Results tagged “mac”
After renewing my Netflix subscription last November, I have to say I'm a very happy customer indeed. Add DVDs to your queue, the nice postman brings them to your house, you watch them at your leisure, and then you pop them back in the mail. Rinse, repeat. What could be better than that?
I'll tell you. Instant gratification. While waiting for DVDs to arrive is fine most of the time, sometimes you just want something right away. Sometimes your inner tantrumy five year old stamps his foot and wants to get his way.
That's where Netflix instant streaming is wonderful. You browse their site, find the movies you want, click 'Play' and et voila, movie plays right there on your computer. Depending on our mood, we sometimes watch directly on the laptop but mostly just hook the mac up to the big screen TV and stream fullscreen. For the most part, we've had no issues whatsoever.
Well, that's not entirely true, there are a couple of things I've had a wee grumble about. I've noticed that a couple of movies have looked a teeny pixelated. It's not so bad as to be distracting and it doesn't happen all the time. Perhaps some were encoded differently than others? Perhaps it's just my eyes. Old man Spencer.
Then of course not all movies are available to stream. Which can be a little annoying. Like, for example, you're really in a Ghostbusters mood. You go to Netflix, see that Ghostbusters 2 is available to stream but, wait for it, not the first one. So WTF?
Still, the oh hey, look, we can stream that one, let's watch it right now factor is so much fun that any annoyances can be easily put up with. So yeah, very happy customer indeed.
[Moozik: Chris & Cosey - Walking Through Heaven]
At the weekend I performed my first OS upgrade since becoming assimilated by Apple last year. For $29 it seemed like a no-brainer even though there were no new features. It would make stuff faster we were told. I like faster, so I dove right in.
The upgrade itself was quick and absolutely painless. Like all good OS upgrades should be. Except for when they're not. And I'm looking at you Ubuntu. Still, it was that little suckfest that finally convinced me to become a Mac addict so that things just work going forward.
The verdict after using it for a few days?
The good? Well it definitely seems faster. The Finder is certainly a lot snappier - thumbnail generation is lightning fast now for example. I do like new dock menu colors and the scrolling stacks as well.
The meh? I haven't noticed any speedup on system wake up when opening the lid on my MacBook Pro though. I could have sworn that was one of the promised speed improvements.
The bad? iScrobbler broke which I didn't notice until this morning. Which is a shame because the official Mac last.fm client is a little temperamental when it comes to scrobbling songs from your iPod. Still, a downgrade to iScrobbler 1.5.2 seems to have done the trick.
So overall, I'm a happy Snow Leopard user and can count my first Mac OS X upgrade a success.