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  • 17 inches

    The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is reporting that Apple has introduced the 17-inch Macbook Pro. Still too big a machine for me personally, but still great as a portable workstation.

  • MacBook Pro Review

    Over on Inside Mac Games is a review of the MacBook Pro that makes a new Mac even more tempting. Though I still think I’m going to hold out for an iMac.

  • What’s the buzz

    There are a crazy amount of iPod accessories out there, but this is the most… uh, interesting one yet. For that special someone in your life.

    iBuzz—iPod Controlled Vibrator
    Images Ibuzz
    Merry Christmas, Mom! Apparently this little device, which hooks up to the iPod and buzzes in time to your music library, is the hottest Christmas gift going. It’s great for getting to sore muscles and aching bones and might even be used for a bit of extracurricular self-induced carnival time after hours, but we wouldn’t condone that at all. The body is a temple.

    Huge buzz for iPod gizmo [The Sun]

    [via Gizmodo]

  • Anime on the iPod

    Ipod Ipod

    More and more content for the video iPod keeps showing up. This time it’s anime from Central Park Media. Their initial offering is a show called Votoms. While I don’t have a video iPod it’s still stuff I can watch on my computer. But people are already putting out content.

    [Via The Unofficial Apple Website]

  • Wiki Madness

    Last night, in a fit of boredom, I deleted my wiki. Of course as soon as I had done it I wanted to find some new wiki software to run. I’ve played with tikiwiki and Moin Moin. Both were decent (and I’m leaning towards Moin Moin) but I figured I’d do the lazyweb thing and see if anyone out there had any recommendations. I think I’m looking for small and lightweight with access control, that has a fairly simple interface.

    On another note, I was trying to edit something over on Wikipedia the other day and discovered that some control key commands were intercepted by the site. Kinda cool, but when editing a text field in Safari you can use emacs controls for moving around and editing. Works great till you do ^e and suddenly find yourself moved to another page because it’s some wiki command. So the question is this. Anyone know how to turn it off? I tried searching around the Wikipedia site, but nothing jumped out at me.

  • Living with Apple

    Dave Winer just got a mac and has been commenting about things he likes and doesn’t like about it. For example, he really doesn’t like Safari. Though he is happy with his Airport Express.

    He’s also been getting a bit of advice about software to use:

    This is the kind of advice…
    This is the kind of advice I’ve been getting from Mac users. Good stuff. You know, based on the rah-rah’s from developers who are probably too scared of Apple to say what they really think, I thought everyone else thought Apple was the perfect company and the perfect computer. That’s the downside of people being too scared to speak up, we get shitty information. How can we change this system, so that people aren’t so scared? Or can we get Apple to thicken up their skin a bit, and learn to not punish people who have the nerve to criticize them. Blogs were supposed to fix all this. Frankly I think it hurts Apple to just have rah-rah public discourse and commentary. [via Scripting News]

    Most people I know who have macs are more than willing to criticize them. The thing is, I find that the positives for me greatly outweigh the negatives. I’ve had no real problems with Safari. I think most of their software is designed for the casual computer user. It does the basics and tends not to get too fancy.

    So in my case I tend to praise Apple a lot since in general it’s been much less of a hassle than my experiences with Windows in its various forms. It’s definitely not perfect, but I’ve yet to find an OS that is.

  • TV on your phone

    Full episodes of cult TV sci-fi show Red Dwarf are being made available for fans to buy and watch on their mobile phone handsets.

    The Doctor Who special The Five Doctors, originally screened in 1983, is also part of the licensing deal. [BBC News]

    Okay, maybe I’m just a bit picky or something, but I really can’t see the enjoyment of watching TV on a cell phone screen. I think the smallest I could go is the PSP screen.

  • So Who Gets It?

    This article at the New York Times made me laugh quite a bit this morning:

    Right Name, Wrong E-Mail In-Box

    LAST fall, David A. Green was looking forward to his new job at a Manhattan real estate brokerage. Finally, he would be able to shed the e-mail confusion that plagued him because of the two other David Greens at his company.

    No such luck. At his new company, Cushman & Wakefield, there was yet another David Green. And that Mr. Green already held the coveted e-mail name David_Green, following the company’s convention for e-mail addresses.

    At his old company, CB Richard Ellis, he had been, reluctantly, David.A.Green. Now he became David_A_Green. Hundreds of his e-mail messages went to the wrong David Green.

    “I would have been better off being at his desk than at mine,” said David A. Green, noting that the original, initial-free David Green is “most gracious about sending me the volumes of e-mails that go to him.” [via New York Times: Technology]

    So why did I find this amusing? This isn’t a new topic. The sendmail FAQ has had a question on this forever (or at least since 1997). It still amazes me that people don’t think that this might be a problem. When I was in college pretty much everyone had four character email addresses in the format (first initial)(second initial)(random alphanumeric)(random alphanumeric). Mine was gb1d. I can still remember pretty much all my friend’s addresses from then too. It also helps to keep out people just spamming by sending emails to any old firstname_lastname address.

  • Mac Mini

    I’ve been a little quiet lately. Doing a bunch of reading and playing World of Warcraft. Somewhere in there Apple released the Mac Mini. I seriously want one. I’ve got an old B&W G3 it would replace just perfectly. I’d probably want the $599 one though. I kind of wish they offered a higher end one with the SuperDrive that wasn’t a custom build though.

    One thing I’ve found is that this has many numerous people I know who had been trying to avoid getting a mac finally take the plunge. Bout time Apple made a move like this. Btw, if you’re getting one, bump the memory up to at least 512MB if not a full gig. You’ll be happy you did.

  • World of Warcraft, First Impressions

    World of WarcraftSo I finally gave into the whole MMORPG craze. I’d played a bit of Asheron’s Call back when it was in Beta and enjoyed it. And even played a tiny bit when it was released, but it never really sucked me in that much. But I have a good number of friends playing World of Warcraft, and it’s one of the few games I can play on the Mac and still be able to play with them.

    First off. Big high-5 to Blizzard for releasing a game that runs on both Mac and PC beautifully. More companies need to do this. I have no idea how much extra effort it requires on their part but they really do a great job. Thank you for giving me something cool to play while all my friends are off playing CoH.

    So, about the game. It’s beautiful. I took some screenshots that are okay, but nothing as nice as some of the ones shown on the World of Warcraft site. The colors are vivid and for the first hour or so that I played the game i just kept looking all around me. I can’t wait to explore more and see what kinds of places I can find.

    World of Warcraft - screenshot 2
    Next, gameplay. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this game was easy to learn. I saw the manual that came with the the game and was a little nervous at first. It’s not huge, but it just looked like there was so much to learn. So, in proper geek form I just dove right into the game. After about 10 min I created my character and was on my first quest.

    So far, I love the game. As I play a bit more and get a little deeper into it I’ll report back with more details. The screenshots are hosted at Flickr, and there is one other up there.