Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.
It looks like Adam Osborne, creator of the Osborne 1 portable computer, has died. Probably.
While everyone has to go at some point, it’s a bit of a bummer — a bit of computer history fading away. My family’s first computers were Osborne 1’s, which I’ve reminisced about in the past. Almost laughable by today’s standards, they were top of the line in the 80’s.
(via Doc Searls and /.)
A ton of useful (and fun, in an extremely geeky sort of way) bookmarklets for digging into the code of a website to figure out just how it all works: Accessibility-checking favelets. I’ve snagged the first two listed already (‘Show and label divs with ids’ and ‘Show and label divs with classes’), and will be checking out more later on.
Geek toys!
(Via Zeldman)
Well, this bites. I’m having problems with my iPod. Normally I’m pretty good with getting things fixed, but I think this is beyond my abilities. Bleah.
Problem one: every so often, when plugging in the remote to the jack on the iPod, or just bumping the connector, the iPod will “short out” and reset. It’s more or less a minor annoyance — the iPod will reboot and start right up again, and the only real lasting effect is that the date and time need to be set — but an annoyance nothenless.
Problem two: iTunes doesn’t know that my iPod exists anymore. As far as I can tell, this behavior started after I applied the Security Update 2003-03-03 system patch. The iPod mounts to the Finder just fine, but nothing I can do seems to clue iTunes into the existence of the iPod.
I’ve tried applying the 10.2.4 Combo Update (even though I’d already updated to 10.2.4 using incremental upgrades, rumor has it that using the combo updater will fix a number of issues), completely deleting and then reinstalling iTunes, and completely resetting the iPod as outlined in Apple’s iPod troubleshooting pages. Nothing’s worked.
Luckily, my iPod is still under warranty, so I went ahead and placed a service request through Apple. I’ve never had to do this before, but I’ve read good reports on Apple’s turnaround time for service, but for the moment I’m without music when I’m not at home.
For some people, this might not be that big of a deal. For me? This bites. Hard.
Especially when some of the people at work insist on listening to “smooth jazz” — one of the few genres of music that I would gladly wipe from the face of the planet. Ugh. I want my iPod back!
This time, the focus is on Macintosh goodies. All you PC-using heathens can read on in wistful fantasyland, or just find something else to do — like reinstall Windows again. ;)
Enough people linked to PerversionTracker that I finally had to take a look. Looks like I’ve got another regular read! Any site that the Opera webbrowser has “taken the cake, and it is filled with plague and cottage cheese,” and that it is “slower than a squashed waterbear” defintely gets my approval. (Via Brent Simmons, along with many other Mac-based weblogs)
I’m probably the last Mac afficionado to find out about this, but it looks like Safari is actually going to get tabs. Nifty! (Via MacSlash, MacRumors and others)
This could be a fun toy to play with: VoiceBox, a tiny app that will take text files and convert them to audio files using the Mac’s speech synthesis. It will even ‘read’ RSS feeds, so I could listen to websites on my iPod while going to work! Useful? Dunno yet. Cool, though. (Via Rael Dornfest)
Dave Hyatt has got to be one of the bravest people on the ‘net I’ve seen. Consider…
Kudos to Dave for being crazy enough to do this, and to Apple for allowing him to do this. More companies need to realize that this is a real, effective way to encourage their users. We know that Safari is being worked on, we know that it’s being worked on by someone who genuinely cares about the project, and we know that they care about and listen to what their customers want to see in the product. I can’t think of a better way to build and keep customer loyalty than that.
While there had been rumors of an Apple-branded web browser for a while, Safari‘s introduction at this most recent MacWorld took a lot of people by surprise, and watching the reaction has been quite interesting. Yesterday, Opera Software (makers of the Opera webbrowser) announced that they may stop development on the Mac version of their browser.
I’d say bummer — except that every time I tried Opera on my Mac, I was severely unimpressed.
The C|Net article, however, made me raise my eyebrows quite a few times as I read it over.
Specifically, [Opera CEO] Tetzchner said that he had asked Apple whether it would be willing to license Opera either to replace KHTML, or to supplement the current Safari version, which Apple said is a stripped-down affair with a minimalist interface and limited feature set.
“We have contacted Apple and asked them if they want a third-party browser, and we’ll see what the answer is,” Tetzchner said. “They could say we want to use Opera as the core engine. If they want KHTML as a simple little browser, and also something more advanced, we would be happy to provide it. Obviously, if we don’t get any positive signs from Apple, then we have to think about it.”
You’re kidding, right? After Apple has taken the time to create Safari, which has been getting good reviews all across the web, does Opera really think that they’ll suddenly decide to reverse direction, tear Safari down and rebuild it with an entirely different rendering engine? One that isn’t open source, and isn’t nearly as solid as the KHTML engine that Safari is currently using? I just don’t see that happening. And, apparently Apple doesn’t either:
“We think Safari is one of the best and most innovative browsers in the world, and it seems our customers do too,” the Mac maker said in a statement. “No one is making Mac users choose Safari over Opera — they’re doing it of their own free will — and Opera’s trashing of Safari sounds like sour grapes to us.”
Later in the article, C|Net gives us this:
Last quarter the online music service MusicMatch decided to drop its service for the Mac, following Apple’s release of the competing iTunes application.
At the time, MusicMatch reasoned that with Apple directly competing with it for an already small pool of users, maintaining development on a Mac version no longer made business sense.
Now, the PC version of the iPod uses a custom version of MusicMatch Jukebox on the PC for all the features that iTunes provides on the Mac! Sounds to me like even if MusicMatch did decide to drop their native Mac support, they didn’t exactly end up entirely on the losing end of the deal. While quite possibly a technically correct few sentences in the article, C|Net sure makes it sound like Apple did MusicMatch far worse than is actually the case. Anyway…
“It’s not a platform where we’ve earned a lot of money,” said Tetzchner. “It’s a business decision. We have been putting a lot of resources into the Apple version and think we have a much better product, but it’s still a question whether it’s worth it.”
Well, y’know, if you’d made a better browser, maybe you would have fared better. The times I tried Opera, it was slow, kludgy, had some very odd rendering issues, and had a huge, obnoxious ad banner embedded into the free version. When there are other free browsers available, even pre-Safari, that were smaller, faster, more accurate, and less intrusive, why would I choose Opera? Sour grapes, indeed.
(Via Safari developer Dave Hyatt)
Oh my lord.
Apple just revamped their desktop line and dropped prices — severely — on their monitors.
Their Power Mac G4 line is now available in single-1Ghz, dual-1.25Ghz, or dual-1.42Ghz models, and the mid-range dual-1.25Ghz model starts at \$1999.
Prices on their LCD monitors have dropped precipitously. The 17\” model dropped \$300, from \$999 to \$699, they introduced a new 20\” model at \$1299, and their top-of-the-line 23\” model dropped \$1500, from \$3499 to \$1999!
I really need to get my money saved up….
On this day in 1984 (story), the first Mac went on sale.
(Via Aaron)
I doubt this is very serious (or likely), but apparently someone has set up a grassroots movement to elect Apple CEO Steve Jobs president!
The site, unfortunately, is currently slashdotted, but there’s some great comments in the /. thread…
well, the mac community is probably larger than the perot community. ;)
— rojo\^
“I hereby declare that The White House will no longer be boring”beige”, it shall be painted”Lickable Blueberry\”.
The Apple hoardes debate among themselves whether the country is now just “insanely” better, or “miraculously” better.
The White House will remain white, but all the plaster will be replaced with translucent white plastic.
The capitol dome will be redone in anodized aluminum. It will also have firewire.
[This is illegal…] Due to the seperation of church and state.
Steve cannot be both God and President without violating some part of the constitution.
Of course, given recent events, that ‘problem’ can probably be remiedied.
In order to give it something of a workout, I went ahead and set Safari to be my default web browser. I’ll probably keep it here for the next couple days to stress test it, then switch back to Chimera until Safari moves out of beta status.
Mark Pilgrim has a good rundown of current CSS bugs that he’s uncovered in Safari so far (thankfully, though, it renders djwudi.com just fine). Amusingly enough, I may have just found one more while I was reading his post: while most of his links highlight correctly when the pointer is over them, the ‘First test case’ link towards the end of the post that has \<code> tags within the link displays oddly — the code snippets disappear! Here’s a couple quick screenshots of how it looks in Chimera and in Safari:
I’m also finding that I (along with many other people) really miss the tabbed browsing available in Chimera and Mozilla — once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s really hard to go back to having window after window all over the place. Still, the speed is definitely good, and overall, it’s not too shabby. Just definitely a beta release. Here’s hoping that future releases are as impressive as the first shot!