Complementary Insults

Since my parents are moving away some time in the next few months, I went with them down to my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving.  It has been a fun trip overall, but since we drove the RV down that means in both directions I have a ~9 hour span of counting the mile markers.

For the last few years I’ve had laptops so I can watch movies and play games on the go, but this time around I also have an internet-enabled cell phone, which has led to amazing time killing.  Flash games, discussion forums, and news sites are all readily available.  If I’m near a major city the service is even fast enough that I can watch Youtube videos and the like.  As I type this message, we’re on I-70 heading East and closing in on Indianapolis (I think).  The sign we just passed said 169 miles to Columbus.

If you travel often as a passenger and have a laptop, a mobile internet connection is possibly one of the best things you can have in my opinion.  Depending on the provider they can be had for as little as $10/mo for unlimited access, I pay a little over $50/mo for high-speed unlimited access from AT&T.  That’s probably a bit too steep for the casual user, but for me it’s worth it since I also use that connection to work from on a regular basis.

This morning, the EMI Group announced that they would begin offering their music library for sale online without DRM. Not only that, but the DRM-free files would be encoded at a higher bitrate than their “protected” counterparts. Of course, this comes with a cost. Rather than the now-standard $0.99 per song, these files (which certainly do offer more to the consumer) would be priced at $1.29 per song.

As I was reading this, I began to think about what the real value of a digital music purchase is and whether the current pricing model makes sense, so I looked up the numbers. What follows are my results.

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In his recent Home Media Server Guide, Brian Won of Ars Technica briefly discusses the heat and space issues involved with packing lots of hard drives in to a personal server. Since these problems are handled nicely by cases such as the Cooler Master “Stacker” line and the Antec Nine Hundred, I started thinking about power consumption.

My question then became whether it would make sense from a financial perspective to pay extra for larger hard drives which you could then use less of, thus burning less power.

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I just updated this site with new pages telling about the things I love and a bit about myself as well. Links are at the top of the page.

I’m also trying out a new template which I really like.  I think I’ll keep it.

A week ago, I finally filled the gap I’ve had since giving up my Powerbook G4 back in May and I bought a base model MacBook.

• 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
• 512MB (2×256MB) DDR2-667
• 60GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Disk
• Slot Load DVD/CD-RW
• Airport Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Mac OS X 10.4

All that and a 2GB iPod for $1049 using the student purchase program. I financed it through Apple Credit, which was a bit of a hassle (more on that some other time), but it allowed me to get this nice notebook for $25 a month rather than forking over $1000 in one shot.

As a two time previous Mac owner, I’m not going to go in to detail about the “switching” process, since I alreay had it planned out and most of my applications were available for Mac anyways.

The hardware that makes up the MacBook is leaps and bounds above the previous iBook models. Coworkers of mine have both second-generation G3 and G4 iBooks, and neither hold a candle to this. It feels like a quality piece of hardware, on par with an IBM Thinkpad or upper-level Dell. The Core Duo is also an amazing chip. When comparing pure CPU performance, this notebook can hold its own against my 2GHz AMD Athlon X2 desktop, though the faster hard drives and quadrupled RAM give the desktop the advantage in all real-world situations.

The unusual keyboard and glossy screen were concerns of mine before purchase, but at this point I can say that neither have turned out to be real problems in day to day use. I’m sure I’ll find some situation where the glossy screen gets annoying, but honestly none of my past notebooks have been very usable outdoors either.

Right now, the only upgrade I an certain to do to this machine is maxing out the RAM to 2GB. Like all modern OSes, OS X loves memory, and 512MB just isn’t enough. It is my opinion that even the lowest of low end computers should have at least 1GB nowadays, and 2GB is a starting point for enthusiast machines (gamers, multimedia, etc.). I am considering a hard drive upgrade, but it seems more likely that I will just upgrade the drive in my desktop and place the old one in a Firewire enclosure to use as an overgrown floppy disk and backup medium for all my computers.