies. Things have kicked into a high gear at a personal level, though have hit a new low elsewhere. I find myself Twinkle’ing a lot more often from my iPhone on the road. It is a unique experience getting to read Twitter micro-blogs now contextualized to location. It is remarkable how such a simple concept catches on. Being in Amsterdam, I could read what people around me were up to, and could instantly query people in my immediate vicinity regarding the best places for x or y. The community being new, has ample motivation to respond. For now it feels good to be amongst the pioneers of the Twinkle group.
The week ahead is going to be awesome. Rissa arrives on Friday for an extended break of seven weeks! Though it shall be slog time for her as she prepares for her boards, I shall get to be with my love, and spend time together, and spend what promises to be a glorious summer together! Preparations for her arrival are already on, as the excitement reaches a fever pitch. Although before then, there is a lot of stuff that she needs to get done – an exam, and stuff.
I hope the current bout of excellent weather continues – it has been sunny and beautiful the past few days and since I have a day off on Wednesday (Queen’s day in the NL), I plan to go to Aachen to enjoy the beer and the sunshine a wee bit.
Off to goof off some more, probably watch some more "24" etc. Cheers!
Leopard updates, EFI shines thru!
Just a short blog post regarding the recent OSX Leopard update 10.5.1. Attempts to install it the previous evening were met with abject failure on my part, and replacing stock vanilla kernel and kexts helped naught. I had to begin from Zero again, wiping my system clean and this time following documentation and common sense + logic to the T.
As it turns out, I have successfuly managed to implement a dual booting Vista+Leopard system running 10.5.1 *directly updated from Software Updates*. Am running a stock vanilla kernel with no additional kexts. I have fully documented the steps I followed, lest the problem should arise again. But due to the rock stable nature of the kernel I don’t foresee any problems cropping up.
lol and to those who "gang"ed up on me, lol y’all know who you are, BOO to you! I have fully working system, and it just runs dreamy! Oh ye, look at the pic and despair!
You have got to be kidding me!
Unbelievable. This post from my PDA. I am monitoring the CPU idle temps with the Akasa CPU fan. Um with the overclocking it used to idle at 58 Degrees C. Welcome now to 37-38 C. That is a phenomenal drop indeed! QUITE impressed.
