Category: Guest Post

  • Boldly going without DSTV

    Boldly going without DSTV

    South Africa is an interesting country. We have crooked politicians, state-owned monopolies and more crime than you can shake an AK-47 at. But we love it here nonetheless – or some of us do, anyway.

    Another interesting phenomenon in South Africa is DSTV – part of Koos Bekker’s media empire. At roughly R600 per month (I have to pay extra to access the HD content, etc.) it really isn’t cheap, especially not if you consider what you’re really getting for your money. As a tech savvy individual, I recently decided to see if I can go without DSTV. Step 1: Disconnect it!

    Did you know that you can disconnect your DSTV subscription at any time, for as long as you want? This means that, if you are heading abroad for a month, you don’t have to pay for that month! Obviously if you want your PVR to record stuff while you’re away, you have to pay. But if you don’t need to record, it could be worth saving that cash. Hell, I’ve even turned it off when I go away for a week – because then I don’t pay for that week. Just call them, and they’ll do it – or visit the self-help section on www.dstv.com

    The reason for making the disconnection Step 1, is that it forces you to get on with alternative plans. Which is exactly what I did. To me, the process was two-tiered: Firstly I wanted to stream my existing media from the desktop in my study; and secondly I wanted to watch TV shows and even sport online somehow.

    Some background: I run a 4mb line at home, which is administered through Axxess. So even though the infrastructure still belongs to Telkom, I can complain with Axxess, who then sort it out on my behalf. My data also comes through Axxess, and even though they do offer an uncapped service, I opted for a 50GB capped service, which has less shaping than the uncapped offering – this is important for streaming TV and movies.

    AppleTV now available locally, for around about R1,000.

    After much research and digging around, and with the sound of my wife and kids screaming for content, I decided to get an AppleTV. This was before they were officially available in SA, but I got one through a shop in Cresta Shopping Centre regardless. Nowadays you can just buy them off the shelf at your local iStore for around R1,000 a throw.

    With iTunes set up on my desktop, and both the desktop and AppleTV connected to my home network, I was up and running in minutes. Lovely streaming of movies, TV shows, music, images and more – all from my shared iTunes library. Quick, easy and relatively cheap. BUT this meant I still couldn’t watch all the latest TV shows. So how now brown cow?

    First I indulged in some Bitorrenting, which I shall not elaborate on. Suffice to say that I had to hunt down my content, download it, convert it to MP4 and then import it into iTunes. Works okay, but it is a bit laborious. And it takes up a heck of a lot of space on my desktop. With Apple not supporting the popular codecs for downloaded torrents, it kept me busy too with all the converting and what-not.

    So I turned to Netflix and Hulu Plus – the two stalwart American streaming services, which everybody knows you can’t get to work in South Africa. Except, of course, if you are ‘n ‘boer’, Because a boer makes a plan, eh?

    Enter – a DNS service which makes services like Netflix and Hulu and many more think you are in the US of A. And this means you can get Hulu and Netflix to send you content. Sadly you still need to pay for these, and setting up working accounts for both of them is a test in itself – but it can be done. If any of you want help with that, let me know and I’ll write up a how-to guide. But after a couple of hours of tinkering and many, many restarts of my router, I got it to work like a charm. Now
    I can watch the latest episode of Greys Anatomy on Hulu the night after its US broadcast – which means I’m about to finish the series next week. Cool. I can also delve into the mass of historic content on both services, and keep the kids busy with plenty of suitable programming. Also, I can access Netflix and Hulu on my iPad, iPhone, AppleTV and Desktop – all at the same time if needed. And the 4MB line is plenty fast for this. So all of a sudden my AppleTV has become a major hub of entertainment – and you get apps to control it from your phone too, if you want.

    But what about live sport? Alas, this is the one area where I still need to figure things out. As a fan of the British Premier League, I desperately miss my footie. But I shall keep hunting for solutions. I did find one service, Firstrowsports (link deliberately left out) I think it was called – but their ‘client’ added so much crap to my machine that I ditched them.

    XBMC is worth checking out if you have spare hardware lying around.

    In the mean time I have started tinkering with XBMC – an open-source media centre system that runs on almost any platform – including Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux… It is robust, if not particularly user friendly. As things stand right now, I have sacrificed a spare laptop with HDMI output for this purpose, and run the server on my Desktop. The main advantage over AppleTV is that XBMC can play almost any codec, so no converting of new content needed. It is also more customisable, which is great if you know what you’re doing (and less so in my case). Overall I think this is another good solution, though the hardware will cost more than an AppleTV (or similar box). Worth investigating though…

    Other solutions also exist. WD makes a great alternative to the AppleTV for similar money, and if you want to order from abroad you can look at Roku or Boxee – all with their own pros and cons. In the end, though, I have found that it IS possible to get away from DSTV, but at a cost:

     

     

    PER MONTH

    • LINE RENTAL – R350.00
    • DATA – R400
    • NETFLIX – R80
    • HULU – R80
    • – R80

    So I pay roughly R1000-odd for my TV now, which is R400 MORE than I used to. But the big thing for me is that I work from home, and would have had to pay the ADSL line rental and data regardless. Thus my actual increase runs only to R160 for the two streaming services, which is a hell of a lot less than DSTV. Plus the small fee for the unlocker – and check out their variety of payment options. Oh, and I can’t watch live football. Which sucks.

     

  • Spud is no small fry!

    As you may know, one of South Africa’s most anticipated movie releases hits the big screen on the 3rd of December, Spud the Movie. I was unfortunately unable to attend the premiere here in Durbs on Friday eve, but my mate, Rich Mclennan, went down to the Pavilion, and gave this sterling review

    It was always going to be a challenge taking the hilarious Spud novel and turning it into a film but Donovan Marsh (Director and Screenplay) certainly didn’t disappoint. The film is clearly no small budget affair and is sure to get international acclaim.

    “Spud” for those of you who haven’t read the book by local author John van de Ruit (shame on you!) is a 13 year old boy who’s real name is John Milton, yes, like the poet… It’s 1990 and young “Spud” is attending the prestigious Michaelhouse School on a full scholarship and this is where the fun begins. Our very unique South African idiosyncrasies and the changing political climate of 1990 only add to the winning formulae that makes this film so relevant to us.

    Throw in 7 crazy dorm mates with nicknames like “Rambo”, “Boggo”, “Fatty”, “Gecko”, “Rainman”, “Mad Dog” and er Simon and you know you are in for absolute mayhem, the boys do not disappoint.

    John Cleese steals the show as young Spud’s English teacher and mentor “The Guv”,  his hilarious profanities will have you in stitches. Young South African born actor Troye Sivan who play “Spud” will be a name to watch in the future, the boy oozes talent and will be nice to know he honed his skills on our sunny shores. Local Durban comedian Aaron Mcilroy adds to the talented cast with his brilliant performance as “Spud’s” eccentric Dad.

    It is hard to fault this film, cinematography is inspiring with the impressive Michaelhouse setting the perfect scene. The soundtrack is full of 80’s classic and the attention to detail on the set, particularly with 80 and 90’s memorabilia is impeccable, right down to original rice crispy boxes and dodgy garden furniture that we all once had.

    If there is just one small fault it is just that there seemed insufficient time to get to know some of the other characters better. Sure, a lot of stuff has been missed but it would have been impossible to cram it into an 80 odd minute film.

    “Spud” get’s a 10/10 and is bound to get excellent international exposure both for our local talent (on and off screen) and beautiful country. We can certainly expect to see the next 2 books making their way to the silver screen in due course, move over Harry Potter and Hogwarts there is a new ‘kid’ on the block and he is sure to keep us spellbound for the next couple of years.

  • Thoughts on Apple’s Media Event

    Another awesome read by Apple boy Pete, who takes a look at last night’s Apple event with a whole whack of new stuff announced. I know I can’t wait for the AppleTV. Gonna be game changing. Would love to hear your thoughts on the event in the comments below

    As one of South Africa’s number one Apple fanboys, I of course watched the live video stream of Apple’s media event on 1 September with baited breath (yes, yes, “reality distortion field” and all that).  I think that yesterday’s announcements were Apple’s second biggest of the year, after the iPad introduction.  Here is my take:

    • iOS 4.1 is launching next week (Wednesday, 8 September, apparently, according to Apple’s Spanish site).  While it seems to mostly be bug fixes, it includes game centre and high dynamic range photographs.  In terms of game centre…  We’ll have to see what it means practically for gaming on the iPhone, though as a keen gamer I hope that it means that the fragmentation of iOS social gaming into a dozen or so different third party networks (Openfeint, Plus+, Scoreloop, Crystal, etc.) will come to an end.  More exciting to me right now is HDR.  While the iPhone 4 (yes, I’m one of the lucky ones!) has a vastly improved camera, it is still virtually impossible to get good photos under anything but perfect lighting conditions.  Parts of the image always seem to be either over- or underexposed.  The HDR feature will cause the iPhone to take three photos in rapid succession: one under-exposed, one normal and one over-exposed.  Through some magic, the three images then get combined into a single image with much better contrast.
    • Wireless printing is coming to the iPad (and apparently iPhone too!) in November.   Multi-tasking, folders, unified inbox, threaded email and all the other features we’ve come to depend on iPhone are finally coming to iPad as part of the iOS 4.2 update in November.  Printing and multi-tasking would certainly make the iPad an even more useful device than it is today.  It’s also worth pointing out that with the release of iOS 4.2 on both iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, it will mark the first time that all iOS devices are running the same version of the operating system and that hopefully in future the iPad will always be updated simultaneously with its smaller brethren.
    • Apple has massively overhauled their iPod line-up.  Seems like the iPod Classic is slowly being phased out; apparently it will remain on sale for now but it was the only model not getting a makeover today.  I suspect Apple wants people to buy an iPod Touch rather than the aging Classic.  The iPod Nano is now touch enabled and the size of two postage stamps, and the iPod Touch is getting feature parity in a lot of areas with the iPhone (retina display, processing power, etc.).  The iPod is Apple’s only product that has seen sales numbers decline over the last year or two.  I think they’re working to stem the tide to ensure that they don’t see further sales decline there.  (The iPhone has been cannibalising iPod sales, it seems.  Not a train smash for Apple, because the iPhone’s profits more than made up the difference.  But after selling a quarter billion iPods over the last decade or so, Apple will surely not want to let a product line  that was pivotal in their turnaround from nearly-insolvent dinosaur to most valuable tech company in the world just slowly die without a fight.)
    • The new iPod Touch finally has front- and rear-facing cameras and a microphone.  And guess what?  You can now make FaceTime video calls.  From an iPod Touch.  Which is less than half the price of an iPhone.  With no cellular contract (and no GSM connectivity).  It’s not just Google that’s busy working towards making the telcos obsolete (in their current form) with Google Voice.  Now Apple is making it possible to call people, with very high quality video and audio, through an intuitive interface from a portable media device aimed at teens and 20-somethings, with no call charges.  AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone…  Meet the future.
    • Apple made a big deal about the fact that the iPod Touch is now the BIGGEST portable gaming device in the world.  Kinda by accident, through the huge success of the app store, the iPod Touch (even without the iPhone) now has a greater market share than both Sony and Nintendo’s handhelds COMBINED with a 50+% share of both the US and global market.  Part of that success is the ease through which games can be bought and downloaded from the app store.  Part of it is the fact that high quality titles in the app store cost a fraction of what Sony and Nintendo games go for.  Seems like Apple is finally making peace with the fact that they accidentally, and with great hesitance, became the traditional gaming giants’ biggest competitor.  They demoed a game (a version of which is now available in the app store as Epic Citadel) that pretty much kicks the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS’s asses when played on an iPhone 4.  Wow.  Between Unreal Engine based games and John Carmack bringing Rage to iOS, you really don’t have to hide your iPhone gaming addiction from your PSP and DS wielding buddies.  (In fact, they’re ones deserving your pity!)
    • iTunes is getting a new logo.  Now I knooooow.  “Pete, that’s not a big deal.”  Bear with me.  Steve Jobs mentioned that seeing as iTunes will probably sell more tracks by next year than the CD retail industry does, it was time to get rid of the CD in the logo.  Apple’s transformation of the music industry, for better or for worse (depending on who you ask and whether they make a living off selling CD’s), is pretty much complete.
    • Right.  So Google is trying to build a Facebook-clone called Google Me.  Guess what?  Apple launched their own social network today.  In iTunes.  A media player used by millions and millions of people.  (iTunes now has 160 million accounts with linked credit cards.)  It seems to be a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, aimed at music discovery.  Set up your profile.  Follow people.  Follow artists.  Post video clips.  See the Top 10 songs etc. of the folks you follow.  See what they’re listening to at the moment.  See Lady Gaga’s favourite music tracks (you know, the stuff SHE likes to listen to).  Listen to those tracks.  One-click buy them.  Brilliant.  And it’s right there, in an app millions of people use every. single. day.  Unlike Google, Apple is actually playing into their strengths, solving a problem many media-afficionados have, building a social network on top of something that is already hugely popular. This isn’t a ME TOO effort.  This is something I would use (and yes, I am the target market, since I love music and other forms of content).  Oh, and of course Ping will work on iOS devices too.  More than 100 million of them. Effectively, Apple is bootstrapping their social network with more users than Twitter currently has.  (And someone made the point that Ping might just be the final nail in MySpace’s coffin, seeing as MySpace still manages to hang on to life support as a place where many bands promote their music.)
    • Apple is relaunching the Apple TV.  The new model (rolling out end of this month in the US and perhaps a few other privileged countries) is a quarter of the size of the original Apple TV.  It’s a little black box, the size of your palm.  It comes with Wifi and ethernet connectivity options, and has an HDMI output for hooking up to your TV.  So essentially, to get it working is pretty much as easy as hooking up power, plugging the HDMI cable into your TV and BAM!
    • The focus is all on streaming and renting.  No purchases.  Jobs said that people don’t want to have to manage storage, and I agree.  HD TV shows from Fox and ABC can now be rented for 99c / episode.  (The other studios are not yet keen.  Seems like there are limits to the “Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.”)  New release HD movies can be rented for $4.99.  You can stream Netflix and Youtube at the push of a button.  The interface is extremely slick and efficient.  You can also stream video and music from any of the computers in your house, and make photo slideshows from your photo library.
    • Once the new iOS update arrives in November, you’ll be able to stream content from your iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad to your Apple TV.  So you sit on the couch with your iPad, browse to a movie you half-watched in bed on your iPad last night, open it, tap a button to send it to your Apple TV, and BAM! it continues playing on your TV.  No wires, no fuss.  Seamless interaction between all your (Apple) media devices.
    • All of this Apple TV fun costing… $99.  I think that’s a brilliant price point for a device that both Steve Jobs and I believe will go from “hobby for hardcore Apple nerds” to mainstream now, and the perfect complement to the rest of Apple’s ecosystem.  Soon, many people will be playing with three Apple devices in the living room.  iPhone in the shirt pocket, iPad on the lap, Apple TV remote in hand.  Steve Jobs really believes there is no such thing as “too much of a good thing.”
    • (The caveat in all of this is of course that all this beautiful content is only available in a handful of countries.  Which won’t stop me from getting an Apple TV, naturally, but will require a bit of nerd trickery to operate here in SA, given the complete absence of the iTunes Music / Media Store in our part of the world.)

    And that pretty much covers it.  Making high quality mobile calls without a phone, a social network, same content shared everywhere on any (Apple) device, an even greater gaming focus (and keep in mind that the games industry is starting to eclipse Hollywood), an improved and cheaper Apple TV… Folks, don’t sell those AAPL shares just yet!  Apple’s brilliant transformation from also-ran to front-runner in the tech space is far from over.

    Now if only Steve would bring the iTunes Media Store to South Africa…

  • How the iPhone helped developers

    In his third installment of how Apple is slowly but surely changing our lives, Peter takes a look at how the app developers around the world lives have been changed.

    One of the things I mentioned in my previous post on the appeal of the iPhone to users was the app store, with its quarter million apps (and counting).  Of course, most of those apps are really, really bad (just search for “fart” on the app store; or rather: don’t).  But with so many apps from so many developers, there is inevitably a huge bunch of great, quality apps too.

    The reason for this is simple:  Apple revolutionised the way developers think about mobile, how they build their mobile apps and how they sell them.

    When the iPhone launched, there was no app store.  The iPhone shipped with a dozen and a half or so apps from Apple, and that was it.  The Safari web browser was the window through which you could access additional functionality.  Of course, this was somewhat frustrating to the first generation of iPhone users (although I suspect most early adopters didn’t mind too much because their phone just worked so much better for so many other things than anything that came before).

    In hindsight, the fact that Apple focused only on establishing their market share during that first year helped kick off the app store with a bang when it launched in mid-2008 (a mere two years and around five billion downloads ago).  Apple wasn’t distracted by trying to figure out how to sell apps and support developers when they launched, they only had to focused on selling the idea of the iPhone to people who had never experienced anything like it.  The result of this was that by the time the app store launched on 11 July 2008, the iPhone already had 6 million users who loved their phones and were hungry for more.

    The thing is, software developers only get off their Star Trek watching, Red Bull drinking butts late at night to build cool things if they believe that (a) there is an audience for their applications, (b) that it will be really easy for users to find and buy your product, ( c) that it is easy to develop powerful applications, (d) that you can easily distribute your product and get your fair share of the revenue and (e) that it is cheap to develop applications.

    Apple rose to the challenge posed by these developer requirements.  By building up a user base before launching the developer program which feeds into the app store, there was a sizeable audience already.  By putting the app store on the home screen of the iPhone, users instantly know about the app store, they don’t have to stumble across a place to buy apps on the Internet through word of mouth or a concerted effort.  But it’s not enough to have users, those users also need to have and have an easy way to spend it.  By linking the app store with Apple’s huge existing iTunes store user base, most iPhone users already had accounts with linked credit cards through which they could download or buy apps from the app store.  (And if you don’t have an account, you can even create one within a few minutes when you first fire up the app store.)  It’s also important to note that Apple’s customers tend to have more money than your average cellphone user by mere virtue that all of Apple’s innovation and design style comes with a price tag.

    Apple also integrated their iPhone development tools with their existing standard Mac development software.  So it wasn’t difficult at all for Mac developers to make the jump to iPhone development.  (Most early iPhone developers like Pangea and Freeverse had a long history of Mac software development.)  They didn’t have to learn new languages or new tools.

    Also, virtually all software for cellphones before the iPhone was written in Java MicroEdition (or J2ME, as it was then known).  The idea behind Java ME was that you could write software that ran on nearly all cellphones.  As is so often the case in the real world however, this noble idea didn’t translate all that well into reality.  Since Java ME set out to be a lowest common denominator environment, the programs you could write were very basic and rather bland, and couldn’t take advantage of many of the advanced features of different makes and models of phones.  So various “add-ons” were created which allowed Java ME programs to access useful features like SMS, the GPS, the mobile web, data connections, the camera and so forth.  While you could now, in theory, write much more powerful applications, it also meant that suddenly you had to figure out on what specific phone model you were running and what that phone supported.  What a headache!  Also, even if a phone allowed developers to access a certain feature, there are no guarantees that Nokia and Samsung (for example) would implement it in the same way.  (And quite often, the manufacturers would even implement some features differently among their own models.)

    If this wasn’t bad enough, the basic hardware on phones differs significantly.  Some phones have tiny memory, virtually no storage for files, slow processors and tiny screens.  Other phones have a lot of memory, file storage, fast processors and higher resolution screens.  Most phones lie somewhere in-between.  If this sounds like a mess, it’s because it is!  If you wanted to develop on software that ran on a few hundred devices, you had to write and compile dozens of different versions of your program.

    In the world before the iPhone, some manufacturers like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung had very large market shares.  Nokia at some stage manufactured more than half of all phones on the market.  However, that market share was split into dozens if not hundreds of different models with different features.  Then Apple came along, launching a single model phone with a single, fixed set of features.  Absolute lunacy, commentators from the sidelines said!  You’ll never compete with the hundreds of models from your competitors!

    But what seemed like lunacy to tech commentators was absolute bliss for developers who were so used to the hurdles of developing applications for hundreds of different phones.  There was only one set of well-defined features to code for, you only had to test applications on one emulator that was tightly linked to your development environment, and only had to test your app on one real iPhone to know with near certainty that your app will run on all iPhones.

    In the two years since then, Apple has upgraded the iPhone twice (first with their 3G model and then the 3GS).  While doing that, they’ve taken great care not to unnecessarily introduce model-specific features.  So even in the two years since then, iPhone development is still far and away the simplest, least  “headachy” of all the platforms.

    The first real fragmentation (geek speak for introducing a model which does have significantly different features) will probably occur with the announcement and possible introduction of the fourth generation iPhone next month.  Specifically, the new iPhone will almost certainly have an incredibly high-resolution screen which will be capable of showing four times the level of detail of existing iPhone screens.  This means that developers need to go through a tiny bit of extra trouble if they want to take full advantage of the new resolution.  But since Apple is well aware of the fact that their restraint on major hardware upgrades has worked for them so far by limiting fragmentation, and since they certainly don’t want to undo that advantage, it is virtually certain that all of the existing applications will work out of the box even on the newest, coolest model.  Albeit with graphics that are a little bit less crisp than the new screen would be capable of; essentially the apps will look exactly the same as they do on older devices.

    Apart from great developer tools, Apple also made it very easy for developers to distribute applications.  You merely upload them through the Internet to Apple.  Apple will then test your applications to make sure they don’t contain any obviously broken code, and to make sure that your app doesn’t do anything that would be harmful to users (like sending a copy of your emails to some dodgy server).  Once Apple has approved your app, they load it onto the app store, and you’re good to go.  Users will be able to find your app, tell their friends, and hopefully you’ll make a truckload of money.

    When it comes to earning money from your applications, Apple made it super-straightforward for developers: no complicated, tiered revenue share models, minimum sales or revenue thresholds.  Apple will keep 30% of any money a developer makes to cover their costs of operating the app store (which are significantly higher than people think!), and gives 70% back to developers by paying it into the developer’s bank account once a month.  If an application is given away for free, Apple doesn’t charge developers anything even though it does cost Apple quite a bit of money to look at and approve and distribute the free application.  If you add features to your app, you just upload the new version to Apple (at no cost), and once the new version appears on the app store, users who already own the app can update it for free.  You can change the price of your app to nearly anything you want it to be, from free to hundreds of dollars.

    All of this power and simplicity comes at the very low price of a developer subscription with Apple for $99 per year.  To put that into perspective: if you can find a mere 130 or so users (out of the hundred million or so who own iPhone OS devices) willing to buy your app, you make that back.  (It’s worth mentioning that the iPhone development tools only run on a Mac.  So if you’re a Windows/Linux PC person, you’ll need to also buy a Mac.  As a Mac-fan, I don’t necessarily see that as punishment.)

    Of course, all of this sounds great on paper.  Obviously developers didn’t line up around the block to sign up for iPhone development the day Apple announced the developer tools; most developers are often risk-averse to trying out “unproven” business models.  But a few developers writing apps over weekends and during their spare time became so rich and successful during the first months of the app store that stories obviously started to spread, and more and more developers gave iPhone development a shot.

    Today, tens of thousands of enthusiastic and skilled developers build and sell applications either full-time or part-time.  This enthusiasm, coupled with the ease of distribution and the potential to make money from a hundred million users has even changed the gaming industry.  Big names like EA, Activision, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Sega and Square Enix have released games on the iPhone.  Today, the iPhone games market in the US generates nearly double the revenue of the PSP.  Those kind of numbers make even big developers and publishers sit up and take notice.

    The last revolution the iPhone caused for developers is that the app store allows a single developer working in his spare time to compete with massive publishers like EA.  Apple features apps from small teams and big publishers in equal measure, all developers have to follow the same processes to have their applications loaded onto the app store, and ultimately it’s up to users to decide whether they like it or not.  Before the app store, it took a lot of time and energy (and money) for an indie developer to find a publisher with the right connections to have their application published on a big network portal (like Vodafone Live) or one of the many off-deck (non-operator) content portals.  Even then, promotion was often a major issue.

    The app store is full of remarkable success stories of indie developers hitting the big time.  Doodle Jump has sold millions of copies at $0.99 and was mentioned on The Big Bang Theory show on TV; it was produced by the Pusenjak from Croatia.  Loren Brichter from Atebits developed the beautiful twitter client Tweetie and became so successful that he recently sold his company to twitter, which re-released Tweetie as the free, official twitter client for iPhone.

    Success if by no means a sure bet on the app store, but it’s stories like these, coupled with the ease of iPhone development that keeps the app store dream alive for countless developers who feel stifled in corporate cubicles.

    In the next instalment of my series on the iPhone revolution, I’ll take a look at how the cellphone networks have been affected by the arrival of that magical device.

  • Getting Creative

    Another guest post and fantastic look at the IT life by Shawn Muller

    Us computer guys are a funny lot.  By and large we’re pretty clever – love a debate and are quite logical. And boy do we love making stupid inside jokes which no one really gets. But, we don’t like to be cast into one generic type.  Hee Hee…  There are nerds, geeks, übernerds and nerdswithtoolbelts (seriously – I know networking is important, but a crimping tool just aint a nailgun).  Who are we kidding here… we are a bunch of nerds.  Never to be mistaken for being cool.  And no, what the tweeps say about you doesn’t count.  I mean, we are never really considered cool by non IT people.  Think back… Anyone remember being in the cool crowd at school?  If you were, remember thinking…  I know this is supposed to be cool, but it’s just so stupid!  Yip – you’re geek.  And no, even Steve Jobs is not actually cool.  At least get your turtleneck in a different colour, Steve!

    And the work we do is,  lets face it, nerdy stuff.  Most of us do get challenged in our jobs.  But by and large, it’s pretty mundane.  Yes, there are exceptions but when you’ve designed the solution the rest is just typing.  Yes, yes, yes…  I know it’s not just typing… Yes, I know you can track my IP… But you know what I mean. How do you get your creative juices to flow? For a long time, we were confined to our little desk (or desks if you’re an übernerd and needed 3 19inch CRT monitors.  Remember those?  Man oh man… They took up so much space and pushed you so far back from your desk – your arms hung in mid air. They spawned a whole generation of carpeltunnelspecialists) I think the word I’m looking for is…

    Anyway.  These days there are a few creative outlets for us.  Blogging is huge.  We can just write – be ourselves or our alter egos. That’s what’s so great about the internet – There’s bound to be someone out there who understands what we are thinking and they’ll find our blog.  Not always true…  Have a look at blog stats and see that really…  Six billion people in the world and only 1 unique IP. Yip. Yours. Mine has three…  My PC, my iPhone over wifi and my iPhone over 3g…  Seriously. That’s why I’m writing on marcforrest.com… his website is huge and I know at least 1 other person will read this.  Thanks Marc!  WordPress is a good app to get you on your blogging way.

    Personally, I cook.  I don’t mean “make supper”.  I mean cook.  Jamie Oliver / Gordon Ramsay / Nigella style.  And I don’t mean naked or swearing – although it happens.  By the way, those three should really get together. Can you say NakedDirtyTalkingFingerLickingOliveOilUthing reality TV show?  In my case, I have a look at what’s in the kitchen and start cooking, using at least 4 bowls, 3 pots, a roasting dish, 10 spices and 15 spoons. Getting flavours to blend and enhance, to become a perfect combination of texture and taste.  It doesn’t always work (mostly, or never and no one says anything) but when I’m busy… I feel inspired.  Inspired to make the ordinary pizza taste gourmet.  One app I really like is the one from Jamie Oliver.  It’s good in that you don’t have to download got onto the internet every time and the video demos are very good. The $20 seems steep, but it is a cookbook and I quite like it.

    And yes, for the manne, you can do it too.  You can be inspired at the braai.  Google how to cook the perfect steak for a start.  If all else fails – if you are not the braaing type – if you bring meat to a bring and braai and don’t really care what happens to it – if you always scout for a dutchman (meant in the nicest possible way… I’m talking about the salt of the earth, knows how to make fire and braai -dutchmen. Insert derogatory statement about Luke Watson here) to make sure the meat will get done, don’t worry – use the flashlight app to help out. Although, it is really lame and might earn you a snotklap.

    Another popular creative outlet is the DSLR.  Or really fancy camera for the 2megapixelphonecamerausers out there.  Pano is a really good app. As is Best Camera. However, DSLR cameras are really amazing.  They have the potential to turn every tourist into a professional, to turn every weekend away with friends into one giant orgy of picture taking.  For the artist out there… this is great.  But as a techie…  is it really about the art – I use the word in its broadest term.  Taking 1000 photos and getting lucky once is not exactly art if you ask me.  Or is it about the numbers?  You know, the resolution, the macro feature or the shutter speed.  Have we gotten so bored with having to say how small our phones are we needed something to get bigger? Really.  For the techies… is it about the pictures? The memories?  Or is it about the camera?  Do you use your camera as a creative outlet, or just to feed your AudreyII?