Month: November 2009

It’s amazing how quickly time goes by: it’s Thanksgiving week already! You surely have tons of things to prepare – grocery shopping, home decoration, turkey recipes – so we thought it would be a good idea to lend you a hand with such a busy agenda. We’ll write some posts to help you with Thanksgiving planning over the next few days, and the best way to start is, of course, a bunch of Thanksgiving wallpapers! These are some of the best ones we’ve found on other sites.

Click on the image to download the full-sized wallpaper. Some of them are available in various resolutions.

Continue reading “Thanksgiving wallpapers and pictures”

The Psystar v Apple case has brought into focus again the debate over whether Macs provide value for money. It was inevitable that at some point, a company would try and make Macs appealing to those who seek lower budget PCs as Psystar rather illegally tried to do so.

Firstly, it’s important to point out that as far as portables go, there’s no way that Macs can compete with lower-end PC laptops. There simply aren’t any Apple Macbooks costing in the region of $600 like there are with PC laptops. However, when it comes to the higher end portable computer market and the mid-range standalone machines, Macs actually work out cheaper. The devil as they say, is usually in the detail i.e. the software.

Let’s take a look at the Dell Studio XPS Studio 16 for an original retail price of $1,642 v The Macbook Pro with an original retail price of $1,699.

Both have a 15 inch screen, Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB RAM. The Macbook Pro has only a 250 GB Hard Drive compared to 500 GB in the Dell. The MBP has an NVIDIA GeForce 9400m graphics card while the Dell has an ATI Mobility RADEON HD 3670 Graphics Card. The MBR has a 7 hour battery while the Dell has a “6 cell” battery.

For an extra $150, we can add an extra 250GB to the MBP to bring it’s specifications to exactly that of the Dell (although you can buy external 250GB external hard drives for just $60).  However, for arguments sake, lets pay Apple’s rather pricey $150 online purchase upgrade so the total price comparison is MBP $1,849 v Dell XPS Studio 16 for $1,699. Total price difference means the Dell is $150 cheaper – so far.

Let’s also take a look at a standalone like the Mac Mini for an original price of $599. The closest Dell equivalent is their own mini the Inspiron Zino HD for an original price of $442. The Mac Mini has a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor compared to the Zino AMD Athlon 2850e (512K, L2, 1.8GHz). The Mac Mini has 2GB of memory compared to the Zino’s 3GB. The Mac Mini has 160GB of hard drive space compared to the Zino’s 320GB. Both have an 8x CD/DVD ROM drive and the Mini has an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card compared to an Integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 Graphics card. Total price difference means the Zino is $157 cheaper than the Mini.

Now let’s get onto the subject of software. Windows 7 basic is provided free with both Dells and Snow Leopard is included for free with the Macs. However, if you factor in additional software costs to the Dell such as Vista Ultimate, it adds another $130 more to the cost of a Dell and the Windows 7 Home Ultimate upgrade adds another $122 more to that. If you were to treat yourself to a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements (broadly similar to elements of iLife) on top, that would be another $99.

This would add another $351 to the cost of the Dell XPS Studio and Dell Zino taking their total costs to $2,050 and $793. That would make the Dell XPS Studio $201 more expensive than the MacBook Pro and the Zino $194 more expensive than the Mac Mini.

In addition, Macs also come bundled with iLife which normally sells separately for a very modest $79 and includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and Garageband. In my opinion, this collection of apps are worth considerably more too. You don’t get anything like iLife bundled with a new PC. You do get some basic household management software in the form of Microsoft Works, but it’s of pretty poor quality – and much less exciting. If we subtract this $79 from the value of the Mac, it makes the Dell $280 more expensive than the MacBook Pro and the Zino $224 more expensive than the Mac Mini.

However there is one big caveat to all this. Dell regularly run price offers on their products whereas Apple usually don’t. For example, at the time of writing, Dell are offering a generous $323 off the price of the XPS Studio 16 and $93 off the Zino. This still makes the MacBook Pro only marginally more expensive than the XPS Studio and the Mini remains cheaper than the Zino.

Of course, this is a very crude price comparison. There are some things that simply won’t show-up in such an exercise and that’s time efficiency and usability. Time is money as they say and over the lifespan of both my Mac and PC, the Mac’s superior stability and efficiency has been priceless.

Well, Thanksgiving is creeping closer, which means that you’re running out of time. Got the turkey trussed, the corn cobbed and the pumpkins pied? The lists made, the jobs delegated and the timing perfect? No? Didn’t think so. Let OnSoftware come to the rescue with some of the most useful tools this Thanksgiving season. Don’t worry if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving (or if it was last month) – this is great stuff for any celebration, whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah or Eid.

Your first challenge is to decide on the big meal. No need to be too creative – people like the old favorites at times like this – but it’s still nice to put a new twist on something traditional. Apart from literally thousands of online recipes, there are also some nice desktop apps that mean you won’t even need internet access, helpful if you’ve all escaped to a cabin in the woods. Recipe Cookbook is one – this app will give you hundreds of (sometimes wacky!) ideas, as well as covering the basics.

Now you know what you’re eating, it’s time to write the shopping list. Make sure you don’t arrive home from the market with everything BUT the turkey by enlisting some technological help. Speedy Shopper should be first in line. Grocery List Generator, meanwhile, integrates with Firefox, a really handy way of creating lists as you browse recipes online.

Now that the food’s planned and bought, there’s a whole bunch of jobs to get done. Make sure nothing gets forgotten and everyone pulls their weight by running the tightest ship around. As everyone knows, organization is the key to success, so download a great planner to make sure everything goes goes like clockwork. As ever, we have the perfect Firefox add-on, ReminderFox, but if you’s prefer something offline, we can help with that too. Just take a look at the this selection and you’re sure to find one that suits – Golden Rules is my personal favorite.

After all that organizing, planning, shopping and cooking, it will probably be high time for the last essential – a cocktail. Ok, the Pilgrims may have raised an eyebrow, but things have come a long way since 1621 and after all that work, a toast to the Mayflower is very much in order! With a store of over 11,000 drinks – both alcoholic and non – CollegeBAR is sure to provide inspiration. Thanksgiving Special, anyone?!

Vector Conflict: The Siege is a defense game where you have to keep waves of attacking vector enemies from hitting you. Vector graphics gave us the first true 3D games way back, and ever though they’re unnecessary today, there’s something undeniably attractive about their minimalism.

The game is pretty tricky. You have  a number of weapons at your disposal, and a tiny radar to warn you of approaching attacks. You can be attacked from any direction, so you have to spin round taking out enemies with one eye always on the radar. It plays straight from your browser, after just a little loading time.

The most tedious part of buying a new computer is having to transfer all your data from the old system to the new one. With photos, music, documents and the likes there’s not much of a choice: you use your favorite backup software or simply copy and paste files and folders from one computer to another using an external hard drive. But what about your web browser data? History, bookmarks, passwords. All of that needs to be synced too. And here’s where Mozilla Weave comes in handy.

This project was released from the Mozilla Labs a few months ago, as an experimental Firefox add-on, and has just hit version 1.0 Beta. Mozilla Weave lets you sync browser data (bookmarks, history, tabs, passwords and user preferences) between multiple instances of Firefox installed across different computers and devices.

The first thing you have to do after installing Weave is create a user account, either on the Weave servers or your own. This account is used to sync data from your browser to the server, so that it’s available when you need to sync it with other instances of Firefox or other devices – your laptop, your mobile phone, another computer. The account creation process also gives you the chance to customize the extension’s settings and choose the syncing method: merging data between the local computer and the server, syncing from computer to server or syncing from server to computer. Continue reading “Sync Firefox data the easy way with Mozilla Weave”