Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 17, 2010 in
Apple 
Well after much consideration, I finally took to plunge and bought a 27″ iMac.
I’ve been running Mac OSX on my PC now for a good few months, and I’ve also got a MacBook Pro. A couple of things were holding me back, first of all gaming ability. As you are probably more than aware, I game….alot ! and the majority of games come out on the PC. Now I know you can run Parallels desktop, and similar wine based software to allow you to run up Windows games on the mac, but there seems to be only a handful of games that run 100%.
Currently I have the option to boot up my Windows 7 drive in my PC and all is good. I was aware of bootcamp too, however until last week I’d not put this to use.
As mentioned, last week, I was going on a VB.net training course and had to put Windows on my Mac, in case I needed to run through anything on a evening….installed windows XP, installed the Bootcamp drivers, and everything ran very smooth 
Another announcement 2 weeks ago which helped sway my decision was the announcement of Steam coming to the Mac in April, and they would also be bringing with them the Valve games. They’ve also said that if you already own any of the Steam games, eg Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress, there is no need to repurchase them !
So the decision was made at the weekend and I bought and iMac 27″. I decided to go with the Quad Core i5 version as I don’t plan on replacing this for a couple of years. When I say I bought 1, I actually mean that I ordered 2, and C wanted one too, as our current machines are around 2 1/2 years old.
I decided as we will have 2 iMacs and 2 MacBook Pros, it was only sensible to get a Time Capsule too. We do currently use our 2Tb Acer Aspire EasyStore for the majority of our storage, but through it would be advantageous to have the Time Capsule for the “what if” factor.
As you can guess by the title of this post, today everything has turned up !
Below are the images of the unboxing of both the iMacs and the the Time Capsule apparently turns up tomorrow.
The huge brown boxes
Unboxed from said brown boxes
Unboxed
The Keyboard
Keyboard and Mouse
Again, the keyboard and mouse
This is how slim the magic mouse is
and this size of the keyboard
Size of the screen, compared to my 15.4″ MacBook Pro
The spec from the box
Finally in place
C with the original PC in place
Both in position
and finally to give you an idea of the screen resolution, below is a google search ! Look at all the white !
Finally, how is it ?
Let me tell you, it’s huge, it’s fast, it’s deadly quiet, and it’s Apple !…..so yup it works really well. The mouse and keyboard are taking a little getting used to, apart from that, I’m loving it !
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Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 1, 2010 in
Fitness Around a middle of January, I though, “The sun will be out soon, time to get
into shape and lose the Christmas gut”. I attempted to go running, and ended up getting 2 colds in a row (probably down to the running in snow), so decided to start working out inside.
I’ve seen multiple “Get Fit” type games for the Wii, and decided to give them a try. I initally started with “
Wii Fit Plus“, which to be honest I didn’t feel like I was getting a decent workout, it seemed really good for slower excersies, but after an hour and a half of running through every activity I could, I still hadn’t worked up a sweat.
The next one I tried was “
The Biggest Loser“, which to be honest was a little too much, especially when over the Christmas period I’d done nothing but sit on my butt, play on the games consoles, drink beer, and eat loads. It was a very good work out, and one I’ll probably work up to, but as a “sofa to get fit”, it was a little too much.
I then tried
EA Sports Active, and I was quite impressed. In the box you don’t only get the Wii game, but you get a leg strap for you nunchuck, and a training band. I tried it for a couple of days, just picking random workouts, and it seemed to work very well. You get an option of Low, Medium or High intensity workout for each session, a choice of genre of soundtracks, and with or without Wii Balance Board support.
Towards the end of January I decided this was the one, and started the 30 day training program, and this morning was my last seasion.
So how was it you may ask ?….Well suprising good !
I ran through the 30 day program of Medium intensity, with the Electronica soundtrack, set my goals, created my avatar, and away I went. Basically the 30 day program consists of 2 days on, 1 day off. Each workout can take from 20 minutes to 35 minutes on medium, and it seems if you select the high intensity this adds around 10 minutes as it just increases the number of reps.
The excersises run from, running/walking on the spot, to more upper body such as upright row with tricep kickback. The workouts seem to try and keep each days workout unique, and seems to exerise different muscles
Before each workout, it gave you a list of the planned exercises it had for you, an estimated time and calories burnt. During the workout you have a running counter in the top left of the screen, informing you of current calories burnt. Each workout seems to burn off an adverage of 160 calories, which for a 20 minutes workout isn’t bad at all.
During all the workouts, you have you created avatar mirroring your movements to show you what you should be doing, and highlights anything your not doing correctly. You also have the trainer on screen, again pointing out anything you may be doing wrong.
Overall thoughts
As I needed something to get my butt off the sofa, this worked really well, because the exersised were mixed up enough, and it attempted to intergrate games into this, the result was, it felt more like playing a game than doing a workout. I think EA have tried to make this fun by adding a few “game type” workouts, eg Baseball, Basketball, Inline Skating, Boxing, Tennis and Volleyball. These however for me were the worst part of the workouts, I didn’t feel the Wii was quick enough to match my movements. An example of this was the Volleyball, basically it would say “Lunge Left” or “Lunge Right”, and then for you to do the Volleyball actions, this however seems to be a little slow, and by the time that it had recogined that I had stepped off the Balance Board to the Left, it then didn’t register my Volleyball movements in times and suggested I missed the ball. The same annoyance was with the tennis, whereby if I moved the Wiimote even slightly, it would take a swing, which would lead to me missing the ball.
A couple of other things, using the Wii to work out is a great idea, however I nearly got tangled up a few time in the cable between the nunchuck and the Wiimote, making some of the excersises quite annoying, however I fixed this by buying a
wireless nunchuck, which was such an improvement. I also felt with the bands I wasn’t getting enough resistance, I did attempt to make them shorter, however they just ended up snapping on me. I then attempted to use some pre-made Reebok bands which did work, however the large sponge handles made it quite hard to hold these , the controller and nunchuck. In the end I bought just a resistance band in the
Reebok Fitness Travel Gym Set with no handles, then tied this to the EA Sports Active supplied handles and this worked a treat. Finally, the excersised seemed to concentrate on upperbody, lowerbody, and only very few core exersises, which was fine, however I would have prefered a little more core.
Final thoughts
If I can forgive the fact that there was limited core exersises, the sometimes oversensitive motion control and the bands sent weren’t resistant enough for me, this is a decent workout, and over the 30 day program I’ve become pretty tones and lost 13lbs which really isn’t too bad. My next mission is to go for the
EA Sports Active : More Workouts, as this is meant to improve the sensitivity issues as well as consentrating a little more on the core.
Tags: active, avatar, balance board, biggest, biggest loser, butt, Christmas, christmas period, colds, core, couple of days, day, decent workout, drink beer, ea, ea sports, excersies, fit, Fitness, game, games consoles, high intensity workout, hour and a half, intensity, January, loser, Medium, medium intensity, nunchuck, plus, program, row, sofa, soundtracks, sports, time, training, type, type games, Volleyball, walking on the spot, wii, work, workout, workouts
