Power Mac G4 Upgrade Part One.

Hey Guys! This is my first post on thecreativeone.tv and I really hope that you enjoy reading my blog posts!

Recently I bought a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, with 733Mhz G4 processor, 256mb RAM, No hard drive and the the crumby 32mb standard graphics card. From the moment i got the machine I was impressed with the design of the machine and even by today's standards compared to some PC's you see around today, the Power Mac is still a beautiful machine.

I really wanted to upgrade the machine to bring it back to date, to hopefully run some programs that i run on my Mac Pro and run as a media center and such.

To upgrade my Power Mac i bought a 120gb western digital hard drive, 1gb RAM from Crucial Ram and PCI usb hub. 

The parts went in the machine nicely and after a few hours work i was running 10.4.11 on the Power Mac and it was running pretty quick for today. But i had a few more problems, the machine was very loud, and the graphics card couldn't keep up when running YouTube videos etc, which is expected. Two things that would really bug me.

I went down to PC World (The name is really ironic to say i was going to be putting the parts in a Mac) and i bought three new silent fans, one that would replace the fan cooling the CPU, another to replace the big 120mm fan that was cooling the majority of the computer, and the last one that was blowing air out of the power supply unit.

I have on phrase to say, Mac's do not like to be ripped to pieces. It was a nightmare trying to get all of the fans out of the mac, and then replacing them with all new ones, but after a few hours and several scuffed knuckles, I had replaced every fan inside the Power Mac. 

All the pain was definitely worth it though as when the Power mac was all back together it was considerably quieter than it previously was. Next up was the graphics card.

Now for financial reasons, the cheapest way for me to upgrade the Power Mac's graphics card, was to buy a PC Graphics card and flash it for use with a Mac, easier said than done. The graphics card came, we popped it into an old PC i had laying around and booted up Windows XP.

We created an MS DOS CD, which is considerably hard to make than creating an MS DOS floppy disc and booted into MS DOS, to find out, to flash the graphics card we needed to use a floppy disc, which naturally, because floppy discs are nearly as old as me, I don't have a floppy disc drive or any floppy discs, so it was time to scavenge around.

Now luckily because a friend of mine, has old computers for testing and upgrading, he could find me an old floppy disc drive we could pop into the PC we was using to flash the graphics card, again because he'd never had a need for floppy discs, he didn't have any.

So more work had to be done, I had to go onto trusty eBay and buy some floppy discs, something I thought i'd never do, this morning, a packet of floppy discs landed on my door mat. Stay tuned for an update, and I hope you will enjoy my blog posts in time to come!

Sam

www.twitter.com/spamup94

www.youtube.com/spamup94

Could Bing Overtake Google?

Bing is a search engine that was made to compete with Google, Yahoo and other notable search engines. This was big news for Microsoft and the tech industry. However, many non-techys dont even know what Bing is. Microsoft aired many adds for Bing but they were somewhat meaningless and boring. After watching the add several times I still didn't know what Bing was. 

I honestly dont think that Bing will ever catch on. Everyone, and I mean everyone uses Google. Why change? Google is a great search engine, quite possibly the best in the world. I use Google all the time and have it bookmarked within my browser. Why go to the trouble to change that bookmark to Bing when Google works perfectly fine. I think the main point in why most people won't change from Google to Bing is because Google works seamlessly with no trouble. Why try to fix something that isn't broken?

Many people, including myself, have given Bing a fair chance. But when your using Bing, you realize something... It's not Google!

Final Verdict: Bing will not overtake Google.

Thanks so much for reading,

Gus

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/flashboxzer

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/applemacpod123

Why we use a Mac (Collaboration Video)

Thankyou for everybody who participated in this collaboration video!

Lots of people participated which was awesome, it was all powered by the Twitter community, which is great. I may do for collaborative videos in the future!

Please post this to your Twitter :)

TweetDeck for iPhone - Review

TweetDeck for iPhone

Price:£FREE
Description:Tweet on the go with all your favourite TweetDeck features on your iPhone.TweetDeck is your mobile browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now on Twitter from your iPhone or iPod Touch. TweetDeck shows you everything you want to see at once, so you can stay organised and up to date no matter where you are.Create groups, search Twitter, manage multiple accounts and easily post your tweets or share photos, link and much more. Plus sync your existing TweetDeck columns between your desktop and iPhone. Nice and easy.
Rating:

The time has arrived! TweetDeck for the iPhone is upon us!

I've been a big TweetDeck Desktop fan for many a month now, and I'm really happy to wake up to see TweetDeck for the iPhone sitting on the AppStore just begging for me to download it. The best part is it's price. Free!

First Impressions:

Upon opening the app, you're presented with a page to be able to add your Twitter account. It's an incredibly sleek setup sequence with prompts for you to sign in to your TweetDeck account so you can sync your columns and what-not from the Desktop version straight onto your iPhone. the setup lasted about 30 seconds, and I was then straight into the application itself.

The first thing I saw was a somewhat familiar colour-scheme and notification. I was really impressed to see that they'd ported over the notifications feature to the iPhone version, because simply put, TweetDeck isn't TweetDeck without them! As you can see from the screenshot below, there is a set of settings in a sleek black bar.

The bar shows updates to your Twitter account, Refresh feature, Add Column, Settings and More. We'll look through each of these in detail, shall we?

Updates Button:

I was very impressed with this little feature. Not only does the Updates section of the bottom bar actually show how many updates you've missed, or are yet to read, but upon tapping it you're presented with a box showing exactly how many per column you're yet to have a gander at, and also a handy little feature to mark them all as seen!

Refresh:

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Add Column:

This is one of the biggest features in the whole application. This allows you to add an array of different columns such as 'User Group', 'Twitter Search', 'All Friends', 'Mentions', 'Direct Messages' and 'Favourites'. This works in exactly thesame wayas on TweetDeck desktop. I currently have six columns set up on my installation of TweetDeck for the iPhone, and have had it crash just once due to receiving a large amount of updates all in one, whilst trying to scroll down. I'd recommend not doing that!

You also get the option to import columns from the TweetDeck server so that things are set up in the same way as they are on TweetDeck desktop. Clever eh?

Settings:

This opens a completely new screen for you to Manage your multiple accounts, Edit your TweetDeck account and change General settings.

Manage Accounts and TweetDeck account is very self-explanatory. Not much to talk about there, but when it comes to the general settings, there are a few that you can tweak around a little, such as Auto-Correct, Auto-Capitalisation, Picture Service (twitpic or yfrog), Sound Enabled/Disabled, Growl Enabled/Disabled (notification popup), Show Real Names and Shake to Refresh. As you can tell, there are a nice amount of settings to tweak TweetDeck to your liking.

If that isn't enough Tweaking, hold down on one of your 'decks' until they start to wiggle (like you would on your iPhone/iPod home-screen). From this you can re-arrange the way the decks are presented to you. Nowthat'scool, right?

'More':

From this sub-menu you get two new options to choose from. One being 'Quick Follow' and 'Sync Columns'. Quick Follow is basically a text box popup where you can input a users username and follow them instantly by tapping the "Follow" button. Saves having to find the user through the Search feature and following them form there.

Sync Columns basically does exactly what it says. It syncs your columns with the ones you've syncronised to TweetDecks servers.

Main Section:

The 'main section' of the application is where all of the tweets are displayed. you can either choose form the zoomed-out view where you can flick through each deck, viewing a maximum of 5 tweets per deck, or tap one of the decks to view the whole thing, allowing you to scroll through them all. You can still flick left and right to navigate through each deck whilst on the full screen mode.

Tapping a tweet will take you to a screen dedicated to that tweet, giving you the option to @reply, send a DM, retweet, email tweet and +favourite.

Tapping the user takes you to their profile. From here, you get the option to Follow the user, View their followers, View who they're following, @message them, DM then, see their recent Tweets and Block/Unblock the user. You can also see their picture, Name, Twitter UserName and their biography on this screen also.

Notifications:

These are somewhat very similar (actually a lot better looking) to TweetDeck Desktop. They pop up whenever you get a new Tweet, Mention, DM, Search etc. This obviously only occurs in the TweetDeck application itself, due to the iPhone's restrictions on background processes, but they are a nice little addition to the app itself, for that added sleekness/feature-rich application they were probably looking for.

API Call Information:

This is different for an iPhone Twitter application to have - an 'API Call Remaining' feature.

Let's Tweet:

Tweeting in TweetDeck for the iPhone is easy. All you need to do it tap the new tweet icon in the top right () and you're presented with a text box, the keyboard and the option to shorten a url, post an image and post your current GPS location to your Twitter profile or to Google Maps. It also appears that URL's are shortened through bit.ly.

Verdict:

TweetDeck for iPhone seems to be a very decent iPhone Twitter client, although could do with some touch-ups here and there, and the possibility of some new settings. I'd really like to see functionality to just have the zoomed out tweet view (below) as opposed to the full screened one. I like the look and feel of scrolling through each deck that way much better, and think it makes the UI look a lot tidier also.

In terms of keeping up with its sister on the desktop, they have done incredibly well. What sets this app apart from all of the others is a) free b) exclusive 'deck' UI c) pop-up notifications (in-app).

It's a very competitive app and will give all of the other iPhone Twitter applications a run for their money. I, myself have tried the majority, if not all, of the iPhone Twitter apps and this is by far my favourite and has found its pride of place on page one on my iPhone home screen!

A few snags though - it tends to crash on occasion when a large amount of notifications come in, and scrolling is rather rugged compared to other apps such as Tweetie and TwitterFon. By this, I mean it doesn't scroll smoothly and jitters just a tad.

Other than that, I've found no problems as of yet!

Definitely recommended to anybody with an iPhone and likes to Tweet.

You can find me on Twitter at @LewisBeechey

Astronaut Tweets from Space

This afternoon, astronauts from the Atlantis embarked on their second spacewalk to make some repairs on the Hubble Telescope. The spacewalk lasted for nearly 7 hours and included having to replace the Hubble's batteries so it could work through 2014.Astronaut Mike Massimino started using Twitter in April, and currently has nearly 290,000 followers! (View his Twitter page HERE) This past Tuesday, he sent the first Tweet in space stating:

"From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!"

Congratulations to Mr. Massimino, and I hope for a safe return of the entire Atlantis crew.