Was advising a friend on how to shop for laptops. I buy only high end mac laptops so this won’t be useful if you buy $699 HP/dell/whatevers.
1) try not to buy generation one, but if you must, just buy extended warranty.
2) max out the CPU speed, if they offer several models, because you’ll never be able to upgrade that
3) leave the ram stock. don’t buy the extra ram. You’ll be able to upgrade it from kingston or crucial later for much less
4) leave the hard drive stock. you’ll pay a premium now, but in one year you’ll be able to upgrade beyond the original.
Basically, this way, I get the laptop, use it for a while, then it ‘starts to feel slow’. I upgrade to the latest OS, it gets a bit slower. But then – I max out the ram for cheap, and I pop in a huge hard drive – whatever the latest and greatest laptop drive is. Voila, new feeling computer.
I’m really disappointed with the stability of Leopard for me personally. I’ve never had a rougher OS X UPGRADE experience.
the OS itself is great. And if you buy a new computer – or do the “archive and install” (replacing, not upgrading your old OS) everything is rosy.
but for guys like me who’ve been carrying the same /Users/myname folder for years, it can be a little hard…
My brother upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, which resulted in an unbootable system – ironically, it reverted to a stable Windows machine because he could only boot to XP.
I said “Pshaw, bad karma, brother – it’s not that unstable”. I installed over my 10.4.
Just highlights:
1) on first boot, finder routinely crashed. Wouldn’t start. Had to force quit finder to open a window.
2) Mac mail crashed 5 times trying to import my mail. I had to use webmail. Anticipated 2 hours importing my mail. Finally i started it holding down option or something – now i have all my new mail on my imap servers, but none of the archived mail, which i’m going to have to manually import. No end user would know how to do this.
3) iCal – oblivious to my calendar. It’s gone. No where. At least it didn’t crash; on the other hand, i’m now trying to make appointments and … I have no idea when i’m available. I’ve tried importing some calendars strewn in ~/Library – but there’s a bunch from 2 years ago, and then a bunch of folders filled with hundreds of .ics
4) iCal forgot all my calendars AGAIN on last boot. A day later, now, they’re back. There were NO calendars listed. A reboot fixed it – but not after i had pretty much given up on using the calendar feature.
5) increased multi-lingual-screen-of-death (the OSX BSOD) – if i run parallels, spend 10 minutes booting it and getting word going, then close my laptop (sleep) and then wake it up, it almost always crashes the machine hard.
Sad huh? Besides quick-view, I’m not seeing much in the way of killer features.
And the garment industry can now create hidden messages only viewable on digital cameras. Now you can have subversive free speech only viewable to camera-toters.
This weekend I’m attending iPhoneDevCamp, to research iPhone Hacks for the upcoming book of the same name. It’s in San Francisco @ Adobe – friday night through sunday afternoon. If you can show up to help develop for iPhones – please do!
I’m amazed how many sponsors we got for the event….
If you want to contribute a hack to the book, please contact me – dstolarz@robotarmy.com
I wanted to quickly jot down some notes on my experiences with the iphone.
First off, it lives up to expectations; it is the best consumer electronics device I have ever owned. It has it’s flaws, well documented; I am very very content with the device.
AT&T however, is clearly not what it used to be. I’ve been on Sprint for a year and I rarely dropped a call and they always sounded great; I have consistent dropped calls with AT&T as well as “I can’t quite hear you” moments. I live and work in the San Fernando Valley/Burbank areas. So AT&T had better improve. I do applaud the iPhone going with GSM however – I prefer international standards when possible.
EXCHANGE: As far as exchange goes, I “keep hearing” that they’re going to add activesync support, which makes me hesitant to invest any time in “hacking” my iPhone to work with exchange (which I was prepared to do). If your corporate security regime does not mind, the simplest is to forward your exchange mail to a gmail account, then set your gmail account to use your work email as your “reply to” address. Although your mail will say, “sent by <gmail account> on behalf of <work email>, your emails will properly be sent to your work email account. Don’t do this of course if your work will fire you for breaking their tight exchange security.
GPS: I am working on the following hack, which I encourage others to do as well:
1) get a sprint or verizon rev A evdo card 2) plug it into a tiny, linux-bootable arm device such as this TS-WIFIBOX 3) plug in a GPS receiver 4) enable the wireless router 5) write a small script or program to get the GPS data and send it out on a port, or simply paste it, once a second, into a little text file served on a web server on the same box 6) write a safari HTML mash-up “application” that uses google/yahoo/MSN live maps and plots the lat/long of the box. Since the iphone will be connected through the wifi box, it can get the GPS from “192.168.0.1:80/gps.rss” on the wifi box, and integrate it through javascript, plotting it into the web
Simple, eh? The total thing should cost $250 (TS-WIFIBOX) + $150 (Sprint u720 EVDO USB receiver) + $75 (any USB GPS receiver).
Streaming Media Magazine just posted one of my articles online:
“The proliferation of new media channels presents an interesting conundrum: How will consumers be able to afford all these new services? The answer? …”
Well, it seems like a number of our presidential candidates have gone down to crazy town and are blithely open to the concept of tactical nuclear strikes against Iran. This Reuter’s article, Republicans: Iran must not have nuclear arms, highlights some of the madness:
Wolf Blitzer asked:
“If it came down to a preemptive US strike against Iran’s nuclear facility, if necessary would you authorize as president the use of tactical nuclear weapons?”
Here were some of the responses:
Rudolph Giuliani: “Part of the premise of talking to Iran has to be that they have to know very clearly that it is unacceptable to the United States that they have nuclear power. I think it could be done with conventional weapons, but you can’t rule out anything and you shouldn’t take any option off the table.”
Mitt Romney: “You don’t take options off the table.”
Duncan Hunter: “I would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons if there was no other way to preempt those particular centrifuges”
James Gilmore: “We’re also going to say that having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable. They need to understand it. And all options are on the table by the United States in that instance.â€
Later on, Blitzer asked: Congressman Paul, what’s the most pressing moral issue in the United States right now?
Ron Paul: “I think it is the acceptance just recently that we now promote preemptive war. I do not believe that’s part of the American tradition… And now, tonight, we hear that we’re not even willing to remove from the table a preemptive nuclear strike against a country that has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security!”
“We, in the past, have always declared war in defense of our liberties or go to aid somebody, but now we have accepted the principle of preemptive war.”
The problem with wars is that they are made. They are planned. They are huge, huge, logistically complicated affairs. They don’t just happen. A lot of people have to go mad or stop caring simultaneously for them to really come to a head, but they are planned, sometimes decades before they happen.
The US used to be very isolationist. It took surprise attacks like Pearl harbor to anger the American population into war. But recently techniques for goading our populace into a fighting stance have been developed to high precision.
All that has to happen is spill a can of talking points into the news channels and suddenly, everyone is “talking” about “what to do about Iran” or the Axis of evil or some other construct for public debate. There’s no vast conspiracy to it – it’s the same technique used to get people excited about the iPhone or whatever.
People worry. Give them a new threat, they’ll worry about that. Frame the outlets of their worry – “what would we do to avoid them getting nuclear weapons?”
I could go on but I’m sure some other website dissects this issue with more patience. For now I’ll leave you with the relevant pop culture references to help “frame the discussion” in a better way:
There’s Dr. Stranglove (1963), a cold-war era movie that is helpful for understanding the ramifications and motivations behind this sort of war.
Dr. Strangelove is also playing in restored high-resolution digital at Landmark Theatres.
Still feels too Hollywood for you? Fine, here’s a motorcycle tour of Chernobyl – our prime example of nuclear devestation, estimated to be habitable by humans within 300-600 years.
Here’s a clip from youtube to make the point we all need to get:
(credits: Strangelove Mushroom cloud picture sourced here Wargames pix from the youtube post)
One of the biggest challenges to “mobile computing” (besides battery life) is outdoor readability. (If you’ve ever squinted through your sunglasses trying to dial on your windows mobile phone, you know what I’m talking about).
Recently I had an old EO 72xx UMPC upgraded to a transflective screen. It cost a few hundred dollars for them to treat the LCD with some sort of new surface and then replace the touch panel with another type with some sort of glare reduction. You can get these transflectivized screens and conversions from http://www.mp3car.com (Disclaimer: I used to work there . I then brought up google maps on both units and took them outside to get a comparative.
In the picture you can see the top, washed out picture is the normal LCD, and the bottom picture is the transflectivized unit. Here are a few more pictures of the two units….
There are these little plastic protectors that go over electrical sockets to protect them from toddlers.
This morning while vacuuming the vacuum suddenly stopped… and on the other end of the line, my son had yanked the cord and was replacing the plastic cover, presumably to keep it safe from babies.
. I then brought up google maps on both units and took them outside to get a comparative.
