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Posted at 11:11pm on 14 May 2008

How to Buy a Mac

Advice on which Mac to buy from Macworld.

Aimed at old-gen Mac users looking to upgrade, but probably applicable for Windows users looking to make the switch.

The important thing to remember when buying a new Mac is that even the cheapest consumer models are now pretty powerful machines - the Macs are expensive myth seems to have sprung up because PC users are used to buying over-specced machines to compensate for all the malware, anti-malware and other crap using up processor cycles.

If you want to, you can easily blow 10 grand on a Mac, but you'll be buying a server or a supercomputer, not a home PC. The only upgrades worth buying for your machine are a bigger hard disk and more RAM, and if you're smart you'll buy the latter from Crucial, not Apple.

Follow that principle and most machines will leave you change from £1000 (~$2000).

Posted at 6:12pm on 14 May 2008

VBA's Back, Baby

The Mac Business Unit (Microsoft's internal Macintosh development team) announced today that VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripting would be making a return in the next revision of Office for the Mac.

This is great news. I'm not a huge fan of Office, but like Photoshop it's the dominant application in its field right now, and until something better comes along, I'd like the Mac version to continue to be the best it can be.

Posted at 10:00am on 14 May 2008

Animated Graffiti

MUTO: a wall-painted animation by BLU

This is an incredible example of stop-motion animation done on a grandiose scale. I particularly like how the creature interacts with its environment, kicking over objects and eating papers on the wall.

The artist seems to have taken his influence from John Carpenter's The Thing, as well as the "biomechanoid" works of H.R. Giger.

A shorter version was released under the title Fantoche a few months ago.