Memory

Despite my wish to order the new MacBook Pro, I know I will be saving up for the second generation model. Hopefully it would have the 64bit CPU and perhaps even virtualisation! But until then I have to make do with developing ecto on my Compaq Windows laptop. However, ever since I’ve migrated to Visual Studio 2005 it has been hitting the memory limit which was only 768MB. So a lot of disk swapping and waiting which did no good when I am in a coding session and in the ‘zone’, so to speak.

Therefore, I took the plunge last week and ordered a stick of 1GB memory from Memory Ten and it arrived today. After installing it, which took all of five minutes, bootup, launched VS2005, loaded the project, etc. I immediately saw that peak memory utilisation was just over 1GB. Comfortably under the 1.5GB total. Now no more disk swapping and VS2005 is actually very usable and enjoyable 😉 Eventually I think I’ll have to replace the other 512MB stick with a 1GB also to push the memory to the max. 2GB, but that will be in the future.

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Flip4Mac

Have you ever feel Windows Media Player for Mac sucks?

Have you ever gone to a web site with Windows Media file or stream and the playback sucks?

Well, no more. Download Flip4Mac and plays WMV and WMA files in QuickTime!

(Courtesy of Rosyna @ Unsanity)

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Plan foiled

So my career plan for taking it easy for a couple of years before getting back to consulting backfire today, as I have been promoted to manager. It is really just giving me the title for the job that I’ve been doing for the last year anyway. The very slight pay rise is nice but inconsequential. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to stay at this company for a little while longer.

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FUD on MacBook Pro price

So The Register has another FUD headline for the new MacBook Pro, "Intel Macs stay at non-Intel prices".

Yes, $2500 for the 1.83GHz version is expensive but is it really?

Look! The Acer’s TravelMate 8200 has similar spec and the same price!

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Ideal-Lume

Since my interest in home cinema started many years ago I knew ambient lighting makes a difference in picture quality. But many factors prevent me to setup good ambient lighting so when I first heard about Ideal-Lume from CinemaQuest Inc. in the Christmas edition of Home Theater magazine, I was very interested.

After a Ideal-Lume lamp wasn’t delivered by Santa, I ordered one last week and it arrived today. The lamp is of high quality, higher than my expectation, and the installation (photos of the installation on Flickr) was very straightforward. The lamp comes with a rotating filter that let me set the amount of light output. After making sure the TV is calibrated as well as I can with Digital Video Essentials, I installed the lamp and used the DVE’s ambient light test pattern to setup the lamp.

Does the lamp make a difference in picture quality? Yes but not as much as some people make out to be. I definitely can feel less eye strain with the lamp on and the lower contrast between the background and the TV bring out more picture details. But unless you know what to look for, the difference is not big.

So for around $50 (including shipping) it is a fairly affordable way to improve the HDTV picture quality while at the same time making your living room look cool.

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