Category: General Tech

Michael J. Kavanagh at Bloomberg:

Rules backed by Apple Inc. and Intel Corp. to stop sales of minerals used in electronics from funding war in Central Africa took effect today, forcing miners from the region to seek new buyers in Asia, according to exporters.

“There is a de-facto embargo, it’s very clear,” said John Kanyoni, president of the mineral exporters association of North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We’re committed to continue with all these programs. But at the same time we’re traveling soon to Asia to find alternatives.”

Continue reading ⇢

The Macalope celebrates April Fools Day in a way that I solidly approve of.

Continue reading ⇢

Not backing up your data is like not wearing a seat belt when you drive.

Continue reading ⇢

My buddy Dave, on a new podcast he’s on with Myke and Terry:

Imagine you’ve spent time with friends, having a drink and a laugh, letting the conversation go where it may. Later, you might be asked, “What did you guys talk about last night?” Inevitably, you’d recount the one story that stood out as the most interesting, funny or engaging. That’s what I want to get at: the best part of a casual, friendly and spontaneous conversation.

Continue reading ⇢

Microsoft’s global chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie:

I think there’s an important distinction - and frankly one we didn’t jump on at Microsoft fast enough - between mobile and portable. Mobile is something that you want to use while you’re moving, and portable is something that you move and then use.

These are going to bump into one another a little bit and so today you can see tablets and pads and other things that are starting to live in the space in between. Personally I don’t know whether that space will be a persistent one or not.

Continue reading ⇢

The tablet space is a weird little corner of the technology market right now. Apple’s crushing everyone with its iPad 2, clearly. There are several tablets on the horizon, but most of them feel like knock-off iPads.

There is more to a good tablet OS than the cloud, though. People are using tablets for content consumption, and with Android, that’s tricky. Android’s strength is its tie-in with the Google cloud, not with easy ways to purchase music and movies.Honeycomb apps can be counted on both hands.

Continue reading ⇢

Shawn Blanc:

I am as nitpicky about user interface as I am about user experience. There are some apps which, even though they offer a great service, I just never use because I don’t like to look at them. And on the other side you have those apps which look cute but are not very useful.

Instacast, however, is of my favorite breed of apps: one with pitch-perfect design and that does one thing and does it very well.

Continue reading ⇢

Jürgen:

Without large scale tests, it is not realistic to estimate how much resources our users will consume in the cloud. In particular, the frequency of interactions between users’ databases and the central service. Therefore we will be doing extensive scalability testing before we make an announcement regarding possible costs for the service.

[…]

I’m sure the question on the mind of many readers is: when will I be able to play with Things cloud sync first-hand? As it happens, the integration of cloud sync with the Mac version is a little further ahead of its counterparts on iOS. We have therefore decided to start with a beta of Mac-to-Mac sync first.

Continue reading ⇢

Be sure to check out Richard Gaywood’s great post over at TUAW explaining what TRIM does.

Continue reading ⇢

Oskar Groth has released a neat little utility that will enable TRIM for any Mac with an SSD.

Of course, any time you play with kernel extensions, you could accidentally blow something up. That said, I ran this with no issue. Hopefully, my SSD will last longer with TRIM support now enabled in Snow Leopard.

[Thanks Todd!]

Continue reading ⇢

My work machine is a 2.8 GHz Core2Duo 15-inch MacBook Pro with the matte screen and 8 GB of RAM. It’s the fastest notebook I’ve ever used. It gives our 3.2 Ghz Core i3 27-iMac at home a run for its money. Most articles I’ve read by people who have upgraded to a SSD have done it to older machines. I was skeptical of what kind of difference it would make in an already fast machine, to be honest.

Continue reading ⇢

My only problem with this is that Dave Caolo is using the Extended keyboard, while the Extended II is a far better machine. Poor Dave.

Either way, go check out this video. It’s just awesome.

Continue reading ⇢