Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Mac OS X Leopard

Here's what I keep hearing:

Bobo: "Hey, what do you think of the Leopard update?"
Momo: "Dude, it sucks."
Bobo: "What!? How come?"
Momo: "Well you know how you can tell it to give you a back-rub every time the screensaver activates?"
Bobo: "Yeah! That sounded totally great! What's wrong with it?"
Momo: "It doesn't spend enough time on my neck and shoulders! I can't believe Apple would treat its customers this way! Grrrrr!"

But here's what I see:

* The real kewl stuff is in the kernel; read the Ars Technica review.
* ZFS: *everyone* is porting it ... this is going to be interesting.
* This update *sped up* my computer; why do we expect the opposite?
* It installed without making me sit there and click a "gee whiz" button over and over.

So, briefly:

I really like it.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

mippin.com

Mippin is an RSS reader for mobile phones, currently in beta. I like having some reading material on my phone (for lunch time alone or when I arrive at appointments early) and I've been using Google Reader up until now. After two days with Mippin, I tossed Google out. Here's why:

* Mippin is pretty, with favicons and all. (What’s Google’s obsession with the Windows 3.1 color palette?)
* Mippin displays things compactly, yet expands for modern phones with larger displays.
* RSS feeds with image attachments include a thumbnail next to the entry’s title.
* I can ignore RSS for a couple days and not have a stack of "unread" messages. (Didn't we learn anything from usenet obsession?)

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Innovage Digital Camera

Oh, MYGOD ... it plays "Moon River" when you put in the driver disk! This ten dollar digital camera is going to be the best thing EVER. I popped in the included AAA battery and shot a few photos and then booted XP in my Parallels environment to install the easy-to-use patent-pending photo management software and suddenly I'm having breakfast at Tiffany's. This is going to rock!

It takes twenty pictures at high resolution: 352 x 288 pixels. It was easy to get the MY CAMERA software to transfer and save them as jpegs, but I'm still trying to figure out how to delete them from the camera. I can't wait to try capturing "several seconds of video" on it. Being able to "simultaneously send on the internet" is going to change my life, I just know it.

What? Like those Holga freaks are any better? The medium *is* the message!