512 Pixels

Viewable from China to Texas, today’s solar eclipse will be viewable from much of the United States.

Artists this year include Usher, Jack White, Norah Jones and more.

Apple:

Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina, will draw about 20 megawatts of power at full capacity. We’ll be producing an unprecedented 60 percent of this power onsite. To do that, we’re building what will be the nation’s largest private solar arrays and the largest non-utility fuel cell installation operating anywhere in the country. That’s a scale of onsite renewable energy production that no other company has matched. Onsite energy generation minimizes our dependence on the grid and reduces our environmental impact. And when our solar arrays and fuel cells are operating, Apple’s Maiden data center will be the most environmentally sound data center ever built.

[…]

While we’ll produce 60 percent of the power used by our Maiden data center onsite, we’ll meet the remaining 40 percent of our energy needs by directly purchasing clean, renewable energy generated by local and regional sources.

Very cool.

Adam Rosen at Cult of Mac:

What does it take to be a vintage Mac collector?

A love of all things Apple and an encyclopedic knowledge of the many successful, unsuccessful and downright notorious products Cupertino has released over the years are a given. But the job can be more perilous than you’d imagine.

Just ask Adam Goolevitch. Known as “wozniac” on eBay, Adam is one of the premier vintage Mac collectors around. In just he last couple of months, some of Googlevitch’s rarest finds — including a 128k Mac with a 5.25” Twiggy floppy disk drive and a Macintosh SE with a clear outer case — have hit the web and sparked a flurry of interest.

But collecting these Macs isn’t always easy. From almost losing a finger to a PowerMac G4 Cube to mistakenly being investigated by the police under the suspicion of dealing drugs instead of Macs, Googlevitch has some wild stories to tell that prove that being a vintage Mac collector isn’t necessarily for the faint of heart.

The interview is just great, as are the machines photographed for it.

If you work in Markdown on your Mac, the experience is about to get even better.

Federico Viticci looks back at just how far the App Stores have come.

I love the shots of the miniatures.

Uh-oh.

Jim Dalrymple, on blogging:

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

Readers connect with a blogger. They know things about them, they laugh together and sometimes argue over points in a story. It’s a give and take relationship that not everyone can handle.

Kevin Fitchard at GigaOM:

Verizon Wireless plans to close down the mobile broadband buffet for good, phasing out unlimited plans as customers upgrade from 3G phones to 4G. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo revealed the policy plan change on Wednesday while speaking at a J.P. Morgan conference, saying it must turn off the unlimited spigot as a prerequisite for moving to shared family data plans, FierceWireless reported.

Noooooooo!

iMore does the math, with mockups of various solutions.

The WSJ:

The new iPhone that Apple Inc. AAPL -0.37% is expected to unveil this year is likely to have a larger display than its current models have, with the company ordering bigger screens from its Asian suppliers, people familiar with the matter said.

The new screens measure at least 4 inches diagonally, the people said, compared with 3.5 inches on Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S. Production is set to begin next month, the people said. Analysts have predicted that the next iPhone will come out in the fall.

Apple declined to comment.

Reuters is reporting the new screen to 4 inches, when measured form corner to corner.

The question is this: Why would Apple want to change the iPhone display?

The cynic in me thinks that it is a necessity if Apple wants to include LTE in the next iPhone. LTE might mean Apple has to increase the size of the display to increase the size of the battery behind it.

Of course, this might be Apple responding to the market. The majority of smartphones are bigger than the iPhone (due to the reason listed above, in most cases), and maybe Apple doesn’t want their product to look wimpy or puny next to the newest Android phones.

(I really don’t buy my own argument completely, though.)

Whatever the reason, reporters who usually get such things right seem hard set on the fact that the next iPhone will be physically larger. As long as its still comfortable to use — and I’m sure it will be — I don’t see a big problem with it.

Not that Apple asked me.