January 27th, 2010, 20 Comments »
The trouser-rubbing hordes of Macolytes are all in a lather about Apple’s newest device: the oddly-named iPad (insert menstrual humour here). If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the introductory video. It features the usual legion of starry-eyed, breathless Apple senior staff speaking reverently about their newest saint.
It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.
It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.
And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.
I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.
In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?
20 Comments »
March 17th, 2008, 2 Comments »
It was a whirlwind week of meetings, appointments, errands and a conference in Vancouver last week. On Saturday I made the move across the water and have taken occupancy of our Fairfield apartment.
I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a modern reno inside the shell of a 1912 heritage house, with some original features (doors, floors, stained glass) retained. The office upstairs is big and bright, and has a rooftop deck off it with views of the Olympic peninsula and downtown. It’s furnished down to the face clothes and grapefruit knives, which is awesome. One trip to the grocery store and I’m ready to work.
It took Shaw Cable two trips to get my internet access working, but at least they were on time, honest and efficient. Julie’s in Morocco for another two weeks with her sister, so I expect to get plenty of work done.
One thorn in my productivity is that I had to take my MacBook into the shop. About three months ago, the fan started to sound like a crippled Sea King helicopter. It was seriously loud, and it would often rev and spin out. The surface temperature of the laptop increased, and I started seeing worrying behaviour in graphics-intensive apps like World of Warcraft.
Given that the thing is less than six months old, I’m underwhelmed. I count myself lucky that it didn’t melt down in Morocco, where I suspect that there’s a dearth of Apple stores.
I took it into Soho Computer Services here in Victoria. They’d only had it for four hours when they called to confirm my diagnosis–the fan is shot. Kudos to them for the quick turn-around.
Hopefully I’ll have my muted, cooled MacBook back by the weekend. In the meantime, I’m using our underpowered G5 iMac. It’s in desperate need of a RAM upgrade, but it’ll have to wait until I get my laptop back.
2 Comments »
October 4th, 2007, 3 Comments »
I just watched David Pogue’s charming 4-minute review of the $100 laptop (which, as it turns out, costs $188 each). It’s charming because he really seems genuinely excited about the product, and eschews his usual unfunny schtick.
He does reference ’snarky bloggers’ who apparently aren’t digging the laptop. What? Bloggers snarky? I can’t imagine. I think it’s cool–a little piece of nerd history, really–and want one when they go on sale in November.
They’ve got a brilliant sales strategy which you’ve probably already heard of: Americans have to spend US $400 (just CAN $399.04!), buying two computers. They keep one laptop, and another gets sent to a classroom or child in a developing country.
If I can be a snarky blogger for a second, it’d be great if the New York Times let me embed Pogue’s video in this post, instead of just linking to it. You know, like the rest of the planet.
3 Comments »
May 9th, 2007, 13 Comments »
Our Maltese cable provider, Melita, has a fairly Draconian approach to web access and bandwidth. Their best non-business package has a download limit of 10 GB (!) per thirty-day period.
They do, however, have a very reasonable loophole. They offer unlimited downloading between 11:00pm and 7:00am, local time. That provides plenty of time for me to download TV shows (no TV here, and besides, I gather much of it is in Italian and Maltese) and synch my laptop with my large online music archive.
However, I don’t get up until about 8:15am, and want to shut down network access to my G4 PowerBook shortly before 7:00am.
My first, brute force solution–use OS X’s Energy Saver setting to shutdown the laptop at 6:45am–failed because Oboe, MP3Tunes’ synching software, wouldn’t close or stop synching when my Mac asked it to.
Does anybody have any bright ideas about how I might schedule my Mac to turn off internet access at a particular time? I’d prefer that they didn’t include writing code, because, well, I pretty much can’t (besides, you know, 10 PRINT “EAT MY SHORTS”, 20 GOTO 10″). Maybe there’s some kind of cyber-nanny software that will do it?
UPDATE: I believe Travis’s AppleScript solution worked, but I forgot to turn off the automatic shutdown. Still, clearly I managed to close all the apps and then shutdown the computer, so we have success. Thanks again for all the suggestions!
13 Comments »
