Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Mac Mini and Microphone (and Skype)

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

I got in to a bit of a problem today trying to communicate with a friend over Skype. I got several Skype accounts, used them for different purposes, do different things, etc… All in all I use it daily. Saves money, saves time. So I decided to setup Skype on my MAC Mini just to figure out that it does not work. Well, not exactly true. Everything works exactly as it is supposed to. Exactly. But problem is that MAC Mini does not have Microphone input (it does have line in though). So your mic probably will not work. To use Skype on MAC Mini the best thing to have is a decent USB Microphone. I plan to go to checkout the stores to see available USB Mics to see how they will work.  I’ll keep you posted on this….

Update – 27/08/2009: Just bought a USB Mic –  Genius HS-04U.  I’ll check it out and let you know how did installation went.

Update – 02/09/2009: Genius HS-04U works with Skype! :) However there is no driver for MAC for it (so all the funky Dolby Surround things are not working on MAC while they work on Windows0.  I am still happy with the Microphone since it is nice to wear (it is nice on the ears, i.e. does not push to much on them so you can wear it for extended period of time; sound isolation is not to great but it is gamers microphone so I do not think they paid much attention to it).

iPhone country availability

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

I am currently traveling around Europe and I wanted to find out where can I purchase new iPhone 3G S. So I went to Apple’s web site to see if I can find the information that I was interested in.

I was hoping to find something similar to:

http://www.apple.com/retail/iphone/availability.php but for countries other than US.

I did find http://www.apple.com/iphone/countries/ but it did not solve a problem. Why? Well, it lists countries where iPhone is available (any version). That did not help me since I started checking different countries I planned to visit and found their web sites stating something along the lines “iPhone 3G S coming soon…”. What is even worse is that even where I found that iPhone 3G S is available I had to search to figure out if it is locked to a carrier or not. Arghhhhhhh…. Painful… Since iPhone 3G S is not available to all the countries at the launch I think that Apple (or anybody else) should post up-to date list with following: country, models available and locked/not locked to carrier. I think it would be great for people like me/us who are planning to buy iPhone 4G in year 20…something or iPhone 7G in year (…who knows :) ), the sooner the better. What do you think?

Current Country list (please add if you know other countries):
US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, etc…..