Redeeming an iTunes Gift Card Without a Credit Card
December 25, 2007

I bought my wife a lovely iTunes Gift Card this Christmas to start downloading some extra music to her iPod and was greeted by a rather uncharacteristically difficult time. I had imagined being able to set her up with iTunes and the gift card and letting her go, but alas - this was not the case. In Apple's zeal to get your kids to over-spend they've hidden the option to sign up for an iTunes account without a credit card. Well, we were actually prepared to begin sending the gift card back to Apple when thanks to Yahoo Answers (whodu thunk) I located the Apple docs on how to redeem the card without inputting a credit card.

Without further ado, follow these instructions (jump to "I do not have an iTunes Store account") to get your gift card setup without having to tell Apple your credit card number. Useful for kids and those who believe that their credit card shouldn't be floating around out there without cause. I truthfully have no idea why they hide this under eighteen menus.

Playing with OSX86
December 11, 2007

Some of you may have noticed that my posting frequency has severely plummeted and I've sort of dropped off the series of tubes. It's true, I've been super busy with non-Internet related things. So busy, in fact, that my main workstation is torn apart and is being rebuilt at the moment. A friend of mine recently got ahold of a nice shiny copy of OSX for his PC. Well, not to be shy I of course listened closely to his tales and will relate to you the story all about how his life got flipped turned upside down.

The installation boot process actually went very smoothly - so smoothly in fact that it was decided to just go ahead and wipe the disk and start from scratch. Alas, OSX would have none of this. It would seem that the SATA controller was not recognized properly and ended up going AWOL every time any sort of drive activity was attempted.

I tried formatting the disk every which way, but it would simply keep timing out. How long was the time out? Almost a full hour did it sit at "Preparing to Erase". I also discovered that even Ubuntu Linux 7.10 has issues with my SATA controller and it took good old fdisk to even begin to partition the drive correctly. Note to Ubuntu Live CD Users With Display Issues: Boot Graphics Safe Mode with the added boot parameter (F6) "vga=771" might just help you out.

One fruitless night of labor later it was decided to simply remove the SATA disk and replace it with a plain old IDE. Loe, the install then worked smooth as things that are smooth. Sadly, this is not the end of our tale.

First boot yielded a nice kernel panic which forced me to go about the arduous task of tracking down what caused it. Offhand, it seems to have been NVDRESMAN.kext which was causing me issues - and simply moving it out of the Library directory rectified that situation. However, what that left me with was a depressing 1024x768 pixels of resolution on both my monitors.

Unacceptable. So the saga will continue... next stop - the MacVidia project!

Update - 2007/12/10

Sadly my foray into OSX86 has ended badly. I managed to get everything else working with a myriad of custom drivers and hacked packages, my display continually eluded me. My final attempt at getting MacVidia to run caused the whole display subsystem to fail and wouldn't boot at all. At that point, I realized that it was just too much work to get something running that I wouldn't even keep around. So sad. Oh well.

Apple's Pricing Lately
August 10, 2007

Well, everyone knows that I'm a cheap-ass. I don't buy soda when I go out and I steal lollipops from orphans. I also oogle over the latest tech and love good design. What's a boy to do when Apple releases new hardware (besides posting naked pictures of Babbles on the Internet)? Bitch about their pricing, of course! I was drawn to comment on pricing over on Personal Bytes with a recent post about Numbers. Rather than simply say, "Apple's espensive! Neener!", I've decided to treat this with a nice little table! Nay, a set of tables!

Each of the Windows systems are configured with Vista Home Basic. Vista Business adds $100 for domain integration. The reason I didn't opt for that upgrade? OSX has never properly integrated with any of our AD trees at work. You might be able to get them to work, but with my modicum of tech skills I was never able to get it properly working. User profiles always ended up getting messed up in Win2k and OSX (that we have here, 10.3) just doesn't support Windows 2003 as far as I can tell. So, pointless upgrade. Feel free to debate!

Apple Macbook Vs. Dell Vostro Laptop 1000

Item	Apple	Dell
CPU	2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo	AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Processor TL- 60
Memory	1Gb	1Gb
Hard Disk	80Gb SATA	80Gb SATA
Price	$1099	$714

Verdict? Dell's 35% cheaper.

Alluminiuminumimunmimum iMac Vs. Dell Vostro Desktop

Item	Apple	Dell
CPU	2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo	2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo
Memory	1Gb	1Gb
Hard Disk	250Gb SATA	250
Price	$1199	$959

The verdict? Dell's 20% cheaper.

Summary

Dell clearly has the win on the laptop end, but Apple's hardware is definitely a lot cooler looking. Is it worth an extra 35%? My jury (and by jury, I mean budgeting software that won't let me buy anything until I'm done with college) is still out on that one. Apple is, however, forced to compete in the desktop market. You'll find that their iMac's price difference is not as large as the Macbook's. Maybe this is a sign of things to come.

Disclaimer: I threw these stats together quickly, so they're not the end-all-be-all of accurate comparisons. What they do represent is an uncombed relatively straight-forward comparison between between two readily accessible systems. I did not tweak the Dell or search for the best price. If anyone has any recommendations for the comparison, please let me know. I want this to end up being a fair comparison.

What Happens When Apple Dies?
September 25, 2006

I plugged up my iPod today and updated it with my latest Learn Japanese podcast and came to a sudden realization. Before happening upon the iPods, specifically the shuffle... I've never had a burning desire for an mp3 player. That is, everything else was just so big and ugly. I never wanted to pull something like the others out of my pocket and fiddle with it... but I'm happpy to be seen with my new iPod shuffle. Apple puts a lot of work into ensuring that their hardware is "prettily" designed. Most manufacturers use aesthetic design as a sort of afterthought. I wonder though... what will happen to the market when Apple exits?

Apple will exit. No corporation has an unlimited lifetime, especially technologically oriented corporations. They never last. Apple will die eventually...

I wonder though; what will happen when the high end designer leaves the market? Will the market be left to the cheapest && highest quality manufacturers... or will someone take their place? I have my doubts about someone taking their place because only software/hardware from Apple seems to take on these simple and lovely UI designs (both physically and in the computer world) that you see.

So... what do you guys think? Is there someone out there who will take their place that has been ignored thus far? Or will design die when Apple dies?

iPod Shuffle!
September 15, 2006

Through some amazing confluence of events I ended up wandering home with a brand new iPod shuffle yesterday. It's not one of the new ones (shown here), it's an old-school 512Mb one - but I could care less. It was free! I've already loaded it up with a boatload of my favorite tunes, and wore it all around the apartment while cleaning last night. It's quite nice to have something that I can use to drown out neighbor-noise with without worrying about bugging the decent neighbors. Yay!

How did I come by this lovely piece of hardware you ask? The line of conversation went something like this (while I was looking for something with someone in her place of habitation):

Her: *rummage* *rummage* Hey look at this iPod.

Me: Wait... it's still in it's package. You mean it's been hiding under there collecting dust all this time and hasn't been opened?

Her: Ya. Want to play with it?

Me: Sure... but what the hell would I do with it right now?

Her: I dunno, do you want it?

Me: *blink* Of course.

Fin.

Haji memashte yurishko. Mac scarteta des.
July 05, 2006

So, I finally got around to viewing those new Apple ads on youtube today. I have to say, wtf Apple? When attacking the competition, be certain that you cannot be attacked on the same fronts.

Networking and OSX. You see, OSX doesn't really speak the networking languages very well. While it may be able to converse with the polite little iCamera-chan from Japan that's been manufactured by Apple - it really can't converse with the dirty American Windows as well as it did in the video. See, domains and Macs don't work so well. No offense to OSX, because Linux doesn't play well with domains either - and Microsoft purposefully makes it difficult. Don't get me started on having to reboot the whole fricking OS after changing /etc/hosts.

I'm better at life stuff. Oooh, sonanda. "Music, pictures, movies... stuff like that... by 'better' I mean 'easier'.". It's interesting, because I've never heard the term "better" so simply defined as "easier". Surely, the "easier" solution to photo publishing is to not do it at all. I'm also confused, because iTunes is a pain in the ass.

The hiccuping PC joke is old, really. The latest releases of XP itself are rather stable. I can't even recall the last time that I had an entire crash of the OS as depicted in Apple's ad. I'm also a bit confused, because apps are roughly equivelantly stable in OSX and XP. I can get my OSX apps to crash just as much as my XP apps (which nowadays is rather rare). Sure, XP has that huge timeout bug with SMB... but OSX apps go ape-shit if SMB disappears.

So Apple, why don't you play up the fact that you've got a great Operating System? Point out your simplicity and good design. Give us screenshots and goodies, show us spotlight and the wonders of your search-directory things. Don't give us some kid making fun of PCs. It makes OSX zealots giggle, but the rest of us just aren't interested in seeing a company like yours behave that way.

( I apologize for the crappy Japanese spelling. I don't know the Englishized spellings. )