It was also surprising as the last Encore figure, #19, had been released almost a year and a half ago. I was beginning to think the entire reissue line had been cancelled, but this is certainly a great way to kickstart it off again.

Here’s a little bit of history on the figure. Before he became a Transformer, he was part of the Japanese Diaclone line of toys. The vehicles in the set had a color scheme that included orange, red, and blue. Hasbro imported him to the U.S. in 1985 for the Transformers line and went with a mostly all green color scheme. He was the first of many “gestalt” combiners and is the most recognizable of them to anyone who grew up in the 80′s. He consists of 6 construction vehicles that also transform to individual robots. The unique aspect, is that all 6 of these vehicles together combine into a huge robot, Devastator. Each constructicon vehicle was available individually on card or if you were really lucky, you got the gift set box which had all 6. I never had any of these, but they were certainly on my want list. I can’t blame my parents though as I certainly had plenty of Transformers. (Thanks Dad!) I remember a friend having one or two of the 6 figures, but I never got to see the full Devastator.

In the early 90′s Transformers: Generation 2 started. In the beginning they reissued a lot of the original toys, but used colors very different from the originals. The Contructicons were released on cards in yellow and orange colors rather than the green from before, but were never released packaged together as a gift set. This was the last official versions until now.

During the 2000′s a version of Devastator showed up at cheap toy outlets. These versions were Knock Offs and not official in anyway. They were made of cheap plastic and broke easily. They were still interesting to see and I even picked one of these up at a local toy store in St. George. A few years ago now, another knock off was released, but this time much higher quality parts were used and it even came in a replica gift set box. I was certainly tempted to get one of these, but still held out hope that an official version might see the light of day again.

Fast forward to November 2011 and the official reissue version is released in Japan. I was ready to buy it for myself as a birthday present, but Sarah told me not to. She got me one for Christmas, so now here we are, 26 years later, with my very own Devastator.

The real question is how did this combination happen. There’s enough of them out there, that it was deliberate and not just a one off accident. The majority of these type of miscards show up on Trilogo cards which replaced the Meccano cards later on. Did Meccano get a stock of Luke figures, but didn’t have the cards printed up for them yet? And why no accessories other than the palace blaster? Maybe because of Lukes popularity they were having trouble keeping up with demand and were just trying to get them out as quick as they could? It could also have been later on and they were simply trying to get rid of extra figures on extra cards.

The first and foremost advantage with pairing it with an iPhone or iPad is Airplay. Basically you can take any piece of media on those devices and with the tap of a button, send it on over to your T.V. This works with the latest pictures/video you’ve taken on your device, music, videos, youtube, etc. This feature alone is certainly a great reason to get an Apple T.V.

There’s also a decent selection of streaming/downloadable content. Mainly iTunes Movie rentals/T.V. Shows and Netflix streaming. The iTunes movie rentals are on the more pricey side with new releases running around $5 for an HD movie and $4 for an SD movie. Sometimes they do have a deal with a 99 cent rental which is always good. It is certainly cheaper to rent a movie from the Redbox, but a lot less effortless and time consuming by just renting from the Apple T.V. For Netflix the Apple T.V. has what most consider the slickest interface on any device. It looks nice and runs very fast. The only devices I have to compared with, are the Xbox 360 (which also requires a gold live account for netflix), and our set top Blu Ray player which is slow and clunky.

The main way in which I’m using the Apple T.V. though is iTunes Home Sharing. This allows you to take any movie in iTunes and stream it to the Apple T.V. Typically the way you’d do this is purchase your movie in iTunes on your computer and then it would be there for streaming. I haven’t moved to purchasing movies to strictly digital like I have with music just yet as I like my Blu Rays and bonus features. However, I do love the fact that movies purchased this way display all their info (actors, rating, descriptions, etc) right on the movie list and are instantly playable with no disc waiting time. To get this same experience with my own collection I decided to start digitizing our movie library. It is quite the process when you own several hundred movies, but once I’ve caught up on it, it won’t be a big deal. Anyway the huge advantages are no disc load up times (Blu Rays always take a few minutes just to get to the menus), and where we have two Apple T.V.s I can start a movie on one and instantly resume on the other. Also, all these movies show up on my iPad/iPhone when I’m home on my network. No syncing required, they just stream.

Ripping/encoding your entire movie library is quite the task, but luckily I’ve found some great Automator Scripts that ease the process. I used the workflow for most of our DVDs which worked great. Recently, I started the Blu-Rays and I had a problem with the scripts not detecting my external blu-ray drive. I did some testing for a new version to help fix the problem and the developer figured it out. Overall, they work great. All I pretty much have to do is feed the discs and tell it what the movie is. Most everything else is automated and uses free tools to boot. It also automatically tags all the movie info, chapters, etc for you.

These are the main uses that I use an Apple T.V. for every day and why I’d certainly recommend one for someone who wants streaming content or an easy way to get their media from their idevice up to the T.V. The only main weaknesses that I’d say about the Apple T.V. is it does lack the ability to play other video codecs such as divx, xvid, etc so if you have content in those formats you have to convert to h.264. Also, it lacks 1080p support, so the highest your content can go is 720p. The format issue can be fixed if you jailbreak the Apple T.V., but for me I like the consistency of having everything the same. As for 720p, it looks fine on our set, but I imagine an upgrade will come eventually offering 1080p. When that happens, the question will be, “do I re-encode all HD movies to 1080p?” Right now, I think it would only be a few select titles like the Star Wars set.

Here’s a video showing what’s new.

First off, the service is pretty much only for those who have a lot of ripped music or have downloaded from other sources besides iTunes. If you already buy the majority of your music from iTunes then the service really isn’t for you.

So what is the service and what does it do? The basic idea behind iTunes match is that it puts all of your music library in the cloud. Then you can access it from any iDevice or computer with iTunes. You pay $24.99 for the service, it scans your entire iTunes Library, matches the songs with the ones available in iTunes, and uploads the rest of those that it can’t match.

After that process is finished, you can now enable iTunes Match on say your iPhone and it will make all of your library available to download right from the phone. This is handy if you go for one of the lower capacity iPhones like the 16gb model. You can download the albums you want locally, when your finished delete them, but then still have access to them anytime you want to listen to them again. You’ll get a little cloud icon next to the album/song indicating that it isn’t on your device locally, but you can start playing just as if it was there.

The same thing can be done on a computer. So for example, my iTunes library is on my computer at home. In the past I would have had to bring all my files into work if I wanted them on my work computer. Now I just turn on iTunes match on my work computer and my entire library is there ready to listen to.

The benefit of this service compared to say Google or Amazon’s is that you don’t have to upload your entire library. The matched songs just link to the actual iTunes versions, so you only actually have to upload the ones it can’t match. I have roughly 2000 songs in my library. Some of them include now out of print Soundtrack or for whatever reasons aren’t in iTunes. So of that 2000 I still have 600 songs that it had to upload. Even 600 still takes some time to upload, but it sure beats having to do all 2000.

One last benefit of the service is that the matched versions of the Songs are 256kbps versions. You get those files even if you originally ripped at 128bps or other rates. This would have saved me a ton of time last year when I decided to re-rip all my music from 128kbps to 256kbps versions. I would have paid the price for this service alone for saving me all that time.

I’m still familiarizing myself with some of the service, but overall I’d say if you have a low capacity iPhone/iPod and a lot of music from other sources than iTunes, then the service is definitely worth it.

This is a press photo that was used in the Seattle Times and is dated June 6th 1983. It was taken at a Toys R Us, the back mentions the child’s name and that he was 5 1/2 the time the photo was taken. He’s roughly a year older than I am. It’s fun to see all the old toys in the photo. You can even see my store display in the lower right.

I knew the chance of having to do a clean server install was there, but I opted to try the upgrade first. The upgraded did keep my settings pretty much all intact, but I did have to do some tweaking to get everything working again. One semi major change, is that mysql is not included anymore with the server package. If you do an upgrade over Snow Leopard server, it does keep the old mysql functioning, but it means no future update directly from Apple for it. After backing up my databases, I removed that version and installed the current version directly from mysql.com. It installed fine, but I kept getting a socket error after the install when trying to load it. I simply renamed my my.cnf file and then it worked. Something in my settings from the old one must have been causing a problem. Also, rather than using the bundled version of PHP, I upgraded my version using the package from http://php-osx.liip.ch which includes most of the commonly used extensions.

Other than those issues with the web stuff, the upgrade was fairly smooth. I have read some people having issues with upgrading open directory and mail. I don’t really use those other than mail for forwarding system message to my email address. Those settings upgraded fine and I didn’t have to touch it.

Overall, Lion Server is fine for my needs and for the $50 price compared to $1000 for Leopard Server and $500 for Snow Leopard Server, you can’t really complain. It does require a little more tinkering for more advanced setups than previous versions, but with my Linux experience it doesn’t bother me so much. Out of the box though I would say it is aimed more at the home/small business user now rather than enterprise and I’m not sure that I want to upgrade my work servers just yet.

This year has somehow become the year of “The Force” Lightsaber for my collection. This is one toy that somehow managed to survive my childhood that I still own. Earlier this year, I found a red one that was unused store stock, to go with my original beat up green one. I got it for a great price and was happy to have both colors now. Then, later this summer, I found an auction for the original store display. The display holds 12 Sabers and I have a vague memory of originally getting mine from one of these displays. These displays usually have fairly high Buy it Nows on ebay, but for once I found one on auction and won for a great price. It happened to also fit exactly into the spot I had hoped it would within my collection. Now, shortly after winning the display, I also found a version of the Green saber with the packaging hanger on it. These packages were created in 1984 for stores to hang on pegs rather than using the displays. I picked up a prototype of the packaging last year from a former Kenner Employee and was excited to finally find one of the sabers with the packaging as they do not come up for sale often. That’s it for now on this, but I’ve already lined up two other items to continue this focus, with one of them coming later this week.

Another item that I recently found, is the last U.S. Bagged version of Luke Jedi. I’ve been not he lookout for this for a few years now. The one I was looking for, just simply said Made in Taiwan on the bag, and can be seen, 3rd from the right, in this group photo.

The last item, for now, is the Rebel Rocket from the C-3PO’s cereal. This was the free item in the box of cereal and also included the form for 4 free micro figures. Here’s a picture of the form and the setup within my display. I still need to find the original envelope that the micro figures were mailed in.

“Service plug-ins from third-party developers let you add new chat services to iChat. And plug-ins run in a separate process to help ensure that they won’t damage your system.”

A few days ago I decided to try a google search and see if anyone had made an MSN plugin, and sure enough one now exists. It is still in beta, but works great with text chats. It is however in beta, so I certainly suggest using it with caution. Unfortunately, some of the great iChat features like screen sharing, video chats, etc do not work right now with it if ever, but I finally have that all in one messenger that I’ve wanted.

Here’s their website to grab the plugin. After installing, it does require you to log out and back in on your mac, so be sure and close anything your working on first.