Category: General Tech

Han Solo, Time-Traveler⇢

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Kyle Hill:

You’ll hear any reputable Star Wars fan point it out eventually: Han Solo’s famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs” may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel?

There are two stories going on here. The first is that Solo’s famous line of dialog was simply a mistake of terminology. The second — the one I choose believe — is far more interesting, because it means that when Obi-Wan sat down across from the wryly smiling Han Solo in that cramped cantina, he met a time-traveling smuggler born at least 40 years before the events of The Phantom Menace ever took place.

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On the Mac Media Server⇢

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Shawn’s guide is great, but he really didn’t go into the hardware that can make such a rig really sing.

Storage

If you want a lot of storage, and want it to be redundant, look no further than the NewerTech Guardian MAXimus. I’ve got several of them floating around at work and home, and the simplicity is just great. While hardware RAID shouldn’t be considered a backup, having your movies and music on two drives instead of just one is a good step in the right direction.

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Dell Goes Private⇢

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Market Watch:

Dell Inc. today announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which Michael Dell, Dell’s Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, in partnership with global technology investment firm Silver Lake, will acquire Dell.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell stockholders will receive $13.65 in cash for each share of Dell common stock they hold, in a transaction valued at approximately $24.4 billion. The price represents a premium of 25 percent over Dell’s closing share price of $10.88 on Jan. 11, 2013, the last trading day before rumors of a possible going-private transaction were first published; a premium of approximately 35 percent over Dell’s enterprise value as of Jan. 11, 2013; and a premium of approximately 37 percent over the average closing share price during the previous 90 calendar days ending Jan. 11, 2013. The buyers will acquire for cash all of the outstanding shares of Dell not held by Mr. Dell and certain other members of management.

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The Verge Reviews the Pebble⇢

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Nilay Patel:

After using the Pebble for a few days, I realized that I was daydreaming about it: I wanted it to do more. That’s unusual — I rarely trust new products to work correctly, especially new products from unproven companies. But the Pebble’s charming simplicity and fundamental competence inspires confidence. It’s so good at what it does now that it’s easy to imagine all other things it might do in the future. There’s no reason it can’t replace a Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, for example, and I’d love to be able to send replies to emails and text directly from the device. And Pebble’s promised app support means we’ll eventually see even more uses for it.

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Not Season Four⇢

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Jenna Mullins, on the return of Arrested Development:

Jason Bateman doesn’t want fans to call this season four, but it should be referred to as an “act one” that will lead to a feature film. “These are episodes that set that up.” However, if the feature film doesn’t happen, the new episodes won’t leave viewers hanging. “It is certainly a satisfying conclusion to these episodes if for some reason a movie doesn’t happen, but they are all meant to work within one another as a hybrid package of Arrested Development stuff,” Bateman insisted.

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