Personally I’m not interested in owning an iPhone (I have so far successfully avoided getting a cell phone at all) even though it is the slickest thing I’ve seen anywhere, but a $200 iPod touch might lure me in (there’s talk that Sept will bring about such a thing). The capacity is still too low though. I want it to be able to hold my entire music collection which only the biggest one does right now which is currently $500! No removable battery is a big downside for me having had similar problems in the past with Palm. And no flash support? I’m not a big fan of flash, but it is everywhere on the web! Thats a serious limitation. I do like the iPod/iPhone interface a lot, it’s too much like an appliance for me (kinda like Palm pilots were), although the new ability for third party apps should bring about a much more interesting mix of abilities.

If the hardware ran something totally configurable (more like Linux than OSX) I’d be more gaa gaa over it, and I don’t like the whole ’syncing with iTunes’ garbage. I really don’t want to be tied to Apple’s advertising engine at all. (on a side note: I found a cool python program which allows me to copy files directly to my iPod shuffle, then play them in whatever order I set up and copy them off again on another computer all without iTunes. They’re working on one for the iPod, which would be a deal maker for me possibly.)

I’m also very interested in what comes out of the Android, Openmoko, and LiMo projects. Interested enough that I am willing to hold off on purchasing something in fear that my ideal device is just around the corner.

I read alot about this kind of stuff, but very rarely buy any of these shiny gadgets. I don’t ever have to have the latest and greatest of anything. In fact, I always tend to think that the older it is, the better it is even if that obviously isn’t always true - it’s a prejudice. A lot of times I will actually get hand me downs of old gizmos from the boss or other people who are upgrading, so I’m usually a few years behind in actually playing with any of it. I still use an old G4 powerbook most of the time.

If you have an iPod shuffle and you’re content dealing with iTunes, don’t bother reading this. I was getting fed up with the fact that every time I plugged my iPod into a friend’s machine, or into my work machine, iTunes would bark that the iPod was already synced with another iTunes installation (my Mac) and would ask if I wanted to erase everything on it and sync with this one instead. I realize I can apportion some of the iPod as regular flash space to carry files from one machine to another, but what I wanted to do was to copy music onto the iPod like any normal flash disk, listen to the music in the car on the way to work using the Ipod controls, then maybe grab some different music for the ride home from my work machine. Sometimes I wanted to rip a bunch of disks at one location, and listen to them in the car and then copy them off to my home machine at some point. Apple’s pact with the recording industry made simple uses like this impossible… that is, until an open source project developed in python opened up my iPod (shuffle) and let me use it the way I wanted to.

rebuild_db is a python script which you can put onto the iPod shuffle, that when run, will rebuild the database that the iPod uses to play music. As long as you install python on whatever machine you happen to have (Linux and Mac will already have it installed but it’s trivial to install in Windows too), you can use this script to take control of your iPod. Now I can just copy files to the Ipod shuffle, double click the script icon to rebuild the database, and listen to the stuff I put on there which is available to copy off again on any machine I plug it into. Doing this means that the iPod shuffle will not sync with iTunes anymore, and you have to eject the device as you would any normal flash disk, but I think this is a small price to pay for being freed from iTunes evil grasp.

I work in the IS (Information Services) department at a manufacturing company. I am constantly asked by fellow employees for computer advice. While I really do enjoy talking about computers, and I don’t mind answering their questions, over the years I have come to realize that Windows is really not a good option for someone who does not like futzing with computers as much as I do. I will relate three short incidents (just from *this* week!) to illustrate my point.

• I only recently met the new guy in shipping. He seems really nice - his parents are from Trinidad and they make those awesome costumes for Carnival for a living. He’s articulate, though young, but he’s a real PC novice. He knew he wanted to get a computer because he realizes that having some ability to use a computer is basically a requirement for a better job these days, so he went out and bought a Dell (with Windows). ‘That’s supposed to be top-of-the-line, ain’t it?’ he asked. Well, no but a new PC should work - you certainly pay enough for it. He hasn’t had it very long. His problem was typical - he described a machine completely taken over by spyware and viruses: unwanted windows popping up, incredibly slow performance, strange errors, etc. I hooked him up with a copy of Adaware, gave him instructions on how to use it, told him how to deal with Norton, etc. I did not need another consulting job so I didn’t offer to do all this myself. If I had, I would have replaced IE with Firefox, changed the Firefox icon to use the icon from IE (the little blue “e”) and never even told him about it. I have done this on every machine at work (using an MSI package), and it cut down on these kinds of problems dramatically. (note: I also replace Outlook with Thunderbird/Mozilla which is probably more important)
• Another guy at work is from the Ukraine originally where he was an orchestra conductor! He brought in videos of himself conducting a symphony there since nobody believed him at first. A really nice guy, he’s not a computer-person. He’s a musician. he wants to play his trombone, get online and read Ukraine news websites, send email and write letters. He had some vauge notion that he wanted to compose music on the PC, but realized it is beyond him at this point. Another guy from the Russian side of Ukraine at work offered to build him a PC from parts (cheaper than a complete system and usually you can get better components that way), so the constant Windows crashes, blue-screen memory dumps, strange multi-colored screen errors, and unexplained lock-ups may be hardware (or driver) related, but they happen - stopping from getting even the minimum satisfaction out of his new PC, and keeping him from eventually using it for what he wanted in the first place - a communication portal to his homeland (which TV doesn’t provide) and a possible platform for music creation. His very limited free time is spent trying to get the thing to work for longer than 2 minutes. I may actually offer to look at his machine for him - I really don’t like doing this often because it eats up all my free time (which is why I have a Mac myself) and then you’re culpable for any data loss or future problems. It’s an endless service contract…

• My own brother called this week and described his situation which is quite similar to the one above. He has more interest in music and instrument performance and recording than in PCs. He has been plauged by problems with a non-name-brand PC with Windows for years. While it continues to limp along, he can’t trust the machine and it’s maintenance and fiddling will take away most of the time that he would rather use for the pursuits he enjoys. Luckily, I think I have convinced him that a Mac is appropriate for his needs and I *did* offer him personal support

The moral of this story is that for regular (non-business) users of computers, it makes *no* sense to use Windows. The Windows success stories (and there are a lot, I know) are *all* from folks who have done their due diligence in learning about Window’s peculiar vulnerabilities and puposely taking the time to set up protections and watchdogs to avoid the inevitable problems. For someone new to computers who expects their $1,000+ purchase to be at least as trouble free as their $99 DVD plater, they want an appliance. These folks just want to be able to access the internet, create or listen to music, deal with photos, send and recieve a fax, read and write Word and Excel compatible documents, install programs and hardware for their own personal interests easily, send and receive email, etc. These are all really simple, basic functions that the personal computer has been doing since at least 1993 for a lot of people. For someone who doesn’t want to learn enough about PCs and Windows to run an IS department - the clear choice today is a Mac. But yet, when I suggest this course to people who i think would benefit from this advice, I get blank stares of incredulity.

note1: I realize that Apple has an advantage over Microsoft in that they are a hardware company and can control the type of components that go into their machines and so reduce driver/hardware related issues. Microsoft is foremost a software company - they make money on providing ’solutions’ for the problems they create (like incompatibility with their own software - I love that one: Try opening a Word 2003 doc in Word 97, let alone an Access 2003 database .mdb file in Access 97.)

note2: To normal users, I don’t even bother suggesting wiping Windows and putting linux on the machine unless they ask and seem really interested in learning about it. Linux is a great way to re-purpose a troubled machine that would have gotten thrown away in frustration. But I do offer a bootable linux CD as a ‘test’ - if everything works when you boot up in Knoppix - it ain’t the hardware!

I downloaded video ‘proof’ of OSX booting up on an x86 based notebook, so the rumours are true! It booted amazingly quick on a 1.6 mobile Intel Pentium (532MHz bus) with an ATI mobility radeon 9600 (768MB Ram). I had originally read about it on Slashdot, but…it pointed over to this site which was of course suffering the ’slashdot effect’ where thousands of users across the globe are clicking on the link to check out the big news of the day and end up totally swamping the poor guy’s server just because he had an interesting article up one day.

The site was already getting pounded pretty bad, so they had posted a ‘torrent’ link. Bit torrent, if you don’t already know is a peer to peer file sharing tool (written in python) offers a more efficient method of distributing a big file than just posting it on a single server which can suffer from a bandwidth bottleneck. The trick with Bit torrent is that you *must* share the little bits you get with other clients in order to download faster through a sort of ‘forced altruism’. If you have a firewall or router you may need to port forward several high ports to use it effectively.

I dropped by http://www.osx86project.org/ to see if the rumour was true. They were being careful on their site because there are some DMCA issues involved here that I won’t pretend that I have investigated, but suffice to say - it seems that it is indeed true. I just looked at it quick, but the ‘hack’(?) involves using VMware (not free), a software that allows for multiple independent operating systems to coexist on a machine, PearPC, an open source PowerPC emulator, and a Tiger (OSX 10.4) DVD boot disc.

Currently, the procedure is not for the faint of heart, but I imagine it will get easier as more work goes into it. OSX is an awesome OS and it would be really nice to have it available for x86, but the thing I really like about my Macs has been the hardware quality. I would been just as happy in Linux I think, but I could never find an x86 based laptop I thought was *built* well enough to entrust with my personal ‘digital life’.

This is just another one of those very cool things about the new Powerbooks. According to Amit Singh’s article of the same name, Apple added an accelerometer (motion sensor) to the 2005 series powerbook motherboards to help detect ‘gravity-accelerated impact events’ (dropping the thing) so the system can ‘unpark’ the heads of the hard drive. Turned out Mr. Singh found he could tap into the chip and do some other cool stuff.

He offers some applications on the page to download and play with. One cool suggestion he makes is that it might be possible to write an integration to google maps, where you could tip the powerbook slightly left or right to scroll the map. You might be able to make a computer version of the old ‘Labyrinth’ steel-ball-in-a-maze game.

Do I have ams? pmset -g will list the power management utilities. Look for ‘ams’, a ‘1′ indicates it is active (on), ‘0′ indicates it is not (off)

If you use OSX and you currently use Photoshop or the Gimp for heavy duty graphics work, you’ve probably gotten the feeling that sometimes you’re using a sledgehammer to drive in a nail. These tools are just more than you need sometimes. For those quick and dirty jobs, this is a program you definitely need in your toolkit.

Enter Toyviewer. Totally free, Takeshi OGIHARA’s small and fast image editor can quickly resize, rotate, crop (he calls it “clip”), and save in virtually all useful formats (if it works on the web, I think its useful). It does a whole lot more, including a unique kind of slide show (he calls it “scan folder”) as well as a bunch of effects (though I rarely bother with these).

One unique thing about Toyviewer is the way it handles image modifications. When you apply a “clip” (crop the image), it doesn’t change the original image, instead it automatically produces a clipped copy of the image in a new window. Since each modification appears as a new image, you’re never in danger of destroying your original image.

You won’t find layers or text tools in Toyviewer, but that’s not what this program is for. When you just need something done quick, Toyviewer gets it done quickly and elegantly. Nice work!