syamsul's domain

It never suprises me what lengths some are willing to go to just so that they can make more money. I’m talking about Creative of course, which made such a big hoo-hah about their new Creative Zen Touch in today’s Straits Times. Oh, Apple was slated to, and has announced, their 4th generation iPod today too. Coincidence? You decide.

Now, I’ve always felt that competition is good for the industry, whatever industry. The thing that irks me though is the fact that Creative claims you can put 10,000 songs in 20GB while Apple only claims to be able to fit 5,000 songs in the same amount of space. This looks absolutely amazing..until you realise that Creative is basing on the assumed bit rate of 64kbps WMA files for audio files in the Zen Touch vs 128kbps AAC for the iPod! I’m surprised that Creative would even bother making a claim like this when independent third-party tests indicate that WMA at 64kbps is hardly the equivalent of a well-encoded 128kbps MP3 file.

So, will customers fall for Creative’s claims? Will they go for Creative’s bulkier (though admittedly cheaper) Zen Touch against the market-leading Apple iPod? I guess time will tell.

Turns out I haven’t been able to make the time for any sort of gaming since my last post. Sigh. Looks like my lightsabre wielding fantasies will have to go unsatiated for the time being :p Ok back to the topic at hand..

I’ve owned Palm (now PalmOne) handhelds for several years now, and currently I own the Zire 71 which is really considered rather “antique” in these days of high-tech gadgetry. Since starting work as a teacher though, I’ve been hard pressed to find a way to really integrate my Palm into my workflow, aside from using it to schedule my many meetings (bet you didn’t know teachers too attend all sorts of meetings, did you?) and todos. But PalmOne has come to the rescue with its page on Palm Teaching where all sorts of Palm applications are recommended by actual teachers. Now I can REALLY justify why I need a Palm..coughs…

There are similar Expert Guides for other professions too, so check ‘em out if you’re a fellow Palm-totter.

Yes, so it’s been released for over a year now. But I’d only managed to get around to trying out Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy this weekend thanks to the Youth Day holiday. Thought it appropriate to “celebrate” Youth Day by doing a little of what I used to do lots of as a youth i.e. gaming.

Only tried for a few hours, but it’s been really fun so far. I’m really no good with action games (except for the point-and-click variety e.g. Diablo II) but the learning curve was smooth and even a newbie like me didn’t have too many problems coping…that is, at the lowest, “Padawan” level difficulty (that’s “apprentice” in Jedi-speak). The experience of wielding a light sabre, doing katas and using Force powers like Mind Trick (“You do not see me”) and Force Speed (run like the wind) was truly amazing.

So you know what I’ll be doing every weekend for the next couple of weeks.

BTW I’ve been playing the Mac version published by Aspyr on my rather heavily-upgraded PowerMac. At first I was getting some annoying stuttering and attributed it to the 32MB Radeon 7500, but after I installed the latest patch from Aspyr, gameplay has become as smooth as silk!

Did you know that it was possible for a 1.8GHz-class PC to boot into WindowsXP, load the desktop screen…and load…and load…and load…and load till it suddenly ran out of Virtual Memory? Well, I didn’t know either: at least till I took a look at the PC my cousin sent in for me to take a look at. Turns out that his sons installed just about every adware available, probably without knowing what they really were. It didn’t help that the computer was virus ridden (the antivirus software installed hadn’t had its virus definitions updated in over a year) and it hadn’t been fed a single Windows XP update..ever(think of all the unpatched security flaws!). So it was with a “heavy” heart that I recommended a format and clean install of WindowsXP. Thankfully he says all the important data has been saved elsewhere.

To help him avoid having to face these troubles again, these are what I did:

1) installed AVG Antivirus Free Edition (yes, it has a free edition for home users)
2) installed ZoneAlarm firewall software (again, free for personal use)
3) installed Mozilla Firefox along with the Luna Blue theme to make it look exactly like IE in WindowsXP (yes Firefox is free too..do you sense a pattern here? :> )
4) explained to him the evils of adware, the importance of updating his antivirus definitions and doing Windows Update on a regular basis

I know I could have simply recommended him to get himself a cheap Macintosh and be guaranteed about NEVER having these problems again, but this PC is a relatively recent purchase for him (only about a year old) so I doubt he’d want to spend the additional $$$.

In the meantime, here’s hoping that his PC stays problem free..for a while at least…