Adding Confusion to the TV Switch

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Washington Post:

Broadcasters now have until June 12 to turn off their analog signals, although they can do so anytime after Feb. 17 if they choose to. Many broadcasters already air a digital signal as well as an analog signal. Once analog signals cut off, consumers with older analog TV sets that receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna will need to buy a digital TV set or install a converter box to keep getting signals.

So instead of one solid switch, television stations can move from analog to digital anytime they want within that window – leaving uninformed customers angry and confused as their televisions lose stations one by one over the next 5 months. Ridiculous.

Men Reach New Low: PMS Apps

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CNET has a piece pointing out several applications designed to help guys… uhh… track the cycles in the lives of the women around them. Really. Here’s a sample:

PMS Buddy, due to launch for the iPhone this week, has been available as a free service for nine months. The site’s tagline is “Saving relationships, one month at a time.”

[…]

Take the competing app PMSTracker. “Tired of your wife/girlfriend/sister/mom/secretary biting your head off unexpectedly once a month?” the app summary on iTunes asks prospective buyers. Another one, called uPMS, markets itself as “an application for all guys out there suffering the monthly Psychotic Mood Shifts from their better halves.”

Isn’t the 21st century an amazing place to live?

 

Hackintosh Netbook vs. iBook G4

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Gizmodo:

Still, taking all tests into account, you could conclude that the MSI Wind is on a pretty level playing field with a 4-year-old Apple laptop packing a PowerPC processor. Is that some great feat? I’m not sure. Is it interesting? Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, especially if you were considering a used iBook to save some cash.

This answers one of the biggest questions that comes to mind when I think about putting OS X on my new HP Mini 1000. It’s currently running Ubuntu, and runs like a dream.

PowerPC Users Getting Their Sad Faces On

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Ars Technica:

Despite all of Apple’s foot stomping about Universal Binaries and convincing developers how easy it is to straddle both sides of the Mac CPU fence, the company felt the need to take the much-buzzed new “Artist Lessons” feature of GarageBand ’09 to the side with greener grass. From iLife ’09’s system requirements section at the Apple Store online: “GarageBand Learn to Play requires an Intel-based Mac with a dual-core processor or better.”

[…]

Apple’s site and the iLife ’09 software box both state this requirement in fine print, though this increase in system requirements appears to be the latest in a new trend for Apple. The dramatically rewritten iMovie ’08 was the first iLife app to eliminate the G4 PowerPC from its supported CPUs, raising its demands to an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0 GHz, or an iMac G5 1.9 GHz.

They’re going to be real sad when Snow Leopard rolls into town.

Rejecting Multiple Faces

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Mac OS X Hints:

When confirming a large number of Faces in iPhoto ’09, you probably already know you can drag across multiple photos to accept them all at once. Sometimes, though, you might want to reject a group of Faces instead. 

To do this quickly, just drag across the photos while holding down the Option key. You can also use this hint to reject individual photos without having to double click them – just hold down the Option key and click on a particular photo to reject it.

Apple Store Sales Down?

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Macworld points to an article in Barron (their site requires a subscription… sigh…) claiming that sales are down in Apple Stores:

New data from Needham hardware analyst Charlie Wolf says that there was only 1.8 percent less foot traffic in the December quarter 2008 versus the end of year 2007.

But here’s the rub: most of those shoppers are walking out empty-handed. Wolf notes that same-store revenue dropped 17.4 percent during the period, year-over-year.

Makes sense.

1 TB RAID Inside a MacBook Pro

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Damien Stolarz details how he stuffed two 500GB drives inside his MacBook Pro with one of these. I love his honesty about the rig:

A smart thing to do would have been either:

1) Make a RAID mirror of the two drives. I would only have 500GB of storage total, but my chance of data loss would be far less with a backup drive.

2) Leave the drives separate. I’d have 500GB + 500GB, and I could even back up critical data using Time Machine.

Of course I did the cooler, more risky thing: I used a RAID stripe – half the data to each drive, adding the drives together.

Very slick.

Segway Inventor Gets Philosophical

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CNN:

When to quit – said Kamen, also the inventor of health care technologies and the Slingshot water purifier – is “the toughest question there is” for any entrepreneur who survives on creativity and instinct.

“It’s not nearly as glamorous as people think to keep working on something and to keep hitting roadblocks and to keep going,” he said.

Steve Jobs, on the Television

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Out of a Rolling Stone interview in 2003:

The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent. Because the average American watches five hours a day of television, and television is a passive medium. Television doesn’t turn your brain on. Or, television can be used to turn your brain off, and that’s what it’s mostly used for. And that’s a wonderful thing sometimes – but not for five hours a day.

That’s why we don’t have a television in our house.