Meh to the iPods, Yes! to AppleTV
September 2nd, 2010So, Apple had their fall iPod event yesterday. Crazy.
Antennagate
July 19th, 2010My first cell phone, a Nokia I got about a decade ago, specifically said in the manual, similar to this page from the manual of the HTC Droid Eris (via Daring Fireball), not to touch a certain area of the case while you are using the phone, because it would affect the signal and battery life (and it would get hot). Made sense to me, it’s a freakin’ radio.
So, from the start all of the iPhone 4 attenuation bullshit seemed like a non-issue to me. Some of it is Apple-bashing, and some of it is from people who are true Apple fans, but they still want their magical unicorn, too.
Mac (i)OS, the Future of the Desktop
July 14th, 2010There was a giant argument raging on Macbreak Weekly on the future of the Mac OS. Alex Lindsay thinks Apple, within 5 – 10 years, will license or open source the OS, pretty much abandoning the desktop in favor of its mobile iOS platform. Andy Ihnatko vehemently disagrees, thinking there’s lots of life left in the desktop; he is merely curious about what Mac OS XI is going to look like. I think they’re both kind of wrong.
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Design: Getting on with the Past
May 5th, 2010Here’s an interesting thought: for the most part, the way of American life hasn’t really changed for a century. Well, okay, make that 60 years. Take away computers and the Internet, and the most defining pieces of technology in our lives are, going backwards in time, the television, the automobile, and electricity in the home. Everything else is unchanged. My life is essentially the same as it would have been in the ’50s, sans computer.
4.0 for Me?
April 8th, 2010Today Apple is set to announce iPhone OS 4.0, and probably go into some details about what is going to be in it. Most are speculating about multitasking and some new springboard, but I have to think it’s going to be more than that. There must be something really interesting Apple is going to do with it, or why do it?
Telegraph, and Macworld
February 4th, 2010First, Telegraph:
I’ve finally spent a little time on it, and I have three things fixed.
iPad, or Yours?
February 3rd, 2010I’ll cut right to it: what an awesome device. It seems there are two kinds of people out there: people who went, “Meh,” and people who went, “OMG OMG OMG this changes everything I need one NOW!” I am decidedly in the latter group.
M$ Store Opens, Hijinks to Follow
October 23rd, 2009I am, generally, a liberal. The relevance of this will become pertinent in a moment.
Microsoft, as you know unless insert-your-living-under-rock-cliché-here, has opened a couple of brick and mortar stores. This is laughable for several reasons, most of which are plainly obvious even to Windows enthusiasts, but I’ll repeat them here for the sake of completeness.
Beatlemania
September 17th, 2009I have it. Crazy, but there’s something about that group—there’s no cultural touchstone, let alone any band, that’s anything like the Beatles for my generation1. I’ve been jonesing for my extended family to get Guitar Hero or Rock Band for a while now, and when it was announced that the Beatles were going to have a game, well, that cinched it for sure.
- One phenomenon is close: Star Wars. ↩
Reduce, Re-Use… and Rip-Off?
July 28th, 2009Recycling is such a racket, at least in my current experience.
I try to do the green thing. Actually, where I live in Roseville, recycling is built-in to the waste pick-up service, so we can just throw our plastic, aluminum and glass in with the rest of our trash, and rest assured that these materials will be sorted out and properly recycled. But what about that deposit I paid at the register? Lost, at least to me. I have no doubt Roseville is collecting a tidy sum for all this stuff, and well they should, I guess. Those funds surely make their way into the budget somewhere; at the very least I would hope they reduce the cost we pay for garbage pickup.