There isn’t much to say that has not already been said elsewhere. Steve Jobs was a true visionary and completely revolutionized the the technology world into what we know it as today – iPod, iPad, MacBook Air… and those are only the recent accomplishments. Lets not forget OS X; hell, the GUI and personal computer as we know it today!

RIP Steve Jobs. You will be sorely missed.

Apple’s former CEO (and Savior), Steve Jobs, tendered his resignation last night from his post. Steve had indicated that he would like to serve as Apple’s Chairman of the Board and as an Apple Employee – both of which were granted to him immediately after his announcement. Steve’s letter of resignation to Apple’s board of Directors and Community is posted in its entirety below:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Jacqui Cheng summed up my thoughts best with her Tweet, “8/24/11 Never Forget.” Yesterday marked a monumental part of history for Apple and the technology world as a whole. Am I concerned about Apple as a company, their amazing corporate culture, and their ability to continually innovate? No. I think that Apple has adopted Steve Jobs’ qualities and they have an amazing executive team to continue steering the ship. Am I concerned about the public’s perception over Steve Jobs stepping down? Yes. I don’t think that people realize that Steve did not single handily design the iPhone and iPad – that the same team of people responsible for those products are still working hard as I write this.

Apple will continue to do amazing things and I will continue to be a loyal fan. I wish Steve Jobs the best and also want to thank him for all that he has done for Apple and the tech community as a whole over… well, lets face it, my lifetime.

The upgrade process was quick and absolutely painless, no issues whatsoever – except that I wanted to do a clean install and didn’t realize I was doing an upgrade. Once I realized my mistake, going back and doing a clean install was also painless, although not exactly intuitive for a new Mac user.

I purchased the OS through the Mac App Store (as is the new method prescribed by Apple), but once it downloaded I extracted the package contents to pull out the hidden .dmg file which I burned to a DVD – hello OS X Lion install media (good for clean installs, upgrades, and repairs). Cnet has instructions to create the DVD here; I highly recommend it as it will save you from re-downloading the Lion upgrade if you ever need to do a system restore (the installer deletes the 4GB upgrade file once it has finished upgrading your machine).

Things I like about Lion – well, pretty much everything; it’s a polished version of Snow Leopard. The hiding scroll bars are great, the new button shapes, progress bar colors / animations, it all looks very clean. The new login and lock screens are fantastic; really puts an extra level of “Apple” on the OS. When I unlock my computer I no longer forget that I’m using OS X vs. Ubuntu Linux. I also really like mission control, I never really used dashboard (or whatever it was called) before, but I can really see myself using mission control. It organizes your windows in a really intuitive way and multiple desktops is always a nice-to-have.

Things I don’t like about Lion (Steve, I hope you’re listening) – multi-touch gestures that are different from the gestures in Snow Leopard. I have become so accustom to swiping two fingers left / right in my browser to go back and forward as well as three fingers up / down to jump to the top and bottom of a page and you have taken that away from me! Swiping two fingers left and right (in any app) now takes me across my multiple desktops… if I’m on my desktop that makes sense, but not in my web browser! Three fingers up will now take you to mission control – I’m all about the multi-touch, but keep it consistent!

The “natural” scrolling feature doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They have essentially flipped the scrolling (using multi-touch) so that it is upside down – flicking your fingers up scrolls the page down and vice versa. I get it, trying to make this more like iOS. On a touch screen it makes sense to scroll that way, but it really doesn’t translate to a computer. Luckly you can turn this “feature” off.

The final nit I have to pick is that my external drive still drops from the system if it has been inactive for more than 5 seconds. I suspect this is due to the fact that I have a Western Digital Green drive in the enclosure, but Apple should figure out a way to gracefully detach these drives; I mean, comon… they use the same “server grade” drives in their new Time Capsules!

All in all I really, really like Lion. Is it worth the $29.99? Yes, without a doubt. Is it perfect? No, nothing ever is… but this is pretty darn close.

What are you waiting for? Go upgrade today!

A landline telephone has some benefits and you should not overlook them. You need to think about the benefits for the cost and weigh your alternatives. Some of the benefits include cheap long distance plans, unlimited local calling at any time, the ability to “conference” with several people/phones in your house, and 911 services (provided that you have them in your area). Another thing for some people to consider is a telephone for their children – the simplicity to have one number for the entire family and in the event of an emergency your kid being able to pickup the home phone and dialing 911.

My biggest obstacles were long distance and unlimited local calling (daytime minutes). My cell plan includes a good amount of daytime minutes for local calling and unlimited evenings and weekends after 6 pm – so I’m not too bad from that perspective. The long distance was the biggest hurdle; however, my solution actually solves both issues! I decided to venture into Voice over IP (VoIP). My cell plan also includes 6GB of data so I have quite a bit of VoIP time before I have to worry about data overages.

I decided to get a SkypeOut account. For $3 (CAD) per month it allows me to make unlimited North American calls at any time. That’s a pretty wicked deal. I can use it on any of my computers or on my iPhone 4 using WiFi (when available) or my 3G cellular data connection. Call quality in either scenario is great and most often people cannot tell when I’m calling via the cellular network or via Skype. In the interests of full disclosure, my home broadband connection is 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. SkypeOut even gives you the ability to link the callerID for your account to your cell number, so when I call people using Skype it still shows up on their phone as if it is me calling from my cell.

I have been using this combination for about three months now and have had virtually no issues… occasionally 1-800 numbers are a problem depending on which number SkypeOut chooses, but if you try it once or twice it’ll work. I highly recommend this setup to anyone who does not need a dedicated landline telephone! Given the prices I was paying here for my landline phone I am now saying approximately $20 per month!

TuneUp uses the GraceNote music database to analyze your music and identify the proper song including all the metadata (artist, title, track number, album, etc) and album art. It presents you with its findings and then allows you to either accept or reject what it has found. If you accept it will retag your MP3s to include the proper data. No more unknown name, unknown artist crap.

I have run my entire MP3 collection through TuneUp and it worked nearly flawlessly. There were a couple really rare, underground tracks that it didn’t properly identify, but there were WAY more that it did (including other rare, underground tracks).

I’ve signed up to be a TuneUp referrer… if you decide to purchase a copy then why not do it through my referral link – http://tuneup.tellapal.com/a/clk/4PYZt. Each referral nets me $10 credit to a gift card or my PayPal account. Clean up your dirty music collection and help fund mine while you’re at it

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/windows-live-messenger-wave-4-almost-excellent-fatally-flawed.ars

It seems to work pretty good out of the box; I’d like to have it more obvious when a post is pulled from a tweet vs. me actually blogging about something. I’m sure it’s a quick fix in the source code somewhere. I’ll send the developer a note to suggest an option in the config page to add a post prefix posted tweets.

As promised, here are the build pics from my new PC.

• AMD Athlon II X4 630 CPU (2.8 GHz Quad-Core)
• OCZ Gold 2x4GB RAM
• GIGABYTE GA-MA785Gt-UD3H Motherboard (AM3)
• Antec Three Hundred Case
• Enermax Liberty Modular 500w PSU
• Windows 7 Professional
• Samsung SyncMaster P2350 23″ LCD Monitor
• Logitech Wireless Desktop K700 Keyboard / Mouse

I’m a big fan. It’s damn quick. It is also incredibly silent. I can hear my WHS box in a closet about 8 feet away over the sound of this rig which is about 2 feet away from my head.

UPDATE: I’ve run into my first real issue with this rig – for some reason the display refuses to wake from sleep. The whole thing will appear to sleep fine, but then when I try to wake it the display will not wake up; the hard drive spins up, fans turn on, etc. The only way for me to get back is to pull the power plug for 10 – 15 seconds and then restart the computer.

I have tried numerous BIOS settings (S1 / S3 sleep, USB wake features, etc), new drivers within Windows (video / motherboard), changing settings in Windows (disable hybrid sleep), but nothing seems to cure this problem. I have a hunch it’s related to the motherboard / BIOS, in particular related to USB. I’m running a “beta” BIOS right now, so I hope that when the final is released this issue will be resolved.

For the CPU I went with an AMD Athlon II X4 630 @ 2.8GHz. This is a quad-core processor which runs at the ultra low power of 95w and is extremely overclockable from what I’ve been reading – people have hit 3.8GHz on air! I’ve decided to put that on top of a GIGABYTE GA-MA785GT-UD3H which is an AM3 board with a bunch of SATA2 and USB2 slots (6 of each), firewire, and onboard video – ATI Radeon HD 4200 which is a Direct X 10.1 card. The board has two PCIE 16x slots so I can run a discrete video card if I choose, two in fact in CrossfireX configuration or in Hybrid CrossfireX with the onboard chip. The board also has three PCIE 1x expansion slots so I have plenty of room to run a SATA3 and / or USB3 controller card if I want. I’m going to throw in 4GB (2x2GB) of OCZ Gold RAM which should do fine for now, the GIGABYTE board supports up to 16GB over four slots, so I have tons of room to expand.

As for salvaging parts of my current Barton rig, my Enermax Liberty 500w power supply will come over as will my NEC 3550A DVD burner and my Maxtor 7 300GB SATA hard drive.

Now, I know someone reading this is probably saying why Athlon II over Phenom II or even an Intel Core i something or why onboard video? Well, quite simply, I don’t need anything that quick or expensive. I want to edit my photos using Adobe Lightroom and maybe tweak a few things in Photoshop. None of which require the crazy horsepower of the Phenom II and Core i5/7 chips. I figured I could save a couple hundred dollars in parts by going with a reasonable choice (i.e. the Athlon II). Besides, the Athlon II is the same as the Phenom II except there is no L3 cache. In benchmarks and reviews I have read it actually outperforms the Phenom II in the tasks I want to use it for! The other great thing is that for almost $200 less than the Core or Phenom II chips I can overclock the Athlon II (for free) and outperform them anyway.

I’m excited and waiting anxiously for my parts to arrive. I’ll post some build pics once I begin on that journey.

I’ve only had this for an hour or so now, so I will have to wait and see how it holds up long term although I’ve never been disappointed with a Samsung product yet *knock on wood*.

I’m actually starting to reconsider the new rig as I’m quite pleased by the new keyboard / mouse / and monitor. I feel like my Barton has a new, albeit short, lease on life. I’m going to keep looking at prices and reviews though, a Quad Core 3.4 GHz machine does sound fun…