Macgasm

Roger’s has the fastest network according to their marketing campaign, but now that Bell/Telus has jumped on the iPhone bandwagon up here in Canada, there’s more competition in the market. Where there’s competition there’s comparisons between devices.

News dropped yesterday that Telus is actually suing Rogers over their advertisement claims that they have the fastest network in Canada. Turns out Telus partnered up with Bell to create a new smoking fast network, and have surpassed the speeds available on the Rogers Network.

Today someone decided to do a speed test in downtown Toronto on both networks and post the video to YouTube. I’d embed the video but it seems like the video creator turned off the embedding ability–god knows why.

You can watch the video here.

If you’re too lazy to click through. The results of the video show the Bell Network pushing 5250 kb/s and the Rogers/Fido network is pushing 2611 kb/s.

That’s a big difference, and if I wasn’t stuck on this god awful Rogers plan I’d be making a switch right now.

I’m glad Telus is doing something about the advertising practices of Rogers. It’s about time companies fight over truth in advertising.

You know what’s great? Old school video games. I probably sound like a broken record here, but most of my favourite games of all time were played when I was a kid. Borderlands is closing the gap, but frankly, there’s something to be said about the breadth of some of those old school DOS games. I mean, what can compare to King’s Quest?

Well don’t fret, a sweet application called Boxer lets you play some of those old DOS games on your mac. It’s a sweet emulator, and it comes with a couple of games for you to try out. The great part? It’s completely free. I’ve been playing with it for the last couple of days, and it certainly works. I haven’t had any problems with it, and it seems to be chugging along like you’d expect any good emulator to do.

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In this episode, we talk about Blu-Ray thanks to @martysdomain.

[02.6 MB] [00:07:50] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner] [Subscribe]

Have you ever wanted to search a remote computer for some files, but don’t want to run down the stairs to check the Mac Pro in the office? Networks with an OS X Server attached to it have had that luxury for a while now if it has Spotlight Server set up. It’s always amazed me that there’s a distinction between home services and server services in today’s day and age.

We’ve already reached the point where we’re no longer surprised to find a computer in every home, but pretty soon we’ll be seeing servers in every home. It’s happening quickly, and I’d be willing to bet that a majority of our readers already have a form of server in their house already. A lot have media servers, some have web servers, others have development servers. It’s the norm.

There’s a huge movement on the internet to move things to the cloud, but a lot of people are missing the opportunity to take things to the home, locally, through utilizing cheap home servers like the Mac Mini.

Think about it for a second. Would you like to have a dropbox setup that actually takes care of some things locally, and only push certain things out to the internet? I think we have a real possibility here for some growth. OS X server isn’t super easy to manage, but if a couple of developers started making server installation packages along side cloud based applications, then we’ll be able to get these services up and running fairly quickly.

Taking a quick look on Apple’s OS X Server page highlights the need, and their own recognition of this fact. They have an iCal server, an Address Book Server, a Podcast Production Server, and a Wiki Server, just to name a few. It’s becoming quite obvious that home servers are becoming the norm. Apple Inc. might argue that these things are aimed more at small businesses, but lets be real, homes are becoming small offices. Keeping information synced between multiple computers in the home is something that needs to be addressed. Pushing information out to the internet to do this isn’t the most efficient manner to get this done. Sure, some things might need to be pushed to the cloud, but the reality is that a lot of stuff only needs to be updated a couple of times a day.

Now that I think about it, the Mac Mini is a logical choice for a lot of the problems with home networks today. Need a Media PC in a bedroom? The Mac Mini answers that bell quite easily. Need a machine to act as a syncing device between all the kids? The Mac Mini can serve that up quite easily. That’s just the easy stuff.

I’m sure there’s a whole slew of uses for a Mac Mini in a home, and I think Apple knows that. There’s rumours about that Apple’s in the market for a gaming executive, and if there was ever a device that could easily be turned into a full fledge console it’s the Mac Mini. The more I think about it the more I realize that this misunderstood device has a big future at Apple Inc.

Okay, you have a Christmasy wallpaper on your Mac now. That’s great, but what about the wallpaper on your iPhone or iPod Touch? You can use a great free app called Backgrounds to search for cheery wallpapers that fit the aspect ratio of the iPhone/iPod Touch screen perfectly.

Sure, you got some music from iTunes for the holiday season, but how about some free Christmas music? You can search Archive.org for free creative commons/public domain Christmas music that you can use in your audio and video productions. Also, there are a fair number of podcasts that release free Christmas music. Free is always nice.

Need some idea for what to cook this holiday season? You can take a look at the Christmas selection over at BigOven.com. There are over 1,900 recipes tagged for Christmas, so you’ll surely find something you’re interested in. The best part is that it is super easy to drill down on the site, and they even have a free iPhone and iPod Touch app.

For more holiday tips involving your Mac, iPod, or iPhone, check out Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this series of articles here at Macgasm.

Photo Credit: Emery_Way

If you’re like me, you like using multiple computers at any given time, but you don’t want to have one monitor (or two) per computer in addition to separate keyboards and mice. I’m a Windows user who wants to take advantage of using both Mac and Linux without extraneous hardware. I don’t need 4 keyboards for 4 desktops, do I? Having the StarTech SV431DVIDDU 4 Port StarView Dual DVI USB KVM Switch with Audio, thus, is an opportunity to get the best of both worlds (or three worlds, or four) since I can connect up to four computers via one console to two DVI monitors, a USB mouse, a USB keyboard, and even 2.1 speakers.

First things first: before using this device, you need to get the right hardware for it. Your VGA video cards should definitely also be DVI compatible, and you should have a solid 24-pin DVI cable at the minimum (a 20-pin DVI cable won’t work on any KVM switches from my experience). Furthermore, you need to resolve to use either VGA mode or DVI mode, not both. Most likely, your video card manufacturer has set this limitation, so if you’re planning on testing out functionality like this, you’ll need to do a complete reboot to get full functionality.

Once you get the computers hooked up, though, you’re well on your way to becoming a multitasking guru. I was able to successfully connect a Linux machine using Fedora 11, a Windows XP desktop, a Windows XP laptop, and a Mac Pro to the KVM switch without a hitch, save for a few frustrations with the Linux box (see below). Further, and something I was especially appreciative about, I was able to connect USB devices that aren’t even recommended by their manufacturers, such as the Logitech MX Revolution mouse which is completely wireless. Even on Linux, the mouse just worked. (On Linux, it was actually the only thing that worked flawlessly.)

The Linux box was the only real issue, but if you’re using Windows and Mac, you should be fine. In the graphical user interface, I often ran into horrible blinking of the screen (on, off, on, off) which was not predictable at all. I’m not sure if it was isolated to the graphics card I had or the KVM, but in the end, I plugged the monitor directly into the graphics card and did not encounter the issue any longer. Occasionally, I encountered a “sticky keyboard” in the sense that when I typed on the keys as expected, the computer thought that the keys were still being pressed and I had to interrupt the inputs which would normally stop myself from writing “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz” or “hhhhhhhhhh.” Again, I’m not sure if this was a KVM or keyboard issue, but it’d be interesting if the latter because I encountered two oddities with the setup.

I don’t have the KVM switch sitting right next to me, so while I can press the buttons to get to another terminal, StartTech has hotkeys that you can use to get access to the desired terminal. For example, to get to my Windows XP machine, which is specified as PC 1, I just needed to rapidly press ScrollLock+ScrollLock+1 (default) or Ctrl+Alt+1. These are user-defined through software, though, in case you have any interest in using an alternative configuration.

What if, say, you use your Linux box like I do, for a “server” rather than a regularly-used OS? When I’m playing music on my XP PC but want to switch over to Linux for some quick diagnostics, I don’t want the sound on my Linux box to take over. That’s fine — you can select a default computer for the music through the software to avoid losing that great song. (Of course, you can also just keep the speakers plugged into the main computer, but we’re talking about unleashing the potential of this StarView KVM switch here).

There are several useful hotkey configurations as well that can be done directly from the keyboard, so you may not need the extra software at all. To that end, the manual comes handy so that you can get familiar with the various options. Once you’ve set up the KVM switch to your desired settings, you no longer will need to use it anymore.

What did I think of output and inputs? As mentioned, it worked with everything except for a computer I use on the command line via SSH anyway. No image was distorted. In the end, the StarTech SV431DVIDDU 4 Port StarView Dual DVI USB KVM Switch with Audio was a solid performer for DVI and USB output across multiple devices — with a slight hiccup.

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In this episode, we continue to talk about having A Very Macintosh Christmas

[01.6 MB] [00:04:50] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner] [Subscribe]

If you wanted to protect your phone, you’d get an iPhone case, and if you wanted it to look cool you’d get a skin. Those were pretty much your two options. Some of each option would overlap, and you’d get something amazing, but they’re far and few between.

News out today is telling us that one of our favourite graphic tee sites has gotten in on the iPhone case design business, and teamed up with the fine folks over at Griffin.

Threadless has taken two of their tees and turned them into some pretty cool looking iPhone / Touch covers. They’re suggesting that they’ll be doing it in the future as well, so if you have the skill, you might have a chance to design something and get it printed on a griffin case. If they haven’t thought of it already, then they’re missing out on an opportunity here. I’d design a case if I knew it’d get printed on a line of iPhone cases, wouldn’t you?

Here’s a video of them talking about the collaboration

Threadless + Griffin = one awesome case! from Threadless.com on Vimeo.