Jonathan Davies

This year has been a very prosperous Christmas with me gaining lots of goods that should hopefully push me further into the online world of content creation and also - a load of cool stuff. The following items are those that I have deemed most interesting for you guys so not all my presents were tech related (though admittedly most were!).

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, Student Edition (they’ve got to shorten the name):

I was really hoping to get this for Christmas, I had been looking at purchasing this for a long time as on the Windows side of life had been using an old copy of Photoshop which I had throughly enjoyed. I am so glad that I was accepted as been a student because the price discount was massive; the RRP is £1600 we got it for £200. Though I did have a few entail problems with the installation I smoothed those over and am now having a great time. One podcast that I should mention is Pixel Perfect.  A very helpful video podcast from  Revision3, it has helped me loads!

Apple Wireless Keyboard:

As I got my 24” Monitor (review here) I knew I needed a keyboard as working with the MacBook Pro’s was unacceptable. So far my experiences have been good, but as with every keyboard it is taking a while to get used to (and due to that the spelling of this post is suffering a lot). However the design is beautiful.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare:

From the review I thought this to be an impressive game - it has so far lived up to all my expectations and has been a real joy, though I still prefer FPS’ set in WWII this hasn’t been a step in the wrong direction, though I would be very interested in seeing the technology used here put into that sort of situation.

Some other gifts of mention: iTunes music card, griffin elevator, Saving Private Ryan and My Boy Jack.

What loot did you get for Christmas? Leave a comment telling us!

I really want to get a good set of speakers, the only problem is that I don’t know anything about them. So… I want your help in choosing some. Here are a few things that you should consider when helping me:

I’m not an audiophile, I can’t tell the difference between my brother’s in-ear headphones and my classic iPod earbuds. So I’m not looking for the best and though that I don’t want to spend a massive amount on money so around £100 ($200) mark is what I’ve been looking at.

I would like them to look pretty good, not butt ugly and perhaps have them look different, bear in mind that my setup is filled with blacks and silvers; so if you can try to do a bit of colour coordination.

The main things I’ll be hearing through the speakers are: podcasts and music and a few movies (played on my MacBook Pro).

Here are a few things to help you:

I live in the UK so it is no good you giving me links to US websites, and if you do the price may be under £100 there but it certainly won’t be with the inflation in the UK, so here are the two online stores I would consider ordering from - check that the speakers are there first before telling me about them.
The UK Apple Online Store
Amazon UK

And here are a couple of speakers that caught my eye:

Altec Lansing VS4121
Altec Lansing FX4021

What made me look at these especially? Striking design and I’ve heard that they produce a good sound. Do you agree?
        
Thank-you very much for helping me, if there are any other questions that you need to helping me shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’ll update this post with the info.

I like my Mac to be ready for me every day when I wake up, but I don’t want it wasting away during the night, after snooping about the the energy savings preference pane I found out how to schedule your mac to sleep and wake up.

Here are the steps:

Go to: System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule

In this pane, pictured above you can set timings for your Mac to go to sleep and to wake up whenever you want. For instance I have mine set to go to sleep and about 2am (because sometimes I am up pretty late and don’t want it falling asleep on me) and then for it to wake up at 6am so my computer alarm will actually go off, which it sometimes doesn’t when it is asleep.

One thing that I would like it to do that it doesn’t; is for it to be able to set sleep and wake times throughout the day, so if I wanted it to shut off every morning for half an hour because I know I won’t be there half the time.

Do you have any Quick tips that you want to share with us? Either leave a comment or use the contact form.

Dell, not Apple?

There were a couple of reasons that made me choose not to go with the Apple Displays. One, the price, with the cost of one Apple 23” Cinema Display I could have bought about two of these monitors - give or talk about £20. Obviously that was one big point and even if there weren’t these others I would have still got this one. A higher contrast ratio of 1000:1 with the cinema displays having a petty 700:1. Also, the Dell 24@ Monitor has a far better response time of 5ms. (great for gaming especially) while the ACD has 14ms. response time. If you ask me there is quite a difference, and I’m not sure if I would be able to live with myself knowing that I payed double the price for a far inferior display. The main reason for these terrible specifications is the fact that Apple has frankly been too lazy to upgrade these to a better spec; and on that side of things, after using both a 23” Cinema Display and this, I kinda’ prefer this.

Design

I’ll briefly touch on some interesting design points, the stand is very stable, and I don’t feel insecure about having it on the edge of my desk, though made of plastic, it has a very professional finish. One downside is the lack on adjustability; you can only tilt the monitor, not raise the height of it, also as far as I can see you can’t rotate the screen into portrait mode, not something that I’d like to do myself, but others may. There is also a limited amount of inputs, only DVI and VGA. Compared to it’s big brother, the UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC (which for some reason I am no longer able to find on the UK Dell Store), my monitor does not have the extra video capabilities. Some of these ports however may have been useful because after having the monitor for a relatively short amount of time I have already been asked by several people if we can hook it up to the Xbox 360 (which you can, you just need an adapter).

Performance

The display is very bright, sadly not as bright as my MacBook Pro (which does happen to have an LED backlit screen) but very close. The native resolution of the display is 1920×1200, which is to be expected for the size of the display. So far I have not discovered any dead pixels and I certainly don’t intend to either. The monitor is very fast to tuen on, pretty much instant. A couple of extra points that should be noted: The display does not have a biult in card reader, if you want that then you have to get the UltraSharp model. Also, you might want a big desk. This thing is massive, my desk is over two meters long and it still makes a big dent in desk, not Dell’s fault just that it is the nature with buying such a large display.

Conclusion:

I am incredibly impressed with the Dell E248WFP 24” Monitor, it has lived up and become more than what I ever expected of it. For £320 it was a bargain, though it’s RRP is £402 so I would wait for another offer if the price pops back up again. I highly recommend it and will be able to report back on it’s performance in the near future when I talk about it’s gaming performance and CS3 abilities. What monitor do you use and why? Did you go Dell or Apple? Tell us by leaving a comment - I’d be very interested in knowing why.

 UPDATE: Charile from the Amateur Photography Blog has submitted the story to digg if you liked it please digg the story!

It’s just too damn expensive. Not only price wise, you just don’t get bang for your buck here. Especially in the UK, we are forced to pay outrageous rates for phones, not necessarily just the iPhone  but all UK phones. But for this case I’ll just compare prices.

UK iPhone Price: $540 (for all the UK prices I just doubled to make the US approximate)

US iPhone Price: $400

So why do we have to pay an extra $140? Sure we have to pay VAT but that accounts for only 17.5% of the handset’s price!

UK iPhone Data Plan Price:    $70        $90        $110
US iPhone Data Plan Price:    $60        $80        $100

Well there isn’t much to say about the pricing apart from what you can obviously see. We have to pay an extra $10 per plan, but it gets worse because in exchange for the extra $10 we have to pay we get less.

UK iPhone Minutes:             200        600        1200 (paired respectively to prices)
US iPhone Minutes:            450        900        1350

Why the hell do we have to pay more to get less than half the amount of minutes then the US in one case, luckily for some of the more minute needier users the iPhone minutes do get slightly better - but not by much. Let the madness continue when we look at the amount of texts that you are allowed.

UK iPhone Texts:            200        500        500
US iPhone Texts:            200        200        200

So when you first look at this then you may think - this is where they extra $10 may make sense to some people on the high end, and it did to me until I found this: “For $10 more per month, you can upgrade to 1500 SMS messages” So then, lets look at a revised text plan when now all the prices are the same:

UK iPhone Texts:            200        500        500
US IPhone Texts:            1500        1500        1500

Not so even now is it?

After looking and comparing these prices I just don’t see how i could live with myself when buying one of these, knowing just how much I payed for it and how I’m being cheated by both Apple and O2.

What do you think about the text, minutes and monetary differences? Leave a comment or use the contact from to tell us.

Photo Credit: Niall Kennedy

Do you make any changes to you Mac or PC (I’m going to refer to the mac from now on) for Christmas. I do, not for any particular reason, but it is fun. The image above is of my desktop.

Here are two really easy changes you can make to your Mac for the festive season:

Change your wallpaper:

It’s simple, but makes a big difference. Below are two very good Christmas wallpaper collections.

The Christmas Corner

Christmas Carnivals

Change some icons:

The Icon Factory have some great collections of icons themed towards the holiday season right here.

Do you spruce up you computer for the holiday season and how? Leave a comment with a link to your desktop.

In this weeks episode of Tech Today we talk about:

CompUSA shutting down for good

How the "Kill Switch" is dropped from Vista

Nintendo pulling ads to try and steady demand

MacMall offering impressive deals on hardware

DOWNLOAD Right Click and "save as"

[Running Time: 22:23]

When I first purchased my iPod Touch I knew that I would have to get a case, in fact there was only one reason for me not getting a case with the same order from Apple - they didn’t have any, and they still don’t. Well they do, but not the one that I want. In fact there as one that I had my heart set on: The Elan Convertible  but I still can’t find a UK reseller that stocks it.

Now I’ll move onto another, far more important reason. I don’t care. After having it for nearly two months, nothing has happened to reignite my yearning for a case, because the screen will not scratch, though I can’t say that I have tried to. Of course the back in scratched but after all; that’s not the side that I’m looking at most of the time. So I’ve decided not to buy a case, that £20 saving can go towards something else, as to what - I’m not sure.

With my previous iPod, a 5.5 generation, I bought a case with it and till the day I gave it to my dad it didn’t have a scratch, probably because from the time I opened up the iPod to putting it in the case lasted about twenty seconds. Unfortunately this is now no longer the case. After my dad buying it off me it is scratched all over. When I asked him about it he said “So what? I didn’t buy it from you for it to look good, I bought it to play music”. I am now starting to see where he is coming from.

Do you always buy a case for your iPod or do you not see the need? Tell us, by either using the contact form or leaving a comment.