THe other day I was looking for a new speaker system for my mac pro. I have been looking at a few different systems from Creative and Bose. The systems are priced comparably so I decided to go with the Bose system since it offers a 30 day money back gurantee. I have been listening to music on the Bose Companion 5 system and so far it is pretty good. I have yet to actually test out a movie. The system from what I understand is not a 5.1 system. There are 2 speakers and a sub so I would guess that it is a 2.1 however Bose technology makes it sound like 5.1 quality.

I am not sure how much I like the setup yet but the sound quality is pretty nice. A BIG DRAWBACK is that the system does not come with a remote control. It does have a control pod that sits on your desk and has a volume knob with one touch mute. However if I am in bed watching a movie I do not want to have to get out of bed to mute the volume. It seems that the volume control is not effecting the OS X volume settings so I doubt if even the Apple Remote will help with this and that alone is a bummer.  However there is another issue that I have found with the Bose system already and that is the control module has no way to adjust the bass levels.  In order to increase or decrease the bass level you have to get to the back of the sub-woofer and turn a knob like so many older systems are setup. There few things Bose could do to increase the usability would be to add a remote control to the setup, this would give the remote control luxury but also would allow for the bass to be changed with the remote so you dont have to climb under the desk to change that.

I have also been looking at the Creative GigaWorks ProGamer G550W which is a true 5.1 setup and has wireless rear speakers. The cost for the both systems is the same $399. The GigaWorks system comes with a remote which is a big plus.

I have been a strong believer in Bose and will give this system some time before I jump to conclusions and return it. I will try watching a movie on the system later and see just how well the speaker system sounds during a movie. I will post here again with my findings and whether or not I decide to return the Bose system.

Today i was browsing around and I ran into something called Forex Trading. I was confused because I have heard of the stock market and mutual funds etc. What is this forex? I did some google searching and found that there are a lot of people who trade forex. From what I have been able to gather up it is buying another currency and when the value of the dollar increases you would sell it and make a profit.

This was a new thing to me and sounds really interesting. Why not take advantage of the value of a dollar in another currency? For an example currently you can buy 1168.4 yen for $10 USD. If you did that and then tomorrow the value of the dollar in Japan increased you could sell the 1168.4 yen for say $12. I am not sure how often the rates change but it does sound interesting and I am going to look into this. Pretty much rather than investing in a company on the stock market, you are investing in the value of the dollar converted to other currencies.

I am going to Google this term more and I will post here with any updated findings. I am not even sure if you can be a “day trader” as you can with stocks without having a broker etc. I wonder if there are sites out there like E-Trade for trade forex.

I woke up this morning to an email in my in-box that was telling me about a new release for some mac software. The software is called Power Manager 3 and is supposed to help you cut down the costs on running your mac. It allows you to schedule your computer to shut down, go into sleep mode, automatically logout at certain times etc. This all seems very cool. Could you imagine running this on the computers in the computer lab. You would set it up and it’s all automated.

One thing that the Power Manager 3 website is saying is that it can save you money. Well I guess it could if you leave the computers on 24/7. However I am not sure what computer lab would leave all of the computers on overnight. This is something they say on their website.

Imagine all your lab computers switching themselves off at night and on in the morning.

This is almost accurate. In order for the computer to switch itself back on it would have to be in sleep mode. While in sleep mode the computer is still consuming power. If you shut your computer down there is no way for it to monitor the time and trigger events such as wakeup. If you are already shutting the computer down at night, how is this supposed to help you save money? I believe that they are misleading people by not disclosing that to the public. Now they also state the following which I have no idea how they would accomplish.

From what I have found out (I am not sure how yet) the mac can actually schedule itself to power up from a shut down state. I retract what I said above about them being misleading and I apologize for stating that when i was incorrect.

Use Power Manager to automate when your organisation’s computers are switched on, off, or asleep.

How they can tell a computer that is totally shut down to turn on sounds impossible weird to me. I think i am going to have to get the demo and try it out.

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