Bits and Jobs

The buying and cleaning continues! Yet another weekend filled with the vicious cycle of clearing space to be filled by more junk from the shops, though at least this time I think each purchase has been, for the most part, purposeful.

Yay, our outdoor couch and chairs are finally here! The delivery truck arrived around lunch time on Saturday so I had the dubious honour of assembling more furniture (one day we'll be rich enough to buy goods that don't require a toolbox) while Alison went out for lunch with Elizabeth. The chairs were a little finicky to put together, as they are suspended and oscillate on a flexible bar, but I managed to finish everything in about an hour. Can't believe how awesome it is to have a couch outside to lounge on. Now we just need to find a little coffee table to place beverages and we're all set.



With a four wheel drive at our disposal (we're car-sitting for John and Sheena) picking up the filing cabinet should have been easy as pie. It would have been if we didn't have to make two trips to Office Works to take back the first cabinet which had a dent in the top. To be fair, the staff were apologetic for the inconvenience and happily replaced our dud with a working model, which allowed us to hide the heap of paperwork that's been clogging up the guest room for the last few weeks. Our little store room has turned out rather well I think.



This means that the guest room is now pretty much cleaned up and ready for visitors at the drop of a hat. No more cleaning up this room and bothering guests when I need to use the computer, nosiree. We even have two drawers empty just for long staying visitors, how hospitable!



The old junk room has been cleared out as well, though we haven't done too much with it as yet. For now it's just a space for the guitars, carpet offcuts, a computer desk (for the other laptop) and the wardrobe of course. Not really all that interesting but I'm sure we'll find a use for this room eventually.



It's certainly an improvement over what it used to look like for the better part of the last year.



All these new goods were accompanied by a mountain of cardboard packaging, so we took a trip out to the "transfer station" on Sunday (once again only possible due to John's car). I would have liked to fit the stump we uprooted a few weeks ago in the back, but the car was jam packed with packaging material. Friendly neighbours to the rescue as they let us dump the stump in their skip bin. Farewell nemesis, you were a worthy opponent.



While out we picked up a few more friends for the garden. We haven't actually come up with names for them as yet (suggestions anyone?) but we already think of them as family. The rabbit tries to oversee the vegetable patch, and is currently conducting a thorough investigation of a list of tomato eating suspects. Our gnome may seem a little laid back but who can blame him when you have a tropical paradise of gingers to relax under.

On the subject of vegetables, may we draw your attention to the awesomeness that is our eggplant. Some of those babies will be going into a stir fry in a few weeks I'd wager. No sign of courgettes as yet, but the herbs have been super.



We bought a rusted old wash basin on our trip to the Tin Dog last year with the intention of planting herbs or perhaps flowers in it. Now that our herb and vegie garden is largely complete we've been forced to come up with a new use for this, and settled on an assorted cacti/succulent arrangement.



I'm not sure how well some of those will do with the wet weather we're having but with luck they'll grow and spread out nicely. We've put together a few different colours so with luck it should end up being a pretty addition to the garden.

New Year and New Stuff

Happy Chinese New Year! Normally we'd have people over for steamboat but we didn't quite feel like doing that this year. Not that we completely gave up on tradition, Saturday was a fully packed day of pre-New Year cleaning (love a good bit of superstition to kick us into doing housework) and we braved the crowds in China Town for a set dinner on Sunday to see the festivities. The mall was redone just in time for New Year and it's looking good, if still a little gaudy. Tossed together a few clips and pics from our night out into a movie.



When we were doing the renovations we knew that an increase in storage space would coincide with a need to fill that space. Of course we promised ourselves that we'd exercise some restraint with our purchases, which lasted all of about a month it seems.

The old dining table has proven to be too big for to use now that we have a sliding door leading to the patio. This new breakfast table for four seems to fit quite nicely though, perhaps even providing enough room for the odd dinner when it's too cold to sit outside.



Our backrooms are now cleaned out and rearranged, with the computer desk coming out of the "guest room" to make way for some book shelves and a new set of drawers. I'd post some photos, but our attempt at cleaning up did not extend to putting away the mountain of filing that heaped on the spare bed. Good thing we have a filing cabinet coming in this weekend.

We also got a new carpet and a hat rack (need somewhere to put those gardening hats and daily bags). Quite a bit of use out of the power drill as you can imagine.

Even the vegetable garden has had a few improvements. We now have a chilli plant, a lemon tree and some rapidly growing rows of eggplant, zuchinni and tomatoes. Well, perhaps not the tomatoes as something seems to be eating the new leaves every night, but the eggplant and zuchinni are doing great.



Oh yes, and there's a tiny papaya tree growing in the back there. Apparently they're fast growers so we should have some fruit by next season. Sweet!

Couch for the patio is still to come. Can't wait as it's been scorching over here and we'd love to just lounge outside with the breeze. It might also spur on yet another trip to the stores in search of a coffee table though... hrmm...

Carpet and iWant

I'm sitting on the couch typing this on my MacBook, sniffling from a combination of dust from the new carpet in the next room and tendrils of cigarette smoke from the tradie outside. It's a relief not to have to put shoes on to walk through that part of the house, and I'm glad we don't have to see that god awful garage floor anymore.



Now that the house is functionally complete (still have more to do around the west side where the bins are), we can start rearranging our accumulation of stuff so that we aren't living with two store rooms at the back. Heck knows what we're actually going to do with those rooms once we clear the junk out of there, but I'm leaning towards a music room or library. Let's hope I can resist the urge to buy more furniture and stuff to fill it.

Speaking of stuff to buy, everyone has no doubt heard about the expected release of the Apple iPad. Engadget has a pretty good guide of what we know about the iPad from various sources and can be read here. I'm certainly not alone in saying that I've been waiting for Apple to release a tablet-style device for some time now, so I woke up especially to catch the news of the keynote coming in on the 27th of January. I'll let you watch Jobs work his magic for yourselves, but suffice to say I was feeling pretty convinced that the shiny object in his hands would be my next must-have-item. In saying that, I was sleep deprived and fully in the clutches of the Reality Distortion Field, so in a desperate attempt at objectivity I had to set my systemic fanboyism aside and questioned my initial zeal and lust for this device. With a few nights sleep and some time to mull over how I see this appliance fitting into my life, I think I've arrived at a rationalised and adult decision.

I WANT IT. I WANT IT NOW!!!



The internet and mass media as a majority have actually landed firmly on the other side of the fence of opinion. Google for articles on the device or pick up a paper and you'll likely read about the disappointing lack of any number of features including multitasking, cameras and the lack of Flash support. Perhaps the most common comment that's being used to dismiss the latest offering from Cupertino has been a terse "It's just a big iPod Touch". My personal reaction is that actually isn't a bad thing at all.

Others on the net have written with greater flair on the subject of why the iPad is actually the start of something big and special in the world of computing. You can read my personal favourites here, here and here (that last one penned by the awesome Stephen Fry). Purely for narcissistic indulgence (after all, that's half the point of having a Blog isn't it?), I'm going to list a few of my own thoughts as well.

It's just a big iPod Touch

Yes, and I think that's actually a good thing. Microsoft have been trying to create a Tablet like device for close to ten years and have failed at each turn due to the fact that cramming a desktop UI model into a miniature form factor plain does not work. It didn't work for Windows Mobile (which incidentally was one of the main reasons why I bought an iPhone in the first place), and it hasn't worked for Tablet PCs. Creating a working tablet device would require a paradigm shift away from windowing systems and desktop mimicry, so it's actually not surprising that Apple decided to just extend an existing and incredibly successful model that they have with iPhone OS.

Aha, but if that's the case then is there any point in getting one of these iPads, especially considering I already have an iPhone? Well the key I think to my justification (call it rationalisation if you will) is that there is an operative word to the iPad death cry on the lips of myopic pundits.

"It's a big iPod Touch"

The increased screen size suggests a lot more than larger movies and a glorified digital photo frame. It offers greater levels of interaction that is now afforded by superior screen real estate. While iPhone apps will initially be the only third party software available, it won't take long for iPad specific apps to arrive and present a more intuitive (dare I say intimate) level of mobile productivity. Lots of people assume that the overlap in functionality will heavily rest between the iPhone and the iPad, while I actually see (or at least hope) to have the cannibalisation occur at the other end of the bridge, with more and more applications that I work with on my MacBook being transferred to the iPad.

The promise of this can already be seen in Apple's own offering of a redesigned iWork for the new device. I'd imagine that most of the following things I use my laptop for will fall by the wayside:

• Browsing full size websites - sans Flash but here's a hope that HTML5 comes along sooner rather than later


• Word processing - Typing on a larger screen should be easier than the iPhone, and there's always the keyboard dock. Great for blogging on the go


• Image Editing - Photoshop for processing RAWs on this would be super! Once again, transferring photos over to the iPad with the camera connector will be really useful while on holidays


• PDF/Comic/Graphic Intensive reading - I do love GoodReader for the iPhone but it's still hard to read a text with lots of graphics unless I'm on a computer. I'd guess that reading PDF text books will be fantastic on an iPad


• Finance Tracking - I'd love to see something like MoneyWell on an iPad. Finance apps for the iPhone never did anything for me with the smaller screen


• Note Taking - I take short notes in Evernote on the iPhone but if I'm at a meeting then I still currently need my laptop. The iPad would be so much better for this

That's not even touching on all the potential when it comes to games on a larger format screen. I'd love to get my hands on an RTS designed for the iPad. Granted that the lack of keyboard shortcuts may be a problem initially, but I wouldn't be surprised to see new UI grammar being invented for the multitouch screen that will allow us to compete at the same level as keyboard/mouse jockeys.

So this is bye bye laptop/desktop?

Heck no! This has been marketed as a device between a laptop and a smartphone and I don't think that's just greed on Apple's part. There are still a number of activities that make more sense on a fully fledged computer, but the thing is most of these aren't really day to day activities, more akin to what one would use a server for.

• Downloading Torrents - Can't live without my movies, TV shows and games. I'm unlikely to chain a mobile device to the wall all day to get the latest episode of How I Met Your Mother


• Encoding - Once again, ripping a CD/DVD or burning media doesn't really make sense to me on a tablet


• Serving media - Of course the same machine in our house that downloads media would need to stream it to the Apple TV and other portable media players, iPad included!


• iPhone/iPad Management - Apple haven't said too much about how the iPad and iPhone would interact with each other. It would be great if I could sync between the two devices without the need for a desktop hub, but I don't know if that's going to happen


• Programming - Unless they release XCode for the iPad, I can't see how I can give up my MacBook

The last point is an interesting one I think, though I doubt anything will come out of it. It would be pretty cool to be able to close the loop and create simple applications on the device itself without having to use OSX.

So your iPhone becomes a dumb mobile

Far from it. I still think that there will be lots of apps that make more sense on the iPhone as a smaller and always connected mobile device, especially when I only plan on getting the WIFI only version of the iPad. Social networking, RSS feeds, media, GPS navigation and casual gaming just to name a few, not to mention having a ubiquitous camera for taking pictures and movies. I also think that the iPhone will be a better device for listening to music, as I've always been paranoid about missing phone calls when I have my earphones in.

It depends on what App Developers do, but I think the iPhone would also make a fantastic satellite device for the iPad. They both run the same operating system (basically) so I could see applications with functionality stretched across both devices. Perhaps a note taking application on the iPhone synced to a text book app on the iPad. A Scrabble boardgame with the iPhone used to display your tiles. A graphics application with the iPhone acting as a palette. You get the idea.

So no disappointments then?

Hrmm... not quite. My cheery optimism for the gospel of Apple can only take me so far. Granted that some of the things on my wish list are a symptom of waiting for the iUnicorn (that mythical Jobsian device that does everything from solving world hunger to toasting waffles), but a guy can still dream.

• Touch-inspired iLife - iWork is great and I'm really happy that they released that, and of course Photos is getting closer to iPhoto with each release, but I was kind of looking forward to seeing Garageband and iMovie at least on the iPad. I'm sure that the App Store will cough up an alternative before long but it would have been nice to see Apple's take on this


• No iBooks store in Australia - Granted I'd still probably be using Stanza to read my free ePub books anyway, but it would have been nice to see the iBooks store as a worldwide release. It took quite a while for iTunes movies and TV shows to come here, so hopefully the wait won't be as long


• Revolutionary Text Input - A large size keyboard seems a little unimaginative, and I'm not entirely convinced that this will be easy to use one handed. Placing the tablet in landscape mode on the lap makes sense, but I think it will still be important to type while standing or on the move. Will have to try it out first hand


• The Name - Enough has been said about this, have a look here. I mean iPad... really? I guess if Nintendo can make millions selling a console that sounds like a bodily function then anything goes.

Another sticking point I have is with the demonstrated user interface. Holdonaminute, no I haven't done an about face. I do think that blowing up the iPhone OS to a larger screen makes sense as a whole, but there are a few tweaks that could have been made on the Home screen to take advantage of the extra space (aside from god ugly backgrounds, what's the deal with that?). Increasing the number of Apps that fit on a page by another column would have been nice. That lock screen is also looking pretty stark. If I had to guess though, I'd say that Apple have simply stuck with what's familiar to get people familiar with iPod Touches and iPhones to adopt the system, and will unveil an evolutionary UI change in the next version of the iPhone OS. Of course there's that iUnicorn again...

So you're getting one then...

Yeah, hopefully in March when they release it and when we're back in Malaysia. I've got high hopes for the thing and my gadget lust is going into overdrive. Especially when I consider how even the first iPhone model released has changed with each new version of the operating system.

I sit here on the couch typing this on my MacBook, smelling some much needed rain falling on our drought stricken grass, and I wish I were holding an iPad. Horrible name and all.