It’s official, I am now a professional “blog/tech writer-like-person” being that I was paid to write something nerdy and it was placed on the Internet. w00t bitches!

What pray-tell is this first piece about? Well, have you heard of a little ole protocol called “OAuth“? Hey… hey… have ya??! Oh. You haven’t, well all the more reason you should read the article then because I do promise it to be a very entertaining read.

Thanks must of course go to the good people who have contracted me to write this, and an upcoming “how-to” piece on the same topic, SitePoint. For without their good cash I could not brandish the title “professional”. Props.

So what are you waiting for?? Check it out for yourself here:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/08/17/oauth-explained-with-foursquar/

It would appear that I have somehow become “The Headphone Guy” for MacTalk reviewing not one, not two, but SIX sets of headphones from manufacture JAYS in my latest tech rambling review.

For those of you interested in the audio phonic delights of headphone glory please jump over and check out the review yourself. Others may be more interested in the photos of the units, which I took myself on my new Canon 7D, these can be viewed in more detail here.

In what could be construed as a modern day version of “rock, paper, scissors” usability gurus Nielsen Norman have released a report paper pitting today’s most common e-book readers against one another, whilst throwing ye-olde paper in for good measure.

Revealing Apple’s iPad as the favoured device many websites, be them Apple-centric or not, have been touting their findings as the death knell for conventional e-book readers and sprouting figures at how we will undoubtably see the cannibalising of Amazon’s 80% market share, let alone the never-ending debate over paper’s so-called demise.

I can’t but help think the entire report as a waste of time pitting apples against oranges in a pineapple competition. Conventional e-book readers such as Amazon’s “Kindle”, Barnes & Noble “Nook” and the old stable horse from Sony “Reader” are E Ink driven devices. Their screens the closest digital representation we have to paper yet. They do not entail glossy glass reflections under any and every light source in the known universe and their battery life is measured in page turns lasting months (if not years) and not in minutes switched on. They’re designed to “read” books.

The iPad on the other hand is not a dedicated e-book reader, it is a computer, or at least a multimedia device that happens to offer an application(s) to read and purchase books on. It’s higher “User Satisfaction” rating (5.7/10) over Amazon’s Kindle 5.6 (paper won at 5.8) can be put down to the products slick user interface, colour and application use, easily overlooking the fact that consistent page by page reading is little to no different to reading from your desktop computer’s screen in terms of ease on the eye. The PC scored a paltry 3.6 I might add.

In addition to which gadget the subjects enjoyed best a metric based upon the speed at which each device was read at compared to paper was also devised. Alas, the results were apparently completely useless, as noted by Neilsen stating “…the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed.” leaving me to wonder again what the point of this report was?

It would appear that the introduction of the iPad has indeed ruffled some feathers, despite it’s adhoc grouping under the e-book reader banner, Amazon has recently released an update and price drop to its Kindle DX, following suit in Barnes & Noble and Sony’s footsteps of a price reduction. The promise of a more “interactive” experience amongst the future of digital publishing is enough to sway general e-book consumers to a more vibrant reading platform but I challenge any person, be they digital evangelist or not, to read twenty pages of anything on the iPad and then do the same on any E Ink device and tell me it wasn’t a better “reading” experience with E Ink.

It’s been three years since Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) gave us the money-grab that was “GT5 Prologue” and over five since GT4 spun away in our PS2’s so you can forgive many people for placing Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) in the “believe-it-when-I-see-it” basket along with other great memories such as “Duke Nukem Forever” and unicorns.

With advertising abound at this years’ Le Mans one week prior to E3 it was no surprise to finally receive a solid release date (November 2nd, 2010) at the expo, for what is undoubtably one of the PS3’s most anticipated titles.

The latest instalment includes 1000 cars to drive around 20 pre-loaded tracks. Naturally it’s all coming to you in Sony’s latest push of 3D-headache-inducer and touts a laundry list of new gimmicks features such as Youtube uploads, split-screen racing, custom soundtracks, head tracking (via the Playstation Eye) and track editor. Justification for a five year hiatus? We’ll have to wait and see.

Not being a die-hard racing simulator type of guy I can’t help but think that many may have found their fix via other means. Forza 3 for the Xbox 360 has been available for quite some time now and it’s near-real sim Project Gotham has had two iterations in the current gen console wars. That said for the PS3 only households the likes of Motorstorm and Burnout just aren’t going to cut the mustard.

All said and done GT5 will be many a stocking stuffer come Christmas 2010 I have no doubt, let’s just hope it lives up to the wait. The “Top Gear” test track alone will be enough for most punters I’d say.

Apple released a long anticipated update to its Mac Mini line Monday morning. The new enclosure with in-built power supply and HDMI connectivity alone has home-theatre PC (HTPC) enthusiasts salivating whilst further blurring the line between the AppleTV’s usefulness and novelty factor.

The new 2010 Mac Mini includes:

• 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1.4″ thick Unibody enclosure
• NVIDIA GeForce 320M Graphics Card
• Built-in Power Supply
• HDMI port and Mini DisplayPort
• User accessible memory slot
• Ethernet, FireWire 800, 4xUSB 2.0 ports
• Secure Digital (SD) card slot
• Analogue/Digital Audio Line out

Whilst the updates (and the immediate availability) are a welcome announcement the additional US$100 price tag has many punters up in arms. The Mac Mini is available starting from US$699 (AUD$999).

In their pre-E3 keynote Microsoft has debuted a new version of the Xbox 360 console. The new “modern” enclosure sports some nice perks over current models (in-built 802.11n for starters) whilst, what’s the most important update for many, delivering a far quieter machine. In un-boxing videos currently clogging up gaming sites world wide a distinct lack of noise emanated by the machine putting today’s whirring banshee to shame.

The new Xbox 360 will be available in Australia July 1 for A$449, the same price as today’s Xbox Elite. The console includes 1xHDMI (no cable), 5xUSB, 1xcomponent, in-built 802.11n Wi-Fi, Kinect port and a 250GB (Xbox proprietary) hard drive. Of significant notice, the new model will only include a 1 year warranty, not 3 like the current models with the red-ring-of-death.

In conjunction with the updated console Microsoft also announced the official release of their “Project Natal” full-body-controller accessory to be named “Kinect”. Whilst we’re yet to see anything particularly exciting (in my opinion) bare fruit from this a group of sport/exercise related launch titles were shown along with mention of Forza 3 support upcoming.

Australian delivery and pricing has yet to be set for the Kinect however the US have been set a holiday release of November.

For detailed information on the new Xbox & Kinect accessory visit Xbox Australia’s hardware pages here:
http://www.xbox.com/en-AU/kinect/default.htm

Things have been a little quiet for me in the online world of recent but that’s all about to change today with a recent guest appearance on MacTalk Australia’s podcast in episode 95.

I’ve you’d like to have a listen head on over to their website or fire up your iTunes and get your Mac on.

Unfortunately it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to do anything particularly nerdy let alone blog about it, thankfully for my adorning masses I’ve chosen to make my “back-in-the-saddle” return with a jump straight in to the deep end. That and quietly going for the record of how many cliche metaphors one can use in the same sentence.

You see just this week gone by I found myself in the unusual position of nerd boredom. I hadn’t done anything really “hands-dirty-nerdy” and my little girly hands were an itch with possibilities. The new Apple Macbook Pro’s had just been released for starters and it took all my will power to not just dash out and buy one for example but I was blessed (or smote) by the good lords of geek with the ghastly sound of a hard drive platter scraping from inside my Macbook Pro’s Aluminium enclosure. Again, scrounging every last fiber of restraint to not run out and buy a new laptop I decided to take the high road and upgrade the hard drive and keep my existing rig, both satisfying my need for nerd and keeping my costs at a 20th of the cost.

Normally, had I opted to purchase a new machine, I start from scratch, reinstalling everything, copying over Mail Libraries, Photos, etc manually and giving myself a fresh start, but as I was only giving the old girl a new ticker I thought I’d do a straight copy restoring my file hierarchy to its full glory via the use of my Time Machine backups. A trick of the Mac trade I’ve yet to make use of.

The hard drive install was as straight forward as can be, a few screws here a torque screwdriver there and Bob’s your Grandfather’s Nephew she was humming to the new tune of a 500GB 7200rpm drive. The next and what i’d also envisaged to be the more lengthy portion of the process of the restoration process then began.

Mac OS X install DVD whirring away in the drive, we arrived at the “Migration Assistant” portion of the install offering the option of “Restoring from a Time Machine backup”. Excellent, that’s exactly what I’d like to do thanks. A click or two later I had a screen asking me what user accounts and applications I’d like to restore, selecting them all and clicking Next I began the two hour wait for the copying process to complete. One movie length break later I returned to see that the progress bar and status text had indeed indicated that everything was all tikity-boo but I was unable to continue on to the next step. I thought I’d just let it whir away for a while, sometimes these progress bars are less than accurate (at a stretch) and I figured it’d all be over soon enough. Two episodes of Deadwood later and there was still no movement to which I threw it in and restarted the `puter myself. Everything booted up fine, even had my user account there for me to log in to but that was about the end of the good news. A Dock riddled with question marks and no mail to be found it looked like the only things that had actually been copied successfully was my Network System Preferences, connecting to my Wi-Fi as soon as it logged in. Balls.

By this time it was about 10pm and I couldn’t be ferked sitting there doing a manual copy so I thought, “You know what Time Machine/Migration Assistant Restore Process, I’m going to give you one more crack of the whip. Balls this up again and the engagement is off!!” So after reformatting and going through the OS X install process again to begin the restoration it was about midnight and I left it all to whizz away as I dreamt of ponies and unicorns battling to death in the Roman Colosseum; as you do.

Waking the next morn to find a beautiful dew adorning my bedroom windows there was a smell of success in the air. Perhaps it was the restoration had worked and I was about to be full of glee, yet again it could’ve been the new air freshener I’d purchased the day before permeating its aroma through out the house? Fortunately for my sanity and the now back on again wedding between myself and Apple technology it was the former and there before me stood the exact same desktop as a day before, same wallpaper, same icons, same file system, same launch items on login, had Time Machine fulfilled its end of the bargain to my wildest dreams?! It would appear so!

Everything appeared to be exactly where I’d left it prior to the transplant. Wrapped! No idea exactly how long it took to complete having let it go whilst asleep but we can safely say it was over two hours (120Gb of data to copy via USB2) and less than twelve (I slept in!) But really, who cares, IT’S ALIVE!!!

Now all of that was a few days ago… and while everything seemed perfect from the casual observers point of view, it would seem that deep down in the bowels of a file system that I roll with there have been a few “issues”, allow me to list them for you now…

• Pretty much anything out of the normal “Mac” root folders gets missed. For instance my SVN repository in /svn hasn’t been backed up or restored.
• Similarly all of the stupid OS X apache example files are back in /Library/WebServer/Documents and my /etc/httpd.conf file has been overwritten
• Aperture wouldn’t launch, my photos were fine but I had to reinstall the application
• I had to do OS X updates all over again from 10.5.2 (Which was on the discs that came with the Mac)
• My Nortel/Apani VPN software had to be reinstalled and didn’t work at all to begin with

All in all, a very small price to pay, and not a lot of work to get things back to normal considering all of my preferences, my mail, calendars, contacts, images, movies, music, applications were back and working. So I guess the question is whether or not I’d use this method the next time or not. Well, yes I would, but if it was a new Mac I was about to obtain I’d most likely stick to my tried and true method of a fresh install & manual copy. Why? Well, I come from an old school and tend to “clutter” a machine over time, an issue your average ham sandwich [person] is unlikely to have.

So go forth, propagate your Mac’s hard drive Guy Pearce style and feel safe about doing so, the process actually works.

In my latest review for those happy chaps at MacTalk I tackle the new iLuv i316 Micro size Bluetooth Headset, which you’ll find distributed by iWorld Australia. She’s a little beauty and I do say “little” emphatically as you’ll notice it’s small size in the photo above. So head on over and check it out, if not for the article do it for these cool photos that I’m quite proud of if I do say so myself. Enjoy!

Product Link: http://www.iworldaustralia.com.au/…
Article Link: http://forums.mactalk.com.au/…

The guys at MacTalk keep sending me crap to write about. Most recently it happens to be a USB webcam that you can plug in to your Mac or PC called the “Agent V4 HD“, something you probably surmised from the title of this post already.

So if webcams are your thing and you’re in the market for one then it’s probably worth you jumping over to the article and taking a look see. In fact, even if they’re not I think you should take a look anyways if only to say hello to my lovely assistant Sooty!

Product Link: http://www.liquiddigital.com.au
Article Link: http://forums.mactalk.com.au/20/67805-review-agent-v4-hd-webcam.html