the P.Pole

This is long overdue!

5 things I had to buy recently:

• a hacky sack from Green Earth for $4 at Fairview Mall (Kitchener)
• Owl City’s “Ocean Eyes” album from HMV for $8 (on sale)
• a super secret present from a mystery merchant for $? (awesome)
• a squash racquet from Sportchek at Conestoga Mall for $60
• Rock Band 2 disc from Future Shop for $20 (thanks to Adwin for the tip)

Total: $92 + ?

The good news is that I will not need to spend any more money on any more things until after Christmas.

In other, more free, news, I started a new game in Tactics Ogre for the PSX on my PSP and am soon to acquire three Terror Knights, after having built up my two Holy Dragons. All that would be left is to recruit Vice back and then upgrade my main character (I called him Captain Owl, leader of the Snowls) to the Lord class (two swords + healing magic + major offense).

Also, if you are a Mac user, MacHeist is holding another nano-bundle thing and there’s lots of free licenses for paid software for members of MacHeist. Check it out if you like the proposition of free software! I am digging my free copy of Twitterific.

Okay before we talk about this, you should understand the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit. What it boils down to is how much memory (RAM) that your programs can access, as a function of how many binary digits you can use as a reference to where in memory you want to work. Think of it like this: how much information you can show on a road sign is sort of related to how big you make the sign.

Anyway, I installed my copy of Windows 7 Pro in 64-bit over my Windows XP SP3 partition today. I downloaded the ISO and obtained my serial number from the MSDNAA. The entire package cost me $0 since I am a University of Waterloo student, so there’s that for awesome uses of some services provided by my school. For fellow Waterloo kids with functioning Quest login credentials, here’s the page. Continue reading

Higgins is the tentative name for my new monitor that I received today. What speedy delivery Newegg has!

I’ve busted the monitor out of its boxes and wrappings and have been using it since doing so. Basically, this is a sexy piece of hardware that I am going to take full advantage of tonight, when I finish off Leon the Professional (starring Natalie Portman when she was 11 y.o. and some badass French dude) with my fair lady.

Higgins is a 22-inch, widescreen (16:10) LCD monitor from Hanns-G. I got him on discount and after all fees and taxes were paid, the entire bundle cost me around $213 CDN. This is including shipping, and also including a separate DVI to DVI connector cable (both ends are male…) from Nippon that I also ordered from Newegg.

So far, it looks super crisp (I’m glad I got the DVI cable) and after some minor calibration, the colors are a near-perfect match with Belle’s rosy visage. I’ve moved all my Geektool meters and my iStat Pro widget onto Higgins (developer’s mode FTW). Now Bellamy feels less cluttered and cleaner while I get to keep all the sexiness of Geektool on the secondary.

Once my dad returns home, I will borrow his fancy-pants DSLR camera to snap a few shots of this mammoth monitor beside Bellamy for you all to see. I actually hadn’t realized just how much extra real-estate a 22″ extended desktop would give me, and now I know.

I came upon this hack today and have applied it with complete success over power level 9000. Basically, the new MBP and the MBA both have gestures using four fingers that are possible considering the hardware inside but disabled by Evil Apple on the previous-generation of MBP (namely, my Bellamy’s generation). With this hack + OS X 10.5.6 and higher, this functionality is possible. The hack is painless and dead simple.

If this at all sounds like anything you’d be interested in doing to your previous-gen MBP, click here for the tutorial and file download.

Update: My dad wants me to also note a bunch of other shit I broke before, such as:

• my dad’s hi-fi system’s volume knob
• a USB extension cord my dad brought back from a trip
• I locked myself in a room as a tiny kid and my dad had to break down the door to get me to stop crying
• there was a LEGO piece I dropped in the toilet once, and not only did I not reach in to get it, I instantly decided flushing it would make sense
• many, many MP3 devices
• my badminton racket that cracked right after I bought a second
• multiple bowls of my mom’s
• and the list goes on; my family is full of petty misers and grudging schnooks apparently

5 habits I should adopt:

• [ ] drink more water regularly throughout the day
• [ ] wake up early to exercise in the morning
• [ ] head to bed before 11 pm every night
• [ ] 48 hour “cool-off” period before purchasing anything frivolous
• [ ] stop breaking stuff

I have always had a tendency to break stuff rather unluckily. When I was tiny, I busted the window at my grandparents’ house by tossing a very light ball at it. WTF. I also broke a telephone in that same house and was yelled at by my grandfather. Later, I suggested that the cops should come arrest him. Keep in mind, I was too small to remember this without the wonders of home video.

More recently, I busted my grandparents’ garage door, which had still worked fine for years after my aunt had driven a whole honking car into it. Somehow, I broke it by closing it. WTF. I also managed to brick my PSP as soon as I got it. Luckily there was a fix for that eventually.

Most recently, I busted my iPod. By turning it off before bed. That’s right, I broke something by TURNING IT OFF. I hate these hands of mine. I went to boot it up the next day, and it wouldn’t turn on. I plugged it in, and it wouldn’t charge. I restored it, and it magically worked. Then, it exploded again within literally a minute of being “fixed”. Thankfully, today I received a call-back from some nice guy at Apple named Adam, saying that the cancellation of service email I got was erroneous, and telling me to package my ‘Pod for shipping and replacement as soon as it was convenient. Phew. I was worried I’d need to buy a new one–if I did, I’d likely end up enjoying an iPod Classic instead.

Anyway, amputation + implants welcome.

Sweet deal alert! Today I stopped by Staples Business Depot to pick up a pair of these for a steal-price of $19.99. They are on sale from the usual price of $40. As I suspected, they are the updated version of my now-ancient RP-HJE50 (the first pair of in-ear earphones I bought and raved about years ago). They have almost identical specs (11.5 mm drivers, 16 ohms impedance, etc.). These have a frequency range that’s slightly smaller than the E50s (6 Hz-23 kHz rather than 6 Hz-25 kHz, but realistically, anything above 20 kHz is more or less ultrasonic anyway).

The one thing I didn’t like about the E50′s was its short cable, which was patched up somewhat by shipping them with an extension cable. Panasonic has since gotten smart, and made the cable length 1.2 meters without need for extension (which makes the whole thing lighter, since there are no heavy connection adapters in the middle of the cables). This means the E240′s are pretty much a fixed, honed version of the E50′s.

They come in a variety of colours, three of which I saw at Staples. Specifically, they had gunmetal carbon earbud/black cord, silver earbud/white cord, and aqua blue earbud/white cord models, and I obviosly picked the carbon/black one. I fear white cords age/yellow too easily and the aqua blue just looked girly.

In any case, if any of you are looking for a pair of mid-high end in-ear phones for your iPod or whatever, I’d definitely check these out and give them a chance. You really can’t get a much better price on such a solid product. I have no idea when the sale ends, but it wouldn’t hurt to be speedy.

For reference’s sake, my dad found this deal first at the Staples near his office, downtown, at Yonge and Adelaide. Where we ended up buying, however, was at the Staples on Steeles, near Kennedy (down the street from Pacific Mall). I’m sure those two have these in stock. No idea about any other Staples.

Of course my own experience with this particular product may be just an outlier, but in any case I might as well share this with anyone out there who might be thinking of getting a hardshell case for their MB/MBP. For specifics’ sake, I’ve got a first generation MBP 15″, without any outside protective skin (such as ZAGG body skins) on.

I purchased the Incase hardshell (from here on known as “the shell”) a week or two after I received my MBP. There were two main offerings at the time: frost white and smokey black. Both were nice looking but I thought the frosted look would be the least conspicuous.

Installation: Snapping on the shell really was a simple affair, as simple as it sounds, except that it was at the same time a workout in itself. A few tabs and a little pressure later and I’d successfully attached the bottom half of the shell on my lovely Bellamy. The attachment for the top part (the screen) was nowhere near as simple. It was first off slightly confusing where and how to orient it so that the “teeth”/tabs would not bump into the bottom ones when closing the laptop. The second thing that peeved me was the amount of pressure I needed to exert to get the damned thing in place. I was worried I’d have warped the aluminum case by pressing so hard.

Note: Another little thing I hated was the hard plastic tabs that seemed like they were scratching the aluminum finish when sliding over the body into place. I don’t like that one bit.

Maintenance: So far, the shell has been decent and not too hard to clean. Continue reading