The Push-Button Finger

Asus: They have it all right

natemallard — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:05:48 +0000

Official today: Asus eee PCs are coming in May with bigger, touchier, screens. I still haven’t broken down and bought one of the first gen mirco-lappies, and man I’m glad I was poor for so long. Just in time for summer comes the new model with a 9 in TOUCH screen. This thing is going to be the bomb. Well done Asus. Coming from a motherboard manufacturer that I had only read about maybe twice, to one of the hottest PC makers going takes skill. It literally seems like overnight they have become a major presence in the laptop word. I have yet to see an eee live and in person, but I blame that on living on an isolated peninsula in the deep-south. The closest thing we have to a computer store is a Wolf Camera, on the main tourist drag.

Star Wars Three Year old

natemallard — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:06:27 +0000

I thought I would just share this with everyone.

New MacBooks Offical

natemallard — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:48:55 +0000

Well, I guess dreams do come true. All the Apple fan-people out there are probably wrapping there fingers in tape after the constant clicking of refresh on the Apple Store Page. In normal Tuesday fashion Apple announced updates to their line of notebook computers. According to Apple’s site the pricing breaks down like this:

MacBook

$1,099 – (White) 2.1GHz, 1GB memory, 120GB HDD, Combo drive
$1,299 – (White) 2.4GHz, 2GB memory, 160GB HDD, Double-layer SuperDrive
$1,499 – (Black) 2.4GHz, 2GB memory, 250GB HDD, Double-layer SuperDrive

MacBook Pro

$1,999 – (15-inch) 2.4GHz, 2GB memory, 200GB HDD, Double-layer SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB
$2,499 – (15-inch) 2.5GHz, 2GB memory, 250GB HDD, Double-layer SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB
$2,799 – (17-inch) 2.5GHz, 2GB memory, 250GB HDD, Double-layer SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB

They sound nice especially sporting Intel’s new battery friendly Penryn processor. The Pros will get that new fad called multi-touch that its anorexic sister the MacAir is using.

Now more than ever I wouldn’t mind having a Mac. I still have some mileage left on my trusty ACER though, but by the time I’m ready to upgrade I think Apple will have a MacBook that is ready for me.

Wii Really Gonna Rock You Tonight….. Really?

natemallard — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 03:01:30 +0000

Why is the Wii getting the shaft from any of the major publishers? To prove the point let look at the wildly popular Guitar Hero franchise. A part of the game is to unlock all the songs, but to do so you have to play in the cooperative mode. This requires two guitar controllers. After picking up a combo of the game and a control I played for a few weeks, but it soon became not so much fun to keep passing around the one guitar controller. I thought a quick, maybe pricey, remedy was a short drive away at Target. Nope. Only combo packs, no single controls. Ok well I’ll give in and support the monster that is game chain stores. “Really, you don’t have any either and haven’t seen any?” Hmm, well lets go to the global supermarket, Amazon- What? What! The single controls are not available yet. But this game came out in October. Who thought of this? Is this some kind of marketing gone wrong or a careless mistake by Activision. I did a simple google search and found it on the toys r’ us site. 1/28/08 release date. Late January! Thats three months for the release of the game.What did the Wii do to deserve this.

Zelda DS Lite Bundle Unboxed

natemallard — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:52:26 +0000

eah, people do this. I don’t know why. Enjoy me opening my Phantom Hourglass bundle.

>Read

Lag: overcoming a Word of Warcraft addiction

natemallard — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:45:05 +0000

With Activisions acquisition of Vevendi games, who is the parent company of Blizzard entertainment I thought I would share my World of Warcraft story.

Massive Multi-Player Online Game’s where never of interest before. I had made it all the way to the second year of college before taking the leap into a lonely, sleep deprived life.

Living in the dorms there are several things that you do as a roommates. In room 231 we watched South Park every Wednesday. At the end of the Emmy award winning episode about World of Warcraft, I posed the hypothetical “Are people really like that?” My freshman suite-mate, McFly we’ll call him, said he had friends back home that are like that. Of course this lead to the next logical question. Yes, McFly played WOW.

After watching him play for a few weeks my roommate bought the game. I was still reluctant. Although raiding and the quests seemed like fun, I pretty busy, and this game seemed to be pretty time consuming.

Two weeks later I bought it, and I hated it. Too vast, and open. Game play so intricate that I spent more time talking about what to do to my character than doing it. I tried hard to get into it, but I didn’t have the time. Chunkfest, my night elf rogue was suck at level 25, and I didn’t care if he ever leveled again. Then I realized Blizzard was still charing me monthly even if I didn’t play. So, I logged on once again.

Soon though, it grew on me. I found myself lying to friends (including Girlfriends) to make the time need for this game. Sad part, I wasn’t even that good. My roommates over powered me and I was always the end of jokes within our end game guild (at least by the ones that would talk to me).

There was good that came from my time in Azeroth, mostly McFly and I became the best of friends, and now we can all joke about that brief time we were addicted to pixels on a screen.

Asus is blowing up

natemallard — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 23:46:15 +0000

It is considered by CNET.com to be near the top of the most wanted list this holiday season. The slim, sleek, ultra portable windows free, low cost, laptop named eee has put this Taiwanese hardware AsusTeck manufacture on everyones radar over the past two months. Stateside we know them as Asus.

If you are reading this you probably know all about that.

So will Asus be able to really start the ultra portable in a reasonable price range revolution? They will make great strides. Now that LCD’s cost close to nothing, it is very reasonable to think that ultra-portables will become a part of everyones life soon enough, but Linux, the OS the eee runs may not.

Don’t get me wrong, Linux has amazing potential. I dual boot Ubuntu on my laptop. But Linux isn’t for the masses, yet. This isn’t to say that Microsoft has the answer either. It won’t be until Microsoft wises up and decides to create on OS that is streamlined and light weight that an Ultra Portable notebook will be worth the cost. Maybe with the success of this product more people will jump on the Linux boat and make the OS better (that is the point of Linux right?)

The eee does look nice with its reasonable price tag, $399 for a 4 gb SSD and 512 ram, but for around 100 bucks more I can pick up a full blown acer with a 14.1 screen, that is pretty portable. Although It is probably nothing like the portability the eee will offer. I can only imagine, as the pictures I’ve seen probably don’t do it justice.

Asus has a opened this new market wide open. Thee eee is currently only offered at a few online retailers, and as long as they can keep them in stock, Asus will be carrying the light weight notebook to the bank.

Nerds

natemallard — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:22:53 +0000

It happened. I knew one day it would, but it didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth like I expected. I bought a Nintendo DS and not how I would normally handle a desire like this, finding the cheapest rate possible. No, this one was purchased full price in a special Limited Edition Phantom Hourglass bundle.

Don’t laugh at me, I’m a nerd. And its cool. Nerds are people that seem totally normal in a room of people, but bring up Master Chief and the nerd explodes out like a sticky to the chest. We are the ones reading the tips, watching the videos, following the new PR team at Nintendo, and writing …. the blogs. Most of us are nerds. We hide that subject that we don’t want to bring up our selfs, but over hear it mentioned across the room and we light up. An hour later we come out of our lose jawed cyclone to see the bored faces of the innocent bystanders.

If you can’t tell I nerd in technology. Everyday I pour over my RSS feed catching up on the latest in the e-world. Hopefully my nerding will provide a source of information and entertainment as I continue through our push-button world.