Category: General Tech

With the updates this morning, I read over this sentence and didn’t even really stop to think about it:

AirPort Extreme now operates in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously to ensure top performance for all your devices.

Here’s what that really means - that a single base station can broadcast the faster 802.11N signal for N-equipped computers (including ever Macintosh computer, including the just-updated Mac mini) and the slower 802.11G signal for devices like iPhones, iPod Touch devices, and older computers.

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The New York Times has posted a story about Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. Here’s a bit from it:

“It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say, ‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’ ” she says with a staccato laugh that has earned a following of its own in Silicon Valley. “I can’t articulate it anymore. I really love color. I’m not very knick-knacky or cluttery. My place has very clean, simple lines. There are some elements of fun and whimsy. That has always appealed to me.”

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Photocritic.org has put together a collection of 100 great shots taken with Apple’s iPhone.

Needless to say, I was surprised to see one of mine on the list:

The shot was like many I’ve taken with my iPhone: I simply didn’t have one of my cameras with me (I normally shoot with a Canon Powershot G9 or a Canon Digital Rebel XT) and hoped that the rather wimpy iPhone camera would get the job done. On this shot, it did.

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This is a little old, but here’s why Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:

I wanted to write a site for someone it’s meant for. That reader I write for is a second version of me. I’m writing for him. He’s interested in the exact same things I’m interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he’s read it all.

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The MacOS iPhone Project is (according to their site) an attempt to get Mac System 7 running on an iPhone. Details are sketchy, but they do have photos. Here’s a blurb:

This is where we ran into one of our biggest issues, the cursor, it sound simple, but Apple didnt make it easy for us.

I have a feeling this will require jail-breaking the device, but time will tell.

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Wired:

But here’s the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

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Gizmodo spent some time with Apple’s new 17-inch MacBook Pro and has posted a nice review of the machine:

Apple will tell you that the MBP17 is the thinnest, lightest 17-inch notebook in the world. We’ll tell you that for a monster of a laptop, it manages to not be too monstrous. The 17-inch (1920x1200) screen is a sharp, contrasty and colorful panorama, but it’s the little touches that make the MBP17 manageable: The system’s near-silent operation (using a 256GB SSD instead of a hard drive) is almost unnerving. Its underside gets warm, but never hot. And the unibody design makes particularly good sense in this larger size, as the wide chassis does not flex to your grip as you might expect.

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From Engadget’s lengthy review of Amazon’s revamped Kindle e-book reader:

All in all, the hardware has been seriously streamlined, and the result is nothing short of gorgeous. Besides being evened out and pulled in, the Kindle 2 is also astonishingly thin – just 0.36-inches – which makes it a pleasure to carry, though we miss some of the bulk of the original for reading duties. It’s not a huge deal, but besides the frequent mis-tapping of buttons, we still feel the original more closely replicates the “book holding” experience. But ultimately, the question that will be nagging most people here is, “why didn’t they do this stuff the first time around?” and it’s a valid one. It’s amazing to consider how many (original) bad hardware choices have been overcome with this new design, but also somewhat vexing if you were an early adopter.

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The Washington Post:

NASA and climate researchers are weighing their options after yesterday’s crash of a new satellite designed to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide with unprecedented accuracy. A malfunction during the rocket ride toward space sent the Orbiting Carbon Observatory plummeting into the Indian Ocean near Antarctica.

“To say that it’s extremely disappointing would be an understatement. This was a really important science mission,” said a dismayed Edward J. Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

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Macworld, on Apple’s annual shareholder meeting today:

With Jobs currently on medical leave until the end of June, the health of Apple’s CEO was very much on the minds of attendees at the shareholders’ meeting. In fact, it was the subject of the first thing asked when company executives opened the floor to shareholder questions. A shareholder asked whether Apple’s board of directors had kept investors in the dark about the status of Jobs’ health and inquired about a succession plan. Board member Arthur Levinson, who is also chairman and CEO of biotech firm Genentech, replied that the board disclaims information that it deems important and proper, and that it talks regularly about a succession plan.

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I stumbled across this Time article from 1983, about Steve Jobs and his young company, Apple Computer. Here’s a bit about the origins of the Apple // computer:

“Steve didn’t do one circuit, design or piece of code,” says Wozniak, who was widely regarded as the true technological wizard in Jobs’ corporate Oz. “He’s not really been into computers, and to this day he has never gone through a computer manual. But it never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them up in the air and sell a few.’ ”

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I’ve been a notebook user ever since my first Mac - a 1GHz Titanium PowerBook G4, until about 18 months ago, when I bought a 20-inch aluminum iMac as my main machine. It’s a beast of a computer, but I still need to be portable from time to time.

I’ve also always been a fan of smaller notebooks, but never used anything under 15-inches across, until I bought a 12-inch PowerBook a while back. I loved that machine, but I really wanted something small enough to toss in my bag and ride my bike somewhere without the weight of a PowerBook.

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