Finally bought an iPad

As with most things Apple, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an iPad since I knew of their existence, however was always put off by the lack of multi tasking, however the recent release of iOS 4.2.1 has fixed that problem.

In the recent tech news, there are already a lot of rumours flying around about the iPad 2, suggesting it will have a USB port, a front facing camera, a rear 8 Megapixel camera, carbon fibre back, etc etc. With all these reports, and the release of the new OS, the iPad is back onto my radar.

Tonight (thanks to Tony Lunn), I bought one !….now don’t start saying, “Ooo, did Tony buy you one, what a nice guy ?”, it was due to him I couldn’t resist and bought one.

So here’s how it happened, Text from Tony around 6ish “I’ve been offered a iPad for x amount, what do you recon ?”, I then spent the next 30 mins googling to see what prices they were going for……somehow ended up with one in my basket, then checked the opening times and the nearest store with stock (turned out to be the Leicester store of Comet), jump in the car, drove to Leicester, got lost, spend 20 minutes running through Leicester trying to find the place…..and finally walked out of Comet, 5 minutes before it was closing with a shiny iPad and case.

So, how is it ?…..it’s bloody lovely !

As you know, I’ve got an iPhone 4, had the iPhone 3GS before that, before that had the iPod Touch 2nd Gen….this is the next step up the evolutionary chain.

It does, (as you would expect) everything any other iOS Device does, but just on a bigger screen. To be honest, seeing the difference between the iPhone 3GS screen and the iPhone 4, I was a little worried how this screen would look in comparison to the retina display, but have to say I’m very impressed !, It’s sharp, bright, and everything you would expect from an Apple product.

The model I went for was the 16GB Wi-Fi model, as I plan on buying the next gen when it comes out. Not wanting to scratch it, I also bought the official iPad case thingy with it, which as you can imagine, fits like a glove

When I’ve had a good play with it, I’ll update the post, but for now, it’s play time

As always, unboxing photos below.

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Happy Mac Day !

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 !

Tags: 27", acer, alot, announcement, Apple, aspire, based software, bootcamp, capsule, consideration, core, couple, decision, desktop, easystore, everything, game, half life, handful, i5, imac, imacs, images, keyboard, mac, Mac OSX, macbook, macbook pro, majority, mouse, Parallel, parallels, PC. Now, place, plunge, pro, quad, screen, Size, steam, storage, team fortress, time, time capsule, Unboxed, unboxing, valve, week, windows, windows games, windows xp, wine

Consolodating email

I like most of you have been using email since it first came out, way back in the days of a 14k modem was FAST !!

As you can imagine, I have switched between many mail programs as they have advanced over the years, and have disks and disk full of archives.

Last week, I came to the conclusion that I needed to get all of these onto Gmail, as I really like the idea of cloud computing, and it really helps when you can get to your email from anywhere.

I’ve tried a number of ways to upload to GMail, eg setting up IMAP and dragging and dropping, Google Email Uploader (which only works if you have a google apps account, and also attempting a few tutorials I’ve found on the web, which seem to be out of date.

I have however managed it, and below is how.

Firstly, you need a “throwaway domain”, I’ve got a couple of domain names that I’ve registered but never done anything with. You will need to have access to change the MX records (normally found at your domain hosting site)

Log into your domain hosting, got the DNS management section and change your MX records to these

Next you need to setup a google apps account, the signup page is here, please note, it was assume you are a business, and suggest the paid version, however just sign up for the standard, as this is free, and will do everything you need.

Right, now that’s in place, you will need to add this account to your main GMail account. Gmail will allow you to download email from 5 external emails. Log into your Gmail, go to Settings, then Accounts. The section that says “Get mail from other accounts:” Add your new account.

The setting for the new account are

Username = full email address
password = your password
pop server = smtp.gmail.com
port = 995
Click the Always use a secure connection……
Click the Label incoming message….I created a Label called “Old Archive”, as google uses Archive
Click the Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)….learn from my mistakes, not clicking this, meant for the last 24 hours, my phone, my mac book, my PC, my Ipod touch have been going mental with new email alerts !!

Assuming you’ve now done the above, your ready with your email.

Ok now to tidy up the email, as I’ve got so many email archives, I had quite a lot of overlap, I found the best way to fix this was to get them all into Thunderbird. If your not familiar with Thunderbird, it’s Mozilla’s email client. The reason I’ve used this, it because, as with Firefox, there are loads of addons.

First thing I did, was (and there is probably a lot easier way of doing this) was to load up outlook, and outlook express, and drop in all the related email archives into each. Once this was done, I opened up Thunderbird, and used the Import function to import all mail from these 2 programs and get them all into Thunderbird. Now all my email was in 1 place, I was time to do some tiding.

I dragged all the email from all the folders (Inbox, Sent, etc) into 1 big folder, I know to some of you, your thinking WTF !!!, but wait, hear me out. As Gmail works differently to other email systems, it stores all it’s email in one please, and separates by label name, and not folders, Also the end result will be all imported with a label of “Old Archive” anyway.

Once you have all the email in one place, I downloaded an addon for Thunderbird to remove duplicate emails (as I type this, there were 2 available, and the Alternative one worked best for me. Once downloaded and installed, right click on your big email folder, and remove duplicate emails. Once done, we’re ready to upload.

Download Google’s Email Uploader program found here and close down Thunderbird.

Enter your throwaway email address (the one set up for google apps), and you password.

On the next screen, select your Thunderbird email mail box, and there should be a count of all your cleaned up emails, select this and hit go. I think mine took about 6/7 hours to upload, so I suggest you do this overnight, or at a time when you’re not planning on using the internet for a while.

What will happen next is this.

The Google Email Uploader will upload all you archived email into your google apps email, your usual GMail account will check for new emails every hour and download these, and apply the label “Old Archive”, job done, all your email is now on googles servers

Just a note, I’m not sure how long this process will take, I set the emails uploading on Friday evening when I went to bed, and I’m still getting email added to the “Old Archive” label, from my understanding, the “get from external email address” has a limit of 200 emails every poll, (meaning 200 emails an hour), however if you did click the Click the “Archive incoming messages” this won’t be a problem, just let them come

1 more note to add, I have noticed that my “Old Archive” label has a vast amount of Unread email, (which would be try, as to my main Gmail account, these will be new emails), if this doesn’t bother you, then feel free to ignore, however if your like me and a little anal when it comes to email folders, I did the following.

Went into settings, changed to maximum page size to 100 conversations, then clicked on the “Old Archive” label, clicked, “Unread”, More Actions >> “Mark As Read”, granted there is probably a lot quicker way of doing this, but I thought, I could do this about a 100 times, in the time it took to google an answer.

I did however find a cool way of finding unread email in the future, as you are unable to create a label for “Unread”, I assumed that google uses this as a function, so in the top search box, if you type label:unread this will display only the unread email, I wish I’d have known this weeks ago, as somebody sent me an email, with the wrong date on, which meant I had to click through pages of emails until I found it.

Well I hope this is on use to somebody, and if I haven’t explained any of the parts enough, drop me a comment or email and I’ll try to help you out.

Cheers

Darren

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