You can do pretty much do everything on the internet these days. You don’t have to go to the grocery store anymore and you can order pretty much everything you need to survive and have it delivered. Now for those of us who like to gaze off into the night sky and ponder the vastness of the universe, there’s no need to leave the comfort of the computer screen. And better yet, we don’t have to wait until it gets dark.  This new convenience was heralded with the launch of Google sky in august 2007. Similar to Google earth (a tool for visual exploration of the earths surface) but pointed in the opposite direction. The project was undertaken in coordination with the Space Telescope Scientist Institute and Hubble Space Telescope.

In response, Microsoft will be launching its own version of a virtual telescope called WorldWide Telescope by the end of May. Microsoft hopes to win some loyal Google Skiers with its attractive extra features. For instance the WorldWide Telescope offers relevant audio and video presentations so the user can get further information about the part of space that is currently being viewed.  In his announcement speech, Bill Gates alluded to the possible application of this kind of software to something like the genome project – it will be interesting to see how that turns out.

Despite all the improvements in Hard Drive technology, they are soon to become obsolete. How do I know this? Well, it has to happen. The Hard Drive contains a chunk of metal spinning at about 5000 rpm with little heads suspended just above the surface reading and writing data using magnetic pulses.. they are fragile, power hungry and they all fail in the end. Often before failing they get noisy.

The future is the SSD, the Sold State Drive which is faster, silent, much more reliable and unfortunately still much more expensive.

SSD drives are catching up in terms of capacity, and the price is falling all the time. Within a few short years the old hard drive will be like the CRT monitor, we will wonder how the hell we ever put up with them!

I’m a Mac fan, but I use Windows too and I don’t get involved in all this Mac Vs. PC thing because actually the Mac and PC both have their strong points.

I nearly fell off my chair when, after installing Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard and connecting to my network (which has a couple of PCs on the network) the default icon for a windows machine is an old CRT monitor with the Blue Screen of Death!   This is funny, but I’m actually surprised that this icon is the default.

I have been looking forward to OSX Leopard for ages, the launch was delayed by Apple earlier this year which annoyed lots of Mac users including myself.

The installation was simple on my Macbook pro, it took about a hour to do all it’s stuff but in fairness most of that time was in the installer verifying the system prior to actually doing the update.

It’s not all good news though, my gmail email stopped working the moment the upgrade was complete.  I read online that a few others were having similar issues so I simply started using my mac.com email address and redirected my gmail so that I do not lose any mail.  I was going to do that anyway and was waiting for a good time to do it.

Overall it’s a great OS, and in particular I like the Time Machine backup bit.  I’m a huge  fan of backup, on the principle that every hard drive fails in the end and lots of my data is really important to me.  I bought a big 320gb external drive to use with Time Machine, but that’s the subject of a different post.

I will write about Leopard again when I have been using it a while.

I have been using a Acer 22″ widescreen monitor for the last few months, but I needed another monitor last week so that my girlfriend can work on adding products to a couple of ecommerce sites that I run.  She had been using my Mac connected to the Acer 22″ and the wide aspect made her more productive than using a smaller screen so I decided to buy another 22″ for her.

I went to Pantip Plaza in Chiang Mai and looked at all the 22″ monitors for sale, which was easy because there were only two options, the Acer and the Samsung Syncmaster 226BW.  The Samsung looked the better monitor, and for only 12,900 thai baht I figured that on looks alone it had to be done, so I bought the Samsung and gave the Acer to my girlfriend!

The Samsung is a better monitor all round than the Acer AL2251w, which is not to say that the Acer is bad, far from it, but the Samsung is better.  One thing that may be an issue for many is the Samsung’s glossy screen.  It’s no problem for me as I have no light facing the screen, but if you work with a window behind you then it will be an issue.   On the whole I prefer do a matt screen to a glossy one, but the Samsung performs so well that it can be forgiven!

Like most 22″ screens the Samsung is 1680 x 1050 resolution.  On the Acer things looked a bit bitty compared to my Macbook pro which has the same resolution on a 17″ screen, but the Samsung makes it look smoother and nicer.  I have not tried the VGA analog socket yet as both my machines connect via DVI.  The Samsung can switch between analog and DVI at the touch of a button whereas the acer was tricky as you had to go into the menu to switch.

I don’t often pay attention to specs on a monitor, I trust my eyes instead.  The bottom line is simple, if you are looking for a 22″ screen then buy the Samsung 226BW and you will be impressed.

It says nothing on the box about Mac compatibility, but then few monitors do!  It works perfect with a Mac, no setup needed and no adaptors so long as your mac has a DVI socket (all Intel macs do).

I’m hard on printers, they always end up going wrong within a very short time of me owning them.  In the last 3 years I have had 3 Canon, 1 lexmark, 1 HP and 1 Brother Printer.  Actually the Lexmark, HP and Brother have all been Muti Function Devices.

I use both Mac and PC, so I need full compatibility with both.  I have plenty of room in my office but I don’t want to waste space by having a Fax, Printer & Scanner all on the desk, but I require all three devices to be top quality, oh and I dont want to spend too much money either!

I bought this Brother when my HP C5180 screwed up when printing labels and decided to say screwed up.

I don’t need to print colour, so this time I decided to buy a laser printer based multi function device.  There was plenty of choices, but the Brother has cheap toner and easy availability of both the toner units and other consumables, and the fax and copier work without the computer being switched on.  It has proper drivers and software for both the Pc and Mac.

I installed this on a PC first, the install was smooth and includes paperport, which is an amazing application.  The scanner can stack and feed hundreds of documents and archive them as PDF files..great.

The Mac software is good, it does not include paperport but my Adobe Acrobat software (not Adobe Acrobat Reader) seems to do a good job or archiving documents.

I don’t use the supplied scanner software on my Mac, just the Twain driver.  I can import a scan straight into Photoshop and edit it there.

The printer is great, the scanner is super, the fax is fabulous and plain paper faxes are very good if you are used to the old thermal paper rolls as I am.

This device just sits in the corner of my desk and gets on with the job, I can recommend it to anyone with a home office, small business, or just the requirement for a Fax, Scanner, Copier and Laser Printer.  Don’t ask me the spec, I don’t even know the maximum resolution, how many pages per min or whatever but I know it does the job and that’s what counts.

Today, even if you have a PC on your desk you are still using an interface and mouse system which was first introduced to the public in 1984 by Steve Jobs of Apple Computer. Ok, I know that the idea was first developed by Xerox in a lab, but the first person to bring it to the masses was Apple.

So your computing experience today is a direct result of that first mac introduced in 1984. I remember standing in a computer shop in 1984 looking at the mac and thinking “This is the future”, and I was right.. You may remember that at the time it was ridiculed in the US as a 2500 dollar etch-a-sketch, which was exactly why it was so good..it was easy to use.

Today the first couple of million Americans will be getting their hands on the iPhone , and in 5 or 10 years from now we will all be using iPhones or at least we will be using phones that mimic the features found on the iPhone today.

Apple is expecting to ship 10 Million iPhones in 2008, barely 1% of the market, and they will surely do so.

Critics point to the past failure of the Newton, but that’s not fair because the world was not ready for the Newton and in fairness the newton was not ready for the world when it was released. But with innovation comes risk, and Apple is all about innovation.

It’s under 1 month since I bought a shiny new MacBook Pro 17″, and they have just released a new one, however I’m not kicking myself for not waiting because these things happen when you buy any new computer.

Changes include Nvidia GeForce 8600m GT in place of the ATi that’s in mine, and the option of Core 2 Duo 2.4 which is a small improvement.  Also there is the option to have a higher resolution screen with 1920 x 1200 resolution in place of the 1680 x 1050 on the current model, and the introduction of 802.11n wi-fi in place of 802.11g.

OK, the faster processor would have been nice, I’m sure the Nvidia is better than the ATI graphics, and the faster wi-fi may be useful one day, but I’m still happy that these changes would not make any real difference.

Im not sure I would want 1920 x 1200 resolution on a 17″ screen, it seems top me to be the ideal resolution on a 22″ screen but may be a bit cramped for everyday use on a 17″.  Also, for me the benefit of 1680 x 1050 is that it’s the same as my acer 22″ monitor and everything stays in the same place on my desktop.  So, given the choice, even at no extra cost, I would (probably) not have taken the 1920 x 1200 option.

I guess the next step would be for Apple to offer a 19″ MacBook Pro screen option.  That would be nice, but already I find the 17″ a bit of a handful to carry around.   Anyway, I guess apple are to busy with iPhone’s to put too much effort into new MacBooks!

I have been a Mac fan since the start, well actually even before the Mac because I was a Apple ][ user many years ago.    I have been using PC’s for work since the 80’s, and I have switched a few times between Mac and PC for home use.

These days my home use  and professional use is blurred because I work from home in Thailand, I actually have 3 computers and a couple of old ones hidden away too, but I’m using my MacBook Pro 17″ notebook attached to a Acer AL2251W 22″ LCD screen on my desk.   The 22″ Acer is the same resolution as my MacBook’s screen at 1680 x 1050 so things look more or less the same when I switch from attached screen to built in screen.

Anyway, the point is that I’m using my Mac on a daily basis for website stuff, surfing, answering email, keeping lists in excel, and dabbling in forex and some trading stocks.. The Mac does all of this and does it better than any PC I have ever used, except for one application, FTP.

I discovered Cute FTP Pro on the PC a few years ago and it instantly made my life easier due to it’s ability to upload compressed and to recover from a lost connection without having to start a transfer all over again. This is something that many FTP programs do in theory, but in practice Cute FTP professional is the best one for me.

I tried a bunch of FTP apps on the Mac, the best one I found is the free Cyberduck FTP, but it’s not perfect because if the connection is lost half way through uploading a big folder then it just starts again and it can take ages.   I bought Cute FTP for the Mac, and I was very disappointed, it’s next to useless for me.

The answer was to use Cute FTP Pro for Windows and run it on my Mac in what’s called coherence mode using parallels.  That means the application opens just like any other and runs the same as it would on a PC.. only it’s on my Mac desktop. It runs like a dream, and I dont need to visibly run windows, I just click on the Cute FTP icon and the app runs after a delay of about 5 seconds whilst parallels kicks in, in the background.

I’m getting closer every day to being 100% Mac centric.

I have been a big fan of Apple ever since I got my first Apple II computer way back in the 1980’s. My first computer was a BBC Micro, but it was that Apple II that really got me hooked. There has always been something about Apple products that goes way beyond the call of duty.

For most of the last 10 years I have been using PC’s for my work. In 2003 I bought a 15″ iMac (the fancy dome with a 15″ lcd on that stainless steel arm) and swore I would never buy another mac, it was slow, the modem kept on disconnecting, and both the hard drive and the screen failed in the first month.

Last year I was wooed by the MacBook because I could run windows as well as Mac OS.. within weeks it was shutting down at random and I had to fix it myself because at that time Apple did not recognise the fault that is now well known as the RSS (Random Shutdown Syndrome).

I ended up selling my MacBook to a friend and buying a MacBook Pro 17″, and in the last few weeks I have managed to stay away from windows as I can now do everything via Mac Os Tiger..and I cant wait for Leopard as it looks great. Im keeping windows on my mac so that I can run Flight Simulator X, and so that I can still rin windows apps if I need to.

Today I read that Apple have released Safari Browser for the PC, I will download it and try it in the next couple of days. Im not keen on Safari because it replaces buttons on websites with it’s own aqua style buttons, which often looks bloody stupid. I guess they may not have done that with the PC version.

I’m convinced now, as I was 25 years ago, that Apple make the best computers in the world. There is something very special about a Mac that no PC has ever been able to achieve for me, despite serious quality problems a few years ago, they are still the ones to beat.

If you want a taste of Apple, download Safari Browser and you should get a feel for what makes Apple enjoy such fierce loyalty from its customers.

I’m not sure that the iPhone will be the revolution that they are looking for.. but I will certainly be a buyer in the first few months..like I have been for so many new Apple products over the years (remember the Newton..yes I bought one) provided they see fit to sell them here in Thailand.