512 Pixels

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.

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.

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.

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.

PC World has some fun examples of what to do with older Macs - including robots, car-puters and more.

Jon Armstrong of Blurbomat (he’s married to Heather of Dooce), has posted this jaw-dropping screenshot of his Mac Pro working way too hard. The culprit? Adobe Flash.

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.

Starring the Computer is a site dedicated to pointing out computers in TV shows and movies. Pretty fun to click through.

Fraser Speirs is the developer for the wonderful FlickrExport tools for iPhoto and Aperture (I use the Aperture plugin every day) and Darkslide, an iPhone app that allows an excellent Flickr experience on the handheld.

When Apple announce iPhoto 09 was going to have a built-in Flickr exporter, I was worried. Often times, when Apple “adopts” a technology that was available as a 3rd party add-on, usually that 3rd party add-on goes away, but Fraser Speirs’ own look at iPhoto ‘09 may prove that sometime the 3rd party guys get it right:

iPhoto ‘09 really, really wants to make Photosets for you. When you select even one photograph to upload, iPhoto will create a single-photo set for you. You have no way to stop this from happening. Do you put every photo you upload to Flickr in a Photoset? I certainly don’t. That said, I suppose this makes sense if you’re dumping an iPhoto “Event” en masse into Flickr.

[…]

iPhoto’s sync connection to Flickr critically depends on you not deleting the photoset that iPhoto created for you when the photo was uploaded. If you delete that set from Flickr, the syncing is permanently and irretrievably broken as far as I can tell, since there’s no way to recreate the link from the Flickr source list item to another set on Flickr.

The iPhoto-creating-a-photoset thing is annoying. Real annoying, but Speirs’ review goes a lot deeper. Go take a look. I think I’ll be staying put with Aperture and FlickrExport.

A hilarious interview on The Daily Show with Neil DeGrasse Tyson who wrote a book called The Pluto Files:

Dear CNET, you are why my iMac is now all slimy:

The museum building, designed by Roman Delugan from Delugan Meissl Associated Architects in Vienna, Austria, touches the ground at only three points and so appears to be floating.

With the advent of iPhone 2.0, Apple’s App Store has made it easy for users to find, purchase, and install software on their iPhone anywhere - adding programs is no longer dependent on a “host computer.” Macworld’s Ryan Faas ponders what could be next for the App Store:

Since netbooks essentially fit in between a smart phone and a full-featured computer, they’re a logical step for App Store-style software distribution. In fact, many of the constraints on netbooks and smart phones are the same: small screen size, limited memory and processing capabilities, and restricted storage for the applications themselves. Since many netbooks are designed to be easy to use and carry and often serve as a second computer, making app installation simple is an excellent idea.

[…]

Apple is probably in the best position to deliver a netbook with an App Store. The company is no stranger to creating stripped-down versions of its flagship Mac OS X operating system, and its upcoming Snow Leopard OS X update is designed to be more streamlined. In fact, the iPhone and iPod Touch both run a version of Mac OS X, as does the Apple TV. It wouldn’t take much for the company to create an operating system, the developer frameworks and an extension of the existing App Store for an Apple-based netbook.

Brilliant idea. My new HP Mini 1000 runs XP fairly well, but I am thinking of dumping Windows for Ubuntu (which is by far the most popular build of Linux for end users) but the lack of applications (and the work involved with compiling and installing applications) is worrisome. Apple could really knock it out of the park with a netbook attached to an App Store.