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On not buying Apple hardware…

For the first time in twenty years, I decided to build a PC.  This project isn’t born of an idle whim – it’s born of my dislike for the Virgin+ box.  Seldom have I seen a more ill-conceived piece of hardware.  I’ve certainly never seen a system which glows more brightly on standby than it does when it’s ‘on’.

The requirements started simply.  Any box that I build will be able to record freeview television programmes, convert them to a format that I can play on my Mac or my iPhone, and make them available on my home network so that they can be copied off easily.  I don’t have time to watch much TV at home, so I’d really like to be able to watch my recordings on the train to and from work.  The box will also need to be able to play DVDs and I’d really like it to be able to play my MP3 files too.  If it can connect to Boxee then so much the better.

As for the hardware requirements, it will need to be exceedingly parsimonious.  A box that records will need to be on standby much of the time, and I don’t want it to chug though the juice like an alcoholic in a brewery.  I’d like it to be remote controlled from the sofa just like all my other kit. An LCD front panel would be nice too – if only to make it look more like a hifi separate and less like a computer.  While we’re on the subject, it’ll need to be quiet as well.

I decided not to skimp on the quality.  The kit I bought is all good, albeit at rather less than the manufacturers RRP.  I decided what I wanted and then went looking for it at the lowest possible price.  My shopping list, and my rationale, went as follows:

  • Antec Micro Fusion 350.  The Antec Micro Fusion 350 is a nicely compact PC case, a good match for my hifi.  On paper at least, it’s quiet and it boasts an efficient power supply.  It comes with a remote control and it has an LCD front panel, so it disguises the computer quite well.
  • Asus E35M1-M PRO.  ASUS are a good brand, a big PC name that I trust.  Their website isn’t bad (by PC manufacturer standards) and I was able to find their support pages fairly easily.  On the whole, I don’t buy products if the provider doesn’t offer solid and usable support.  I chose this board for its AMD Zacate CPU which uses very little power whilst still offering reasonable performance. I’m impressed.
  • Western Digital Caviar Green Power.  I’ve used these hard drives before, for archive on my Mac.  The Green Power range isn’t fast, but it is power efficient and it does seem to be reliable.  This is the first time I’ve used one as a startup disk – but power efficiency is more important than speed for my media player.
  • Memory.  I get mine from Crucial, and I’ve installed 4GB.  The board will take up to 8GB so I may upgrade again before too long.  I don’t want page faulting to occur at all if I can help it, and especially not with a slow hard drive.

For this posting, I’d like to leave aside the issue of OS (I chose Mythbuntu, but I may yet decide to use Windows Media Centre).  The Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux is a meme as old as the hills, and not as interesting.  I know which is best for me, and I know which is most likely to crash with a virus and a blue screen.  I’d like to pick a different fight today…

…Hardware.  Good lord, common PC hardware is crappy.  The stuff I bought isn’t bargain basement – but it doesn’t even come close to the quality that I’ve come to expect from a computer.  And even if I’d spent thousands on the most expensive kit possible, it’d still lag behind Apple because of the need to maintain compatibility with the woeful generic PC standard.  I beleive in elegance.  I don’t want to see a rat nest of cable inside my computer.  In fact, I don’t want to see any cable – I want all the wires to be hidden neatly away so that they don’t bugger up the airflow inside my machine.  It isn’t just a matter of aesthetics, it’s a matter of longevity.

This home build isn’t my only experience of generic PCs. As well as my Macs, I do have a bog standard generic PC.  It’s a Dell XPS tower (not the latest generation – and I certainly won’t be buying another).  It’s crap.  It’s a professionally built machine, the top of Dell’s line, and it still looks like it was assembled by a crazed magpie. To use the car analogy, this isn’t Mercedes engineering.  This is Trabant.  On a bad day.

Sadly, it isn’t possible to do what I’m attempting to do with Apple hardware.  Apple doesn’t make a machine with the form factor that I’d like.  So I’m making the best of a bad job.  Software-wise though, I’m very much open to conversion. Suggestions for alternative software stacks and improvements that I might make to my system will be gratefully received.

If, on the other hand, you don’t need a custom computer, if all you want is a machine that you can work on and, perhaps, use to play the odd game, if you don’t want shoddy build quality and worries about reliability then I’m afraid that you don’t have a great deal of choice.  Only one manufacturer offers the machine you want. Guess who?

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A Nuclear Future

There is no dispute that coal is a dirty fuel and also that coal generates radioactive byproducts too – radioactive byproducts which are largely vented into the atmosphere. But here’s the thing – you can’t actually make a bomb, dirty or ‘clean’ from coal ash. What’s more, if you wanted to dispose of the ash you could just stuff it back down the mine or quarry that it came from – we have enough abandoned workings after all. We just don’t have the political willpower to do so. Ash is largely safe – yes, I know about the heavy metals and other pollutants in the ash – but generations of Welsh communities have demonstrated that it’s quite possible to live your life and raise your family in the shadow of the ash pile. Perhaps not nice and yes, fatal if it slips onto your head, but ultimately fairly safe. Besides, after years of plant growth (yes, plants can grow on an ash pile – some even like it), the ash pile stabilises – and many of the nastier waste products get locked up.

Good luck doing that with current, and even next generation, Nuclear reactors. I’d rather live in Aberfan than Pripyat. Even the most vocal adherent of Nuclear has to admit that ash is easier to deal with than nuclear waste.

I don’t actually have a problem with building Nuclear – provided we know what we’ll do with the waste. And we don’t. We keep lobbing ideas around, none of which work so far, and the piles of toxic and radioactive waste continue to build. And the two Nuclear solutions which seem to be cleanest (Hybrid reactors – which would reduce the overall amount of high level waste – theoretically, they could ‘burn’ waste from other reactors, and burn old nuclear warheads, and Fusion) are either too expensive or too impossible with current technology or lack the political will to implement. So yes. Fuck new Nuclear until we do the job cleanly and properly.

But (whinge, whine, moan) we won’t have enough power if we don’t have nuclear! Boo Hoo. Turn your computer off at night. Buy less gadgets. Get rid of your energy hungry plasma TV. Recycle. Reuse. Use public transport. Problem solved. Sure, you’ll have less toys – but you’ll also have a cleaner world. You’ll thank me for it one day.

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Mk II AppleTV

How refreshing.  And how typically unusual.  Rather than doing the usual, boring, upgrade – you know, the one where the new product is significantly better than the old one, Apple has reinvented the new release!  They thought differently and released a product which is significantly worse.  I’m talking, of course, about the new AppleTV.  Sure, it’s smaller.  It’s cheaper too.  But they’d need to reduce it to the size of an SD card and price it accordingly in order to justify the loss of functionality.  I like the iOS bit.  I like the efficient A4 bit too.  I could stomach a drop in capacity to 64GB if it meant having SSD rather than a hard drive – but they dropped the storage altogether, thereby making it impossible to use as a stand-alone HiFi separate.

You know what though?  I reckon that His Steveness is probably using the last generation, and I reckon he’ll keep doing so.  I reckon he’s quite aware how awful this new TV wart is – but that he’s gambling on the rock bottom price seeing it through.  Well, fingers crossed – I hope that it bombs.  And that they replace it with a device with built in storage. Until then though, I’ll be patching the hell out of my wonderful Mark 1 AppleTV.

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iPad

I can smell a rat.  Humour me while I try to find it.

The iPad.  It looks very nice.  In fact, despite the mumblings of the nay-sayers, I think I’d like to have one.  I don’t even mind that it doesn’t multitask.  I wish it did, of course, but I’m a geek.  Most people don’t really care about browsing the internet, e-mailing, editing a photo and playing Super Whambot Massacre IV simultaneously; provided that they can switch from one to another quickly I suspect that most people won’t notice if those apps aren’t actually running in the background.

I’ll go further.  I think that the iPad might end up being the replacement for the Mac.  Think about it.  It doesn’t even matter that you can’t write software on it. In the very early days of the Mac you couldn’t write software either.  You needed to buy another, vastly more expensive, system (Lisa) running the Mac development kit to do that.  Substitute iPad for ‘Mac’ and Mac for ‘Lisa’ and that’s exactly what you need to do today.  The Mac won’t disappear tomorrow, or even next week, but one day it will – and the iPad is its replacement.

What I can’t abide, though, is being in thrall to Apple for all my software.  I don’t want to get everything from the app store, DRM’d to the hilt.  I don’t want to be told that I’m not allowed to run an emulator, or that I must pay a subscription for the privilege of writing software – even free software – for their system.  One day, I suspect, Apple plans for us to get all our content, software, media, the lot in this manner.  And that isn’t just unacceptable, it’s a very big rat indeed.

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Piracy

A man, and it would have to be a man because women aren’t usually this stupid, invents the worlds most perfect gun in order to protect his property.  It is a weapon so advanced that it never misfires, it never jams, and it will always work regardless of the conditions and its level of maintenance.  One day, whilst cleaning it, he accidentally blows his head off.

Imagine if DRM had been invented in the sixteenth century.  If it had, then there is very little chance that we’d be enjoying the works of Shakespeare today.  We wouldn’t be able to – especially if the company which held the keys, the sixteenth century equivalent of Apple, Amazon or Microsoft, had since folded.  Some might argue that this is no bad thing.  After all, the real wonders of Rock’n’Roll were recorded in a pre-DRM era – and I doubt that future music historians will care all that much if the oeuvre of Lady Gaga sinks without trace into a digital morass.

If you want someone to be trustworthy, you need to trust them.  If you regard everyone as fundamentally untrustworthy then you shouldn’t be surprised if they turn out to be just that. Many developers and artists understand this concept.  You buy content (software, music, video etc), you install it, and there are no checks to see if you acquired the content legitimately or not.  This freedom means that you can give your content to someone else, provided that you stop using it yourself.  That might not be strictly in the terms of the license, but the content provider doesn’t lose out and it generates good feeling.

Unfortunately, the situation with an increasing number of providers is slightly different.  Once you install the content on one machine you can’t install it on another machine.  So if you upgrade your machine you’re now left with bin-fodder and you need to buy the content all over again.  Fair?  Definitely not.  And the result is that there are a remarkable number of ingenious crackers breaking the DRM and uploading the resultant file.

It’s true that DRM free content is no less likely to end up on a torrent site than that of less enlightened providers.  On the other hand there’s very little advantage (other than the financial one) to gaining it in this manner – and several significant disadvantages, not least the lack of support.

Piracy of heavily DRM’d content is a different matter.  In this case you lose the support but, in addition to the financial incentive, you also gain the ability to use your content wherever you like, on whatever you like, without the need for an internet connection and without the risk that one day your content will cease to work altogether.  Put like that, Piracy may be a crime – but it’s a crime that you’d be daft not to indulge in.

The obsession with DRM can be seen as the last thrashings of a dying industry. I’m not saying that we’ll no longer listen to music, watch video, or play games  – just that we’ll get our entertainment from other, DRM free, sources in the future.  This has already happened with music (so, unfortunately, Lady Gaga might be with us forever after all) and DRM free music is now commonly available.  Video is still locked down, but at least the locked down files can be played offline – and DVDs (and now BluRay) can be copied without too much difficulty. Software is a trickier proposition, with DRM that either requires the CD to be inserted during game play (wrecking battery life on portables, and rendering gameplay all but impossible on a MacBook Air) or, worse, that requires a constant connection to the internet.

DRM won’t kill software, video or any other media, but it will kill any provider who burdens content with protection more strenuous than a serial number.  Treated as criminals in this manner, users will either download the unencumbered version from a filesharing site or run into the welcoming arms of Open Source.  Linux.  Open Office.  Tremulous.  Hedgewars.  All good quality, and all absolutely free.  And best of all, nobody gets their head blown off.

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Baby Care Tip

Picture the scene.  It’s time for the baby to sleep, but he won’t. He’s teething.  He’s crying fit to burst, and all he really wants to do is bite his mummy and then cry some more.  His mummy, quite understandably, doesn’t want to be bitten again, so she offloads baby onto daddy.  That would be me.

Baby redoubles his efforts and, although it would be quite interesting to see exactly what shade of puce he can manage this time (as calibrated by Pantone) or whether his eyes will actually pop out from the exertion, I’m getting a headache.  I’m also running out of options.  He doesn’t want a teething ring.  He never liked dummies (which might explain his objection to my ministrations).  He isn’t thirsty.  And his nappy is freshly laundered and, as yet, unwetted.

Inspiration strikes.  I dandle him on my knee, and fire up iTunes on my Mac.  Turning the sound off, I select something monotonous and middle of the road (Jack Johnson, since you ask) and turn on the visualiser.  Baby is struck dumb by the gently flowing patterns. Result!  Even better, when I look down a couple of minutes later, he’s fast asleep.

For the record, this isn’t a fluke.  My wife and I have used iTunes induced hypnosis on Daniel several times now.  It must be said though that it only seems to work with her music.  My tunes just seem to make things worse (the patterns are far too frenetic!).

And now, excuse me, I think that I need a nap.

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A Pox on Multiplexes

A pox on all Multiplexes. They’re ruinously ugly, uncomfortable, purveyors of the worst kind of dreck. It’s true, I suppose, that they occasionally show a film worth watching – but even then they manage to badly mess up the experience.

You might grumble about having to pay extra for 3D glasses. My grumble is that the hellish Multiplexes ruin a good film BY PLAYING THE SOUNDTRACK AT ANTISOCIALLY LOUD VOLUMES. Why? I’m not deaf. Nor do I wish to be. Are they planning on charging extra for ear-defenders in the near future? Or hearing aids for those customers whose hearing has been irrevocably buggered? Can we please have a campaign for cinemas to turn the bloody volume down before I turn into a curmudgeon. I’m not old enough for that yet.

Praise then to the Picturehouse and Screen chains and all ‘arthouse’ (I hate that term) cinemas. Small. Comfortable. Sociable. And sadly non-existent in south-east Hertfordshire.

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Pointless Censorship

A dictionary has been censored by Apple prior to its acceptance on the app store. Not only have unambiguously rude words been removed; words like ‘screw’, ‘snatch’ and ‘ass’ have been purged too.  Whoever made that decision is a cock.  It’s a type of bird, you know, although the bird is apparently extinct by Apple’s request.

Personally I have no problem with rude words.  If your child can’t get them on your phone then they’ll underline them in a paper dictionary instead.  Maybe Apple are trying to protect me.  I’m grateful.  Really I am.  I shall send over my copy of Rogers Profanisaurus without delay so that they can censor that too.

I do have a problem with all the gun simulators on the app store though.  A rude word has never resulted in injury to another – but guns kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the world every day.  Surely that is more offensive?

To quote South Park it seems that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words.”

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Fear and Trembling

As every good reviewer knows, one should never judge a book by its cover.  If one were to ignore that rule then the Penguin Great Ideas edition of Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard would garner the highest praise.  The cover design of slightly embossed text is plain but beautiful and, unlike many publishers these days, Penguin employs typesetters who understand the importance of ligatures.  This is a book that feels wonderful and is a joy to look at.

No, one should never judge a book by its cover.  The only sound way to review a book is by its smell.  Open it up and bury your nose in its pristine pages – only then will you truly know whether the book in your hand is worth a second glance.  A book may have many smells: knowledge, excitement, adventure, romance, paper, ink and glue.  Mainly paper, ink and glue I concede.  Try it for yourself.  Grab your favourite novel and, lets say, the Microsoft Windows user manual.  The Windows manual will probably have you reaching for a bucket – which is entirely appropriate considering the subject matter.  Fear & Trembling, on the other hand, smells unexciting but mind expanding which I put down to the high solvent content of its raw material.

I mentioned earlier that Fear and Trembling is a joy to look at.  It isn’t, however, a joy to read.  That isn’t to say that it’s not interesting – but it is a bit of a headful and it’ll take longer to read than its diminutive 152 pages suggest.  I’m a fast reader, I can polish off the Lord of the Rings in a week (although I admit that I do tend to skip the dire poetry and the boring battles, which helps).  It took me the same amount of time to read Fear and Trembling, because I’d reach the end of a section and, realising that I hadn’t fully grasped the concepts, have to reread it.  If you have no interest in philosophy and theology then you probably won’t want to put the necessary effort in and if, like me, you’re an amateur in the field then you’d be better off dipping into it rather than reading it in one go.

It’s a dangerous book too, because it doesn’t present a cut-and-dried philosophy for the reader to accept or ignore.  It retells and then dismantles the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, subjecting it to the kind of forensic analysis that’ll boil the blood of any dyed in the wool ‘it’s in the Bible so it must be true’ zealot.  It considers whether Abraham’s faith was justified and whether or not he was on ethically sound ground.  There are people who attempt filicide today, claiming that their offspring are demonically possessed or that they were acting under orders from God.  We, rightly, lock them up for the loonies that they are, but how are they any different from Abraham?  Of course, the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, is full of nasty, violent, prejudiced and contradictory claptrap.  The intelligent mind questions it and excises the poison from the basic worthwhile message, but one can understand how the socio and psychopathically inclined (think of Alex from A Clockwork Orange or any number of real life cult leaders) are drawn to it like flies to rotting meat.  All Kierkegaard does is shine a light on this paradox.  According to Kierkegaard, Abraham chooses faith (do as God says, unquestioningly) over morals (thou shalt not kill).  In doing so, Abraham surrenders free choice and becomes an automaton for another Mind.  Even today, there are zealots in every creed who claim that, like Abraham, their faith is the most important thing in their lives.  Like Kierkegaard I’d argue that they are dangerous and that the world would be better if they lived their lives morally instead.  A truly faithful person can abdicate responsibility for their actions and commit the most appalling atrocities.

I’ve long believed that one should never accept only one point of view and that everything should be questioned – and Kierkegaard goes far beyond my own limited enquiries.  Fear and Trembling should be read by anyone, of any faith, who claims to have any interest, however limited, in religion.  It is not an easy read but, if nothing else, it’s laid out nicely and it smells quite pleasant.

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Wonderful AppleTV

With a son in the first few months of his life, the time that my wife and I spent going to the cinema has been sadly curtailed.  I don’t like renting DVDs, partly because I hate sitting through adverts for films have no intention of watching, and partly because I hate being told that Piracy Is A Crime.  Every. Bloody. Time.  A patronising message which is made more irritating by the fact that if I had pirated the damn film I wouldn’t have to watch the message or umpteen adverts.

So, at the risk of sounding like a cheap radio commercial, I was delighted to discover that rentals and purchases from the iTunes store are not only reasonably priced but also free from annoyance.  You pay.  You watch.  You aren’t forced to sit through crap.