Archive for the 'Geek stuff' Category

Macbook Pros are WAY overpriced

Published
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kevin
on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
in Geek stuff and Opinions
. 0 Comments

Seriously… Holy shit. Compared to every other manufacturer on earth, they hideously overpriced. Not to mention they charge an exorbitant amount for upgrades. $400 for 4GB RAM? Are you shitting me? I can get two 2GB SODIMM’s for under $100 easily. But the thing that kills me is that even compared to a Lenovo T61p, it’s ridiculously overpriced! I understand that part of the allure is the OS and the overall “look and feel” of the machine. But is it worth $500? I seriously doubt that. Just look at the comparison I did rather quickly.

We’ll start with a nicely configured 15.4″ Macbook Pro.

2.5Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (6MB L2 cache)

2GB RAM (2×1GB)

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB

200GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive

15.4″ 1440×900 LCD

8x DVD+/-R/DL

Integrated Bluetooth & A/B/G/N wifi

60W/hr Lithium Ion Battery (no word on how many cells)

Admittedly, it’s a beautiful piece of machinery and does have both the LED-backlit display and the muti-touch interface. However, it’s insanely expensive. Now let’s compare to a Lenovo T61p:

Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5Ghz (6MB L2 cache)

2GB (2×1GB) RAM 

Nvidia QuadroFX 570M 256MB

200GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive

15.4″ WUXGA+ (1920×1280) LCD

8x DVD+/-R/DL

Integrated Bluetooth & 802.11a/b/g/n wifi

7.8A/hr 9-cell Lithium Ion Battery

Windows Vista Business x64.

All this for a grand total of $2143.20… In order to match the Macbook Pro’s price, I would have to reconfigure the Lenovo with 4GB RAM, a Lenovo USB webcam and a 2yr Onsite/9×5 next business day warranty. Adding the webcam brings it back in-line with the feature set of the Macbook Pro except for the multi-touch interface. But still. Why is Apple so insanely expensive? Adding 4GB RAM and AppleCare to the Macbook Pro and changing the Lenovo to 3yrs to match the AppleCare makes the tally $3298 for the Macbook (!!!!) and $2596.16 for the Lenovo. I love the Macbook Pro, don’t get me wrong… but holy SHIT that’s a lot of money. I realize that if you configured them both with 2GB it’s a little closer in price ($2443 for the Lenovo and $2898 for the Apple). I guess you’re paying for the look of it.. along with the OS.. and the cache of owning an Apple product. Whatever. Way too much money if you ask me. 

Economic stimulus, bitches!

Published
by
kevin
on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
in Geek stuff and Life
. 1 Comment

Well, from the looks of it, I’m getting my “economic stimulus payment” on May 16 based on the last two digits of my social security #. Here’s the breakdown for those that are curious:

  • 00-20 May 2
  • 21-75 May 9
  • 76-99 May 16

That’s just for those that had their returns directly deposited. For those that get paper checks, you stand to wait considerably longer than that. Here’s the breakdown for those:

  • 00-09  May 16
  • 10-18  May 23
  • 19-25  May 30
  • 26-38  June 6
  • 39-51  June 13
  • 52-63  June 20
  • 64-75  June 27
  • 76-87  July 4
  • 88-99  July 11

In any case, I already know where my $600 is going. A brand new TV! As I’ve said before I’m eyeballing the Toshiba Regza series. I’m pretty sure I’m going LCD since I can’t afford a Panasonic or Pioneer plasma. I also get an extra payday in May, which will further help out the finances for my new TV. Problem is, I still want a squeezebox so I might have to skimp a tad bit on the TV to fit that into my budget. In any case, I’ll be getting some nice stuff in a month or two and I’m a little more than mildly excited. I’m pretty sure that’s what the government had intended when they decided to send these checks out. :)

time for a new TV!

Published
by
kevin
on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
in Geek stuff
. 1 Comment

I know this sounds just completely asinine, but I think it’s time for a new TV. Maybe not right this minute but it’s definitely in the not-too-distant future. My only problem is choosing which TV I want. I know what I want in a TV, just finding the best TV for the money with the features I need seems to be the problem. There are just TOO goddamn many! Anyway, here’s what I’m looking for in a TV

  • 42″ or larger
  • LCD or Plasma (sorry, no projection)
  • 1080p
  • reasonably low refresh rate
  • 120hz would be amazing, but not mandatory
  • number of inputs, type of speakers, presence of a tuner aren’t important

I have a decent home theater receiver with 4 HDMI in and 1 out, so I don’t care how many are on the TV. I use Comcast HD so I don’t have to worry about an off-air tuner. In a perfect world, I’d love to just snatch up a fucking Pioneer Kuro or an Elite, but I’m not spending that kind of coin. I’d really like to keep it around $1500 but I’d go up to $2k if the TV was a good enough deal. I’ll probably buy online because it’s just plain cheaper. In any case, maybe there’ll be another post in a couple of months saying I got a new TV. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get some suggestions in the comments though that’s doubtful.

So I need a new bike

Published
by
kevin
on Friday, July 20th, 2007
in Geek stuff and Life
. 1 Comment

I’ve pretty muched bashed the crap out of my poor Fuji and it needs to be replaced soon. I’ve decided that without a doubt I’m buying a new bike within 2 months…. and it will be something a whole lot more practical than a nearly-race-ready uberlight aluminum speedster. I think I’ve decided on the Kona Dr. Dew though I’ve looked at a few other options from Specialized, Trek and Giant. I just think I like what the Dr Dew offers the most. I’m going to also put a rack & panniers on it… get a headlight and some fenders as well. I want something that’s going to be a really good commuter and will actually stand up to some abuse.  I do know that when I get the Dr Dew I’m going to have to ditch the Hayes Sole brakes (they suck ass) and the Continental tires for something more flat-proof. In any case, I figure this commuter bike project is going to cost me $1500 after it’s all said and done. Not bad at all if I do say so myself. I’m excited already!

My new Pioneer DV-400V DVD player!

Published
by
kevin
on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
in Geek stuff
. 0 Comments

Yes, really… I FINALLY bought a dedicated DVD player. I had, for the longest time, been using my PS2 as my DVD player. I have a 32″ LCD HDTV and while it didn’t look too bad, the PS2 just isn’t a standalone DVD player. I have it connected via component cables so it was able to do progressive scan output but that’s still just 480p. After looking at a few options (mostly the Oppo 971HD), I happened to be at Best Buy and found the Pioneer DV-400V 1008p upscaling DVD player. It has HDMI output and upscales ordinary DVD’s to a maximum 1080p resolution (though it also does 720p and 1080i). It also plays DIVX and WMV files burned on to a disc along with having a USB port through which it can play these filetypes as well. I decided it looked like a pretty good deal @ $99 and took it home with me….

I got it home to hook it up and discovered my one and only real beef with it so far: no optical-digital output. It uses coaxial-digital instead. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s no real difference in sound quality that I can tell so I don’t care THAT much. It’s just that my other stuff is hooked up via optical and I kinda wanted to keep things the same. Oh, well… I dealt with it and moved on. Connected the HDMI output to my TV, went through the initial setup and put in a DVD to watch. We rented Apocalypto and decided to try that out since it seemed like a good title to run the player through its paces. I set the DVD player to my LCD’s native resolution of 720p and proceeded to enjoy the movie…. I’m not really sure if it looks any better than the PS2 since I didn’t do any direct comparisons, but I will say that it did look absolutely fantastic! I didn’t notice any tearing or other types of weirdness with the picture at all… I did really enjoy the “last position memory” feature since I had to stop the disc a couple of times for various reasons. Press stop one time and it stops the disc but remembers where you were in the disc so when you press play it starts right back up where you left off. Pretty sweet. The remote is very easy to use and laid out pretty well. Not 100% perfect but about as good as I’ve seen anywhere else, honestly. The one thing that struck me as odd is the fact that the player is black but the remote is white. I’m not really sure why they’ve done that but whatever. Maybe it makes it easier to find? I know it doesn’t quite fit in with everything else I have. My receiver, TV, TV stand, coffee table, PS2, Gamecube, speakers and subwoofer are all black. My TV remote is silver, though now that I think about it. Anyway, I digress… Point is, the DVD player kicks some serious ass and I can’t wait to throw more stuff at it to see how it looks on my TV. :)

On a side note, I’ve decided I’m going to have to get a new receiver soon. I’m tired of having 900 wires going all over the goddamn place and my current receiver doesn’t upconvert, nor does it have HDMI. That’s for a later date and time, though. We’ll see how that works out. I’ve decided I either want Pioneer Elite or Yamaha. More geek stuff to come!

Here’s a pic of the DVD player, thanks to Pioneer’s site.
Pioneer DV-400V

laptops!

Published
by
kevin
on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007
in Geek stuff
. 1 Comment

So now both my girlfriend and I have laptops. I’ve had one for a good little while thanks to work but now I bought her an iBook G4. Now that we both have laptops, the desktop is going to hardly get used! I’ll probably just use it for storage since it has a 750GB drive in it. Her iBook is a 12.1″ and my Lenovo is a 15.4″ so the size difference is quite amusing if nothing else.

here’s a pic of the two sitting side-by-side. Click for a larger view.

Laptops

On the left is my Lenovo T60 15.4″. It’s a Core Duo 1.83Ghz with 1GB RAM, 60GB HD, DVD/CD-RW combo drive. On the left is the iBook. It’s a 1.33Ghz G4 with 512MB RAM, 40GB HD and a DVD/CD-RW cobo drive. 12.1″ screen, too! Damn that thing’s tiny. I think I’ve shit turds bigger than that thing. Oh well… she likes it, so it’s all good.

new geek stuff

Published
by
kevin
on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
in Geek stuff and Opinions
. 1 Comment

Yes, I’ve purchased some new “geek stuff” lately that I’m rather happy with.

First off, I got a new router. Mind you, I didn’t NEED a new router, but I wanted one. I was using an older Netgear WGR-614 for my home network, which did the job fairly well. I had a few issues with it here and there where I would have to reboot it after some heavy bittorrenting and the port forwarding functions completely stopped working until I reset it to factory defaults and set it up again but other than that, it worked fairly well. However, I figured it was about time to upgrade despite not really having a NEED to do so.

This time, instead of going with previous-generation wireless I decided to go ahead and jump into the next-gen stuff. I opted for the D-Link DIR-655, which is a Draft-n router. Admittedly, I don’t have any draft-n equipment yet but I figured it’ll be nice to have when I do decide to get the card for my laptop and the home wireless media extender to go with it. In any case, the router is pretty fucking pimp. It supports Draft-N, which has a theoretical max speed of 300mbps (though closer to 100mbps in practice), has 4 gigabit ethernet ports (most only support 100mbps) and supports “Intelligent QOS” which allows latency-sensitive packets (gaming & VOIP) to be passed through first-priority over other things such as FTP downloads and bittorrent. In practice it seems to work, as I was uploading around 45kB/sec on bittorrent from my desktop pc and not causing undue lag for my friend playing counterstrike. The router has quite possibly the most configuration options I’ve seen on a router so far, even allowing you to manually specify packet priority in the options for the intelligent QOS. It does support automatically updating dynamic DNS services, automatic firmware update notification, along with WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption. It has 3 external antennae which should in theory boost signal strength but with my internal Centrino wireless it doesn’t appear to have made much difference so far. I mean, maybe a little bit but signal has already been so good in my apartment that any improvement in signal strength wouldn’t net any sort of performance improvements. In any case, I’d like to get the wireless media extender to hook up to my TV in the near future. Then I could just download movies to my PC and watch them on my TV, thanks to Windows Media Connect. I’d also like to snag the 2-bay Network Storage Enclosure and stick a couple of SATA hard drives in it (two of the new 1TB drives from Hitachi, perhaps).

Also, I decided it was time for a digital camera. I found a great deal on a Panasonic Lumix TZ-1 camera for $199. It’s a 5MP camera with a 10x optical zoom, which is pretty much unheard-of in such a small camera.  All the reviews I’ve read of it have given it high marks and I thought having a 10x zoom and anti-shake technology would make taking nice pics even easier. I haven’t gotten to test it out yet since my SD card hasn’t arrived yet. However, I’ll be sure to report my findings once I get the card. So far from toying around with it, it appears it’ll be a sweet camera. More to come on this one later. :)

I want an Xbox 360

Published
by
kevin
on Friday, January 12th, 2007
in Geek stuff and Opinions
. 1 Comment

…. and not a PS3… and here’s why.
1) The Xbox 360 has more good games out, period. Gears of War, anyone? Forza 2 is coming up. Project Gotham 3 looks simply badass. I could go on and on.
2) It’s $399, ready to go. Admittedly, buying an extra controller, wifi adapter, etc. will run your total cost close to quadrupe digits, but it’s worth every penny.
3)Xbox Live. It kicks ass, period. Voice chat with fellow players, game downloads, exclusive content for games, movies, tv shows, movie trailers… all kinds of cool stuff. Worth the money if you ask me. It’s infinitely better than what Sony has to offer online. Hell, Sony doesn’t even have a unified buddy list system such that you can only see who’s online playing the same game as you. Fucking idiotic!
4) IPTV is coming. Streaming TV to your xbox… pimp shit, I’m sold!
5) HD-DVD is optional, not mandatory. I don’t have to pay the extra money for the drive if I don’t need it just yet. Granted, I’ll end up buying it at some point… just not right off the bat.

Having said all that, the Xbox isn’t without its flaws. Yes, it’s loud as piss and runs so hot you could cook eggs on the CPU. I frankly don’t care. I have a home theater system that would have no trouble drowning out any noise it makes. It doesn’t support HDMI, but Microsoft has already said that it would be possible to do in the not-too-distant future. It doesn’t support 1080p; fine by me, I don’t have a TV that can display 1080p. The PS3’s piano black finish is infinitely sexier and it has triple the hard drive space. I can live with that… MS has even hinted at a new revision of the 360 that will include HDMI and a 120GB drive. I hate to say it but MS really seems to have an answer for everything Sony has tried. We’ll see how this all pans out but I really think the PS3 isn’t going to dominiate the market like the PS2 did.

More HD please!

Published
by
kevin
on Monday, January 8th, 2007
in Geek stuff, Life and Opinions
. 0 Comments

Ok, to be truthful, Comcast DOES have HD channels, just not enough.. That’s my issue. I don’t have HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, etc. so I miss out on a few more HD channels that I normally would have. Being that as it is, I get maybe 12-15 HD channels…. totally not enough for my tastes. What sucks is that now that I have HD, I really don’t like watching standard def TV anymore. The picture quality is really lackluster in comparison. Watching football in HD on ESPNHD is freaking amazing. Even Discovery HD Theater is fucking awesome. I’d really like to see more than ESPN and ESPN2, INHD, Discovery HD Theater, MHD (Music Hi Definition, a combo of VH1, MTV, CMT) and my locals in Hi-Def. I really wonder whether the issue is Comcast not offering the channels or the networks not broadcasting in HD. Hopefully once the digital mandate goes through and networks stop broadcasting in analog, it’ll free up some bandwidth to broadcast more in HD. Obviously in a perfect world, every channel would have its HD equivalent and thus all my channels would be in HD. I mean, I could understand leaving off the inspirational/religious channels and maybe all the home shopping channels. They could stand to be in standard def since nobody really gives a shit about them anyway. Other than that, give me all my channels in HD, please. Hell, I paid $750 for a TV plus $25 for a stupid HDMI cable and I’m paying extra monthly fees for the HD/DVR box. Give me my money’s worth, Comcast! Hell, Dish Network offers 30 HD channels. Surely they don’t have exclusive rights on ALL those channels. Unfortunately I live in an apartment complex and my southern view is blocked by a HUGE tree, so no Satellite for me. Honestly I may look into it when we move, but I’m not sure just yet. I just want more HD, damnit.

4GB Flash drive

Published
by
kevin
on Thursday, October 5th, 2006
in Geek stuff
. 0 Comments

I’d been wanting a bigger flash drive for quite some time since the one I had was given to me by a friend and was only a measley 128MB. I happened upon a great deal at Best Buy of all places! They have a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro for $99 after instant rebate. Amazingly, no mail-in rebates or any of that other shit, that’s the price out the door (plus tax, of course). So far, after a few days I can say I really enjoy having it. It’s U3 compatible so I can download any U3 compliant apps and run them directly off the drive. What’s really nice is that the U3 apps are all packaged specifically for use on U3 drives and all you do is download them straight from  a link the “launchpad” that comes on the drive instead of having to find them, download them, extract them and then modify them to run exclusively off the flash drive and not leave any trace on the host PC. In any case, 4GB is seriously big enough for what I need. I can put movies, music, tons of programs and just about anything else I want on it. It’s not quite as big as buying an external HD but it’s so much more compact; so much so that it fits on my keychain. Maybe at some point I’ll buy a 200GB external drive but now that I have the flash drive it’s not so much of a pressing issue.