I think there is a lot of inherent dislike towards Microsoft, they have just done too many wrong things over the years and Apple has done an excellent job of painting them as idiots with their Mac vs. PC ads over the past decade. Also it doesn’t help that Microsoft made Microsoft ME which is probably the worst iteration of Microsoft out there, Vista was pretty bad too off the start, but got progressively better.

Microsoft does try and in this case they launched the Microsoft stores, after all this time they know that Apple is successful with their stores and every Apple store employee is supposed to know everything about every product that Apple has and they inherently love Apple. So people love the Apple stores.

Recently I had a chance to spend some time in an Apple store and this one had people in it. I have recently gotten into the Windows Phone 8 and so I decided to venture into the store and mess around with the machines. I played around with the Microsoft Surface Pro and it is a very interesting machine, very solid and smooth, I liked how it felt. they had a selection of hardware from Acer, Asus, HP, and Sony, not including the Windows Phone section and the XBox Section. People get a hands on feel for Windows 8 across different hardware and the Windows Phone 8 platform as well.

Microsoft is really trying to make you feel that you are in one environment, that everything is connected and they are trying to connect things but they aren’t there yet. Apple doesn’t release a feature unless it knows it works 100%, except for Apple maps, that was a blunder that Apple has never seen, but Microsoft would rather release a broke feature then no feature, that is their problem from my aspect.

The store was a fun experience and honestly they have a good range of products, and the staff who are there are good but they are lacking a bit in information, sometimes I know that I knew more about a product then they did which shouldn’t be the case.

I have been a huge proponent of Google and their Android platform, I love it, its great, flexible and the selection of phones are insane, so many to choose from. I liked what they have done with their Play Store, now its really organized and only getting better. Even with the release of the Nexus 4 I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

My one major issue with them is the region segregation, its annoying as hell, Apple honestly makes no difference what so ever. If your account is registered in the US then you are treated as if you are within the US and get access to all the software, shows, and movies.

Google operates differently, even if you are a US account with a US Credit Card and Address you don’t get access to everything on the US store which drives me nuts. Except if you have a US sim in your phone, but if you have a tablet then it does it based on your location.

While I was in the states I bought Iron Man, Transformers, and Star Trek, just movies I love watching again and again just to see how the Nexus 7 works with and they are amazing movies. And I downloaded it onto my machine not just streaming, so I can take it back home with me to Kuwait and play it normally. Now in Kuwait with the movies on my device it won’t let me play them, are they serious, thats just ridiculous. People willing to pay for whats legal but if you stop them from getting it legally then they will get it illegally, what they are doing is ridiculous, they are seriously stopping a source of revenue, people want access.

Apple products are amazing I will say that about them, even though I hate the company, and even for my love for Google, they have screwed up and they need to learn from Apple that got something right. Fix this already.

Last year and the year before RIM was struggling, now they are just a sinking ship, when a few years before that it was everywhere like wildfire, everyone had a Blackberry. I still kept mine because of our Dewaneya being on it, and honestly it is still the best group communication App out there, I think they should have sold it off as an App in the App Store and Android Market, it would have helped sustain Blackberry on the software side.

They held on for so long and still RIM didn’t turn around at all, and a lot of people got fed up with it, they even switched to Android because some people didn’t want Apple. The whole of 2011 didn’t change anything for RIM, and Android & Apple just kept coming up with more updates and better handsets. People started shifting, it feels odd when people start leaving your contact list, at first its normal but then it just got ridiculous, floods of people disappeared. It was honestly sad some of these people were gone, it was nice to to star in touch with them. To be honest up to this point there isn’t an application that is better then BBM and nothing beats a good Qwerty keyboard but they had their problems and they didn’t progress. We are still stuck with the 10 MB which is pretty much useless when roaming, it gets used up in two or three days at most. I don’t know why but it feels like I was abandoned when I see the status update “BBM OFF – WhatsAPP +965##$##$##”, as if the person just gave up and left.

Now the migration has begun, very few people are left on Blackberry, I’m still holding on to it and using it when I can. I’m not a fan of WhatsApp even though pretty much everyone shifted over to it. I tried ChatON and a few other Apps they weren’t that great either. I think I’m probably going to stick to it until this piece of hardware quits, then I don’t think I will be getting another Blackberry until I see some drastic changes in the coming future.

The Dewaneya Media PC has been running for a good 6 years, and I think the age is showing. Since I have made some major changes to the dewaneya I was going for a bit of a hardware upgrade, starting off with the media PC.

New Specifications

• Intel® Desktop Board DH67CF – Mini-ITX – Media Motherboard
• Core i5 2300 – 2.8 GHz
• 8 GB Ram (2x4GB)
• Corsair 90 GB SSD – Sata 3 (For The OS)
• Pioneer BluRay RW

Total 187 KD From Professional Computer

What I Already Have

• Thermaltake Case
• Power Supply
• 2TB HD – Sata 3 (For The Media)

I almost store nothing on my PC’s these days, everything is stored on a network storage device which in this case is the Netgear 24TB Storage Unit. This little Unit is gonna pack a punch with the upgraded hardware and will be able to handle everything that I throw at it. Gonna install Windows 7 on it and from there I’m going to configure XBMC for my network, gonna take some tweaking and getting used to but I’m sure it will work perfectly. Other hardware upgrades are taking place in the dewaneya but that will be forthcoming in another post.

I’m not usually posting about hardware updates from Apple but this one seemed very interesting and enticing. These new Mac Book Pro with Retina Displays are supercharged machines in a smaller size then expected.

The one thing that is oddly changed is that power socket for the new MBP Retina Display models. That means if you have been collecting the power cables for your Mac Book Pros & Mac Book Air for all these years then you can’t use them for the new machines, going to have to collect a whole new bunch of them.

As usual the price is also up there, for a while I have been thinking of getting a new laptop, probably a Zen Book, but this update has thrown a wrench into that idea with a very lovely spec sheet below. Still its a bit on the pricey side, I think I want to see one in real life before making a decision.

Standard Model: 2.3Ghz quad-core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Intel HD 4000 & NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB [$2199]

Premium Model: 2.6GHz quad-core i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Intel HD 4000 & NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB [$2799]

Just to get an idea, this is the difference between the MBP 15 Inch & MBP Retina Display 15 Inch, and it packs a bigger punch then it’s predecessor.

Physical Comparison Between The Old & New MBPs

• Height: 0.95 inch (2.41 cm) vs. 0.71 inch (1.8 cm)
• Width: 14.35 inches (36.4 cm) vs. 14.13 inches (35.89 cm)
• Depth: 9.82 inches (24.9 cm) vs. 9.73 inches (24.71 cm)
• Weight: 5.6 pounds (2.56 kg) vs. 4.46 pounds (2.02 kg)

This is just a simple look into the Apple update on the Mac Book Pro. For a full breakdown check out all the articles over at Jacqui’s CouchAvenue she covers the Mac Book Pro, OSX Lion, iOS 6, and Other Minor Apple Updates. (She is the Apple Girl)

The cloud dashboard for your mobile phone

Simply enough its a service that lets you manage your phone calls, text messages and contacts from a remote browser. Discover a new way of managing your phone calls, text messages and contacts remotely from the browser. Currently its working for Android only, and I think some sort of integration with Nokia, not iPhone integration because of the way the application works.

• Syncs your contacts, messages, and history to this application which you can control online
• They give you lots of statistics about the people you call, who you call the most, the number of messages sent, if you like statistics you will love this program
• The only thing to keep in mind is that they do have access to your phone, your messages, and you phone book which can be a bit freaky but it seems to be a legitimate company
• The simple idea for me is that if my phone is somewhere in the same building but I’m on the laptop, I can see who is calling and answer or reply, its a very cool and simple concept

Link: PhoneDeck

One of the things that I always wanted to learn is how to edit videos and put something decent together. I always admire quality video work and I always wonder how they did together and the team that put it together and the equipment. Sometimes I come to the realization that I should just try it, I planned so much and even thought about buying Final Cut Pro, I was really really wrong! I got a lot of equipment that I use for photography and I use a lot of it, and recently I had the courage to try to put together a video together from all the footage I had. I use my Canon 7D for all my video footage and Go Pros or Flips for tight spaces, I have a storyboard or image in mind, I can even describe how I want it to together but I do not have the technical skills to do it, I wanted to rectify that and gain those skills. Since this time around I thought to myself that I had no expectations and I had the right tools in mind to try it out easy with iMovie. I spent the first two hours trying to figure things out and then another out trying to figure out how to transition, I was going nuts, it was taking too long to do something my head thought it was too easy.

Bloggers That Have Made Amazing Videos:

• 360Dewan
• 7ajidude
• InfiniteDriver
• Q8Path

I really need to take a few lessons from these guys! I respected the work they did and now I respect them even more, I have managed to make some headway but I’m going to take it easy and figure this out. It is very time consuming but the end result will be worth it once I get it all together and get the perfect clip. Hopefully I will keep learning and getting better footage and better ideas together. Right now I’m going to stick to the simpler editor before going to something more complex.

DropSnap Instantaneously Syncs All Your Android Device’s Photos to Dropbox. I am the type of person who is constantly snapping pictures with his phone but then I have to choose which pictures go to Dropbox and manually select them all and upload them. It was a very tedious process, but luckily someone thought the same thing and did something about it. The only way I could think of uploading my pics to my PC without connecting my phone to it was through DropBox and someone had the same idea but created a software to do what I was doing manually.

The moment you snap a picture it is saved to a photodirectory directory in your Android phone which DropSnap syncs automatically to a folder inside of DropBox. You have several options about how many times a day you can sync, if you want it only over Wifi or also over 3G, but I stuck to wifi because I’m usually connected to wifi where ever I am. DropSnap is a free download, but requires a $3.99 in-app purchase for automatic uploading to work. If you stay with the free version, you’ll get a notification every time you take a picture, which will let you enter the app and manually sync your photos.

Link: DropSnap

Sometimes I’m paranoid as hell about my website and that something is slowing it down, but in reality I’m not really sure and its always a matter of trial and error. Recently I stumbled upon this testing tool from Pingdom, you enter your website and they give you the time to load, whats slowing it down, whats taking more resources to load, and lots of other details. You can see what is loading first and a variety of items which is very cool and keep on testing it every once in a while, I didn’t even realize my website is 1.8 MB worth of data to load back in the day that which is even more then a floppy disk. I liked how they organized the data and they let you organize the data, very useful free tool, and I keep getting 88/100 for my average score, not bad. Check out the tool linked below.

Link: Pingdom

I am very careful with my machines, I update them constantly and I do regular scans. Sometimes some software crashes or a machine crashes, that happens every once in a while. But I am very careful of what I install or download, so when something weird starts happening I go into lock down mode. The day before my machine was acting fine when the next day any website I enter gets redirect to “Yandex.ru/blahblahblah” I didn’t know why. Some websites would stay but regular websites get redirected.

Googling it on the infected machine was useless because it kept getting redirected so I used a different machine to Google if this happened to anyone. Turns out there is a hostile bot that hijacks websites and automatically redirects them to Yandex.ru which is a Russian search engine/mail provider.

First Step:

• Turn Off All Add-Ons on Firefox and Chrome
• Run AVG Virus Scanner & Windows Maleware Defender

Result:

• The scanners didn’t find anything and the websites didn’t find anything

Next Step:

• Update Windows, Firefox, Chrome, AVG Definitions, Windows Defender, Chrome & Firefox Add-Ons, Flash, & Java

Result:

• Still getting redirected

Next Step:

• Deleted All Cookies, Cleared All Forms, All History from Chrome, Firefox, & Internet Explorer

Result:

• Thing went back to normal

I won’t lie I was a bit freaked out after each step and I was getting pissed, I thought some random Russian was messing with me and I wanted to punch him. So these are the automatic steps that I took and luckily things cleared up. And usually if worse comes to worse, I would format the machine after trying everything, I would have gotten paranoid that somebody really got into it, but it didn’t reach that point.