Find that streaming movie
It's a bit awkward to segue on to streaming movies after thinking about the above video nasties, but I've been trying out Justwatch, a search engine for the likes of Netflix, Apple iTunes and Quickflix, and thought it worth a mention especially since it covers providers for the New Zealand market.
While you can trawl through the enormous catalogues of the streaming providers on their sites or via their apps, it's quite handy to have a number of them together in one search engine - Justwatch works fairly well too, and seems to provide up to date results.
Try it out while it lasts. Something tells me the big movie providers won't appreciate a third-party indexing their sites...
Gear: 2015 13-inch MacBook Air
If you follow Apple news and thought the recent announcement of the 12-inch MacBook was an odd turn in the company's product strategy, you're not alone.
After all, it occupies the spot Apple had previously reserved for the MacBook Air, which was the thinnest and most portable in notebook range, with the slimness and lightness coming in at a premium.
Not so anymore: the MacBook Air is now Apple's allrounder notebook, providing good performance and battery life at a reasonable price.
Apple has upgraded both the processor and the solid state storage on the MacBook Air, with both being plenty fast indeed. On the 64-bit Geekbench benchmark, the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.6 gigaHertz dual-core fifth-gen Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, the new notebook hit scores like 2,871 for single core tests and 5,754 in multi-core runs.
That's on par with some higher-end Core i7 processors from two-three years ago, but not as impressive as the upgraded storage performance: the new 256GB solid state unit managed 1,150-1,250 megabytes per second writes and 700-750MBps in the Black Magic Design Disk Speed Test.
On Cinebench, the 13-inch MacBook Air managed a respectable 27-plus frames per second in the OpenGL test that measures graphics performance (the notebook uses Intel's HD Graphics 6000 video which is built into the processor).
In normal English, the above numbers tell you that for everyday computing work, the MacBook Air will work just fine.
What's more, there are two USB 3 ports on the MacBook Air, a single Thunderbolt 2 connector and an SD card slot, adding to the versatility.
Battery life is excellent - the 14 hours plus reported by OS X when the battery is fully charged is too optimistic, and drops down to eleven-twelve hours with use.
If you are considering a MacBook Air however, make sure you don't view any of its Retina high resolution display equipped cousins first though: the 1440 by 900 pixel screen on the Air is a bit average and lacks the brilliance of the Retina displays in comparison. The fat bezel surrounding the MacBook Air 13-inch doesn't help either.
Other than that, the MacBook Air 13-inch is a good, lightweight workhorse for $1,800 including GST. I'd add another 4GB of memory ($160, ouch) though.