Wake up with iTunes thanks to iTaf …iTaf is a OSX tool for programming iTunes “play” times in future : wonderful for waking up with music. iTaf is a Unix command with a Cocoa-based GUI.
Mossberg (WSJ) reviews both the 12″ PowerBook and Safari
First on the 12″ PowerBook:(Subscription required)
The 12-inch PowerBook is one sweet little laptop. Sheathed in an aluminum case, it has the feel of a finely made camera. And it’s the smallest notebook I’ve tested that sports a full range of features, including one I’ve never seen on a compact laptop. Yet it’s significantly less expensive than some comparable Windows laptops.
This PowerBook is slightly smaller than Apple’s low-end laptop, the iBook, but is powered by the more potent G4 processor that drives the larger PowerBooks. Apple has omitted a few standard PowerBook features — including a special memory cache that speeds things up — to protect sales of the older PowerBooks. But in my tests, the little PowerBook felt speedy and sure on every task I threw at it.
Safari’s main goal was to be speedier than the Mac version of IE, and it is. In my tests of five popular Web sites, Safari beat the Microsoft browser in rendering a page every time, sometimes by seconds, other times by huge margins.
Spam Confab: Hackers to Rescue?
Let’s hope they can think of a great solution… some very strong minds will be gathered.
Hackers from around the world will converge on MIT on Friday to swap intelligence and marshal their collective brainpower for the fight against a seemingly indomitable opponent. [Wired News]
Safari Tabbed Browsing Petition
Falling in deep like with Apple’s Safari browser but can’t tear yourself away from Chimera’s tabbed browsing? Now’s your chance to potentially influence the powers that be on the subject:
Sign the petition at PetitionOnline. [raelity bytes]
iCommune threatened by Apple
MacMegasite has the story. Seems that the author of iCommune violated the iTunes Device Plugin SDK Agreement by enabling sharing over a network. Great idea… but think it’s dead now. I guess we really just have to wait for Apple to release the Rendezvous enabled iTunes 3.x shown at MacWorld in July 2002.
nyc burgerwatch
I have eaten hamburgers every day for the last two months. I have traveled the five boroughs of New York City to do so. And in the city’s lowliest corner diners and loftiest expense account restaurants, I have found satisfaction. New York, my research has documented again and again, is a hamburger heaven.
I am going to have to try the Blue 9 burger… If if it is anything like an In-N-Out, then oh my!
South Korea: A Window into The Future
Just how successful is the South Korean wireless industry you ask? Consider this: South Korean operators launched their CDMA2000 1X services way back in the fourth quarter of 2001. This is a standard that many experts consider to be a 3G technology because of its speeds of 144kbits/second. Some will argue that it is not a true 3G technology, but judging by the data intensive services Koreans are utilizing on the network, it is as close as anyone has come to 3G. In the 8 months following the launch of 1X, the Koreans had created a user base of more than 12 million subscribers (some say the number is 16 million today), according to Ovum, a wireless consultancy based in London. That’s more than a third of the 31 million mobile subscribers in the entire country, which by the way, represents a market penetration of more than 65 percent of the total population.
The Koreans have shown a remarkable knack for transitioning customers onto newer phones and faster services. In Japan, where NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA network – a real 3G network capable of 384 kbits/second and streaming video – has only been able to entice a tiny fraction of its customer base onto the new service. According to Strand Consulting, an independent consultancy based in Copenhagen, only 4 out of every 1000 mobile users in Japan are using a FOMA terminal. Compare that to 400 out of every 1000 in South Korea owning a 1X terminal, and you start to see the disparity.
“Everyone is talking about Japan and DoCoMo and i-mode, and that is a classic case of the emperor has no clothes,” says John Strand, president of Strand Consulting. “i-mode’s biggest success was in getting the international marketing around it, but what makes Korea so interesting is that they have been up and running with 1x for one and a half years. People are paying more for the advanced devices, generating more revenue, and using more airtime. Korea is the land of milk and honey.”
Space: Final Vacation Frontier
Both the European Space Agency and NASA have plans to make outer space a major destination for adventure travelers. It won’t happen this year, but it will happen, they say. By Karlin Lillington. [Wired News]
AOL in Interactive TV Deals
America Online (NYSE: AOL) announced Wednesday at the Los Angeles-based Western Cable Show that the company has reached agreements with several media companies to provide content for its heavily touted interactive television set-top box. [osOpinion]
with deep sadness
Interactive Taxi
I was running late this morning so I decided to grab a taxi instead of my usual walk-subway combo. Soon after I told the driver my destination, I was surprised to hear some technolite music and when I looked up to see if it was the driver’s selection I realized that there was a Hummer commerical playing on a flat panel display in the middle of the driver-passenger partition.
While the ad played I explored the screen which turned out to be a touch panel with quite a bit of content to play with during the ride. I could pick my choice of news from either NY1 or Fox News. In both cases the News was listed as a linked headline list on the left 1/3 of the screen. On the right side there was room for commercials to play while I selected a story to read. Advertisers I noted in my trip were: Hummer, American Express; Hot Jobs; CBS for CSI Miami and North Fork Bank.
On the bottom of the screen was the main navigation for the system and offered the following options: NYC Info; Restaurants; Specials; Night Life; Business or Pleasure; and About Us. From each of these selections I was able to go several levels deep to learn or read more about each option.
Live time and date as well as weather information was easy to find and seemed to be quite accurate and up to date. When I asked the driver about it, he was fairly clueless simply stating that his company put it all in there. I had not seen this kind of taxi before, but have seen the taxi tops that contain live ESPN scores which I know are delivered to the cabs over the air. I suspect this is the same way that the low bandwidth content (news and weather) arrive, but that the commercials and video content gets updated only when the cabs return to their stations.
The company that delivers this Type-A delight is called Global Vision Interactive, which is a division of iT (Interactive Taxi). As a marketer and as a tech enthusiast, I’d say this is a very intriguing way to reach your audience.
Triad works to wed Wi-Fi to cellular
Good stuff for the future…
Avaya, Proxim and Motorola are codeveloping a mobile device that roams between cell phone networks and public or private Wi-Fi wireless hot spots, company executives said Tuesday. [News.com}
Ask and Ye Shall receive…
Hoping this is real!
15.4 inch PowerBooks?
Digitimes rumors [MacRumors]
Cheap Transit
I’d heard about this previously, but for a trip to Boston. I actually go to Philadelphia and $5 is certainly the least expensive option.
Enter the Dragon Coach, the latest in the spate of chinatown bus stories [anil dash’s daily links]
The ideal PowerBook…
After much consideration following the MacWorld Keynote Address, I think I have discovered the ideal Powerbook
Well take all the goodies of the 17″ new G4 and squeeze them into the 15″ case. Simple right? Include FireWire2, Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, Keyboard Illumination, SuperDrive, Aluminum Case, NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 60GB Hard Drive, 1Ghz G4 or faster and support up to 1GB DDR SDRAM. Simple right? We already have the form factor – just upgrade it! The 17″ just seems too big and heavy for my daily travel habits and the 12″ requires that you make sacrifices like limiting your RAM needs to 640MB. I think I can live without the Firwire2 for now, but adoption will be quick and soon enough I know I will miss having it. Airport Extreme and Bluetooth are absolute requirements as is the change in placement of the internal antenna. Keyboard illumination is just cool and should be in there.
The iTrip for your iPod
Apple snub stings Mozilla
As Apple computer chooses open-source competitor KHTML for its Safari browser, Mozilla critics say AOL Time Warner’s browser suffers from code bloat, among other problems. [CNET News.com]
Surgical Options…
Right now I am debating having surgery on my hand. It would be arthroscopic and minimally invasive, but still surgery and for me the possibility of returning to a cast looms. Since most people reading this don’t really know me so I will provide a brief background…
Last March (almost 10 months ago!) I broke my wrist while on vacation in The Bahamas. I was playing tennis at the time and slipped while serving on the clay courts. I went straight down at top speed and fractured my scaphoid. The scaphoid is literally the worst bone you can break since it does not get enough blood flow to heal properly or in a timely manner. My treatment consisted of 10 weeks in a cast, followed by 6 weeks in a brace and then freedom, but immediately into Occupational Therapy and then Physical Therapy which is where I still am today – twice a week. The length of my immobilization caused MAJOR atrophy and allowed for a vast amount of scare tissue to develop. (You can expect the healing process to be 3 times the length of time immobilized. For me it’s 16 weeks x 3 – 48 weeks!!)
In December I learned that in addition to the fracture, which is finally healing, I also have damaged cartilage and ligaments in my hand which has been causingmy general loss of flexibility, cracking and popping, general stiffness and of course some pain.
Since this is my right hand and I am right handed I am faced with the very real possibility that my hand will never be the same. At the moment, my left hand is actually stronger than my right which is a weird thing since I have never been ambidextrous. Anyway, the surgery would allow for the cartilage to be potentially fixed and the ligament damage to be explored. According to my doctor, there is about a 95% chance that the cartilage can be fixed which should offer some relief. There is a 5% chance that when he scopes my hand we will learn that the damage is more severe than expected and to fix it will require that I return to a cast for 4-6 weeks.
At this point he is not recommending working on the ligaments as they can not be repaired through this type of surgery and would require a significant healing process and a return to a cast as well.
I am leaning towards the surgery since I want my hand to be back as much as it can, but am worried that the damage will be bad. I have not had much luck with my hand since the injury so far… A new cast means additional immobilization which means that I take a step back in my recovery in order to hopefully be able to go further than I have gotten today. Well – something to sleep on anyway.
The Nextel Advantage
While other carriers in the US are all talking the talk about adding Push to Talk to their service, Nextel has gone ahead and expanded their regional coverage. The service will now allow traveling parties to Direct Connect each other while in new markets as well as use Direct Connect to speak with anyone else in the region. By Q3 of this year the feature will work Nationwide and will be light years ahead of what anyone else is will be remotely capable of offering.
The “call setup time” refers to how long it initially takes to connect to a network. Mullins says that the iDEN-based Nextel system has a call setup time of less than one second. By contrast, CDMA networks have a wake-up period of around four seconds: The handset has to request a session and be assigned a resource in the network before packet transmission can begin.
CDMA carriers working with Qualcomm’s BREW technology have a long way to go before the delay is remotely tolerable enough to make this service close to usable.
NetNewsWire Pro 1.0b8
NNW just keeps getting better and better…
This release focuses on the news reader. Changes include displaying the time for the next refresh, remembering column sizes, and fixing an OPML subscriptions importing bug. (See the change notes for more info.) [Ranchero]