Today at the apple store
Today (well, technically yesterday) i accompanied friends of mine to an apple retailer to pick up an ibook (wouldn’t wanna have missed that) which ended with an additional impulse-bought ipod mini. I’m convinced now that there’s nothing quite like women picking an ipod mini…
Anyway, they had the new g5 imacs on display, right next to an adorable 20″ apple display, and i finally realized why the new imac doesn’t quite work for me. When i saw it the first time i was underwhelmed at best by its appearance but later reasoned that it’s a damn fine piece of engineering with the whole cpu stacked behind the display. Problem is, it doesn’t look like a computer at all – it rather looks like an ugly, bulging flat panel display. As an all-in-one computer the new imac is really neat, it just looks too much like an ordinary display for its own good.
Ruby on Rails demo video
I just finished watching the rails demo video which is available @ruby on rails and boy, it blew me away. If you haven’t seen it yet, get over there and watch it immediately. The 9 minute video demonstrates rails from installation to first application, and that first application goes well beyond the over-stressed “hello world”: a simple weblog application. I don’t know how versatile rails is beyond putting and pulling data into and out of a database, but what i’ve seen so far looks astonishing. I wouldn’t say i’m a slow coder (not particularly fast either) but looking at this video left me wondering what i’ve done wrong up until now. Perhaps i should grab that untouched copy of programming ruby and get started, but then, i’m still in the middle of diving into python. Also of note: textmate, an upcoming text editor, is used in the demo and it looks like it could possibly replace subethaedit as my editor of choice.
Why i don’t believe in mobile video
When reading this article at ipodlounge i had the following realization: if you wanna see the future, look at the past. There’re already several precedents demonstrating that mobile video won’t fly.
Remember the old days when people didn’t use spinning magnetic platters for all their media storage? Those where the days of untivoed radio and tv broadcasts, magnetic tapes and optical storage discs. All these media’ve been used for distribution and consumption of both audio and video, all of them were vastely successful and resulted in tons of playback devices. Take portable cd players and portable dvd players as an example. The former cheap, successful, lots of people still using them, the latter expensive, cumbersome. I’ve never seen anybody using a portable dvd player in my life.
While portable music players are a cheap commodity with broad social acceptance, portable video players will get you as much acceptance as the word “geek” tattooed in bright red letters onto your forehead. With ipods sticking to what they’re really good at (playing music and looking cool) while becoming cheaper and cheaper, i don’t see a rosy future for personal video players. Just because something works in the living room doesn’t mean it’ll work on your daily commute or on your next shopping trip. All those people clamoring for mobile video apparently believe that video is just audio with moving pictures slapped on, that both work pretty much the same – just as people have their stereo next to their home cinema in the living room. Here’s a clue: it doesn’t work that way. As much as i believe that microsoft is onto something with their media center pcs i also believe they’re way off with personal media players as ipod killers.
Mac OS X RSS Readers
The rss reader scene on mac os x is getting crowded. Yesterday saw the public release of the netnewswire 2.0 beta. I’ve been a netnewswire lite user since i’ve switched to the mac and now with version 2.0 around the corner might as well be the right time to purchase the full version. Still my feedreader of choice on mac os x.
Newsfire got lots of positive press lately, though it strikes me as a more casual reader, not the right tool to keep on top of my currently 137 subscriptions. Yesterday i decided to give it a try. After importing my opml subscriptions list, newsfire went totally crazy and started fetching all feeds simultaneously, spawning connection after connection. Not very well behaved if you ask me and it also affirmed my previous assumptions that newsfire isn’t right for die-hard read-all news junkies.
And while i was trying out new feedreaders, i also took pulpfiction out for a spin. Besides the fact that i didn’t like this concept of one central inbox delivering an endless, incomprehensible stream of incoming news, the thing that bothered me most was the overwhelming graphical style of the app. Very orange, very green, and quite unnerving after a while.
Fav blogfinding of the moment
I’ve been on a subscription frenzy lately and among the dozens of new weblogs i’ve subscribed to, there’s one that really stands out, that i don’t wanna miss a single post of: go fug yourself, “a blog to honor all the visual atrocities of the world”. It was about time. Great morning coffee reading.
Some people shouldn’t touch anything in the kitchen
Just reminded myself quite effectively why i don’t cook with a fairly deep cut into my left middle finger while slicing bread. Now i’m typing this with 9 fingers and it sucks big time. Of course such shit only happens when you’re home alone. At least i managed to rush through our flat getting things off the hotplate, cleaning the wound and searching for a plaster without leaving a trail of blood. Guess it’ll be lots of outside dining in the foreseeable future for me.
BYOB: Build Your Own Bag
This has been in my backlog far too long: byob, build your own bag via Anne Galloway.
Modular smart bags. I’d be more than happy with modular, plain old dumb bags (anyone aware of something like this?), but these are smart, or as the website says, computationally-enhanced bags. This is very high on my “wanna have right now no matter what”-list. Definitely check out the promo video. Simply stunning.
Uptime 31 days
One of the reasons why i’m so glad i’ve switched to the mac:
If it weren’t for some system updates requiring reboots my uptime would be even longer. It’s nowhere near the 164 days uptime sun brags about in this article about solaris on a laptop, but for someone coming from windows, a month without a reboot on a personal computer is quite impressive.
Quote of the day, reblogged
From near near future:
“Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” – Kristian Wilson, Nintendo VP, 1989
Update: apparently it’s a fake
Time magazine pulling a goatse
This is nothing short of amazing: time magazine is pulling a goatse on its cover (via boingboing). Extra props for the caption: “Who Left the Door Open?”. You haven’t been really online unless you’ve been exposed to the inevitable goatse. The original goatse.cx has ceased to exist for better or worse, but a quick google will get you a mirror. Be warned: you should be prepared to get your mind wrecked by the goatse, perhaps it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever seen, but it’ll be very, very close.