Technology

Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.

Mac mini (and more)

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Only the sketchiest details so far, ganked from MacRumors’ live update page, but…

Mac Mini

  • Mac Mini
  • very tiny
  • quiet, fw, usb2, video out, ethernet – very very tiny
  • pizza box style
  • analog, digital video out
  • comes with Panther & iLife 05
  • half as high as an iPod Mini, surface of a little dish
  • coming 1st half of 05
  • 1.25 Ghz G4
  • another at 1.4 Ghz
  • most important new mac ‘ever’
  • available Jan 22
  • prices for mac mini: \$499 and \$599
  • \$499 with 1.25 G4, 256, 40 gig, Combo

[Update:]{.underline}

Okay, everything’s done, and Apple’s website has been updated.

Funny: On the iPod shuffle page, there’s a picture of the iPod shuffle next to a pack of gum, with a caption that reads “Smaller than a pack of gum and much more fun.^[2]^” When you go to footnote 2 at the bottom of the page:

  1. Do not eat iPod shuffle.

Funny: On the Mac mini Design page is the notation, “Keyboard, iPod mini, dock, hands, AirPort, Bluetooth and PC sold separately.”

Macworld 2005 Keynote

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The keynote for this year’s Macworld starts in about an hour. I won’t be able to ‘liveblog’ it as I have the past couple of years, as little things like work and Apple’s decision not to stream the keynote are getting in the way.

Rumor roundups have been posted on MacRumors and Think Secret — we’ll see how many of them come true once the press is allowed to start talking.

DVD-R? DVD+R? Argh!

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In theory, according to Apple’s promotional literature, iPhoto is supposed to be able to handle up to 25,000 photographs in its library without a hiccup. I’d love to know what kind of hardware they were testing that on, because I’ve got around 7,000 photographs in my iPhoto library and it quite frequently brings my 2.0Ghz G5 to a standstill, if iPhoto doesn’t crash out entirely.

Annoying.

So, part of last weekend’s running around was picking up a small spindle of recordable DVDs so that I could back up the older photos and pull them out of my iPhoto library. Prairie and I hit Best Buy and found a spindle of fifteen recordable DVDs for about ten dollars.

Yesterday, I grabbed all my photos up through 2003 (only about 2.5Gb out of the 4.7Gb available) and told iPhoto to burn the DVD. It asked for a blank disc, I put one in…and it popped it right back out and asked again for a blank disc. “That’s odd,” I thought, and put the disc back in. This time iPhoto went ahead and started chugging away, and I didn’t think more of it.

Until iPhoto finished burning, and the disc never mounted on the desktop. I started trying to figure out what was going wrong, and then some small part of my brain kicked in. “Wait a second…aren’t there a couple different DVD formats?” Sure enough, I’d picked up a spindle of DVD+R discs, and the Superdrive in my G5 uses DVD-R discs. Crud.

I’m just glad the discs weren’t terribly expensive, and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience. Thanks to an Office Depot just a few blocks away from my apartment, I now have a spindle of 25 DVD-R discs (for only \$9.99, too — the sale goes through Jan. 8th, and that’s a pretty good deal, as their spindles of 50 DVD-Rs are priced at \$40), all my photos up through 2003 are successfully burned onto one disc, and most of 2004 (Jan-Nov is all that would fit on one DVD) is merrily burning away in the background as I type this.

Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible formats, though, especially so similarly named (one is “DVD ‘plus’ R(ecordable)”, and one is “DVD ‘dash’ R(ecordable)”, I guess, though it could just as easily be read as “DVD ‘minus’ R(ecordable)”, which is even more confusing). If I hadn’t had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I’d probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary.

iTunes “I Sit on Acid ’96” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1996, 4:31).

NNW missing images

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NNW Image Bug

This is odd — sometime over the past day or so, NetNewsWire has suddenly stopped displaying images. Images on pages show up fine in Safari, but never load in NNW.

I’ve checked all the preferences I can find in NNW, and can’t come up with anything that might be doing this.

Has anyone else ever seen this, or have any idea how I can troubleshoot this further and figure out what’s going on? I’m stumped at the moment.

iTunes “King Crack” by Dax, Danielle from the album Blast the Human Flower (1990, 2:10).

Netflix Friends

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Yesterday word starting flying around the ‘net about a new feature on Netflix‘ site: Netflix Friends. I read about it on Hacking Netflix and was definitely interested, but by that point there were already a ton of people asking for invites, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable joining in the “add me!” crowd, so I just tossed a link into Eclinkticism instead.

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Of course, what I didn’t think about was MovableType’s automatic Trackback discovery feature, so when I posted my link, Hacking Netflix got pinged — and Mike was kind enough to toss an invite my way after all.

After playing with it a bit last night and this morning, I’m really enjoying this. The first thing I had to do was toss out some invites to people that I knew had NetFlix accounts, and some have already responded and joined in. The more people listed as friends, the more choices there are on your friends page, of course, and it’s been fun watching the recommendations change as more of the few people I invited in join in the fun.

NetFlix Friends

The main NetFlix Friends screen is divided into a few sections. Over to the right is a list of your friends and how many movies they’ve rated, a list of people you’ve invited but haven’t accepted yet, and links to either invite more people in or edit your friends list (delete friends or edit their display name on your list). The main column of the page starts off with a list of movies that your friends have watched and rated recently, with their ratings displayed in purple below the movie. Further down the page (and not displayed in my screen shot) are sections for “New and Upcoming Favorites” (recently released and soon-to-be released films), “Unique Films Your Friends Love” (movies that people you know have given an above-average rating), and “Friends Top Favorites” (four- and five-star ratings from your friends).

NetFlix Friends Share Page

Clicking on one of your friends names in the “Your Friends” section of the page takes you to that person’s “Share Page”, with a larger list of what they’ve watched recently on the right side of the page, along with the same “Recently Watched” and “New and Upcoming Favorites” lists (in slightly longer form) from the main Friends page.

Netflix Movie Page

One of the nice touches is that once you’re part of the Netflix Friends program, there are little adjustments throughout the Netflix site that tie in to your Friends pages. On any page in the site, if a movie is displayed that one of the people on your Friends list has seen, a little purple person icon appears in the lower-right corner of the movie icon or next to the movie’s name. Also, on individual movie listing pages (which recently gained a “Watch Preview” option — nifty!), there is now a listing towards the bottom right of ratings from any friends who have rated the film, and you can add short one-line blurbs about what you thought of the film.

So far, it’s looking like Netflix has a really good thing going here. If you’ve got a Netflix account and want to join the fun, just let me know!

iTunes “Connected” by Alabama 3 from the album Exile on Coldharbour Lane (1997, 6:15).

ecto 2

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So ecto 2 is updated, and one of the nifty new features is Amazon integration. It’s pretty slick, with a handy little search window within ecto to find items, one-button posting once you’ve chosen what you want, and a few options for how you want the finished link to appear.

I do have one concern about the link format, though.

I’ve been very careful to make sure that all my Amazon URLs are formatted a specific way, after reading this from kottke early last year:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/0sil8

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/0sil8

If you’ve linked to items using that style of URL (something I’ve seen on several sites), check your reports at Amazon…you’ll find that you’re not getting any Associates clickthroughs or credit for those purchases.

Obviously, since I would like to get credit for any clickthroughs I might receive (rare though they may be), I’ve been very careful to make sure to use the ‘ASIN’ format of link, and not the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format.

While experimenting with ecto’s new Amazon integration, I put together a quick link to Neal Stephenson’s ‘Quicksilver’, and checked the URL — and, unfortunately, it came up with the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format (though I’ve fixed it in that link). After poking around in ecto’s settings for the Amazon integration, it doesn’t appear that there is any end-user control over the links (that is, the URL format, not the format of the link itself) other than manually fixing them after they’re inserted. While this really isn’t a major dealbreaker — it’s essentially what I’ve been doing for a while anyway, and the ecto integration does make it much easier to find items — it does leave me with a few questions…

  1. Most importantly, does this still matter? Or does Amazon now give credit correctly for both styles of links? On the assumption that it does still matter…
  2. When constructing the link, does ecto receive the entire URL string from Amazon, or just the ASIN?
  3. If ecto only receives (or needs) the ASIN, can the URL string be changed to the ‘ASIN’ style of link in the next update to ecto?
  4. If ecto receives the entire string…
    1. …is the returned string always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, or does it switch between that and ‘ASIN’ format?
    2. If it’s always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, can that be automatically adjusted within ecto to ‘ASIN’ format?
    3. If it switches, can ecto watch for that string and adjust it when necessary?
  5. And lastly, according to the tail end of Jason’s post, adding ‘ref=nosim/’ before the Associate ID forces Amazon to skip the “You may also be interested in…” page and send you straight to the actual product page. Can an option be added to ecto to add the ‘ref=nosim/’ string in the right place for people who might worry/care about such a thing?

If not…well, I’ll live. I can hope, though! :)

iTunes “Leæther Strip Part II” by Leæther Strip from the album Penetrate the Satanic Citizen (1992, 6:00).

Switch to VoIP?

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On the off chance anyone noticed, my site (along with all other sites I host) had about two hours of downtime earlier today. Sorry about that — as it turns out, the DSL modem had frozen up, probably from overheating thanks to the poor ventilation in my apartment. Once it was reset it was fine. Sorry ’bout that.

While I was bouncing around Speakeasy‘s site during the initial round of “what’s going on?” troubleshooting, I ran into some interesting information that may lead to me ditching my current phone service with Qwest.

Item One: Speakeasy OneLink — DSL service that doesn’t require a phone line.

Item Two: Speakeasy Voice — VoIP service.

Item Three: Nice savings when you order both packages.

I already use Speakeasy as my broadband provider, and I’ve been very happy with the service I get from them. I have a good package for a reasonable price, and the few times I’ve had to call tech support, they’ve been quick, friendly, and very friendly (and occasionally just a little bit silly).

I currently use Qwest for my phone service, and have very intentionally been getting the bare minimum necessary package. For me, that means about \$30/month for basic phone service plus voice mail, and nothing else. No caller ID, no call waiting, no other fancy features — and no long distance.

According to Speakeasy’s site, if I were to switch over to their VoIP service, I’d get unlimited long distance in the US and Canada, voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, last call return, do not disturb, and I’d even get to keep the same phone number I’d have now — all for the same price as my current basic service from Qwest.

If I switched over to both OneLink and VoIP, my final cost would be about \$6/month more than what I’m paying now, but the first three months would be cheaper, as you get a “free three months” for signing up (some of which are offset by the setup costs, but that’s expected). All in all, this sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me.

Giving this one some serious thought.

iTunes “Predator (Final)” by Collide from the album Vortex (2004, 6:32).

Delicious Library

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Ars Technica has a great review of Delicious Library, the new book/movie/music/game cataloguing software from Delicious Monster. I’ve downloaded the demo and have started to poke around with it…so far, quite enjoying what I see.

The second page of the review does a wonderful job of going into just why we Mac people are Mac people, and how nice it can be to get software also made by and for Mac people.

There is simply a “climate of excellence” on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn’t matter: pay attention to detail, or else.

Windows users, think about what your typical download and installation experience is like. How many dialogs are you presented with? What do the file names and icons look like? Do you have to run an installer? What kind of manual clean-up is required afterwards?

Linux users, when you look at the carefully laid out disk image contents in the screenshot and links above, think about how far “desktop Linux” has to come before it can even begin to think about details like how single-icon drag-installed applications are arranged in their disk image windows.

Yes, I know, all of this is “pointless” and “dumb” because looks are meaningless. It’s the software that counts—the code, the bits, not the packaging, right? And so we come to an important difference between Mac enthusiasts and other computer users. Mac users understand that the packaging counts too (and are willing to pay for it). Happily, you get a lot of nice things “for free” on the Mac platform these days: composited windows, large icons, rich disk image and application bundle standards, etc.

So very true.

Wishlist: Bank transaction RSS feed

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Just something that popped into my head.

I want a daily update from my bank via authenticated RSS feed.

Something like:

Account holder: Michael Hanscom
Account: XXXXXXX

Today’s transactions:

>

>

>

>

>

Party Amount Balance
Broadway QFC ($5.78) $385.73
Pike & Broadway ATM ($20.00) $365.73
Direct Deposit $783.56 $1149.29

Thank you for banking with Your Local Bank! Promotional copy, yadda yadda, whatever.

Are there any banks (especially in the Seattle area) that offer this as part of their online banking? If not, any idea how this could be suggested or promoted? Alternatively, are there any reasons why this couldn’t be managed securely?