Monthly Archive for October, 2009

OS X isn’t some super epic OS, you know…

Published on 24 October, 2009. Closed Tags: Computer, Mac, MacBook, Operating System, OS, OS X, OSX, PC, Snow Leopard.

“You never have to reinstall OS X!!!11!1!1!!!!1111!1oneone!1″

Well, no. You don’t. But a fresh install of an OS is always a nice thing. For example – I reinstalled Snow Leopard on my MacBook last night, and have almost finished installing everything – I just have to install three things now, Photoshop CS4, Toast Titanium and World of Goo. With all my other apps installed so far, OS X is sitting at a pretty tiny 9.26GB. Once I install those three apps, it should bump up to about 15GB used space, tops.

Before I reinstalled Snow Leopard – and with the exact same apps, data, and so on, on the HDD, OS X was taking up just over 35GB. That’s with 11 months of constant use, and what was originally Leopard installed.

So yes, sure, Snow Leopard was running pretty smoothly before I reinstalled, but now it’s running even better. Actually, the one thing I have noticed is that now it only takes about 25 seconds to reboot, from the time I hit “Reboot” to the time it was at the desktop, with everything loaded – before, it used to take about 60 seconds.

Next up, reinstalling Windows 7 with the retail version this coming week.

Tweetie 2

Published on 9 October, 2009. View Comments Tags: App, App Store, atebits, awesome, iPhone, Tweetie, Twitter.

Released in November 2008, I bought it and was hooked. The clean UI, overall simplicity, and ease of use were great. Sadly, it lacked useful features like multiple attachments (eg, photos to TwitPic), and support for other services, like TwitVid. But it was still usable. The problem is that the developer pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a few months.

Until last month, when Tweetie 2 was announced, which came out, literally, in the last hour or so.

Sweet new icon eh? Anyway, Tweetie 2. It’s awesome. It has support for 2394586345749356436 different services, including TwitVid (yay!), and, in one word, it rocks. It’s well worth the £1.79, and the whole app feels super smooth, the UI is still clean and still works well, and it’s amazingly good overall. If you have an iPhone and use Twitter, then get Tweetie 2. There’s a reason why it’s the winner of Apple’s 2009 Apple Design Award.

And of course, you can get Tweetie 2 on the App Store.

Sennheiser CX300 II Precision

Published on 5 October, 2009. View Comments Tags: Bass, CX300, Earphones, Excellent, Headphones, iPhone, iPod, Movies, Music, Precision, Sennheiser.

The majority of my music is listened to at home, using my speakers, and I don’t use headphones/earphones very often. I generally only use earphones when going out for a while, or for watching movies late at night. Up until last week, I’ve been using Apple’s rather “meh” iPhone headset. They’re okay, and they do the job, but they sound very tinny, they lack bass, and they always fall out of my ears if I do anything other then sit deadly still.

To be honest, my headphone and earphone history is quite easy to remember. Pretty much: Generic Sony earphones -> more generic Sony earphones -> “sport” Sony earphones (they were yellow, how could I say no? ) -> some random generic headphones -> iPod Nano 1G earphones -> Logitech USB Headset (which I still have, for if I ever want to use it with Skype or something similar on my PC) -> iPhone 2G earphones -> iPhone 3GS earphones….and now, Sennheiser CX300 II Precision earphones.

So basically, Fr3d and Acksaw were discussing earphones on IRC, and the CX300s were suggested, so I took a quick look and noticed they were only £14 on Play. Not bad. So, I bought a pair. I’ve had them a few days so far, and they’re fantastic. Compared to the iPhone ones, they’re amazing. They sound much clearer, you can hear all parts of the music, and they have ACTUAL BASS! The iPhone earphones didn’t even understand what bass was. These do, and they do so very well. I’ve watched several movies with them so far, and a few episodes of CSI Miami, and compared to the iPhone ones, they just have so much more bass and clarity, it’s amazing. No surprise they’re the best sellers on Play.com. You can pick them up yourself here.

Pros:

Comfortable to wear, small, and neat.
They sound fantastic, have plenty of bass, and are loud too if you want them to be.
Comes with different sized thingies for your ears, and a small pouch for when you’re not using them.
Cheap in price, but not in quality.
Cable wraps around the back of your neck to go to the right ear, which I find is quite nice.

Cons:

The Eco packaging is nice, but good luck getting it back together again easily.
The cable is a rather annoying stringy-type one, that tangles up quite easily. I don’t like this. I like the cable like the original iPhone had – it didn’t curl up all the time and just sat there.
When wearing them, you go deaf. Seriously. They’re not noise cancelling, and on a plane they’d probably be pretty “meh” at doing so, but it would be nice to be able to hear someone speaking to me in my own home.
Doesn’t have a mic or controls for the iPhone, however, there is an almost-identical model with these features, the Sennheiser MM 50 iPhone.