Tag Archives: iPhone 3G

MSI Wind

Posted on
Reply

My parents are dead set on buying a Mac Book.

I’m a PC. Vista isn’t the answer to the world’s problems, Windows 7 is going to inherit many of the same issues, and for the last 14 years Microsoft has been making changes based on the Mac OS.  If you’re going to overspend on a Macbook, I can see doing it for a few reasons:

  1. Strong dislike for Microsoft Vista
  2. Desire to belong to the Mac culture
  3. You like shiny objects

After talking it over with my Dad, he wants to use Garage Band and doesn’t like how slow his current Vista desktop gets. Garage Band does seen pretty sweet, but there’s enough open source and free ware that can do all those things. Vista Sidebar and User Access Control are annoying but can be disabled. I just don’t know. $1500 is a lot of money, especially when you can buy a Windows Vista laptop for half the price.

Then I discovered the MSI Wind. It’s a $400 netbook that I’ve seen running Mac OS. The hackintosh concept was never popular with Apple, but now you can get a hackintosh macbook. MSI has even come up with Mac OS X drivers for the wireless network card in their MSI Wind. I can run XBMC and, with Boot Camp, I can get it to run Windows XP and maybe Ubuntu on top of it.

I’m still very much a PC. I work all day on Windows XP, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL, and I think the “right-click” is the most essential productivity hack ever. For an enterprise-wide solution, there’s no logic to choosing Mac Server; even it’s own website says it’s best for small businesses [probably small photography and graphic design shops]. But I do like my iPhone 3G and wouldn’t mind having a slick netbook.

I’d hesitate to give one to my parents, since there won’t be any real tech support [just me] and I just don’t think I’m up for that. But I wouldn’t mind trying it out for myself. If I can find it on sale for $350 I might just buy it.

Simplify Media

Posted on
Reply

What a great idea. What a great iphone app. Here’s the official site, but basically it’s an app that makes any iTunes music share available where ever else you’ve installed the Simplify Media client. I’ve been streaming my home iTunes library (over 350 albums) to my laptop in the office so I don’t need to copy mp3s locally or carry a portable hard drive. And the aforementioned iphone app – I can stream it all to my iphone over 3G, which essentially means while I’m driving.

There is a friend’s list option that let’s you keep tabs with up to 30 friends also using Simplify Media. It also let’s you stream from their library. Travis has mostly audio books, but whenever I want to listen to some Beastie Boys, I just pull up Tim’s library. Good stuff.

Also worth mentioning is the Last.fm iphone app, which keeps track of your entire music library, but the essential feature of choosing whatever you want to listen to gets lost.

The only downside with the app is that it doesn’t start streaming the next song until the current song ends, so there’s a small 1 second gap while it starts streaming. If you’re using iTunes, it also means that annoying “Streaming…” dialog that pops up and pulls focus, so you have to Alt+Tab back to what you’re working on. I’m sure that gets fixed in the future.