Philonoist.net

Or rather, I guessed it.

I have some new insight to share with you regarding the portable device Apple is working on. In a previous article, I described the mysterious portable as perhaps Apple’s rival product to the Intel Ultra Mobile PC ( UMPC ) initiative. In talking to several sources close to the secretive project, a few more details have emerged while the actual identity of the device is still shrouded in mystery.

Whether or not you’re sold on all the products, face it: Tuesday was the most exciting day for Apple since the release of the iPhone (or even its announcement 1 year ago). 4 majorly big things, culminating in what had long been common knowledge on the Internet: the release of the ultra-thin Macbook Air.

There’s been a lot of criticism of the Macbook Air since Tuesday: who is it for? Why buy it? OMG Apple fails, right? After all, it’s no power machine, running on an oldhat processor. Many people point out, correctly, that upgrading the basic Macbook to 2 gigs of RAM would produce a computer with nearly equal specs at a significant price reduction.

Folks need to learn: it’s not what the product is, but what the product does. And what the Macbook Air does over the Macbook is provide ultra-portability to the masses: for the first time, a 3(!) pound notebook that just works is available. True, there are what can be described as design flaws: a lack of audio in and ethernet ports may come back to bite this thing. But both of those can easily be converted (at a cost) into USB. Stereo speakers would have been nice, too, but in an ultra-portable with a headphone jack, they’re not absolutely essential. Sure I would have liked to see a MacTablet, but this is pretty darn close.

Another thing: it’s not what this product is, but what the next product is. Pity on you if you can’t see the convergence of form factors happening. Apple devices are slowly moving to the singularity: a full on computer in a package the size of the iPhone is years, not decades, away. The limiting factor is the screen dimensions on which they show the eye candy.

And here’s the kicker: I don’t even think the Macbook Air was the killer app on Tuesday. For all the talk of Time Capsule and the iPhone/iPod Touch refreshes, the defining Apple moment was the iTunes Movie Rentals. In the span of about 20 minutes, Steve Jobs killed Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and most of Netflix. With high speed internet reaching ubiquity, over-the-ether movie rentals were inevitable. But take it one step further.

What Apple should do is copy the iPhone apps/widgets business model to movie rentals and music downloads for independent filmmakers and musicians. Aspiring artists can Radiohead the mainstream record labels and upload songs, albums, or indie films onto iTunes. Your movie’s or album’s world premiere could happen in hundreds of living rooms at the same time. Apple could even take a rake on the distribution and first-time filmmakers might still achieve the holiest of Hollywood grails: profitability.

There’s thousands of aspiring filmmakers who just became more enamored with Apple: a whole distribution mechanism could be coming soon to a home theater near you.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, MacBook Air

I may be late to the game on this one, but I’m super excited about the NPR media player. I’ve long loved NPR, but my days of being in the car during Morning Edition or All Things Considered are past me (for the moment). NPR has always released the material online a few hours after air, and with RSS feeds, it’s been a snap to at least *read* about the day’s topics.

Listening was an entirely different matter: NPR provided Windows Media and Real Player formats, but Windows would get clunked down in codec hell and Real Player would hang for at least 45 seconds before each clip.

Fortunately, NPR now has a really slick web-based media player, with the critical playlist functionality. I can finally queue up some clips and go about my morning, listening to the news the way it’s meant to be heard.

Technorati Tags: NPR, media player

Finally took the plunge while visiting my family in North Carolina.

(obviously a rip from apple.com, but mine is nearly identical at this point)

Sweet. Shiny. Goodness.

Technorati Tags: apple

Outlook Search is terrible: in my mind it’s been the worst feature for years (even more annoying than Clippy). As someone who meticulously saves and categorizes every e-mail I receive (I have all four years of Olin e-mails, including mailing list threads, archived), it’s dreadful to have to search for an old email in Outlook: books are made into terrible movies in the time it takes Outlook native search to find an e-mail.

Of course, you could use Google Desktop to index and search for e-mails, but if you’re looking for a more Outlook-specific solution, look no further than the Lookout plugin. It’s a snap to set up once you find a copy: this thing has apparently gone the way of the buffalo, but my colleague Bruce has a version on his website, along with some thoughts about why Lookout is great. Like Google Desktop, you’ll need to let it index your .pst file(s) (don’t forget to index the archive folders as well), which took about 15 minutes for me. You’ll also want to set up the attachment filter to include .pdf files.

Like Bruce, I experienced both a huge speed increase and more relevant results. There’s a small glitch in what I can only assume is the message preview functionality: the tooltips flash for only a fraction of a second, totally useful and my minor aggravation with the product.

Best part: Lookout is freeware, albeit no longer supported.

Check out the image below: Search took 0.02 seconds!

Technorati Tags: lookout search, outlook

With all the glamor and glitz of Leopard and the constant PR push by Apple, it’s almost refreshing to see someone out there admit to the faults of Apple’s new OS. I just wasn’t expecting that someone to be so harsh:

“Hey, at least Microsoft reps have the decency to look a little abashed when you point out their product’s screwups. Apple reps just glare at you like they’re daring you to say something.”

“Is Britney Spears moonlighting as Apple’s UI designer?”

“Maybe Apple couldn’t spare the programmers working on the hugely important Star Wars core animation splash-screen project.”

“When I saw that, I actually looked around to see if Ashton Kutcher was going to pop out from behind my lab bench and tell me I’d been punked.”

Yikes. PC Magazine readers won’t know what hit them.

Technorati Tags: leopard, apple, pc magazine

Only Skymall can bring you the incredible idea of keeping a extremely hot beverage within close proximity to your laptop computer. I can only assume that when you take a sip, the tethered cord serves as a signal for your coworkers to laugh at you. 



I’d be curious to see how it registers in the annoying balloon popups in Windows.

Technorati Tags: gadgets, dumb gadgets

As my girlfriend will attest, I have a plethora of junky music that clogs my iPod. It’s almost embarrassing: a lot of the songs are holdovers from my “I need every song in existence” period. (I’m looking in your direction, Hootie and the Blowfish.) Lately, I’ve been asking myself: what’s the point of having 60 gigabytes of music on your hard drive or mp3 player if you don’t listen to 80% of it?

At any rate, I got it into my head today that I wanted to listen to some music, and perhaps start the process of eliminating some songs from my iPod. Reducing clutter on an mp3 player is the same as reducing clutter elsewhere in your home: it’s one of those things that requires an unemotional, unattached view. (Or, you know, you can just wait for the zombies to arrive and start chucking your LPs at them. That’ll separate the wheat from the chaff real quick.)

One big problem: my apartment is configured in such a way that it’s a pain to hook up a USB hard drive and my speakers to my laptop. Oh sure, I guess I don’t need my speakers, but listening to anything except the aforementioned Darius Rucker et. al using lappy speakers is a crime against musianity.

My parents gifted me a crummy old workstation*, appropriately renamed on my local network as “busted”, from their now-closed medical practice. It’s been holding the floor down since I moved in as a future Ubuntu linux box that I haven’t gotten around to reformatting, one of those rainy day projects for a couple of months down the road. It’s not a terrible computer, and it’s really just a big hard drive away from being a decent FTP server. Unfortunately, the apartment is configured in such a way that it’s a pain to hook up a monitor to this computer.

I haven’t gone the entire four months I’ve been here sans music, of course: when I wanted to listen to some music, I either plugged my iPod or busted into my slick TV with its monitor port and mini-audio inputs. The problem of course, is that it sucks to have to get up and walk over to change the song when Toni Basil’s “Mickey” starts playing.

This is what’s great in theory about VNC: I can connect to the computer using a virtual display on my laptop where I’m doing my work, make some quick edits to the playlist, and go back to work. The memory hog that is iTunes isn’t using up cycles here on the lappy, and I can ostensibly get more done, especially as iTunes tries to find nearly 3000 album covers.

VNC can be crappy depending on which instance of the software you’re using. I’d been using RealVNC and found the performance sluggish at best: good enough for when we needed it for our SCOPE project, terrible now. The RealVNC viewer is probably OK, but the RealVNC server choked on just about anything I threw at it.

Then I discovered UltraVNC, and once I had quit jiggling with domain settings (busted may be old, but it’s a WinXP box) by disabling the MSLogin junk, I hopped right on… and the general navigating around Windows performance was just as good as if I had been sitting in front of busted itself… (Of course, busted and my laptop are both behind the same firewall, so there’s not a lot of net traffic to deal with. YMMV). Or so I thought.

Busted is just that: an old, busted computer: I didn’t realize how old until I pulled up the Recycle Bin and found some stuff marked for deletion in 2004. So iTunes the memory beast will work on busted, but it won’t necessarily work well…. and especially not well when it’s trying to dig through 11000 songs. My preliminary tests on busted had been with only a couple dozen songs or so at a time. So I have access to my library, but only in ones and twos.

Of course, there’s other media programs out there, and moving to Ubuntu would let me do the exact same VNC without the windows cruft. But the prospect of doing more jiggling outweighs the want of listening to some music. Sigh. Looks like I’m stuck with this POS music and POS computer until I get my new iMac or MacBook.

I only wanna be with you………


*The fan on this sucker kills me. Any suggestions on how to quiet it down?

Technorati Tags: music, iTunes, technology

Like to bum games of Guitar Hero off of your friends, but don’t have the money (or desire) for your own PS2 or XBox360? Don’t fret (horrible pun intended): with  the open-source Windows/Linux/Mac OS X/FreeBSD version of Frets on Fire, you can get your Free Bird on faster than you can say “And this bird you cannot change”.

You actually heft your keyboard (check out the YouTube video for an example) or get a supported guitar controller (or if you’re a tool, generic joystick). There’s a decent user community out there, writing songs for the Python-based app. You’ll need a “fairly fast” OpenGL graphics card to get going. The screenshots look pretty awful if you’re a hardcore Guitar Hero, but with all that money you’re saving, you could go out and buy a real guitar.

I wouldn’t recommend using your laptop to play, but I suppose you could….

Frets On Fire

Technorati Tags: Frets on Fire, Open Source Gaming, Guitar Hero

This appeared on LifeHacker (such an excellent resource) two weeks ago, but it’s worth mentioning here, if only because I just went through the process: If you have >1 Win/Mac computers, and run Firefox on each, you need to do this for yourself. I spent the better part of a day customizing my Firefox profile at work: the thought of tweaking it again for home made me gag. FolderShare took a little jiggling (you’ll need to open some ports on your NAT/Firewall and disable History, a regrettable loss), but now I’m using and syncing between work and home.

Unfortunately, FolderShare has some limitations that need to be resolved: I’m a bit of a desktop packrat at work, and I wanted to grab some files. Since the documents are free-floating on the Desktop, I can download local copies (individually, ugh) to my machine here, but I can’t since the entire Desktop folder for some reason. I suppose I could downThemAll, create a local folder, and sync my work machine with that before making some changes to the documents, but that seems kinda hardcore. I guess this just means that I’ll be cleaning up my Desktop tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: FolderShare, Lifehacker, Firefox