Archive for January, 2008
January 17, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Apple / Mac
A peculiar thing I’ve noticed with Mac software is that there seems to be a lot sales and offers on where by you can buy bundles of apps for next to nowt.
I was oh so tempted by Give Good Food to your Mac back in December but just couldn’t work out what to get. The idea behind it was the more apps you picked the more of a discount you got. I was looking at trying to get an 80% discount but you had to pick 10 apps and that was like a $100 minimum and to be honest most of it was chaff… so in the end I couldn’t decide, which was a pity since there where a couple of apps I was very tempted by, namely CSSEdit and Pixelmator.
As it turns out though, another bundle sale cropped up, MacHeist II (which at the time of writing has 6 days left). And unlike Give Food to your Mac, its blissfully simple. 12 apps for $49. And two of them happen to be CSSEdit and Pixelmator! Normally they’d cost $29.95 and $59.00 respectively so even for just those, I got a bargain! There are also some weird mission style things going on in the forums where you can get extra stuff for free and I managed, by doing very little, to get a further $4 knocked off.
It’s also worth noting that 25% of the sales go to various charities, which sounds like a good idea. There’s 10 in total and when you buy you have the option of either donate to a selected one or all.
I’ve not had chance to tinker with the rest of the apps properly, but a couple stand out. AppZapper has come in very handy at tidying up the slew of apps I’ve being trying out and found I don’t want anymore. The clever thing with AppZapper is it’s able to work out where an app has put it grubby hands with regards to settings, files and related gubbins and just deletes it all. Speed Download also has come in handy, I’d say it’s Windows equivalent is GetRight which I used to use occasionally for downloads that were really slow or a pain to get.
Anyhoo, MacHeist is well worth a look!
Oh and first post from ecto… it’s pretty good actually! Seems to do a lot of what BlogJet does.
Edit: Hmmm, ecto seems to output really messy HTML so I’ve had to fix it with BlogJet.
January 16, 2008 at 9:56 pm · Filed under Chaff
We got this lovely email through to the help desk today:
It consists of a completely black screenshot, no subject or any text in the email describing what the problem might be, other than the standard signature and 20 lines of disclaimer telling you not to divulge the contents of the email to your pet squirrel (grey squirrels are terrible gossips) and the usual pseudo legal gubbins (the fact that this at the end of the email where you technically could miss reading it therefore making it pointless is another matter).
Anyhoo, I, with all the subtlety of an elephant on Viagra, would have loved to have replied with “That’s nice dear” and left it at that, but fortunately for us, I’m not on help desk and so the crack team that is, handled it with their usual slickness.
The email did however have some use and reminded me of one of my many favourite sketches from The Fast Show:
January 15, 2008 at 11:25 pm · Filed under Apple / Mac, Cool, Tech
Mmmmmm MacBook Air. Just watched the full Macworld 2008 keynote, pretty impressive stuff.
The Air is a really cool piece of kit and pretty well specced for an ultra portable. What gets me is how dinky it is. At it thickest, at 0.76”, it’s still smaller than the thinnest part of a Sony TZ Series! There are a couple of things that aren’t so good such as only 1 USB port and the lack of a removal battery, but I could probably live with that!
I was also impressed by the Time Capsule. A wireless n network hub + 500GB hard drive isn’t bad for £200. I remember reading up on home NAS style devices in PC Pro not so long back and they were more expensive than that.
The user reviews on Amazon for the NAS stuff listed in PC Pro came back with some real horror stories of them just been generally useless and a pain to connect too. I’d hope with the Time Capsule it’d be a doodle to setup and use!
It’s very tempting… Damn you Apple and your shiny new products!
Ars Technica has the full beef on it.
January 14, 2008 at 11:57 pm · Filed under Cool
Variation on a theme and clearly someone with too much time on their hands… bit like me for looking at his photos.
Before
After
Oh and of course there’s Portal in Lego too.
Found via BoingBoing.
Edit: Hooray first post of 2008! More to come in the next week :)
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