Saraton Theatre Gets 7.1

Today I had the pleasure of being one of the first to experience Tron in 7.1 audio at a cinema that wasn’t IMAX. Yes, Grafton, my humble little hometown has recently updated the heritage listed Saraton Theatre into the 21st century.
We were told at the start of the movie that the cinema had been just updated to a 7.1 system with a 4k 3D projector for entertainment bliss. The audio was crisp and clear with almost perfectly balanced surround sound, and the picture was sharp and clear 3D. The seats were clean and comfy with a slight recline and plenty of leg room.
This is the sort of cinema that people should travel to, just because it’s so damn awesome. And the price for all this movie-going pleasure? $14 with a Coke and the glasses. $14!! That’s less than a single normal ticket at your rubbish Hoyts or BC&C. The same movie would be over $20 with a drink. Rubbish.
I’m glad they’ve renovated the cinema, and from talking to the staff, they’re very proud of what they’ve achieved. Check it out if you’re in Grafton.

Moto GP 2010

It’s day one at Phillip Island for the Moto GP, and there isn’t a bit of blue sky to be seen. It hasn’t stopped raining since about 2am this morning and there is mud, slush and water everywhere. I’ve had a look through the display pavilion, bought some stuff, looked over the bikes, and managed to see Wayne Gardner give a speech on behalf of the Flying Doctors. Although I did find out a little more about his latest doctors checkup than I anticipated.
I’ll keep this blog updated as the weekend progresses, so please feel free to check back.

It’s race day today and the sun is trying to punch through. I managed to wander around the circumference of the track yesterday during qualifying to get some different angles on the bikes. Plenty of knee down action from the GP bikes, with Stoner taking pole position for today’s race.

I was planning on doing my usual run up Gardner Straight after the race has finished, but they’ve removed the tyre wall and created a mud filled moat with an Arco fence. I’m doubtful I’ll be able to get myself and my camera gear from the Honda tent, down the hill, over the fence and onto the track without making a mess of it. Maybe next year…

So after another Australian win by Stoner, and an amazing battle between Hayden and Rossi, the 2010 Moto GP is over. The sun came out for all three races: 125cc, Moto2, and Moto GP. This provided it’s own challenges, with a mixture of wet and dry patches on the road creating numerous issues for the riders. But the sun quickly dried the track to allow for some exciting racing!

I’m looking forward to next year, and taking the 2500km round trip on my little Honda. Pack light, enjoy the ride, and have a beer with mates at the end of a day in the saddle.

Facetime: Why can’t it be used over 3G?

Now, I’m not one of the boffins working as an engineer at Apple, but what I want to know is why the hell you can’t do FaceTime over 3G?
Yes, I understand the AT&T network is rubbish and suffers from dropped calls and overloading of their data network, but that’s for just one country. What about Australia, Japan, the UK, France and Germany? We don’t have the AT&T abomination that Americans suffer through. Just have a look at the graphs below…my 3G connection has a better upload speed than my WiFi! So what’s the limiting factor?
All I can put it down to is that AT&T is rubbish, and the rest of the world has to suffer for it.

WiFi Speedtest

3G Speedtest

 

 

Google Goggles On iPhone

Google Goggles has been released for the iPhone Google app as of today. This neat little feature provides visual search of things around you. While it’s not too crash hot on identifying things like plants and animals, it is brilliant at translating text, identifying landmarks, bringing up info on logos or reading text and providing search options. This feature has been on Android phones for a while, and is definitely a welcome feature to the iPhone. It’s free, so have a look-see at the Google App on the App Store.

iPhone 4 HDR Comparison

Apple iOS 4.1 was released this week after its announcement last week. It included a number of changes including Game Center (sic), a few bug fixes and surprisingly High Dynamic Range Photography, or HDR. No-one was really expecting this from Apple at all, but it is definitely welcomed. So what is it?

Well, put simply HDR is a combination of a number of different exposures that are blended together with the best features of each extrapolated to provide detail across the entire scene. Fortunately for us, our eyes do this on the fly constantly without us really knowing about it and adjust the amount of light they see dynamically as you look out a bright window, or back into a darker room. Cameras aren’t so versatile and need a little assistance. If you take a photo through that window you just looked out your camera has two basic options: Expose for the bright areas, or expose for the dark ones. HDR will take a photo of the scene with both of these areas exposed properly and meld them together so the entire scene is properly exposed. Clever, huh?

This is a feature that on my relatively expensive Canon SLR requires me to bracket the scene, set the camera to continuously shoot photos in rapid succession, put the three exposures into an image editor like Photoshop or Photomatix, get the balance right in the photo, wait for it to number crunch and spit out my HDR photo. Pretty time consuming? You betcha. This is how the iPhone 4 does it… Open camera application, make sure HDR is turned on with an on-screen button, take the photo, wait 3 seconds and review both the HDR and the photo the camera would’ve taken if HDR was off. Tell me which you’d rather?

Yes the SLR gives me a bucket load of options to configure this and that, but when you just want to get past the limitations of an already wonderful little point and shoot, this is a free addition that just can’t be beat. See below for my comparison shots of what you can now get out of a photo where the light in the scene just won’t play ball.

Non-HDR iPhone 4

HDR iPhone 4

AT&T iPhone 4 Plan vs Australian iPhone 4 Plan

I’ve heard stories for a while about how exorbitant it is to have an iPhone 4 in the USA on AT&T, so I decided to get my geek on and compare the roughly equivalent plans on AT&T’s network, and the network I’ve chosen to be on in Australia. I’ve put the prices for each category in the current US dollars given the exchange rate for today (25 Aug 2010).  Not only are the US plans more expensive, but they’re a LOT more expensive. I’m amazed at how ‘optioned’ AT&T is with absolutely every feature seeming to attract a dollar value.

First up is the handset cost. Both offer the iPhone 4 in the 32GB variety with AT&T costing $US299 and Optus costing $US213, but AT&T also have a one off primary line activation fee of $36, and then you might get extra state taxes thrown in for a bonus. You then need a plan to make all those phone calls on, and these were a little harder to compare as AT&T plans are in minutes, and Optus is in dollars (but is around 600 minutes a month). So I grabbed the plan costing the same monthly amount as what I’m on here, with both offering free calls to other phones on the network, and no additional charges for STD calling nationwide. Optus do include international SMS’s in their monthly allowance, but this will also reduce the call time you have.

Data is included in the Optus plan at no additional cost, and they provide 2GB and free tethering for your $AU59. AT&T want $25 a month for 2GB, and will sting you for a further $20 every month for the privilege of using that data through your laptop. Really AT&T? It costs you that much to enable a setting in the phone so that users can use the data they paid for on another device?

SMS is a bone of contention for me after I visited the US back on 2009. Get this, if someone sends you a text message to your phone (something you do not have the option to accept or reject) you get charged for it. Yes, the sender still pays, but you pick up a “standard charge” to receive the text message. Normally this is around $0.10, but if you had a trigger happy mate on an unlimited text plan he could very quickly send you to the poor house by smashing you with text messages. What’s that, a question from the back row? Yes, I will tell you how to get around this, glad you asked. You pay AT&T an additional $20 a month for unlimited text messaging. Luckily in Australia, this is included for free in my plan, as well as the more expensive ones too. If I didn’t have unlimited SMS, could my trigger happy texting mate hit me with a huge bill? Not on your nelly, it doesn’t cost a cent to receive a text message in Australia, only send one. And that’s just how it should be.

I also have the added benefit of having a completely unlocked iPhone 4, so I can put any GSM carrier’s micro SIM into my phone, very handy for roaming internationally. AT&T will be kind enough to offer you roaming charges using affiliate networks in foreign countries, but you won’t be swapping out that SIM card any-time soon unless you jailbreak the iPhone.

So how does this all add up? Well, I’ve been kind enough to summarise it in a nice little table below (Australian dollars in parentheses) but the gist is that you pay 57.2% more for the handset initially, and 172.3% more for roughly the equivalent value in each plan.Exclusivity, while good for the provider is bad for the consumer. I guess we’re very fortunate here to have four carriers fighting for our dollar, and it makes for a very healthy market.

AT&T vs Optus

iPhone OS 4.0

On Friday, 8th April 2010, Steve Jobs announced iPhone OS 4.0 for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. From what’s been coming back from developers so far, this is the biggest OS release for the tiny miracle I call the iPhone (and it’s brethren). Steve announced on the day seven of what he calls “tent poles”, and I’m going to go through these now while including my thoughts on each one.

1. Multitasking This is a biggie, just like copy and paste was back in a previous release of the OS. People have been crying out for this for a long time. Me? Not so much. I was happy to have a stable environment after seeing the butchered job that phone operating systems like Windows Mobile (sorry, I just threw up a little in my mouth) had done to multitasking. Having to either manually shut down programmes or continuously restart the phone because the OS couldn’t manage its memory any better than Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates was a right royal pain in the A. So I was happy for my iPhone to do one thing at a time. But when Steve rolls up his sleeves (let’s call him Sleeve-rolling Steve), he does things right. With a simple double tap of the home button, the screen shifts up to reveal up to four new icons at the bottom. These are the currently running apps, and you can finger swipe left and right to see beyond the initial four. Apps that are running in the background are put in a suspended state, so they only occupy a small memory footprint, and not any of those precious CPU cycles. It apparently only takes a developer around 5 minutes to insert the lines of code to take advantage of multitasking, so it’s a win for users, developers, and the hardware! Yay!

2. Folders This is one that I’ve been hanging out for like a fat kid outside a closed bakery (please, no personal fat jokes, I’m sensitive). With a simple drag and drop of one icon on top of another (kinky) while they jiggle (kinkier), a folder is automatically create containing the two apps (even kin… okay, too far?). Up to twelve can be clustered together, giving you the possibility of having over 2,000 apps on your iPhone (I’m 7.5% of the way there). It even automagically names the folder according to the genre of the first app you place in there. This is great for an obsessive/compulsive like me who has each page ordered by genre (travel apps, social networking apps, utilities, movie & photography, action games, puzzle games, tower defence games – please don’t judge me, and RPG’s). You can even drag a folder to the dock at the bottom of the screen so up to twelve icons are accessible at all times. Simple, but brilliant!

3. Email This one may not seem like a big deal, but use the iPhone email app with multiple accounts for a day, and you may just sympathise with me. I love doing email on the iPhone. I use it more for mail than Hotmail or Gmail on the web, or my ISP email in Outlook. It’s delivered instantly or within 15 minutes, I can reply directly from the device (with a smug “Sent on iPhone” signature block at the bottom of each one), and it’s easy to delete once I’m done. What I don’t like is tapping in twice to go to an individual inbox, the returning out with two more taps before delving into the next one with another two. I’m 33! I don’t have time for all this, I’ll be dead in a couple of years! But Apple has heard my quiet sobs at night as I cry myself to sleep, wishing for a unified inbox. You can still access your mail accounts individually, or you can see them all in one glorious whole (yes, spelling is correct)! They’ve also let us see emails threaded together in one conversation, so no rather than deleting all the old replies of an email thread, they all sit under the one heading with a simple  >>  off to the side to let you know it’s a thread.

4. iBooks Like iBooks on the iPad, but smaller. Oh and you get Winnie The Pooh for free. I like Stanza for my book reading, but if I can integrate all my current eBooks into iBooks (all I need now are aBooks, oBooks and uBooks and I have the whole bloody set to qualify for the free steak knives), and I think I can with an epub converter, then I’ll be set to continue reading my Dexter trilogy.

5. Enterprise Some stuff for stiffs in suits that like TPS reports, mission statements, KPIs, lattes (wait, I like lattes…), and motivational posters. The real motivational posters, and not the funny ones. Yeah, you know the ones, you got an email full of them today.

6. Gaming Apple is releasing Game Centre, which is like the Plus Network and Open Feint, except some of you might actually accept my bloody invites now! (calm safe place, calm safe place…) Ahem, so it brings together everyone to chat, brag, and matchmake games, just like Plus and Open Feint… Hmmm. We’ll see how the tea leaves pan out for this one.

7. iAds Boy has this received some backlash. “Oh no, ads in games! What will we do?”, the fanbois scream. Now I’m not too worried about this one, as the presentation that Sleeve-rolling Steve (god I hope that takes…) gave was pretty good. Ads appear in apps already, it happens, developers need to make money. The problem is that if you do want to see what an app is offering, it unceremoniously dumps you from the app and into Safari or iTunes, leaving you to wonder if your high score on Peggle is still there when you come back. With iAds integrated into the OS, ads can be opened within the app, viewed, played with and molested, before you return to exactly where you were. It supports HTML5 (and leaves that nasty Flash at the door), and allows movies, games, audio, shopping, the possibilities are endless. I actually like the potential it has, particularly as I’ve been booted from my apps before for wanting to check out another app from the developer that they’ve advertised. It puts consumers off when that happens.

Some other mentionables that popped up in the presentation were:

• Homescreen wallpaper. Just like on the iPad, and you can have a unified wallpaper on your home and locked screen, or two separate images. I’d still like more done with the locked screen though than just the time.
• Bluetooth keyboard support. For all you mad l337 skillz texters out there.
• Background location. Apps like Gowalla and Foursquare can keep tabs on you even after shifting apps. This feature uses the mobile towers to work out if you’ve moved far enough to need a GPS lock to save on battery power. And on location, you can now selectively, well, select which apps use locations data, similar to the Push Notification screen (that sentence could’ve been so much better, don’t you think? write to me at bigkev64@gmail.com and tell me what you’d have come up with. Or not, I don’t need the attention, honest…)
• Local notifications. Like push notifications, but, local… Okay, that was shithouse. I can do better. Local notifications: brings warnings, alerts and annoyances to your phone without the need for cloud based networking from the Apple in the sky. Much better, informative and entertaining!
• Task completion. Oh this is a nice little addition. You can now upload a photo to Facebook and text all your friends abut it while it continues in the background. Teenagers are gonna love that. “Hey, chek out my kool pic I jst posted of moi! TTYL”, or something… God I hate textlish, it makes me want to claw my eyes out and sacrifice them to the Gods Of Punctuation And Half Decent Grammar (church services every Sunday at 9am).
• Improved spell check. Those mentioned in the above bullet point will turn this off, but for the rest of us using the Queen’s English we will now have more than one result for our fat-fingered misdemeanour’s.
• Background VOIP support. This lets you have Skype running in the background, and will alert you when you have an incoming call.

So that’s about it folks, all the goodness of iPhone news locked up in a delicious WordPress blog post with my ever so witty and puerile spin on things. Enjoy!

Apple MacBook Pro 13″

This week I bought the new MacBook Pro 13 inch from Apple. I wasn’t planning on getting it just yet, but pressure from a certain someone convinced me. So now I have a shiny new unibody aluminium (yes my American friends, the spelling is correct) laptop, I can tell you all about it. Now I’m no Apple fanboi. Yes, I’ve had every iPhone since conception, and I’ve had a good half dozen or so iPods in my life, but I’ve never actually sat down and used a Mac proper. Well, not since the Apple IIe anyway, bless its cotton socks. No, this was my first foray into the world of Mac OSX, that’s version 10 for you Linux and Windows heathenites out there.
So after picking up my rather small white box from JB Hi Fi in Newcastle, I head back home to unpack my new wonder and have a play with its shiny self. The first thing I noticed is how well packaged it all is. No spaces is wasted, no excessive bits of card and fluff. Just a simple and elegant box. The laptop sits first and foremost with a power cable on the right, and discs, manual and power adaptor underneath. I remove the laptop with glee, plug in the MagSafe power connector, and boot up for the first time. A simple setup is involved in creating my user account, and a pretty intro video plays welcoming me in a variety of languages. Once at the desktop, the standard Mac OSX wallpaper greets me with the dock down the bottom. No icons offering free trial software adorn the desktop. Always a good thing in this writer’s opinion.
Mac OSX 10.5 Snow Leopard and Apple iLife come as standard fair. I also added Mac Office 2008, VLC, Peggle and World of Warcraft. That’s it. Everything else is already there: iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie (seeing a pattern here?), iMail (I tell a lie, it’s Mail, but why stop a good thing?), and Garageband. It’s simple, elegant, and pretty intuitive. There are plenty of tuition videos, and the Apple website gives a nice 5 minute video on how to use OSX if you’re a Windows user by trade (that’s me).
Diving into iPhoto I import some of my faves onto the drive and notice how amazing they look. Ice never seen my photos look like this on my Dell 2407 WFP monitor before. They’re so clear and natural looking. I start assigning friends and family tags in the Faces part of iPhoto to keep track of them all. It has a bit ic trouble learning who’s who in the zoo, but generally it can at least identify a face do you can give them a name. It also remebers previous names so you only need to give the first couple of letters and it tries to auto-complete. It’s very addictive, and you have a Pokemon “gotta get ’em all” feel come over you.
So after the first four days of use, I’ve come away with a very positive feeling, happy with my new little MacBook. For those that want the stats, it’s a Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz, 4GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 9400M and a 250GB HDD, all for $AU1900. Not too bad compared to my old Dell XPS 1210 that was $2800 for half the RAM and hard drive a few years ago.

Written on an iPhone.

Apple iPhone 3G S

Today’s the day us Aussies get the new iPhone 3G S, and while it’s not a huge upgrade, it’s enough for a technogeek like myself to want to have. There were a few dramas getting the phone initially. I needed three forms of identification (apparently driver’s licence and a credit card need to be supplemented with a gas bill before you can have the phone). So a quick, and I mean quick, ride back home to get the relevant papers and I was away. I had to cancel my old plan and buy it out, but Optus was nice enough to give me 20% off to ease the pain. My new plan has a gig of data, plus an additional 200MB used purely for tethering off a laptop for 1.2 giggata gigs of internet goodness.

The unboxing can be seen in these two photos, and I’ve included the iPhone 3G’s box on the right for comparison. Apple really cut down on their packaging size, so good on the for looking after the environment a little, and all that *wanders off for a moment to hug a tree and feel warm and fuzzy*.

Okay, back. So these photos were taken with the iPhone 3G S camera, and allowed me to use the autofocus trickery in all its glory. A quick touch anywhere on the screen will focus the camera there, as well as meter and adjust the shutter speed for that spot. I really hope this feature starts to show up in regular cameras, because it rocks. The low light capability is also much improved, and while grainy, doesn’t look like the dog’s breakfast the old camera used to give.

Another thing I noticed about the new phone is the speed. Yes the ‘S’ stands for speed, and it’s blinding. One of my apps that used to open in around 5 seconds was done in a second! Lag time on the keyboard is gone, and everyone is generally warm and happy in the belly at the groovy new 600 MHz ARM processor tucked away inside (the 3G used a 400 MHz, and the Touch 2G used a 533 MHz). The voice control is another new feature that’s introduced, and why this couldn’t be included in the 3G with the 3.0 update is beyond me. Playlists can be played, callers can be called, and and songs sung, although the voice control will probably complain at your lack of harmony. If you don’t provide enough information, it will ask for you for it. For example, “Call Bill”. It will reply with “Bill Smith or Bill Bloggs”. Replying with “Bill Bloggs” may prompt it to ask for a mobile or home number, and so on. Scrolling past in the pretty blue background are suggested words you can use, so if you’re stuck, just stare blankly at the screen until one shoots past that catches your eye.

My old iPhone was imported effortlessly, including contacts, SMS’s, screen layout and a collection of photos best left to viewing by those old enough to drink rum and not get kicked out of the pub. I did have to re-enter my email passwords, but all the details of the accounts remained, and emails were then redownloaded for my viewing pleasure. The extra capacity was a big plus. On went more music, more podcasts, and more prOn, errr, I mean documentaries. The compass app is nice. It’s compassy, and can point at magnetic or true north. And, erm, that’s about it. You do look like a right prat waving it in a figure 8 through the air calibrating it, or maybe I just look the prat most of the time and this just added to said pratness.

So any questions, queries or doubtful points from the class? No? Then I’m off to bed…. and I may just take this gleaming white bundle of iPhone goodness with me. To listen to music on of course! Perves….

Honda CBR600RR Jenolan Caves Ride

This post is a little overdue, but with preparations for my trip to the US, I didn’t get around to following up my Jenolan Caves ride.

The day started with perfect weather, and three of us met up at a local cafe for a coffee and breakfast before making a move. My counterparts were on a Triumph cruiser and a Suzuki GSXR1000. Traffic was a little heavy heading up Bells Line Road, but was thin enough by the first twisties that I was able to have a little play. I had the utmost confidence going into the 35 and 25 km/h corners, more so than I’ve ever had on the older bike. Taffic got heavy again from there, but we moved past most of it before hitting the smooth ashphalt of Mount Tomah. The brakes were hardly touched at all, as the engine managed to pull me up most of the time once the throttle was released.

The ride down into the caves themselves was a slower affair, with the narrow roads and loose gravel giving me a cautious outlook. At some places there was only enugh room for one car, and I’d hate to round a corner to meet a situation like that at pace. Call me a girly girl, but I didn’t want to write this beautiful machine off in its first real ride, nor did I want to see how far down it was over the edge.

The Jenolan Caves themselves were magnificent, with our tour taking us through the Lucas Cave. We were in there for about an hour, and I’ll have a gallery showcasing this phenomenon once I return from overseas. The ride home was as fantastic as the ride out there. I made a brief stop on the way home to take photos of the scenery and came across three riders on the side of the road. Unfortunately one of them on an Aprilia had a siezed engine, and they were awaiting a tow. I stayed for about 15 minutes chewing the fat and talking bikes before heading off again to catch the other two riders down the road for a coffee.

Once coffees were down (and Graham had finished his $15 pastie), we conducted a fuel check. The GSXR was on reserve, while my bike was about 2/3rds full. I know the Suzuki had about an extra 40kms to ride than me, but that was quite a shock. I worked out that I should be able to get around 400kms out of a tank, a 30% improvement on the 2004 CBR. I’ll know actual mileage once I fill the bike up, but it’s looking pretty bloody good so far.

Writing this has given me the urge to go for a ride, but my bike is holed up in the garage on the other side of the pacific. the wait will just make the ride that much sweeter once I get back home.