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Bang for buck

Joel and I have been commenting back and forth in one of his posts, and I thought it would be better to just post a blog entry of my whole argument here in my site – instead of second guessing what “perspective” one has to take when stressing the point of the Apple-PC debate in terms of “value for money.”

In summary, the “debate” began from a linked article stating that the “myth” of Apple being more expensive than PCs is finally being debunked, now that the platforms are on a level x86 playing field. And just for the record, I agree that it is in fact a myth when it comes to a certain price-point with laptops.

What I just wanted to clarify however was at this point in time, when it comes to the desktop realm. This isn’t a myth at all. Apple products are indeed much more expensive than the PC counterparts beyond any doubt.

So I thought I would just post the following scenarios and points to clarify my stand.

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Peecee power!

I was happily computing 2 nights ago, when my “table” collapsed. You see, I have this small adjustable table which is right in the middle of my main PC (windows) and bed. That’s where I usually place my laptop and incidentally, my 200GB external drive (which contains my music, work, ebooks, and incomplete anime).

For some reason, the support suddenly gave way, which sent the top part crashing down, along with the stuff on it. Luckily, my Powerbook was on the bed at the time, but my hard drive wasn’t as lucky.

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NOW’s the time to try this

iScroll2 0.18

iScroll2 has just been updated.

via Joel’s blog

I posted a review comparing this little hack to SideTrack a while back, where the former failed dismally to oust the latter. But as I said in the past: it had a lot of potential. That potential already became a reality in its past releases, but the biggest hassle was it never saved your preferences… until now.

There’s only one problem remaining: making sure it doesn’t break on a OS system update. Other than that, for people interested in trying the hack out, I can honestly say that now’s the best time to do so. I’ve personally un-installed SideTrack for good in favor of this hack.

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Extensis Suitcase X1

X1

I was messing with my font collection so I could check out Extensis’ Suitcase X1 (pronounced “eleven”). I ended up moving so much fonts around that I wanted to start from scratch.

Stupid me, I even deleted fonts from my /System/Library/Fonts folder. But not because I had a death wish. I already had copied the said fonts somewhere and just wanted to do some sort of a “clean install” of them.

The bad part was I couldn’t copy the fonts back. Permission errors abound (which weren’t really permission related) Suddenly my menubar acted weird, apps started crashing (probably because they couldn’t render the system fonts (because they were erased).

I had no choice but to reboot… but on reboot, I couldn’t get into any GUI… I was thrown into the Darwin commandline. Sweat proceeded to pour down my forehead as I was thinking that I may just end up like Joel and his Archive and Install adventure… which I didn’t have time for. Read More

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More covert technology

The 2005 Powerbooks have an accelerometer chip to take measurements of the laptops’ motion (e.g. during falls, etc.)

Bubblegym 0.1

This is a tilt-sensitive game which uses the accelerometer in the new Powerbooks!

via Joel’s blog

The real purpose of said chip is:

Apple’s PowerBook laptops now have a little accelerometer inside that’s used to protect the hard drive if you drop it (it notices the sudden speed increase and parks the drive heads).

However, is it just me, or can that chip also be a safety precaution for Apple – so that people can’t just claim warranties left and right. Sorta like the black boxes of aircrafts… to determine wether it was “mechanical problems” or “pilot error” hehehehe.

But then again, you can disable it if you wanted to:

$ pmset -g Active Profiles: Battery Power 1* AC Power 3 Currently in use: acwake 0 … ams 1 $ sudo pmset -a ams 0 $ pmset -g … ams 0

So I guess it’s a cool safe thing to have after all!