Part 30 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal
Book Review: "God's Secretaries"
book review
Sun Sep 02 10:58:17 2007
At the end of the 1960 movie, The Time Machine, when the
scientist leaves for his second journey through time, his friend
notices that three books have been taken from the library shelves and
poses a question to the housekeeper, "Which three books would you
have taken?" Ever since, I have given much thought to my
choices— the King James Bible, the complete works of
William Shakespeare and the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes by
Conan Doyle.
The KJV is my favourite bible for two reasons: 1) it's freely
available as a text file and I have it loaded on my PDA and 2) I love
the lyrical sound of the English it is written in. My book review of
Adam Nicholson's book, “God's Secretaries: The Making of
the King James Bible” (Score: 4++/4) is now available on My Bookshelf.
Tomorrow: Touch-screen iPods (99.9% likely)
hardware
Tue Sep 04 17:12:43 2007
It's all but certain that touch-screen iPods will be announced at
tomorrow's Apple Media Event. The only question that now remains, is
whether I will finally buy an iPod; this is the iPod I have been
waiting for (if it has Wifi or Bluetooth, that is).
I'm really looking forward to an iPod that can sync and charge
wirelessly. We are in the 21st century, after all; I know Steve
Jobs won't let us down.
Foleo, R.I.P.
palm foleo yawn
Tue Sep 04 23:18:30 2007
Palm announced that it cancelled the Foleo. *Yawn*.
Would you like to touch my iPod?
hardware ipod
Wed Sep 05 16:53:04 2007
New Shuffles with pastel colours and a (Product)Red; a fat Nano
and the piéce de résistance, the iPod with touch
capabilities (8GB and 16GB) and (surprisingly) WiFi download
capabilities from iTunes; Safari for surfing the web and watching
YouTube movies) and (shockingly) NO WiFi syncing with the Mac (aren't
you people tired of the USB dock? welcome to 2001) and Starbucks
integration (*Yawn*).
8GB iPhone drops to $399 and pisses many people off. The price drop
probably means that they made back their R&D investment and the
rest is pure profit.
You'll be able to touch your iPod "later this month..."
TouchiPods: [THAchee•pawds] n. synonym for
iPod Touch.
Origins of the Species
hardware ipod
Fri Sep 07 07:24:13 2007
The Register has an editorial
on the iPod Touch which ends with the following: "Like the LED, the
Multi-Touch was invented here in Britain, and becomes another Great
British innovation got away. And the team behind the iPod Touch?
British again, led by Ken McAlpine and David Tupman [who worked on
the Psion]."
Ownership of the Species
Speaking of the Psion— which I think was a marvel of
engineering— I learned that a faculty member in the department
who has one, recently bought a Mac (and his office is right next to
the only other faculty member's office who has a Mac—
coincidence?). My boss immediately inquired whether he owned a
domestic or foreign car, and was disheartened when the faculty member
said he owned a foreign car (the reason he gave for owning a foreign
car was because he cared about design). Another faculty member in the
room then mentioned that he was going to buy a Mac for himself when
Leopard was released— but he drives a Ford with 80,000km on the
odometer. My boss found that comforting— because, at last, my
rule about Mac ownership correlating to foreign car ownership would
be broken.
This morning, my brother asked me whether I was going to buy the
TouchiPod. Without much thought, I said no— I really want
wireless syncing— remember that picture of the iMac next to a
Dell with a mess of cables behind it? Also, Rule No. 0 is: Never buy
Rev A. products from Apple. By next February or March, there should
be a newer version with more storage and BT.
"Get A Mac" ads win Effie
apple ads
Fri Sep 07 14:24:01 2007
The "Get a Mac" series of ads have won the Effie 2007 Grand Prize
in the Computer Hardware category.
Before and After: Form Design
design
Sun Sep 09 13:48:53 2007
I redesigned one of our departmental forms after reading
Before and After Page Design by John McWade. It should be
plainly obvious which form is the "before" and which form is the
"after". (I always thought the old form looked "fine", but I had to
reconsider my perspective after reading the book).
iTunes Temp Files
itunes
Mon Sep 10 15:47:38 2007
Listening to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me... podcast, I
got an error that iTunes couldn't write some file "Error number
-#####". So I poked about in ~/Music/iTunes/ and noticed
that there were 473 "Temp Files" (Temp File 1
... Temp File 473). A bit of Googling led me to this article.
I quit iTunes and deleted them all along with ._Temp File*
using rm; I couldn't use the Finder because it errored
when I tried deleting them. I have no idea what's going on and
neither does Apple, it seems.
Book Review: "Before and After Page Design"
book review design
Tue Sep 11 17:54:18 2007
My review of John McWade's “Before and After Page
Design” (score: 5+++/4) is now on available on My
Bookshelf. This book gave me an eye-opening experience on
the subject of page design in the same way the Dean Semler's
(Director of Photography) commentary on the extended edition of
Dances with Wolves gave me about cinematography; I looked at
movies completely differently after listening to that commentary.
Plastic Surgery
hardware headphone ipod phone shure
Fri Sep 14 16:44:40 2007
Something I have to keep in mind when I decide to buy an iPod or
iPhone is that the headphone jack of the iPhone/iPod is recessed,
meaning that some plastic surgery is required on many
headphone plugs so it can be inserted into the jack. Belkin,
Griffin Smartphone
Experts and Shure manufacture extenders
to allow headphones to be plugged-in without requiring a bit of
plastic to be hacked-off with an Xacto knife. Comparing my Shure
hardphone jack to the one in the Flickr
photo, I note that the thick exposed part at the base, is covered
by plastic on my jack.
There is a good reason for the recessed jack— it reduces
stress on the solder connections of the jack and extends the usable
life of the device.
"Go ahead, mac my day"
macgirl blog
Fri Sep 14 17:50:46 2007
Nadyne is a user experience researcher, "Microsoft girl in a
Macintosh world", who works in Microsoft's MacBU and writes the go ahead, mac my day blog.
Rhymes with "artifice"
One of her latest entries is about a website called Art of Office, a website
dedicated to, 'pushing the boundaries of what can be done in Mac
Office'.
The Top Ten Things The New Guy From Windows Office Promises Not
To Say In The MacBU
From Gavin Shearer's blog post:
10. "Where's the Start menu on this thing, again?"
9. "Wow, that Spotlight and Dashboard stuff sure looks a lot like Vista."
8. "So, why isn't there an Intel Inside sticker on this machine?"
7. "Man, I can't believe you can't use a two-button mouse on OS X."
6. "Anyone know why my Zune isn't being picked up by iTunes?"
5. "Yeah, I don't know what's wrong with my Mac. I think the registry got corrupted."
4. "We design for college kids and hipsters, right?"
3. "Oh, those guys can totally fail. Remember the Newton?"
2. "We make Office for MAC?"
1. "...and I'm a PC."
iPod Touch Surgery
hardware ipod
Sun Sep 16 00:22:44 2007
ifixit has pictures of the disassembly of an iPod touch —
available in limited quantities in certain stores. It confirms that
the display is glass, similar to that of the iPhone.
It is somewhat dissappointing that calendar events cannot be
entered via the iPod. And I'm still waiting for Java support; I don't
understand why it's not included as it's certainly more stable and
secure than Flash.
Seven Shortcomings about iTunes
software itunes
Sun Sep 16 09:34:23 2007
Simra has enumerated seven
deficiencies about iTunes' library management. The reason it
"sucks so bad", is because iTunes is designed to operate in an ideal
world— music bought from the iTunes Store, ripped from ones
collection of CDs and kept in a single library in a single,
unchanging, location. Reality, however, is a low-resolution
simulation of this ideal— we copy our friend's music collections,
download tracks off the internet and as our collection grows, we lose
track of the music we already have in our collection. So having a
mechanism to find duplicates is a necessity that Musicbrainz fills nicely— it
would be nice if it was integrated into iTunes. Improved Spotlight
integration would allow "lost" music that was moved somewhere else,
to be quickly located and re-inserted into the database.
Always Restore Firefox Sessions
software sessions firefox
Sun Sep 16 11:54:30 2007
For some reason, Firefox wasn't restoring all my tabs after I
re-started it. After a bit of googling, I found that setting
browser.startup.page to "3"— resume sessions always
(default is 1, open to homepage)— via about:config,
fixes the problem.
iPod Reviews
Sun Sep 16 13:01:29 2007
Reviews of the new generation of iPods:
- Nano:
("Now that it plays video, the nano's bottom-mounted headphone jack
has become an obstacle to placing the player upright for
viewing... When I disabled the transfer of album art to the iPod and
re-synced with iTunes, the nano's menus felt zippier.")
- Classic:
("There were times when I'd retreat to the main screen by pushing the
Menu portion of the Click Wheel, and the classic would pause while
drawing the screen.")
- Touch:
("However, you can't mount the iPod touch as a hard drive as you can
with the iPod nano, classic, and all other previous iPods.") See the
article for a comparison of the Touch with the iPhone screen. The
screencap from Chinatown seems over-exposed on the iPhone
screen (you can't tell the man in the background is wearing glasses)
and perfect on the Touch; however in the other screencap showing the
girl, the iPhone shows more detail and has better contrast.
Update Wed Sep 26 21:48:35 2007: Software update 1.0.1 for
the iPod Classic has addressed the clickwheel responsiveness issues,
it also decreased audio playback time but increased video playback
time. Playlist has an updated review.
I would still recommend an iPod Shuffle if you don't care about
video.
The Big Apple
apple mac ny iphone
Mon Sep 17 12:46:39 2007
Powerset: The new game in town
search engine
Tue Sep 18 22:08:03 2007
There's a new search engine being tested by an invite-only group. I would not
normally mention a new search engine, however, this one uses a
natural language interface— rather than searching by keywords,
you would ask questions in plain English. I know what you're
thinking: Big Deal. I thought the same thing, until I read that the
CTO of this startup is Robert Kaplan, who, according to the article,
is the top natural language researcher at Xerox PARC (he's not one of
the founders though). If they're any
good, Google will just buy them. I still believe that a
natural-language-like 20-questions search engine is our best
hope.
What is worrisome is that I didn't hear about this on the Net, I
read it in today's Globe and Mail newspaper. I say this is worrisome
because I have a rule that if you read about something in the
newspaper, pretty much everyone knows about it. I have been slightly
behind the times lately; I only found out Monday that "The Hulk 2"
had been filming 2 blocks away since Friday evening.
The Once and Future Music Industry
itunes music sony apple
Sun Sep 23 12:38:45 2007
Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good
records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no
longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music.
—David Geffen
The Sep. 2nd issue of the New York times Magazine has a great
article about Rick Rubin, the co-head of Columbia Records.
More Ads
imac iphone "tina fey"
Mon Sep 24 12:40:05 2007
New Game in Town II
itunes virgin amazon olpc
Tue Sep 25 21:29:03 2007
Just as Virgin announced the closing of its online music store (I
didn't even know they had one; music was DRM'd) Amazon announced that
it was opening AmazonMp3(beta) to sell non-DRM
MP3s via the web (1-click shopping for single tracks) encoded at
256kbits, ranging in price from US$ 0.89 to 0.99 per track from a
library of 2M songs by 180K artists. Album downloads require a OS
specific plugin which is currently available for Windows and Mac,
with a Linux version forthcoming.
OLPC also announced that for a limited time (2 weeks) beginning
Nov. 12, people in the U.S. could purchase a laptop for $399 which
gets the buyer a laptop and donates a laptop to a child in the
developing world.
Parity
amazon dollar
Thu Sep 27 16:10:06 2007
The Canadian dollar recently achieved parity with the American
dollar but it's taking some time for the prices to adjust. For
example, The Complete Peanuts 1950-1954 Boxed Set is $USD
32.97 on Amazon.COM
and $CAD 37.77 on Amazon.CA.
Even Porsche Canada has dropped prices in Canada by 10% to stop Canadians
from buying their cars in the U.S.
Parity II
apple dollar
Sat Sep 29 11:56:12 2007
Product | Price USD$ | Price CAD$ | Difference $ |
iPod Shuffle | 79 | 89 | 10 | ![](images/pricesUS.jpg) |
iPod Nano | 149 | 169 | 20 |
iPodClassic | 249 | 279 | 30 |
iPod Touch | 299 | 329 | 30 |
Apple TV | 299 | 349 | 50 |
iPhone | 399 | N/A | N/A |
MacBook | 1099 | 1249 | 150 |
MacBook Pro | 1999 | 2199 | 200 |
Mac Mini | 599 | 649 | 50 |
iMac | 1199 | 1299 | 100 |
Mac Pro | 2499 | 2799 | 300 |
The table above shows the difference in prices between the
American and Canadian online Apple Store. The top 3 price differences
are the Mac Pro ($300), the MacBook Pro ($200) and the MacBook
($150).
The faculty member who was planning to buy a Mac when Leopard
shipped, is now considering postponing the purchase until January
when he hopes the prices will better reflect the parity between the
two currencies. This means that my rule (Mac owners drive foreign
cars; he drives a vintage Ford) will remain unbroken for another 3
months.
My boss (who is also planning to buy a Mac) just recently
discovered Podcasts after the aforementioned faculty member showed
him his (first generation) Nano loaded with music, photos and
Podcasts. He now installed iTunes (on this XP computer) and downloads
and manually syncs the podcasts on his HP phone (he purchased an MP4
codec online so he could play them on the WinCE 5.0 phone). I
suggested that he listen to the NPR podcast, "Wait, Wait... Don't
Tell Me."![](images/bm.png)