Not enough Kool-Aid for me thanks!

It's a close call, but here we are post-iPhone-launch and I still don't want one. Well, I don't want one enough to blow $500 on it. Of course, if my Treo 600 had held out until now we'd be having a different discussion, but it didn't and I had to replace it a few months ago. Which involved two years of handcuffs to Sprint. According to Apple's site right now I could wake up tomorrow and go to any Apple store in California and buy one, but that isn't going to happen. I've watched the web videos, I've read the web frenzies and my final reaction is meh. See here's the thing - I don't really use a phone that much. And it may be the most fantastic phone browser on the planet, but it's not better than my Powerbook, except in obscure mobile circumstances that just don't happen to me very often. I want to play with the UI sure, but $500 worth? No. Video playback? I've never watched a single movie on my PSP, and I'm not going to start buying 480p from iTunes anytime soon. iPod replacement? Well . . . I have two iPods. My trusty 40gb "3rd generation" iPod which holds all my music and a smaller iPod Nano that I use pretty much just for podcasts. (This is a stupid point and it's because Apple never updated the 3G software to bookmark podcasts properly. I find that fairly annoying, since it's obviously a simple thing. But I've already crossed that hurdle, so leave that behind.)

The iPhone could replace my Nano, but my Nano doesn't need replacing. It can't replace my big iPod because the 40 Gig drive is mostly full and I've been debating upgrading my "base encoding" beyond 128 Kbps AAC. If I was going to replace my "big" iPod I'd have to replace it with a bigger iPod.

So I'm the user that is holding out for for that UI and the touchscreen stuck on a hard drive. Make something the size as a full iPod but with the multi-touch screen? Oh yes please. I don't really care whether it has a cell or Wi-Fi radio, that's not what I want in that size device. But as it is? I can wait for version 2.0. At least until they provide a real programming interface ("web apps!" <snort>) and there's a version of OmniFocus for the iPhone. That might bother me as well.

And I haven't even mentioned how much I disliked Cingular when I had them. From what I understand rebranding the network AT&T hasn't improved the quality in the Bay Area. Sprint isn't as good as Verizon was back in the day, but it's better than Cingular was circa 2004. Here's hoping that by iPhone 2.0 Apple supports more carriers.

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And still more on Windows Backups!

"Oh lord!", you say. "Is he still on about backups?"

Well, yes I am. My Windows strategy failed, and I had to regroup. To review (if people really care), here is my first post where I laid out my current thinking and strategy - super briefly I buy an external USB or Firewire drive and clone my computer's main drive onto the external. In that post I recommended a program called Acronis Home Image for Windows machines. Turns out that Acronis doesn't support something about the Boot Camp partitioning of an Intel Mac. I explained how to hack around that using Parallels in my second post. Then lastly I mentioned in the third post that Parallels had broken. This is the flaw with that backup strategy - if Parallels breaks you can't restore. D'oh!

So I looked around and found a solution. Even better it's all freeware! There's one key bit I failed to notice before, and that is you need to be able to boot and run the restore EVEN IF THE OS IN QUESTION HAS FAILED. So here I present a suite of tools that work on a Mac Pro with a hard drive split into an OS X and a NTFS Boot Camp partition. This has even been verified. I managed to screw up the networking drivers for Boot Camp as well while doing Registry surgery, so I booted from an external CD-ROM and restored my entire XP partition to fix it.

1) DriveImage XML. You can go ahead and install this just like normal on Windows XP. Run it periodically to clone your drive to the external drive.

2) Bart's Preinstalled Environment (Bart PE). This is some slick software. In a nutshell it slurps just enough of XP's installer to run drivers and some software. It uses that to burn a CD that can boot a limited Windows GUI - with the right drivers for your machine.

3) Once you have BartPE set up install the DriveImage XML plugin. Notice that this page talks about using WindowsPE, but it also works with Bart PE.

In a pinch you can boot the Mac Pro while holding down Command. If you have the Bart PE disc in the drive you can boot from it, mount the external drive and run DriveImage and restore the entire drive from there. Reboot again into Boot Camp and Bob's your uncle!

Not the most exciting article I've ever written but if you want to Boot Camp an Intel Mac, this is useful stuff. Wish I had figured it out BEFORE blowing up my XP install . . . .

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Pac-Man: CE and Band of Bugs

I had a longer post about Pac-Man: Championship Edition written on Thursday and I managed to destroy it before posting (sigh). I didn't have time to write another on Thursday, and honestly my patience level with recreating it isn't high. So I'll summarize. I expected to not be super-impressed with Pac-Man:CE, in part because Microsoft has been so heavy-handed with the marketing message. They keep saying that it's a "great gift to the world" which is such hyperbole as to be insane, and also that it's the first Pac-Man with different maps. The latter is somewhat true I suppose, but only in a hyper-technical sense. Every time I saw something about how it had "different maps" I would mutter "Great. Here on Planet Earth we've had Ms. Pac-Man for over twenty years." and ignore the rest of the blog post or whatever.

Well Pac-Man:CE's maps don't work at all like Ms. Pac-Man and they are pretty neat. The map is split into two halves and when you clear all the dots in one half a fruit appears in the other half. When you each the fruit the clear half-map changes to a new map and repopulates. So it's a much more dynamic experience than Ms. Pac-Man cycling to a new map every two-three levels. If you've been ignoring Pac-Man:CE because you've had enough Pac-Man, or because Microsoft dialed the hype machine to 11 give it a look-see. It's not earth-shattering, but it is a lot of fun.

Also, I got all the achievements in it so now I have two games I've maxed the achievements on. (I talked briefly about maxing Worms before.)

In other XBLA news I picked up Band of Bugs and like it so far. It screams "Final Fantasy Tactics", but there's nothing wrong with FF:T, and 8 player online multiplayer tactics is something I can get into. I suspect that next week I'll be lobbying for some multiplayer Band of Bugs on the gaming nights.


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