Posts by stu 4

Apple's new Final Cut Pro X 'not actually for pros'

hmm

yeh, bought it to 'upgrade' my FCS3 I bought last year.

So far not too impressed. Usual lack of docs and crappy online help you get with apple stuff (online help only!!! so can't use it on the laptop without net acces for help - mental)

Still, it could just be getting used to the new paradigms, but at the moment I'm no convinced.

Motion integration in particular seems to have almost disappeared... though it does leave motion as a standalone bargain at 25 quid.

FCPx is gonna need a tutorial course purchase before I can work out if I stick with it or go back to FCP7.

Peugeot iOn e-car

mental. absolutely mental

I do about 6k a year in my car.

my X5, 300hp v8 gas guzzling 'evil' car.

my car that cost me FA, and is 10 years old.

My car that costs me FA to run a year (about 50 quid a month in tyres, servicing, depreciation).

add 40 quid a month for petrol

And yet I'm the one that is marked with the number of the beast.

Here is a car that costs 500 quid a month!!!. making them pumped 100s of tons of christ knows what into the atmosphere. batteries that are so expensive and inefficient they can't even be bought... and it's sold as green.

Now, before the tree huggers start - I had 2 electric bikes and use them whenever I can. The thing is - it was a regular bike, with a battery added, low emission. that to me, makes sense.

electric cars,, well to me, any new cars tbh make no sense at all and are about as green as crude oil... a modern car last more or less for ever (well - both mine are 10 year+ and look new). Do you get a 'new' house every 3 years ? do you fuck.

don'y buy into the industry's mince - and stick with what you've got. it's the greenest thing you'll ever do.

stu

Vintage Psion prototype: Yours for £85,000

time for my PDA museum glass case....

spot the 5MX... revo... even a ux50 in there....

http://powerlord.smugmug.com/Gadgets/PDA-cabinet

stu

Apple iMac 27in

nice

bloke in my office just got one today. I've been humming and hawing about replacing the quadcore hackintosh I have with one for a few months (mac household: imac, mac mini, MPB17, MBA11).

I run 2x22 inch dell 1600x1200 monitors on the hackintosh and its fully utilised for final cut pro duties and garageband (with firewire pro sound, leccy guitars, shure mics, monitor speakers, etc).

A 3.4 27 incher would probably be about 2.5x as quick as my current Q6600 hackintosh. And it would sleep and hibernate (damned if I can get my P5e to do that with SL). But I'm not sure that I might lose something from having one big screen rather than 2 smaller ones - running one app 'dull screen' and having the other spare, running aperture in dual screen mode, etc... and pixel for pixel 3200 x 1200 is better than the res of the 27".

hate reflective screens and specified the matte one on my MBP17 - but then I'm using that everywhere - this is fixed in place somewhere, so I don't think its a big problem.

So I agree its a heart over mind thing - if it gets bought it will be because I get my bonus this month and it's a damn site more fun to spend some of it on an imac than on the mortgage! :-)

servicing

On the other hand: I have a 2006 imac,

screen started to go all wonky end of last year with lines all down it. (this is a 4 year old imac - no apple care, and in fact I'd got 2nd hand off ebay)

took it into genius bar - they said it was a known problem and repaired it for collection next day with a new LCD panel and motherboard.

no charge.

Smart Fortwo Electric Drive e-car

battery stations

What I don't understand is why someone with tons of cash doens't push for battery 'stations' across the UK...

With a standardized sized battery pack, hot-swappable from underneath a car - you could just drive into a station, have some gizmo swop the pack for a fresh one, pay up, and you are on your way.

Why cover the world in sockets to plug cars into when you can just 'convert' petrol stations into battery charging/swapping stations.

It needs:

1) standards for battery size and fitment

2) crap loads of investment into stations and battery stock.

but then, you have removed the only real problem with them - range. To stop and 'swap batteries' every 100 miles is not that much hassle for anyone if it's cheap and quick.

You would have thought it could be started in a city similarly to LPG stations - and then move out from there.

stu

Speck SeeThru MacBook Air cover

actually...

I got a cheap 5 quid one off ebay for going on holiday.

while on hols I forgot to close my rucksack and it fell out onto the concrete pavement.

totally undamaged to my amazement.

stu

DIY kit computer goes Forth against Braben's RaspberryPi

python my arse

How to put them off programming for life.

BASIC or LOGO

Microsoft resuscitates 'I'm a PC' ads to fight Apple

windows 7 parties

reminds me of the windows 7 parties fiasco video... I actually registered for one, so I got my free windows 7... and the 'party pack' they sent just defied belief... they reall really don't seem to get it at all...

you can see some MS FW sitting there 'ooo apple always has these big queues with new products' - we'll show people how they can arrange a group of people to meet together and have exiting fun around our product...

we'll give em the product free for the publicity...

oh.. and it's our customers we are talking about here, so we best explain to them what a 'party' is and provide a series of games for them. that's what happens at parties right ? anyone ? anyone got friends and been to a party ? anyone ?

JVC Everio GS-TD1 3D camcorder

deinterlace

Sorry... you've done one of my pet hates: DEINTERLACE before uploading.

stu

Assange: Facebook a ‘spying machine’

I've given up

I used to point out the feckwittedness of the tesco clubcard for the same reasons.

I decided if one more friend said 'I've got nothing to hide' I'd kill them.

Now I just grin piously and let them do what the fuck they want

The Sandy Bridge Hackintosh

here's my hackintop

made a few years ago... I even did the logo, etc

http://powerlord.smugmug.com/Gadgets/Making-a-Macbook-Nano/

since then I've actually got 2 MBAs, a new MBP and an imac to add to the mac mini I've had since 2006

I also run my old quad core PC as a hackintosh running SL 10.6.7 with 2 monitors. It's rock solid.

all of them backing up over the network with timemachine.

Air Video 2.4.6

used to use it - now just use samba shares

samba shares and xbmc for ios

or ifile

work a treat. even plays 720p mkv files and some 1080p mkvs

stu

My Taptu

rival equivalent

be good if at the end of these articles, you put a few rival equivalent apps.

i.e. iOS in this case.

I quite often read the android one and end up searching for an iphone version.

I'm sure some of the droids will be doing the same thing.. well the minority that can read iOS articles without foaming at the mouth and gibbering on about apple evil. :-)

Apple Mac OS X: A decade of Ten

eh

"OpenStep's foundation was entirely different from the existing Mac OS. It was written for Intel CPUs, for instance"

no it wasn't - it was OPEN - for various hardware - that was the point.

previously it had been motorola and intel only (NeXTSTEP ran fine on intel architecture! - I had a P60 running it when they came out in 1994) . openstep ran on sun risc, intel and loads of other stuff.

NeXTSTEP was my main dev machine at work in the 1990s, then Openstep on sparc stations and finally intel pcs.

Green Parrot to cure YouTube shakes

stabilization

yeh, nowt special. even imovie has it.

with HD, and uploading to youtube anyway, it makes sense to do it somewhere if you have shaky footage

Doesn't help much with rolling shutter stuff though (imovie, final cut, etc have different filters for that)

I suppose for your general unwashed phone uploading utube muppet, it could make their happy slapping more watchable....

what would be interesting is if it does any magic if the stuff has titles, etc on it - I would assume not... hence why you stablise BEFORE editing....

Tearful NASA salutes space shuttle Discovery

trigger's broom

how much of it is actually original I wonder ?

Anti-religious campaigners smack down census Jedis

no religion != athiest

agnostic

athiest

antitheist

these all say far more than 'no religion'.

As an antitheist, I'm pretty fecked off that all I can do is check 'no religion'.

If there was an antitheist and an athiest checkbox we might find that rather than settling for religion NOT having as much influence, we could get to a point were it is actively discouraged through funding... IF that is what the unwashed declared themselves.

Conviction overturned for abuse images bought from bookshop

CPS punished ?

I'd like to see the CPS get the same treatment as, say women who invent rape cases -

they should be prosecuted for ruining the guys life.

Once a few CPS arseholes have been banged up for a few years, the pencil pushing pricks might thing a bit before bringing fuckwitted charges against people.

Apple 'outstrips' all brands at box office

Supernatural

Is a weird one - in the series they use apple macbook pros - but with the apple logo hidden and the thing running some sort of linux flavour...

wonder if that counts.

Mio Navman V575 TV satnav and Freeview tuner

my X5 has it OEM

not that unusual - my X5 has built in GPS and TV - no biggy.

I hacked it so it works while driving - but only to provide a mirror output of my hacked ipod - so I can more easily change tracks with it.

I suppose it does mean you could watch movies while driving if you were an idiot.

Boffins demand: Cull bogus A-Levels, hire brainier teachers

quite the opposite imho!

Lets face it - 50% of folk are of below average intelligence.

the bottom of the bell curve there sucks up most of the time and effort of teachers - If we were smarter about filtering out the window lickers at 12-14yo like they used to do when you had to do entry exams for secondary school, maybe we could free these resources in the education system to teach people who will actually benefit from it....

If yer going to spend yer life changing tyres/working in mcburger/working in tescos then why the hell keep em in school part 12 years old - how long does it take to teach the thickies to use a cash register and learn how to say 'do you want fries with that?'....

Of course, that would require the admission that 'some folk are smart, and some folk are thick' - something that seems to be accepted less and less by governments and parents....

Q) if you have kids: are any of them thick ?

Q) have any friends of yours admitted that their kids are thick ?

30-40 years ago the answer would have been yes - it wasn't a stigma - there was a realisation in the laws of nature - which seems to have been replaced by everyone being dyslexic, having TDD or any one of a number of other 'conditions'* rather than admitting they arn't the brightest tack in the box.

*read carefully please: not ofr a moment suggesting these conditions are not real for some - just suggesting that its an easy label to attach to the 'ralphs' of the world.

Oh and to the Art grad: I have no problem with you going to university for universities sake - be my guest. Just don't expect me to pay for it.

I'd make uni fees based on the countries need of each subject - updated every year.

Shortage of electronic engineers: make the course free for those that start that year.

Expected shortage of travel agents ? - make art degrees free for folk that start that year...

otherwise - you pays full price.

stu

DEC: The best of systems, the worst of systems

wow - el reg readership age demographics

never realised there were so many old timers on here....

Sorry, I said ' I NEVER REALISED THERE WERE SO MANY OLD TIMERS ON HERE'

Kindle update to add 'proper' page numbers

pillars of the earth

Lottie - yup - I finally took plunge before going on hols 3 weeks ago - managed to read about 2000 pages (4 books), including Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth which is over 1000 pages in paperback - no way I'd have been able to fit that in my case.

Beastly Android will batter Apple's iOS beauty

eh?

"The biggest reason for this consumer adoption is the robust developer adoption Android has engendered. James Gregory, co-founder of application developer Whereoscope, talks about the shift from iOS thinking to Android thinking:"

proof ? sounds a load of mince to me. Most consumers wouldn't have a clue about any of this.

If you ask me - one of the main reasons is quite simple - price.

Ford sell a hell of a lot more cars than Porsche (note - making no claim that iphone is the 'porsche of mobile phones quality wise - just price wise).

So your article would conclude that Ford sell a hell of a lot more cars than porsche because ford embody bla bla and xyz...when it would clearly be price price price.

unlike the car industry - there are really only 2 viable smartphone choices at the moment - looking for a complex differentiator when the obvious one is staring you in the face seems quite perverse.

In your article

US politician: 'homosexual agenda' behind TSA groin grope

the real quote

"The next TSA official that gives you an 'enhanced pat down' could be a practicing homosexual, caressing your privates with his slender hands, his rippling biceps straining under his tight shirt, his strong chest brushing against you, secretly getting pleasure from your submission," Loudoun County, Virginia, supervisor Eugene Delgaudio wrote in an email to his followers in the conservative organization Public Advocate, of which he is president.

Apple MacBook Air 11.6in sub-notebook

Got mine at the weekend!

Speeced up to 128g, 4g ram, 1.6 processor.

plays 1080p mkvs with about 30% CPU usage with XBMC, editing my mp4 gopro HD 1080p footage in imovie no bother at all.

As a second laptop for travel/holidays it is excellent.

Absolutely amazing little bit of kit - I love it. 1200 quid well spent.

US man slips into perv scanner-busting undies

nah

u want a picture of a grenade, or 'BANG' or 'EXPLOSIVE CONTENTS' on em surely....

'Plastic surgeon' cuffed for in bar boob checks

wow - I admire the commitment

a lot of hassle to go through - getting a sex change - just to feel some tits.

NY youth makes $130k selling real(-ish) white iPhone 4s

retina display not required

just the capacative touch screen is built into front casing - not actual LCD display.

eh - mince!

I bought an original white glass back for my iphone 4 for a tenner last week off ebay.

Front parts are about 30 quid.

just search for white iphone 4 and you'll find all u need.

The forgotten, fat generation of Mac Portables

arg

please please sell the apricot and buy a vacuum cleaner!!

Rethinking the iPhone

mental

even for an american, that is some mental logic there... al because for some reason you don't like the iphone as a phone... what's wrong with it ? mine works fine for calls.

Proposing a solution of substituting 1 device for about 5 is mad as a tree.

since I iphoned up last year, it has now (iphone 4 now) became my one and only device I take everywhere - 90% of the time I use it for emails, surfing and apps (the stuff I'm told I have to buy a similar resolution, less feature rich massive ipad for)... and the other 10% is calls which it does fine.

Unless you could using it as a mobile wifi hotspot and tethered solution for my macbooks - in which case I use it 8 hours a day on client sites for that too - all one device.

stu

- itard (MBP17, MBA13, MBA11, imac, mac pro quad, mac mini, hackbook, iphone4, 2xipods... 2 IIc and a few mac classics)

Apple MacBook Pro 17in Core i7 BTO notebook

@JonHendry

well if it's a 2010, it must still be under warranty ? - take it into yer apple store and get it fixed ?

me too

made the move last year from windoze.

maximse windows: RightZoom

decent finder: forklift or Pathfinder

PARIS in 89,000 ft climax

good wprk

have a look on you tube for lots of others - seems to be the hobby of choice recently. there is an excellent HD one on there filmed with a gopro HD.

Online badness: The kids are not alright

shavin'

I don't think there can be any doubt that the internet affects kids/teenagers.

Amongst my generation (late 30s), 10 years ago I remember asking my friends (that are girls) if they shaved below the belt - they all thought it was ridiculous and no one did it.

These days you'd be hard pressed to find a girl in her 20s with fluff.

Reason - the internet: exposure to pr0n.

is this good or bad ? I'm not saying it's either - but it does show the power of the net to dramatically affect the behaviour of a generation.

paris icon for obvious reasons.

Apple bolts chastity belt on super svelte MacBook Air

1.4gz

I have to say - that was what made me sad...

I have an original 1.6 MBA in my apple 'garage'... its ok for holidays and stuff when I don't need the 17" MBP, but once you try playing say gopro 1080p footage it maxes out the CPU and stutters to a halt. Obviously editing them in FCP or imovie is equally frustrating.

However, I popped in to apple today with a USB drive with some straight 1080p gopro mp4 H264 footage to see if it would play it....

F**K me if it didn't play it smooth as a babys ass cheeks - and with only about 15% CPU usage ( I remind you - this is a 1.4 core duo - and I've not done any fancy crap like I do on my PCs like use the right version of MPC-HC and feck out to try to get it to do some hardware acceleration.

And, as ars technica has pointed out the flash memory speed is absolutely mentally quick (160MB/sec).

Now, granted, when it comes to something that actually needs raw horsepower still - like ENCODING 1080p (at least for now under OSX that doesn't use the GPU) you are going to feel that 1.4ghz slowness, but seriously I could not believe how responsive it is just down to the flash memory

Gosling blows lid off Jobs Java nonsense

so ?

java has had it's day.

I've been in the java biz since the start. I was in the nextstep biz before that...

java will have a place in the enterprise for some time, but it was never a big thing on the consumer device.

Sure - it will be important to maintain a developer env for enterprise apps - but this can as easily be through vmware as native - I use my MBP every day at work with a client build on a VM.

I don't see the problem. the ease of objective C coding via X code has really resulted in java being dead on osx for the last 5+ years. There's not COM+ or DLL hell here, and unlike .NET there was no requirement to have .NET compliant runtimes, etc, etc - for once Stevey 'I must control the world' Jobs had a point if you ask me.

These days you'd have to be mental to write java code for windows or .net - its an enterprise only solution - the new cobol if you like.

stu

p.s el reg needs to update the steve icons - he's far too far in them.

Apple rolls out two new MacBook Air models

Company

Well I'm gonna go see em today.

A 11.6 specced to 1.6 at 128gb is still much cheaper than the old air which I've got as a 'holiday' laptop.

If they have sorted out hardware acceleration and it can play 1080p gopro footage I can see me walking out with one

Apple to lead fanbois 'Back to the Mac'

Barbary lion

thats my guess anyhoo.

Schmidt: Google is the 'inverse' of Apple

@AC 12:51

hear hear I agree.

It seems to only be the last 20 years or so that for some reason we don't just care about the product, buut somehow need to have our value system mirrored in the bloke that owns the company or 'the company values'... I mean WTF is that about ?

'company values' is such a nonsense 90s+ phrase anyway.

When did it become the norm to anthropomorphize companies. It's just madness.

Apple's 11.6in MacBook Air release imminent?

overpriced macs ? don't think so.

I crossed to the dark side a few years ago.

Usual stuff -best laptop I've ever had yada yada.

However - here's an example of why apple does it for me (even with Mental Jobs at the helm):

I bought an imac from ebay 6 months ago - 2006 core duo. screen a bit shagged for inch on left hand side, otherwise fine. 200 quid.

It was useable and a bargain.

However, 2 weeks ago screen went totally.

Hmm.. gonna be expensive I think. Well - first step is to find out how expensive. I bring it in to my local apple store - NOTE: a 5 year old computer - 4 years out of warranty. no applecare, etc.

Hmm, they say... it needs a new LCD panel, possibly new motherboard.

Arg I say, probably not worth repairing then.

No no, they say - we'll repair it free of charge.

I day later, they call to say its all fixed - need a new LCD panel.

I'm typing this on it now.

say what you want about apple, but I can't think of another computer company I'd get that service from.

stu

When double D isn't enough - go 3D

aha

So that's what Tom did after Magnum.

talented versatile bloke Tom. Good to see he landed on his feet.

Nvidia boss: cloud, ¡Si! Intel, ¡No!

Time to brush the dust off those old textbooks

Occam might have its day yet.....

World's first pedal-powered ornithopter takes flight in Canada

er

1 - it would not 'slow down'. whether he flapped or not, it would maintain the same airspeed.

2 - the glide ratio of wing section like that will be massive (1:70+ - better than the best gliders). i.e. it can travel 70m for ever 1m lost.

Or to put it another way - it started off 2m from the ground, and GLIDED 140m before landing on the ground.

I agree, it seems likely that the flapping is adding nothing whatsoever.

stu (pilot)

Steve Jobs in iPhone bitchslap to creationists, Tea Party

excellent

I also recommend iphone bible apps. As an antitheist.

reading and searching for stuff in the bible is a hilarious way to pass the time.

Did you know that it is a sin to eat an owl for example ? Or that women raped in cities who do not cry out should be stoned ? (the inference being that they were clearly asking for it...)

hours of hilarious top tips in there.

it's better than Viz.

you're joking right ?

I mean, have you actually read what he said ? Do you understand evolution ?

"In the book, Benedict defended what is known as 'theistic evolution', the view held by Roman Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches, that God created life through evolution and religion and science need not clash over this."

Thereby quite neatly summarising his complete inability to understand evolution* and the selfish gene. sigh.

*im tempted not to have to explain that - but for the hard of thinking: evolution does not 'result in man' anymore than it results in an ameoba. Perhaps god was happy to wait and see and would have written the bible for ameobas if evolution had played out that way ? personally I think the pope needs to give up trying to make a cat bark.

GoPro HD Hero camera

why only 80%

Had one for about a year now (since they came out). Totally awesome for my paramotoring.

Couple of things though - you mention 60m waterproof and 'amazing underwater clarity' - er... that is mince. Even GoPro admit that you cannot use it underwater at the moment without getting a blurry image - its a 'feature' of the curved frontal lense - So it is useless for underwater sports at present unless you put it in an underwater case or DIY the lense.

Would have been nice if you had mentioned editing footage - as I find many many owners seem to have difficulty with it mainly simply due to slow PCs, etc but it is certainly a surprise to most that there 5 year old PC can't cope with 1080p editing (as a rough guide - >2GHz dual core required for smooth 1080p playback with no graphics acceleration - which u are unlike to have if yer PC is slower/.older than that anyway).

For those interested in seeing examples of of its use in paramotoring:

http://www.youtube.com/user/powerlord69

Playboy centrefold freaks out at 10,000 feet

you can open the door quick easily actually...

Planes depressurize on the ground and on ascent.

If you have an altimeter on your watch you can confirm this easily enough.

Up until the aircraft exceeds the altitude where the pressure becomes less than in the aircraft, the pressure differential is, in fact in your favour (as a door opening mentalist)

As has been mentioned before, the plan is depressurised to around 8000-10000 feet equivalent.

So, roughly speaking until the plane is higher than 10K, it would be a peice of piss to open the doors.

And I would suggest that 9000 feet is still 'at altitude'.

Perhaps one of the more commited El Reg commentards can test this fact out on their next Ryan Air flight ?