Erm…BMW or Jag?

BMW released their new series-6. Is it just me or does it have a similar design to a Jaguar?!

Ten Commandments – thou shalt not fart

I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences with elevators resulting from mindless human behaviour. My recent experience reminded me of how animalistic we are, fighting for survival. Really? In an elevator?

I was literally stampeded by about 7 people rushing into the elevator (never mind the fact I was standing right in front of the doors to step off!) as I attempted to get out. This prompted me to search the Interwebs looking for elevator etiquette. I found the Ten Commandments of elevator manners, so to those 7 people who forgot their manners, this is for you:

For the full listing click here.

Logitech FreePulse bluetooth headphones

I have just realised I haven’t posted anything to my blog in a very, very long time. I now have something to say, I’m someone of few words as you can probably see.

Upon getting my hands on my iPad I could start to see an annoying problem arising. With so many devices capable of playing audio and video, my iPhone headphones in their spaghetti fineness were taking the marvel away from my gadgets. I found myself digging around in my Crumpler bag and ripping out tangled string tied around my lanyard and keys along with anything else they could clutch to in their protest of being dislodged from their resting place. Swapping between as many devices as I have (by choice) to listen or watch media, I was grudgingly upset with my headphones making my geekyness world less geeky by consuming time trying to unravel the mess. Where’s there efficiency and the coolness in that? Everything my gadgets lived for had their glory quashed. My solution? Wireless bluetooth headphones.

Now in my perfect world where I have wads of cash my dollars would be spent on Sennheiser, the God of headphone products (my opinion) but in the real world, I had a meager budget of $140. After streaming through countless reviews of products available in Australia it came down to two candidates, the first a BlueAnt product http://www.blueant.com.au/ and the second Logitech http://www.logitech.com/. The BlueAnt headphones blew my socks off that much that I can’t even remember the model number of the pair I was contemplating! It may have been the X5′s however they are now discontinued. So the obvious winner were the Logitech pair, the FreePluse wireless headphones.

Being familiar with Logitech products, I couldn’t fathom the idea that the FreePulse set would be terrible quality. Now you think I’m lining you up to show you my shock when I discovered the quality was bad, right? Wrong! I was actually quite impressed with the sound quality, the bass is fantastic, the only criticism I have is that sometimes you can hear slight distortion. I might not have enough empirical data however….these are the first Bluetooth headphones I’ve ever used and purchased. The reviews I read were pretty much correct, after an hour or so of use they start to hurt your ears and there are very minor drop outs which shouldn’t deter you from purchasing these in my opinion. I wear them to the gym as well while on the treadmill walking (fast pace) and on the cross trainer, they do not slip or get in the way. It’s a bonus not to have an annoying cord attached to your body while working out. I find that when you turn the device on, sometimes connectivity is a pain on my iPhone especially, which I’ve started to leave Bluetooth permanently turned on so I have no issues when turning the headphones on – connectivity is then fine. If your device doesn’t detect the headphones, you end up having to pair them again. With the iPhone now supporting A2DP profiles as well you don’t need the stereo jack Bluetooth adapter which comes with the headphones; this can be used on any device with a 3.5mm headphone socket to provide your device with Bluetooth connectivity to the headphones.

Overall I am extremely happy with this purchase, you get what you pay for which was around AUD$89.

Final Fantasy XIII – Oz release 9th Mar 2010

I’ve been a huge FF fan since the release of FFVIII, I had played a couple of the previous games however it wasn’t until VIII that I was really hooked. Hence why I am ecstatic to hear the Australian release date of FFXIII!

This is a long awaited release and one main decision that prompted me to buy a PS3. Lucky for Japan, they will get their hands on it December this year so from that we’ll get more in-depth reviews of the game and it’s highly anticipated battle system. There are also a number of awesome trailers out there so I recommend you check them out to get a better insight of the game.

The graphics are spectacular, it’s one of few games that will take full advantage of the PS3 hardware and game play is said to be very smooth.

Here are a number of links to get you up to speed on FFXIII if you’re not already:

Discussion of what was seen at E3
Story and game play
E3 2009 trailer
TGS 2009 trailer

Added new music page

I found a really cool WordPress plugin to import an XML playlist that you can export from iTunes. It’s called Tune Library, it was a pretty straight forward install and you just need to upload the XML file to the correct directory and add a new page to WordPress with the plugin code (you can get the details from the readme file in the Tune Library plugin folder).

You’ll find a list of my recently added music from the link on the top right hand corner which includes Michael Buble and Flyleaf.

I’ve ordered a Sony Reader Touch Edition

After selling my Asus EEE PC I was then on the hunt to use the cash to find a decent e-book reader. I have so many e-books and it’s such a hassle to read them on my Mac and the iPhone screen is just a tad too small, especially for images in the text.

I wasn’t too impressed with the Kindle which is now selling in Australia through Amazon. It’s too restrictive and I don’t like the idea of wireless downloads and the costs involved, particularly when I don’t need the reader to buy more books, I have plenty to read as it is. There are quite a number of other brands out there, all of which were either too pricey or the features were too basic. I started to go down the path of the re-branded Hanlin, the ECO Reader. The reviews looked decent however it was still pricey compared to it’s features. What really drew me to it was the number of file formats it supported.

It’s also rumoured that Asus are bringing out a new reader in December, not sure if it will be available in Australia, the digital reader market isn’t exactly booming here. I’m not a patient person so I don’t want to wait in hope that it might be released here and have better features. LG is also releasing a solar powered reader but out of my price range.

So in the end my final decision was with the Sony Reader Touch Edition (model PRS-600).

The PRS-600 sports a touch screen, after reviewing quite a few videos it appears to be quite responsive. It’s a 6 inch screen using E Ink technology which is quite common in majority of the popular readers. The device comes with a stylus to use however the screen buttons and menus are large enough to use your fingers. The only time you would require the stylus is to select words or make notes.

The freehand highlighting and annotation will be quite handy, this isn’t a feature found in all readers. I believe the Kindle or Kindle 2 has this however. The Sony reader allows you to highlight words in the text so you can revisit later and you can write comments onto the page which you can also refer back to from a menu – it will take you straight back to the page with your notes on it. There is also a search feature to look for key words and a built in dictionary based on the American Oxford dictionary. In the videos I’ve watched, I did notice that writing/drawing with the stylus is a bit laggy however it appears like it wouldn’t be much of an issue so long as you’re not scribbling at 100 mile an hour.

Other features include:

Adjustable font sizes, there are 5 to choose from

You can get around two weeks per charge of reading or 7,500 page turns. The unit will charge via the USB cable or power adapter

You can expand on the built in memory (512MB) with either a standard SD card or you can use the Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo cards, I have a number of each given I have a camera and a PSP

The screen resolution is 800×600 and has 8 grey scales

Compatible with both the PC and Mac. There have been reports that the Sony software doesn’t work well on the Mac, not sure if this is correct but I plan on using Calibre anyway

You can read books in either a landscape or portrait orientation

Here are some videos of the PRS-600:

ireadreview.com

user review on Youtube.com

Cons: A lot of people are reporting the screen glare is worse than most readers because of the touch screen. However by moving the screen slightly you can reduce the glare so it’s not an issue. The unit is also quite small, many believed it would be larger until they opened the box. For me, I’m not worried about that, I just need something that’s a bit bigger than the iPhone and isn’t as big as a netbook screen.

Once I receive the device, I’ll post further comments.

What do you carry in your handbag?

090930_GoBag

Originally uploaded by Ryan G. Biv

I’m surprised to see all this fit into just one bag! Or maybe I’m just shocked to what is being carried around. Everything from a laptop, a Kindle to cables lol. Hmm, makes women’s handbags not so bad right? Ryan G. Biv, where is the kitchen sink?! I’m sure there’s room for it.

Windows Live Writer and WordPress

I read some articles about posting from WLW to WordPress blogs so thought I would give it a test from my Windows 7 netbook. On initial config, WLW has recognised my blog and I can see my blog categories so that’s a good start! Let’s see how it goes.

EDIT: Ok, it posted without a problem. Posted to the specified category and tags worked as well. I also have Twitme installed to post an automated tweet when I publish a new post, it worked also.

Another card bites the dust :(

Found the source of a very loud bang that we heard the other night – popping capacitors. We needed to borrow a SATA cable from the PC and when I booted up the PC it was throwing BIOS errors. Upon checking the hardware I found these on the video card *sobs*. Second video card that my PC has fried. Thankfully, I’ve managed to get the PC up and running with no video card installed as it’s my file server.

Installing XP from a USB thumb drive

So I had the job of trying to install XP back on my EEE PC as I was having issues with Windows 7 that I didn’t feel like dealing with – performance isn’t the best so decided to go back to XP anyway.

After hooking up my IDE DVD drive to my IDE/SATA to USB adapter and firing up my old trusty XP Pro CD I received a BSOD while it was loading the files %$#@!#!. Thinking maybe a hard drive issue, I pulled that out and ran chkdsk…nope, everything ok there. Tried running the install again, still no go. Starting to freak out now because I have no other method of installing this quickly as the EEE PC does not have a built in optical drive and I am limited on the PC hardware lying around as I’ve converted to Mac. I tried a number of other Windows install CD’s to no avail, they either wouldn’t boot or BSOD.

Getting annoyed I decided I might as well try a USB install from a thumb drive. Dug out my 8GB Cruzer and formatted that and came across a quick setup solution here: EEEGuides.com: Install Windows XP on the Asus EEE PC. However! It appeared that this tool didn’t like my 8GB drive, whether it was due to size or the software that’s loaded on it, no idea. So hunted for the 2GB Sony thumb drive and used that. Frigging lifesaver! It was quick to run through so I didn’t have to muck around with PE disks/BartPE or creating any scripts. The tricky bit was getting an image of my XP CD as my Windows desktop had no optical drive and I didn’t have any apps on my Mac to convert it to an ISO. The optical drive I had appeared to be faulty so couldn’t use that. Soooo….the only workable drive was in my iMac but the OS wouldn’t allow me to unmount the drive to create an ISO so screw that, it was after midnight and I wasn’t going to Google why my Mac was misbehaving. Went ahead and fired up VMWare on my Mac which I have a VM of XP and I can access the CD drive from there. Installed a simple and light tool, Magicdisc to create an ISO image. Transferred that across to my desktop as the VM wouldn’t detect the thumb drive so I couldn’t do the setup there.

Ran all the required commands, mounted my ISO image to retrieve the Win XP setup files and voila! One Win XP setup via my USB thumb drive.

A lot of mucking around for something that should take 40 minutes and mostly unattended.