Ad Astra per Aspera
Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.
48 today (ugh!), but guess what was on my front step when I got home: My XO! More info once I’ve had a chance to play with it. Yes, I’m using it to send this.
48 today (ugh!), but guess what was on my front step when I got home: My XO!
More info once I’ve had a chance to play with it. Yes, I’m using it to send this.
So the Macworld keynote has come and gone, and I must say, there wasn’t really anything that thrilled me. A new NAS? I guess. But they’re awfully late to the table, and it’s not cheap. Movie rentals? Not in Canada. An upgrade to get mail on the Touch? Great! But wait, you want to charge … Continue reading “MacBook Air”
So the Macworld keynote has come and gone, and I must say, there wasn’t really anything that thrilled me. A new NAS? I guess. But they’re awfully late to the table, and it’s not cheap. Movie rentals? Not in Canada. An upgrade to get mail on the Touch? Great! But wait, you want to charge for it, even though it’s going to be free on all new ones sold? Come on!
And then there’s the MacBook Air. Am I the only person who thinks this is way too expensive? It’s got only an 80Gig HD, no optical drive, no wired ethernet, only one USB port, no Firewire and a significantly slower processor than the other Apple laptops. I guess it’s nice that it comes with 2Gig of memory, but you’ll notice that they had to put 2Gig in at the factory, since there’s no way to upgrade it.
Compare it to a black MacBook… Same size screen and the same graphics chip. The MB is cheaper, but it has less memory, so let’s say we upgrade the memory to 2Gig and throw in the 250Gig HD — we still only come up to the price of the MBA. And the MB does have an optical drive, a firewire port, a second USB port and a 2.0GHz processor (vs. 1.6GHz on the MBA).
I’m sorry, but making it thin around the edges and backlighting the keyboard is not enough compensation for those limitations. Essentially, no one should buy the MacBook Air.
Update: OMFG, it doesn’t even have a user replaceable battery! WTF?
Not sure whether the consensus in the community is that 10.5.1 is better than 10.5, but several of the problems that hit me personally were not fixed, and I developed a new one: Now, my firewire audio interface disappears at random intervals using the built-in drivers, and attempts to run the official Yamaha ones were … Continue reading “10.5.1 broke my FW audio.”
Not sure whether the consensus in the community is that 10.5.1 is better than 10.5, but several of the problems that hit me personally were not fixed, and I developed a new one: Now, my firewire audio interface disappears at random intervals using the built-in drivers, and attempts to run the official Yamaha ones were unsuccessful. bah! (and again I say, bah!).
Ok, I’m clearly not the only person who is having problems with Leopard. But I have to say this is the worst Mac OS upgrade I’ve been through. Everything from random messages filling up the system logs (in at least two variations), to incompatibilities, to things that are just plain busted (e.g. neither BtmM nor … Continue reading “Bah, 10.5 just blows.”
Ok, I’m clearly not the only person who is having problems with Leopard. But I have to say this is the worst Mac OS upgrade I’ve been through. Everything from random messages filling up the system logs (in at least two variations), to incompatibilities, to things that are just plain busted (e.g. neither BtmM nor Time Machine work for me).
I just spent another two hours fighting to get my (Apple) iSight camera to work again — this even though it had already been working since I upgraded.
I really can’t keep wasting this much time on something that isn’t adding significant value. If things don’t stabilize soon, I’m going to have to downgrade to 10.4 again. And if you want to talk about something that would dissipate the Reality Distortion Field, boy, that would be it.
Aside: On my MBP I did a straight upgrade, but I did a complete HD wipe and re-install on the server. Neither one is working well.
I keep reading posts where I’m told that it’s ok for the iPod Touch to be missing many of the applications from the iPhone, because it really is just a digital music player. To my mind, the thing that clearly puts the lie to that theory is the inclusion of the Safari web browser. As … Continue reading “The iPod Touch is not an iPod.”
I keep reading posts where I’m told that it’s ok for the iPod Touch to be missing many of the applications from the iPhone, because it really is just a digital music player.
To my mind, the thing that clearly puts the lie to that theory is the inclusion of the Safari web browser. As a music player, they could have included (with the built-in wifi) just the dedicated iTunes Store client, which would have brought them up to par with the Zune. Once they stepped over the line and included a full desktop grade web browsing client, they have clearly made something else. In fact, The iPod Touch is the first, true portable computer of the next generation. *
I’m not exaggerating here.
Apple has done what they almost always do: Looked at a hard problem, and found a thoughtful, elegant, effective solution. In this case, it was turning the wild west that is current web design into something that works on a small, keyboardless, information appliance. For the first time ever, I’m not tempted to look for my laptop to follow a link I heard on the radio — the iPod works just as well, and I’ve got it in my pocket.
In truth, I almost never plug headphones into my iPod. I’ll admit to watching dl.tv on it while waiting to pick up a pizza, but in general I just use it as a conduit to the web.
So, it’s in that context, that I find it so painful that they didn’t include many of the absolutely obvious apps from the iPhone:
And don’t get me started on the disabling of the ability to enter new calendar events.
Let’s be perfectly clear about this: This was not an attempt to keep the Touch true to its primary function; it was a transparent play to differentiate it from the iPhone and thereby maintain the iPhone’s value proposition.
Personally, I’m disappointed.
* Yes, the iPhone fits that category too.
** I’m reduced to using the notes field of a contact named “A A”. (ugh!)
So I was working on a slide-deck I have to have done for work on Monday, and I realized I should blog about the iPod Touch I just got — capsule summary: I like it; more later. I started up my browser and logged into this site, then realized I was really just going to … Continue reading “Oh, what a tangled web.”
So I was working on a slide-deck I have to have done for work on Monday, and I realized I should blog about the iPod Touch I just got — capsule summary: I like it; more later.
I started up my browser and logged into this site, then realized
Amazingly, I’m getting perfectly reasonable performance out of this setup. [Ken, with reference to previous conversations we’ve had, I believe VNC running on Vista is faster than on XP.]
In case you’re wondering though, no, that’s not how I normally work. It was a side-effect of needing a VPN connection to IBM (which I only have on the laptop) to get some data for the slide-deck, plus accidentally running Firefox in Win2K (which I had going to read Notes mail).
Isn’t the journey always supposed to be more exciting than the destination. 😉
I just installed the latest beta of Ubuntu 7.10 on my old IBM T30. Unlike the last time I tried this, both the wireless and the video worked first try. Woot! I ran the movie player and attempted to stream a video off my slug and it calmly downloaded the required codecs and then played … Continue reading “The new beta of Ubuntu rocks!”
I just installed the latest beta of Ubuntu 7.10 on my old IBM T30. Unlike the last time I tried this, both the wireless and the video worked first try. Woot! I ran the movie player and attempted to stream a video off my slug and it calmly downloaded the required codecs and then played it perfectly.
Of course, I can’t run the fancy desktop effects, but I couldn’t do this on the old version either, and at least it now notices that it can’t run them instead of attempting to switch and leaving the UI in a busted state.
This spirit of helpfulness carries through in other places too. When I booted the first time, it warned me that my battery was “busted” because the capacity was down to 32%. Yup, that seems busted to me. Anybody know of a good source of T30 batteries in Ottawa?
Anyway, I probably won’t start using the laptop for anything important until the Gibbon comes off beta in a couple of weeks, but man it sure is nice to have found a way to make the old beast useful again. As usual, Ubuntu feels much snappier then WinXP did on this box.
So last night, some time between midnight and 6am, my friend Ken Walker sent me an SMS to let me know that he had just got a new iPhone [WTG, Ken!]. My phone was off, when the message was sent, so Rogers dutifully held onto it and, sent it the next time the phone connected … Continue reading “Note to self: Phone wakes at 6:30”
So last night, some time between midnight and 6am, my friend Ken Walker sent me an SMS to let me know that he had just got a new iPhone [WTG, Ken!]. My phone was off, when the message was sent, so Rogers dutifully held onto it and, sent it the next time the phone connected to the network. In this case, that happened when it turned itself on at 6am this morning.
Now, I leave my phone on the night table beside my bed at night, since I use it to read e-books, and thus the **** BING **** that went off beside my ear at 6am this morning was an excellent reminder to set the wakeup time for the phone to match my own wakeup time.
Technology! [Soon to replace “Belgium” as the worst insult in the galaxy.]
(Yes, that was a HHGttG reference.))
Well, so much for posting about our trip while we are on it. I guess I’ll try again tomorrow, but it looks like it’s not working — I’m posting this from the phone. ?sigh?
Well, so much for posting about our trip while we are on it. I guess I’ll try again tomorrow, but it looks like it’s not working — I’m posting this from the phone. ?sigh?