MacRyu – The Worst Mac Blog in Singapore, and Some Say the World

“Nike, can I have a free pair of shoes since I wear your logo on them?”

Posted November 10th, 2007 by Ryu at 10:32 pm in Jackassery. 0 Comments

This piece of “news” is a few days old but I thought I’ll publish it anyway.

ShuffleArt, a good friend of mine and a partner during the MacNUS days, forwarded the following email to me. The email was sent by, apparently, a NUS student named Hxx Xxx.

Hi XXXXX,

I’m currently a NUS student and got to know this from MacNUS Ryu. Does Shuffle-art give student discount?

Actually I’m just looking for something to protect my macbook as I bring my Macbook out everyday, and if not for Ryu, i wouldn’t have known Shuffle-arts. I was just wondering if you would consider waiving off the $59.90 for the protective shield, given that I provide a advertising space for Shuffle-arts by letting have Shuffle-arts website and logo on the shield? I’ve realised that the number of Macbook user has been increasing and many of them have yet to customise their Macbook, which I believe is because they don’t know where to look.

I hope you would consider my proposal. Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Hxx Xxx

This Hui Xin fellow is apparently one of my customers during the NUS Matriculation Notebook Fair, although I am not sure if she did buy a MacBook from me or not, but it was true that ShuffleArt was offering MacNUS a special deal for their Koobniks then. However, never once did I mention ShuffleArt to her personally, and what the hell is “MacNUS Ryu” supposed to be anyway?

The thing is, this Hui Xin girl actually thought that just by having the ShuffleArt logo and the website address on her Koobnik (which are already on the product in the first place), that ShuffleArt will agree to waiving off the cost of the product? In the first place she is not someone famous, or someone that a company will pay to have their products used by her.

The things that some people will do.

I believed she was eventually asked to try her luck at Nike first.

Publicity Video for Windows Vista

Posted November 10th, 2007 by Ryu at 1:07 am in Vista. 0 Comments

Ohh my god this is sooo funny!! Just found it when I was checking out Amber MacArthur’s blog. Enjoy people!

P.S. If you don’t know who Amber is, check out her Wikipedia page.

What’s the big deal about Woz?

Posted November 9th, 2007 by Ryu at 11:50 pm in Apple History. 1 Comment

This is going to be a bit controversial, but seriously speaking, I think that people, especially old Mac fans, think too highly of Steve Wozniak.

Let’s look at the history. Woz designed the Apple II, which was considered the first personal computer ever. He certainly was to be given credit for the designing, but definitely not the personal computing revolution. Woz wanted to give HP the design, but HP did not think much of it. Woz was about to give up on the Apple II and continued his job at HP if not for Steve Jobs.

Inventions-wise, so what has Woz really done? He invented the Apple II. Period. That’s about all he did for the tech and computing world, besides sprouting his so-called “great ideas” rubbish to tech journalists when they want some entertainment.

Character-wise? He sucks. He is easily as big an egomaniac as Steve Jobs is, but he does not have the guts to do what he wanted to. This was described in detail all over his personal auto-biography, iWoz. He was a hippie wannabe, he blames the US govt for “screwing with his life”, he thinks too much of himself.

Before I read his book, all I thought of Woz was that he is a has-been. Now I seriously detest him.

Seagate HDDs the cause of your dead MacBooks/MacBook Pros

Posted November 7th, 2007 by Ryu at 1:44 pm in MacBook, MacBook Pro and Notebooks. 2 Comments

As this article reports, and I have been saying the same thing for the past 2 years, the Seagate laptop HDDs that are used in the first generation MacBooks and several other earlier Apple laptops/desktops are problem-ridden and generally die despite careful use.

While the article singles out Apple, the fact is that other manufacturers are using the same Seagate HDDs as well, and have experienced similar failures. Seagate refuses to acknowledge the problem, and as such Apple probably has no obligation to issue a mass product recall.

Do note that these drives are generally found only on the first generation MacBooks, which means if yours is a second, third, or lucky you, fourth generation MacBook, they are likely to come equipped with a Fujitsu or a Toshiba HDD instead.

If you own a MacBook or any other Apple laptop, it’s a good idea to check your HDD manufacturer, and do frequent backups. Even better, buy a replacement HDD from Hitachi or Toshiba, you’ll get much more capacity than the original 60GBs on the first generation MacBook, and changing the HDD on the MacBook doesn’t void your warranty as well.

What’s fucking wrong with Apple?

Posted November 4th, 2007 by Ryu at 4:20 pm in iPhone. 0 Comments

When news of the 1.1.2 update arrived via T3, images of more bricked iPhones come to mind. Although seriously speaking, after the last outrage, people should be smart enough not to update their iPhones this time round.

GO UNCHECK THE OPTION TO “CHECK FOR UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY” IN YOUR ITUNES PREFERENCES! RIGHT NOW!

However, what really irritates me this time is the fact that the article specifically states that they will make iToner not work again.

What’s fucking wrong with you Apple? What wrong did iToner do to you? You think everyone will love that fucking crap that you have in your iTunes Store which you call Ringtones? Some of us want Dir en grey in our iPhones! Or anyone else for that matter.

What’s fucking fucking wrong with you Apple?

This is coming from someone who loves Apple so much, who made Apple a large part of my life for the past 3 years ever since I switched.

Looks like even I am frustrated this time round. Go fuck yourself Apple.

Santa Rosa MacBooks

Posted November 2nd, 2007 by Ryu at 1:10 am in MacBook. 0 Comments

As if Apple is too ashamed to announce it, but they finally released Santa Rosa MacBooks, easily half a year after everyone else. Sometimes I am really amused by some of the decisions Apple makes.

So what’s the big deal about these new MacBooks? X3100 integrated graphics, which is Intel’s sad excuse for a “near-gaming-able graphics card”. Not a very funny joke. Like I care.

On the good side, at least you can now put 4 GB of ram inside your MacBooks and run them almost as fast as the fastest Windows Vista laptops (the MacBook Pros) in the world.

Updates – Leopard and my iPhone

Posted November 2nd, 2007 by Ryu at 12:53 am in iPhone, Leopard and Mac OS X. 0 Comments

Sorry for the long hiatus. It will still continue for a while as I have been busy with lots of stuff.

Meanwhile here’s some updates.

Finally Leopard shipped. And I am the proud owner of a copy of Leopard, LEGALLY. Though it didn’t cost me the full 241 singapore dollars. Hehz. And you know? Leopard rocks. It’s rock solid and stuff.

One bad point: All the various cracks/hacks are broken, including my no-cd crack for Call of Duty 2!!! Darn.

Here’s a picture of my Leopard Desktop.

And I finally got my iPhone. SMS is probably the weakest phone-related app. Instead of having SMS chats appear like iChat chats, it will be a lot more functional to make them like email, having the ability to forward SMSes and to send to lots of people at the same time. Yet Apple doesn’t get this. Freaking hell irritating.

And well the typing was irritating for the first 2 to 3 days. Now I type darn fast, but still with one finger instead of two.

And damn the 3rd Party Apps. They make the OS kinda crashy from time to time. And they don’t seem as cool and powerful the hackers have made them out to be. I have had better experience IM-ing with Meebo.com and Jivetalk rather than MobileChat and Apollo. (Edit: Turns out that Summerboard was the evil causing all the crap here.)

But I love my iPhone.

Just a short update here, will try to post more stuff when I have time.

Third Party Apps on the iPhone

Posted October 18th, 2007 by Ryu at 5:26 am in iPhone. 0 Comments

“Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developersâ€™ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because weâ€™re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at onceâ€”provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phonesâ€”this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than â€œtotally open,â€ we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhoneâ€™s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]”

All hail the great Steve!!!

First ever iPod promo video

Posted October 13th, 2007 by Ryu at 1:33 am in iPod. 0 Comments

Wow! Behold the first ever iPod promo video. This is sooooo different from how the iPod ads are like today.

NBC Idiots

Posted October 10th, 2007 by Ryu at 7:02 am in iTunes. 0 Comments

Wil Shipley, Chief Monster of Delicious Monster and Omni Group fame, posts his thoughts (or rather, critcism) about the whole NBC saga. He reckons NBC people are idiots.

You know what? He’s absolutely right.