What do you think?? Are you attending this year?

geek

First – the love – the iPhone really is an easy to use and functional device. The real game-changer is the App Store, which seems significantly better than Blackberry’s recently released App World (I am still carrying my Verizon Storm, too) and more complete then what Android has to offer. On the iPhone, when you say “there’s an App for that” you’re generally not kidding. If only the Mac had such great development community. The iPhone is also a nice phone from a design perspective. For me it fits pretty well – not quite thick enough to put between my shoulder and ear, but generally comfortable to use. It also goes well in a pocket without looking like you’re carrying around a small paperback novel.

Next – the hate – and this one is easy, too. AT&T and by association the iPhone has the worst phone service that I could ever have imagined. I’ve had cell phones for a long time, and as a Verizon customer in recent years I’ve become accustomed to treating my cell phone the same way that I would treat a land-line. I just expect it to work. With AT&T… not so much. I have come once more to the point that I am frequently apologizing for being on my cell phone. It’s embarrassing. And it’s not like I live in an unpopulated area – I live in Silicon Valley – a few miles from Apple – something tells me that it must be much, much worse in other areas.

Just my thoughts, but important to know as the next article I have in mind will include which apps are on my iPhone and why.

geek

Yesterday, though, Apple sent their message to the Apple faithful and AT&T haters by asking if their network and phone would allow them to be on a call and simultaneously use the best features of their smartphone. For most, the answer would have to be no. Unfortunately, the part that Apple left out is the simple fact that on the AT&T network that is only possible when you have 3G access and AT&T’s network just isn’t that great when it comes to 3G network coverage. Small omission, but problem. Oh well, that’s not really the point, is it. The truth is nearly irrelevant – people are going to buy the iPhone regardless of whether or not it’s on AT&T or Verizon – even though they might actually prefer Verizon.

You can see Apple’s newest advertisement below – and of course this comes from YouTube where you can also find the other advertisement that delivers basically the exact same message.

~geek

As my work-at-home life continues to expand, I figured it was time to get a keyboard/mouse/monitor that I could use in my home office without feeling cramped to the traditional notebook keyboard. The keyboard and mouse were easy – I already had a spare Apple keyboard and I’ve really liked my Magic Mouse, so I will get another of those. The monitor, though, because it was for home, was a more difficult decision. At work I use 25.5″ Samsung Monitor, and while big enough it’s not super aesthetically attractive. On the plus side, they’re pretty darn good and regularly priced at less than $400. But, before making a decision – I had to check out the Apple Store to see what they had to offer.

At first blush, the Apple 30″ monitor is perfect, but on further inspection the price rules it out for consideration. It would be difficult to accept paying almost as much for a monitor as I paid for my MacBook – and yes, I know, I look at the monitor all day long. So I kept walking until I got to Apple’s LED Cinema Display, which is actually beautiful to look at – regardless of whether it’s on or off. At retail $900, it’s still more than double the Samsung, although it looks better and seems to be a better display.

Whether the quality is 100% better is debatable, but beauty aside there are some fatal flaws with Apples newest display offering – things that just can’t be overlooked. First and foremost – if you’re using an Apple MacBook Pro – the flaws are irrelevant. They’re features. The integration is beautiful and exactly what you would expect from Apple. Plug the monitor into power and a single whip includes a MacBook Pro power adapter, a DisplayPort plug, and a USB 2.0 connection. It’s perfect and exudes the neatness that most expect from Apple. Unfortunately, the excitement fades quickly.

I like my MacBook Pro – no doubt, but I live in a Windows world and frequently boot into Windows directly. Imagine my surprise – the Apple Display doesn’t work in Windows. Oh, and if you want to plug it into some other computer, other than a MacBook Pro, you’re pretty much out of luck. It has a DisplayPort adapter and that’s it. No DVI, no VGA… nothing. Beautiful if you buy a MacBook Pro, not so grand for anything else. What’s wrong with this picture on a $900 monitor?

So in the end, the LED display doesn’t make sense for me and there was little I could do to justify the cost/value of moving forward with another Apple product. Too bad; for half the price, maybe.

~geek

So here we go, post one for a new era – welcome to thegeekchannel.com!

~geek

Of course, this isn’t the place to find out about the best sales on the internet, but I would be interested in comments on what you’ll be doing to participate in this event. Please comment below and let me know – will you be spending your wad come Friday?

~geek

~Geek

 P.S.  Apple still says Flash sucks and they’re too good for Adobe.  Sorry.

One of the problems that I encountered during the removal had to do with the OneCare backup files.  I couldn’t, by default in Windows Vista, remove them.  I tried a variety of different things before stumbling on Laurent Duveau’s very elegant fix.  Needless to say, it worked first time for me.

Problem: You reinstalled Live OneCare, or you start using v2 beta, and want to delete your old backup folder, but you can’t.

This is a permission problem, that maybe you can solve with cacls with command line:

cacls “<drive letter>:\<path>” /t /g administrators:F 

Sample:
cacls “F:\Windows OneCare Backup\YourComputerName” /t /g administrators:F
Do NOT put a \ at the end of the path.

You’ll get a message “Are you sure(Y/N)?”

This will strip the permissions from the folder and you should be able to delete it.

On the other hand, I think that there is promise here if Apple can get past where they are today and add content for television with the same success that they’ve managed to get musical content.  Imagine, if you will, you could go to AppleTV and buy first-run movies electronically instead of on DVD.  Perhaps, because you’re purchasing digital content you can even burn that out to a DVD and have the best of both worlds?  I believe that people are going this way and that some company will win the battle.  Perhaps it’s not too late for Apple, but they need to get moving and promoting with the same passion that they do their other products.

~geek

I’m sure that this proved to be a very exciting Christmas bonus for the early adopters, with the only good news being that you might not know what you spent because Quicken, Money and Outlook are on the list of products likely to experience corruption when edited on the Microsoft Home Server share.

~geek