Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.
I just wanted to toss out a quick congratulations to Phil, who with the release of O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Panther Hacks, is now officially a published (co-)author!
I haven’t even managed to wrangle my infamy into that particular accolade. ;)
iTunes: “Life In Ecstacy (Long Dong)” by Trust in 6 from the album Techno-Trax Vol. 1 (1991, 6:37).
Any perfume connoisseurs out there?
Taste and scent specialists International Flavors and Fragrances have partnered with fashion and art magazine Visionaire to produce a special fragrance capturing the scent of computers — specifically, “the headspace in the Apple computer store in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.”
Should you want to sample this paragon of computing and olfactory perfection, you can order the “Scent” issue of Visionaire, which comes with not just the Gigabyte perfume, but twenty other specially commissioned scents (Cold, Noise, Heat, Hunger, 2AM, Sadness, Success, Violence, Softness, Electricity, Mother, Wasteland, Fear, Fetish, Strange, Drunk, Wet, Space, Broken Glass, and Instinct) from the company’s website for the low, low price of…\$175 (plus \$25 for shipping).
Y’know, if it weren’t so far out of my budget, I’d pick one up just to find out what all these things smell like. \$200 is a bit rich for my blood, though.
(via As the Apple Turns)
iTunes: “Girl Trouble” by Violent Femmes from the album Why Do Birds Sing? (1991, 2:58).
I haven’t poked my head into the Dashboard versus Konfabulator brouhaha for two reasons: firstly, I’m not a user of Konfabulator (looked at it, decided that it used far too much screen real estate for too little functionality, and that was that); and secondly, the whole thing seemed patently ridiculous to me.
However, John Gruber — who is far more qualified than I am to expound upon such things in any case — has done a masterful job of explaining why this is really a non-issue.
A sliding puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applets — little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time.
Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea.
Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh — conceived by Bud Tribble and engineered (mostly) by Andy Hertzfeld.
[…]
The post-WWDC peanut gallery is atwitter with the idea that Tiger’s Dashboard is a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator. You can’t read anything about Dashboard without hearing that it’s a Konfabulator rip-off.
Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they’re doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a “widget” is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.
The Mac community needs two things: more commentators like Gruber, and more people who listen to commentators like Gruber.
iTunes: “Goddess” by Soho from the album Goddess (1990, 5:13).
I love it when Apple gets snippy…
Other banners sport the slogans “Introducing Longhorn,” “This should keep Redmond busy,” and “Redmond, we have a problem.”
(via MacMinute)
iTunes: “You Suck” by Consolidated feat. Yeastie Girls, The from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1992, 4:13).
Somehow in all of the weekend’s festivities, I’d managed to completely space that this week was the 2004 WWDC (and I call myself a Mac geek?), so coming home to start finding reports of new toys from Apple was a very pleasant surprise.
First off: their line of monitors has been updated, in a big way. And I do mean big — as in a 30\” widescreen LCD monitor. I so want one of those…and I so can’t afford it.
Secondly: a preview of Mac OS X 10.4, AKA Tiger. Wow — lots of yummylicious geek-flavored goodies in there. Most interesting to me are the metadata-centric search capabilities and Safari’s built-in RSS aggregator (which looks quite impressive). I’d be more excited about iChat’s conferencing capabilities, but I’ve got so few people on my iChat list with iSights that I have no clue if I’d ever have a chance to use it.
Really looking forward to getting my hands on some new toys to play with once they’re released!
iTunes: “Hawkmoon 269” by U2 from the album Rattle and Hum (1988, 6:22).
Wow — another big reason to move to a better browser:
Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it.
The loophole is being exploited to open a backdoor on a PC that could let criminals take control of a machine.
The threat of infection is so high because the code created to exploit the loophole has somehow been placed on many popular websites.
Experts say the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast.
Sounds pretty nasty to me.
iTunes: “Voices” by Bedrock from the album Essential Chillout (2000, 9:09).
The Wall Street Journal’s top seven items of techno-lust, with commentary by me:
7: Fancy new does-everything cellphone.
Ugh. God no — at least, not for me. It’s a personal thing, but one I’ve yet to see any need to change my stance on.
6: DVR (Digital Video Recorder — a hard-drive based VCR).
I don’t watch enough TV to bother. Sure, sure, I’ve heard the arguments that DVRs make watching TV worthwhile (easier than ever to weed out the chaff and only see the good stuff), but I just don’t have enough interest in the television world.
Amusingly enough, I actually am considering signing up for cable TV for a few months sometime soon so that I can keep up with the upcoming presidential debates, and as I work nights, I’ll need some form of time-shifting device in order to actually watch the debates. However, given that I have every intention of turning the cable service back off once the election is over and done with, a cheap VCR should do me just fine when the time comes.
5: iPod Mini.
Yup. If I had to replace my iPod, I’d replace it with a Mini (if one were available). Most of the time, I’m only using between 2Gb and 4Gb of my 10Gb (2nd Gen) iPod, so the 4Gb of the Mini would work out quite well for me, and be smaller and lighter. Can’t complain about that.
4: USB flash drives.
If I didn’t have my iPod, sure. As it is, though, I can just drop any files I need to schlupp around on the iPod and call it good.
3: A really big, really flat TV.
Oh, definitely. Not for TV, of course, but I’m a movie geek. Size does matter.
2: Apple’s new Airport Express.
Yup. Even in my little studio apartment, I can easily see myself using at least two of these little gadgets (one for the main room stereo as it’s too far from my ‘puter to get an optical digital audio cable between the two, and one for the bathroom for shower tunes), and possibly three (unwire the webserver).
1: A Gmail address.
Hm. Apparently I’m the only geek on the ‘net who doesn’t care about Gmail. I’ve got enough e-mail addresses as it is, the last thing I need is one more to have to keep track of. Count me out of this one.
(via Buzzworthy)
iTunes: “I Wanna Take You Higher” by Duran Duran from the album Thank You (1995, 5:05).
Former Microsoftie Will Parker has an interesting post about the Microsoft Mac Business Unit’s work on a generally under-appreciated aspect of software publishing: the packaging.
Our study team handed a fresh, unopened Office X box to the subject and asked them to talk a bit about their work habits, their plans and expectations for Office X, and a little bit about the box design. They then asked the subject to open the box, install Office on their machine, and do some work.
One result of this study was a painfully funny Office X Blooper Reel — five straight minutes of people trying to get that damned plastic pack open and get at the CD, by any means necessary. Scissors tended to bounce right off of this thing, so Improvised Opening Devices were the order of the day – pocket knives, steak knives, paper trimmers, teeth, staple removers — even screw drivers made an appearance. Our research team lived in fear of blood spatters.
Not being an Office user, I never had to deal with this, but I’ve certainly dealt with enough other horridly packaged items to be able to put myself in these poor people’s shoes all to easily. Shrink wrap, and its many variations, is evil.
iTunes: “3 Floors Above You” by Meat Beat Manifesto from the album Actual Sounds and Voices (1998, 5:00).
Apache log file analysis plus SimCity equals VisitorVille, a program that displays your website as a city, with traffic represented by people moving from building to building (page to page), and arriving via bus (referrers and search engines).
Visitors come to your web site from other sites (referrers). Some of these referrers are search engines. In VisitorVille, referrers are depicted as buses. And web pages on your site are depicted as buildings. When a new visitor arrives, a bus delivers them to a building. To move between buildings, visitors either walk, take a cab or — if you have designated them as a VIP — a limousine. VIPs also fly in by helicopter.
When you have many visitors on your web site, it begins to resemble midtown Manhattan, and it’s hard to get your eyes off the screen! Buildings resize and illuminate dynamically based on the number of people inside, their relative popularity, and how many visitors exited through them. Buses, taxis, and limos race around the streets; pedestrians walk across crosswalks; helicopters ply the air. It’s all very real, because it’s reflecting something that’s also very real: Your visitors are human beings, and they exhibit human behavior. They are not abstractions, and with VisitorVille you no longer have to think of them as such!
As goofball as it sounds, after spending some time perusing their website, I have to admit that this is a really cool idea. Unfortunately, it’s a really cool idea whose client software only runs on Windows. Such a shame…
(via Wired)
iTunes: “Part 2 (Bomb the Bass/Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five/The Charlatans/Prodigy/Jane’s Addiction/Tim Dog feat. KRS-One)” by Howlett, Liam from the album Prodigy pres. The Dirtchamber Sessions Vol. 1 (1999, 6:44).
Well, it lasted longer than I thought it would, given how fast technology advances, but my dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 is no longer the top-of-the-line machine from Apple.
Apple today introduced updates to their Power Mac G5 line, now featuring a full range of dual processor systems at 1.8 GHz, 2.0 GHz, or 2.5 GHz — and ~~all~~ [the 2.5 Ghz model]{.underline} features a new liquid cooling system to keep heat and fan noise down. Nice!
iTunes: “Hazy Daze” by Wax Police, The from the album Acid: Breaks and Beats (1998, 2:24).