Shyzer.com

EDIT: Here’s a pretty cool video of the computer:

EDIT 2: I’ve moved the video to below the fold, so just click the title here to see it if you want:

The future is finally here.

Personal jetpacks and hover cars will soon be distributed to every able bodied adult. I’ve already booked my vacation package for a week on the moon, where I’ll enjoy low gravity golf and Martian hunts. My own robot slave will soon begin typing these very Shyzer posts for me, as work, thought, and effort will join the likes of polio and the Dodo bird. And lest we forget about the underprivileged, as the homeless will soon be relocated into holographic suites, where they’ll be able to enjoy all the replicated food they can imagine.

Ok, well maybe not, but pretty soon Microsoft will be giving us this damn cool gadget.

Microsoft Corp. will unveil a coffee-table-shaped “surface computer” Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder Bill Gates’s view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch.

Microsoft Surface, which has a 30-inch display under a hard-plastic tabletop, allows people to touch and move objects on screen for everything from digital finger painting and jigsaw puzzles to ordering off a virtual menu in a restaurant.

It also recognizes and interacts with devices placed on its surface, so cell phone users can easily buy ringtones or change payment plans by placing their handsets on in-store displays, or a group of people gathered round the table can check out the photos on a digital camera placed on top.

Of course, the first few batches will cost a cool 10K, but the way computer prices depreciate, it won’t be long before we’re all able to invite friends over, get drunk, and then smash our coffee table computer to pieces when we pass out on them.

I can’t wait.

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Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, MOTHER FUCKING YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Starcraft II is soon to become a reality.

I’m sorry, that sound you just heard was me collapsing onto the floor after hyperventilating from excitement. This has been, what, almost 10 years in the making? By this point, I actually thought Blizzard had given up on the series due to their massive hard on for the Warcraft franchise (which blows, but whatever). So when I woke up this morning to this news…well, let’s just say it was a pleasant little surprise.

From the videos of the gameplay that you can watch here (hint hint Tommy and Clay, that means go watch it so that we can all talk about it like the massive nerds we are), it looks like they’ve rehauled the entire gameplay to look a lot like Warcraft III. I’m not too sure I’m happy about that, but then again, this is a FREAKING SEQUEL TO STARCRAFT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT HERE! They could introduce a new race of magical ponies and faeries that run around sprinkling pixie dust and rainbows on fallen soldiers in the middle of a battle and I still probably wouldn’t raise any gruff.

Early estimates put the release date around my birthday in 2008, so that gives me just under nine months to buy a brand new desktop computer that I can use solely to play this game on. Until then, I’ll just watch this video over and over until YouTube realizes I uploaded it.

Good Christ, I can’t freaking wait!

I’ve never been much of a Mac user in my time, let alone Apple fan. I guess that stems more from the fact that I was never really exposed to most Apple products. Sure, I love my iPods, but I always had a hunch I wasn’t getting the full Apple experience by twirling my finger around in circles and listening to Aerosmith.

But then a few months back, my freebie nose sniffed out a little something that I like to call my new computer:

Oh yeah, baby, that’s a top of the line Macbook Pro you’re looking at. It came with all the bells and whistles; Brand new, Intel Duo processor, 120GB hard drive, 1GB SDRAM, 15.4 inch screen with 1440×900 pixels, DVD reader and burner, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and I think there’s a time travel and teleportation feature that I’ve yet to figure out.

Retail: $1,900ish. My cost: Free.

Well, okay, not actually free. I ended up paying about $250 for it in trial offers seeing as how I had to do 18 of them for a Do It Yourself freebie site (and I actually kept a few of the trial offers since I ended up using their services), but still. I got it at almost a 90% discount. Not too shabby, if I say so myself.

But the point of this post isn’t to brag (well, okay, it is just a little), but to share my opinion on the Macbook itself. Like I said, I’ve been a Windows user my entire life, but after hearing about how “easy” the Macs were and how simple they made computing, I figured I had to give it a shot. Plus, I’ve gotten into video editing lately and I needed a computer that could handle running a bunch of heavy software at once. My desktop, God bless her, is still crawling around with 256MB of RAM and a 2001 era video card. So when I got the Macbook on my doorstep one afternoon, the decision to open her up instead of sticking her on E-Bay was practically already made.

I already knew about most of the common stumbling points that Windows users first encounter, like the extinction of a right click button on Macs. But man, that still didn’t help with navigating around. It took me a few days to figure out that hitting the “X” button didn’t actually close a program or that the top Apple bar on the screen chameleons into whatever nav bar is needed depending on what program you’re using. (For instance, if I’m surfing in Firefox, it’ll show all the Firefox options like “File”, “Bookmarks”, “Tool”, and the such but then when I switch to iTunes, it automatically shifts to the iTunes options, like “Edit”, “Controls”, “Store”, etc.) Kinda nifty actually.

And then the real fun began.

Before I knew it, I picked up on a few of the important keystrokes and was using the mousepad less and less. With Windows, it’s virtually impossible to navigate around easily without a mouse, but not so with the Macs. When I downloaded programs off the ‘net, I quickly realized that all I had to do in order to install them was doubleclick the downloaded file and then drag the new icon into the Applications folder. That’s it! No clicking “Next” a million times and accepting agreements and waiting as the program loads itself. With a Mac, programs are installed in seconds, not minutes.

In fact, it didn’t take long for me to see why people said Macs were “easy.” With Windows, I tweak the hell out of it. I recently reformatted my other laptop (the one I got for free last summer, no less!) and I spent a good two or three hours tweaking all the settings and features from the basic installation. But with Macs, you can’t tweak them! They essentially come out of the box tweaked for you, without any bloated software or goofy settings and within seconds from hitting the power button (There’s another thing, Macs take no more than 10 seconds to boot up!), you’re using the computer as if you’d had it for years. In fact, Macs aren’t idiot proofed. If you want to delete something, it deletes it instead of asking you a million times if you’re really, really, totally, absolutely sure you want to.

I freaking love it.

And as if this cake needed any more icing, the iLife programs are actually a fucking Godsend. I plug in my digital camera and click iPhoto and the program boots up, detects my camera, and imports the photos in a matter of seconds. I can edit the heck out of them and export them either back to my camera, onto my hard drive, or into iMovie, iWeb, or Christ knows whatever i-program my Mac has. In fact, I think I saw iChrist in my Applications folder a while back.

So does this mean that I’m officially and exclusively a Mac user now? Na. Windows still has its own positives, like being compatible with far more programs and software out there. Plus when it comes time to replace my Macbook in a few years, it’ll be hard to drop two grand on a new computer when I can basically get the same specs on a Windows laptop for a fraction of the cost. No, instead, I’ll just happily own computers with both platforms, trying to figure out how to type on three keyboards at the same time.

Apparently iPods are like little siblings. All you have to do is smack them around in order to keep them in line.

I’ve been fairly lucky with my iPods over the years. The ugly rumor at the time was that most of the iPods back then died of faulty batteries right around their first birthday, but mine only succumbed never had a problem and only meet minor resistance to life when it was in the hands of my brother for a few hours one day. After sending it in to Apple to get looked at, I had it back within a week and haven’t had a problem with it since.

Until today, that is. As I was working on Hey, It’s Free! and jamming away this morning, my poor iPod suddenly started making a clicking noise that sounded pretty much like the Kiss of Death smooching away at my tiny hard drive. A few seconds later, the sad icon face showed up and it didn’t take long to realize that the help documents on Apple.com were about as helpful as my dog’s suggestion, which was to try and get it off my desk for a nice afternoon snack.

Thus enter Google and my expert searching skills and within minutes, I was jamming away again. That’s right, with just a few clicks, I found a cheap, easy, and totally useful method to fixing the iPod. What was it?

Spanking it. I shit you not, all I had to do was hold the iPod upside down in my hand, smack it’s ass a few times, and suddenly it worked again. The problem I was having was that iPod actually has a tiny hard drive in it that spins when you are using it (which boggles my mind when I see people exercising and running with one…if there ever was a recipe for breaking your iPod, it’s moving it around and shaking it constantly while the disk drive is spinning. It’s the same as if you hired a monkey just to sit by your home computer and shake it all day long as if he was trying to force as many bananas out of it as possible. It wouldn’t take too long for your computer to go kaput…) The hard drive is like a record player, as it has a tiny needle that reads the information and sometimes, the needle can get out of place and freeze up the entire hard drive.

So, you can either send it off to Apple or some third party and pay almost what it’d cost you to buy a new iPod…or, you can just smack it around a little for free.

Isn’t technology grand?