GeekwithEnvy

Computers

Myspace Ready for Round Two

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Remember back in the day when a little site named Myspace dominated social networking? Well, we all know the story all to well of how Myspace began to loose popularity while Facebook went through the roof but now it looks like Myspace might be ready for a comeback.

Myspace logo large

The old social network was innovative but quickly began to feel very sloppy and some Myspace pages were so bogged down with content that it took forever to load a page. Now, it seems that is all in the past as Myspace has a brand new look and I must say, are you ready for it? It looks really good. The interface looks really smooth and it looks like it will fit in perfectly with Windows 8 or any other touch based OS.

Facebook brought with it a very clean feel and I still like the way it looks even now but sometimes, if it can be done well, a media rich page that showcases you and what your all about can be really nice. When it comes to social networking these days, things seem kind of bland but Myspace’s new look feels different, in a good way. I hope this works as well as it looks and maybe we can see things start to shift again. I guess we will have to wait and see.

There is a new video that shows off the new site and all of its features and eye candy. You can check it out here.

You can also head to the new myspace website directly and see for yourself.

Torchlight II Soundtrack for Free and My Rant

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To help you get in the Torchlight mood, Runic games has released the Torchlight II full soundtrack with album artwork, pretty nice right? You can download the soundtrack for free on the official Torchlight II website. The release day for Torchlight II is Thursday September 20th.Torchlight II Outlander

I don’t know if you’re into this kind of thing or not but personally I love the music from many of my favorite game titles. I think that the music in games is often overlooked, which is quite sad considering the amount of hard work and talent that goes into these compositions. I love listening to soundtracks while I work, I find that it can really put me in a creative mood.

Many gamers will just queue up their favorite play list and turn the in-game music off, which I totally get why you would want to do this after playing the game several times, but when you first play a game, try to experience the game the way the developers wanted you to experience it. I am also referring to the sound effects here too, remember that these guys are custom tailoring the audio to the in-game world around you, it adds an entire layer of depth to your experience.

What’s more interesting is that if you ask most gamers today if they enjoy classical music they would probably answer no, but in reality we are surrounded by it, whether it’s in our favorite games or movies. Now, I’m not limiting everything to just the classical stuff, there’s a lot of other good non-classical tracks out there. I often prefer the more ambient music while I work or study. There are plenty of crazy game soundtracks out there that I like, in fact there’s a ton of classic game music that has be re-done with a full orchestra and includes music from titles like Zelda, Castlevania, and even Sonic The Hedgehog. Just Youtube any of your favorite songs and you will most likely find many different versions and interpretations, there’s even a whole orchestra dedicated to game music. You can check them out here.

So I say to those who work in the game industry and create music and audio effects, your work is appreciated!

MacBook Pro Retina Display A Bit Fuzzy

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The latest version of the MacBook Pro from Apple features a retina display screen that crams 5.1 million pixels into a 15.4 inch display with a max resolution of 2880 x 1800, which looks absolutely stunning. This is the kind of technology that makes you wonder how you ever used any other display.MacBookRetina

However, once you get your new MacBook Pro home and unboxed and once you finish choosing your picture for your desktop as you drool over how much detail you can see in each image, you decide it’s time to move on and start browsing the inter webs. You open Safari and see the ever-so familiar Apple website appear and of course it looks amazing but as you begin to navigate the web, you start to see something a bit unsettling, you notice that things look a bit blurry.

Yes, it sucks but its true, much of the web just isn’t made for a retina display. Sometimes it can be bad enough to make your eyes water and that’s no fun at all, but what makes things worse is that as you begin to install and work with your favorite applications, you notice that they don’t look so good either.

There is a solution, albeit temporary but nonetheless, a solution. You can adjust your display settings by going to System Preferences->Display, then choosing “scaled” instead of ” Best For Retina Display”. Once you choose scaled, you can choose to work with larger text or more space in order to accommodate your needs. This does work well enough to get you by in most cases but it’s really only a temporary solution.

When you first run into this problem you might tend to look at this as an Apple problem but as you step back and look at the big picture here, it’s really more about the display it self being a bit ahead of everything else. Let’s not get too frustrated here, as most likely your apps will get an update to work correctly with the new display and sooner or later your favorite sites may follow, but by no means do I think that this puts the new MacBook at any disadvantage. Overall, the Retina display MacBook is designed with the future in mind as it moves away from optical drives, replaces the old hard disk with a new solid state drive, and adds in one of the clearest displays we’ve ever seen.

Windows XP Usage Starting to Drop

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Windows_7_Horizontal_Logo_Web

Ever since it’s release Windows XP has dominated the PC landscape and when Windows Vista came around, XP users wouldn’t budge. If you ask most XP users why they haven’t upgraded you’ll get a variety of answers but most will likely point toward XP’s solid track record as a stable well performing operating system that works on older and newer hardware with ease. It really is that simple, it works well, and it works well on most of the hardware out there.

Another point to take into consideration here is that most of the people who have tried to upgrade from XP did so while Windows Vista was around and this left a bad taste in their mouths. With what I would call one of Microsoft’s worst operating system releases, I can understand why you would return to your old friend XP, which even on it’s worst day was better than Vista.

However, with the web becoming more media rich, and with more and more people trying to edit videos and photos taken with their favorite mobile devices, the need for better hardware beckons us. Our 512mb of RAM and our old processors, (yes,people are still using these) just aren’t cutting it and PC users are going out and buying new hardware with Windows 7 pre-installed.  Once consumers get a chance to try Windows 7, most are surprised at how nice the operating system is and how well it works with your new hardware.  Windows 7 has been patched, re-patched and optimized over the years to a point to where it just works and that is exactly what XP users wanted the last time they tried to upgrade.

Let’s not forget forget that consumers are not the only important factor when considering operating systems, there are vendors too. Vendors now have more faith in moving on as well. Take Adobe for example, they have indicated that the next release of Photoshop will not support Windows XP. If we look at some statistics, Wikimedia indicates that 38.58% of OS usage belongs to Windows 7 while XP holds out around 21.75%. Windows Vista holds on to a slim 6.98%.

What turns out to be kind of strange and well, a bit of a problem for Microsoft, is that these users are just now starting to catch on to Windows 7 when Windows 8 is about to make it’s big debut and not just any debut, this is going to be a huge change for Microsoft. We will just have to wait and see what develops and I think it will be interesting to see if people can connect with Windows 8’s primarily touch-based interface.

A Guide To Backing Up Your Digital Life

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In the world of digital data we have tons of pictures, documents, videos, email, financial information and more right at our fingertips, but how many of us back up all of this stuff? Backing Up DataWe are using our computers for just about everything we do in our day to day lives. With the major push to go paperless, many of us no longer write out checks to pay our bills, file paper taxes or even receive bank statements in the mail.

The convenience of having all of this information on our computers is great, but it can all disappear with one virus, power surge, or flood. Whats even more strange is that most of us know we need to back up our data but we choose not to. Perhaps it is because we just don’t know how or maybe just don’t feel like we have the time.

Here are a few great ways to back up your data and the best part is it doesn’t take very long and it’s not very expensive.

External Hard Drive-

External Hard drives are easy to set up and you can get a huge amount of storage space for very little, and to top it off they are portable. For example, you can get a 3TB, yes that’s Terabyte, for around $140. You might even find deals better then this, especially if you can find an online coupon or rebate offer. Many of these drives now utilize the new super fast USB 3.0 standard for quick data transfer.

USB Thumb Drives-

Yep, even these little guys can be of great use when you need to back up data. Thumb drives come in many shapes and sizes and some can hold up to 128GB of data. This option is not necessarily the fastest but in smaller sizes, like the 8GB for example, you can back up all of your spreadsheets or photos in a snap. I think these make a better choice than recordable DVD media since they are less susceptible to physical damage, take up less space, and are relatively cheap.

Recordable DVD-

These are quite useful to use but honestly I think the other methods of backup that I mentioned are far easier to work with. I’m not saying you should never use optical media to back up your data I am just saying there are better options.

Home Server Backup-

If you have multiple computers on a network you can back them up using something like Time Capsule from Apple, which will integrate wirelessly with Time Machine to back up your Apple computers. You can also use Clickfree Wireless backup, which will also back up your files on multiple machines. Both of these options are extremely easy to set up and work really well.

The Cloud-

Yes, it’s the cloud again! Sites like Carbonite and Mozy are super easy to use and offer solid back up protection for about $50 a year, that’s about $5 a month which is not bad for peace of mind.

Dropbox is another popular option for back up synchronization that can be downloaded or used on the web. Dropbox stores files in one folder that can be accessed from any device and it features a relatively easy to use interface.

OK, so we have a few options to choose from when it comes to how we want to back up our data but how do you choose what to back up? This process is not as bad as you might think, just think about what is irreplaceable and what means most to you personally. After you determine what can not be replaced, you can start weeding out things like video game data (excluding saved games), old documents that are no longer important like essays from 6 years ago or old resumes and emails.

Many operating systems come with a back up system of their own that you can use.

MAC

Mac uses Time Machine, which you can get detailed information on how to use here.

Windows

Windows users can use Backup and Restore, instructions on how to use this can be found here.

openSuse

With openSuse you can back up your /home using instructions found here.

Remember, redundancy is key here and try to back up only the things that you consider to be irreplaceable and most important. Using this strategy will keep your file sizes from getting out of control and help speed up the back up process.