So…. The iPad…..

Well, I am quite a tech loving guy, and like most of my kind I keep one eye on Apple whenever they are sending out their reality warping events promoting the latest giant bump in their product portfolio.

Yesterday was finally the announcement of the worst kept secret in the industry, the iPad.  I don’t know if I would call myself an Apple fanboy, since I have never owned a Mac computer.  There have been many occasions where I would have liked to, but have gone the way of windows for one reason or another.  I am an iPod guy, and have owned a few since the first gen of the iPod mini up through my current Nano.

Also, I have wanted an iPhone for a while, but absolutely refuse to consider it as long as T-com is the only provider.  I have deep personal feelings about T-com and will not be allowing them to have any of my money.  If the iPhone moves to another provider… it will be on my radar.  But that is another story.

I watched “the Steve” do his thing yesterday, and as usual he was very compelling.  As I watched the announcement and demo, I thought it looked pretty great.  But I have learned that the presentation style of The Steve really does distort opinions of the products, so I had to think about what he showed before I allowed myself to like or dislike this new product.

After much consideration, I would say the iTab is a good, but not revolutionary product.  To me, it is basically a super size iPod touch.  Perhaps a netbook replacement, but i don’t even know if that is the case.  What I like on the iTab

• Screen looks very nice.
• the iPhone OS was already pretty easy and fun to use.
• the Kindle reading application looks well implemented.
• Pricing was far better than I thought it would be.
• Ability to store and display PDF files is great.
• It looks like something from the future.
• 10 hour battery life?  sounds too good to be true.
• Wireless access plans (for US at least) is reasonably priced.

What I don’t Like on the iTab

• No Camera/videoconferencing.
• Any widescreen media (films) will have LOTS of black bars and bezel.
• OS does not support multitasking, not that big a deal, but on a “netbook killer” it should be there.
• Too many adaptors needed for everyday connections.  You need an adaptor for USB?  come on…
• No Flash in web browser.  This is a must if it is a real web appliance.

Will I buy one? very very unlikely.  It would be an amusing toy, but I think all in all I would rather have an iPhone with a few modifications to the OS, or even an iPod touch with a couple more features.

Not much going on...

I have really failed to take any new photos since Christmas, and I really did not take all that many over the break. Such a shame when I find myself with nothing to say.

The Playmobil Castle….

Liam’s big gift this year was a Playmobil knights castle.  I cannot stress BIG enough.  this thing is giant.

I wish I had taken some photos of the building process, as it was a nightmare of tiny parts.  It took me over 2 hours to get the whole thing together, and it was long after Liam was asleep.

Here is the thing in all its beastly glory… Basically every place there is a different colour of plastic, there was at least 2 pieces or more.  The walls and towers had many segments, and all of them needed tiny plastic fasteners inserted with a special tool.  It was very fiddly and slow, but the instructions were clear and nothing was missing.  They are one up on Ikea in that department.

Here is the view a little Playmobil munchkin may have riding through the front gates.Liam was of course overjoyed to see it all put together and ready to play on Christmas morning.  He was so excited to get it the night before and a little disappointed that papa was not a faster builder.  He wanted it to pop out of the box ready to play.   Just look at the size of the thing next to Liam.  We had to clear out a big space in his room to house this beast.  The Ritterburg has seen extensive play since that first day, and Liam of course makes everyone join in the fun.  Of course, Liam always gets first (and second) choice of which knights to use.  In keeping with a feudal themed toy, we poor peasants are left with the scraps once royalty has had its way.

Christmas gift time – Liam

A very memorable moment on Christmas eve was when we all came home from the church, and brought Liam into the living room.  We had sneaked all the gift down while he was getting ready to go a little earlier, so for him, they had magically appeared while we were out.

He stood there and looked at the tree and gifts and was totally speechless, something that we thought was impossible for the little chatterbox.

Here is a selection of Liam opening a few of his many man gifts.  The Knight’s castle was his big gift this year and I will feature it in a future post of assembly nightmares.

 

Christmas Tales

Christmas is of course long gone now, but this will not stop me from posting my Christmas photos. As usual, our house was all decorate up for the holidays, with a few new features this year.

First we have the paper crafted advent train. This came from a book that was a gift from Aunt Doris to Liam. The idea was that every day in December, you read another page in the story and assembled the next part of the display. Of course the reality is that it was way to delicate for Liam and Claudia did the entire project under his supervision. It did turn out very nice though.Next up, we have the winter display made of course by decorator Claudia. She took her domed cake plate, put down some powdered sugar snow, then added our little wooden Santa that we bought at a market some years ago. Of course the missing piece of that puzzle was the deer, which she bought at the hardware store in town. For some reason, they also sell some little toy animals there. Of course the centerpiece of every Christmas display is the tree. We had a nice one this year, although a touch on the short side. Liam would not get out of the way so he struck some slick poses instead while I was trying to get a photo. They worst thing with this year’s tree was that I seemed to be allergic to it. 10 min in the room and I had uncontrollable itchy eyes. I was not sorry to see it taken down last week.

My Latest Project - Home Media Network

So one of the things that has been keeping me very busy is setting up my home media network. This is something I wanted to do for a long time, and certainly something I had envisioned using my Xbox for. I actually don't play very many games on my Xbox, but use it extensively as a media server. I had been limited to the Xbox HD, memory cards, or other fiddly things to get my media on there though.

Over the Christmas break, I assembled the various hardware I have been slowly accumulating over time/holidays/birthdays and got everything together and running.

The files for my video, music, and photos now reside on my NAS (network attached storage) which is just a hard drive with a network card in it basically. This is then attached to my nice new (Christmas) router, making all files available to devices connected to the router.

So, I acquire new media via normal sources, iTunes, digital Cameras, etc.. and these are routed inwards via my old desktop to the NAS, which stores them all. Then I pull out the media I want to use via the Xbox in the living room, my iPod, or any computer that is on the network. It basically looks like this:

It is all up and running as of yesterday and so far everything works perfectly.

The next phase would be to enable web access to the NAS, at which point I will be able to use the NAS from any computer with an internet connection (and my address and password of course.)

I could even go so far as to stream audio and video files directly to an iPhone or iPod touch, neither of which I currently own. I am sure that audio would stream to them no problem, but I am curious to see what happens when I stream a video file to an iPhone that is not already in the correct H.264/MPEG-4 video format.

According to the manufacturer, the NAS will “render content properly for display on the smaller screen…” I am still not sure if this just means that the video resolution is downsampled, or if it is somehow reformatted. I would be quite impressed if the NAS could actually re-code and stream an H.263 file to an iPhone… I may need to enlist a tester with said hardware on that project.

Finally…

OK, i finally got around to unloading my photos and I can start to make some posts again.  I have to say there has been quite a bit going on these days.

I will start off with the usual family Christmas group photo.  This year we were missing the Joneses, who were off in the USA visiting Ryan’s family, and you can see Franz is still recovering from his surgery there.

This will be the last photo of ours with just one little troublemaker in it.  Claudia’s belly is not so visible here, but the next little munchkin will be joining us in future Christmas photos.  Oh, and if Claudia has her way, this is also the last Christmas photo with this couch.  She is desperate for a new bigger one.

Liam’s Photography

Last year (i think) Liam’s wonderful Aunt Shona gave him the gift of a kids digital camera.  I threw a largish memory card in it and let him off into his little world to have some fun. 

Since so many of the photos he took with the camera were really random, I kind of forgot about it and stopped checking up on them, but a week or two ago, he complained that he needed some new batteries.  I took that opportunity to see what he had been up to.  Surprisingly, there were 800 pictures on the camera.

some themes recurred:

1. Liams room
2. The living room
3. Mummy and Papa’s feet.

Here are a couple of the better ones he took.